Genetic Science

Ero Bright’Lor, an outcast krey noble, has a mad plan to form an alliance from the outlaw clans. If he can overcome centuries of enmity, their combined might would threaten the entire fleet of the Krey Empire. But the cause needs a leader.

Are stars like Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, and Serena Williams genetic freaks put on Earth to dominate their respective sports? Or are they simply normal people who overcame their biological limits through sheer force of will and obsessive training? In this controversial and engaging exploration of athletic success, Sports Illustrated senior writer David Epstein tackles the great nature vs. nurture debate and traces how far science has come in solving this great riddle.

In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum - reviving Darwin's own views - thinks not.

Where does DNA come from? What is consciousness? How did the eye evolve? Drawing on a treasure trove of new scientific knowledge, Nick Lane expertly reconstructs evolution's history by describing its 10 greatest inventions - from sex and warmth to death - resulting in a stunning account of nature's ingenuity.

In a world long ago ravaged by war, the nations have sworn an armistice never to use weapons of mass destruction again. Instead, highly-skilled warriors known as Grievar Knights represent their nations’ interests in brutal hand-to-hand combat. Murray Pearson was once a famed Knight until he suffered a loss that crippled his homeland—but now he’s on the hunt to discover the next champion.

The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton is the first in Night's Dawn, a sweeping galactic trilogy from the master of space opera. In AD 2600 the human race is finally realizing its full potential. Hundreds of colonized planets across the galaxy host a multitude of wildly diverse cultures. Genetic engineering has pushed evolution far beyond nature's boundaries, defeating disease and producing extraordinary space-born creatures.

Charles Darwin’s theories, first published more than 150 years ago, still set the paradigm of how we understand the evolution of life—but scientific advances of recent decades have radically altered that understanding. In fact the currently accepted history of life on Earth is flawed and out of date. Now two pioneering scientists, one already an award-winning popular author, deliver an eye-opening narrative that synthesizes a generation’s worth of insights from new research.

Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically - it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him. Society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers and mass-marketed psychedelic drugs.

The fascinating group of animals called dinosaurs became extinct some 65 million years ago (except for their feathered descendants). In their place evolved an enormous variety of land creatures, especially mammals, which in their way were every bit as remarkable as their Mesozoic cousins. The Age of Mammals, the Cenozoic Era, has never had its Jurassic Park, but it was an amazing time in earth's history, populated by a wonderful assortment of bizarre animals. The rapid evolution of thousands of species of mammals brought forth many incredible creatures—including our own ancestors.

There is no one better qualified than Jared Diamond - renowned expert in the fields of physiology and evolutionary biology and award-winning author - to explain the evolutionary forces that operated on our ancestors to make us sexually different. With wit and a wealth of fascinating examples, he explains how our sexuality has been as crucial as our large brains and upright posture in our rise to human status.

In a world where single combat determines the fate of nations, the Grievar fight in the Circles so that the rest can remain at peace. But given the stakes, things are never so simple. The Daimyo govern from the shadows and plot to gain an edge by unnaturally enhancing their Grievar Knights. Cego and his team return to the world’s most prestigious combat school, The Lyceum. Though he'd like to focus on his martial studies, Cego feels the pull of his mysterious past and two missing brothers.

Fifty thousand years ago - merely a blip in evolutionary time - our Homo sapiens ancestors were competing for existence with several other human species, just as their precursors had done for millions of years. Yet something about our species distinguished it from the pack, and ultimately led to its survival while the rest became extinct. Just what was it that allowed Homo sapiens to become masters of the planet? Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, takes us deep into the fossil record to uncover what made humans so special.

A fierce sandstorm hits southern Algeria and uncovers a lost ruin, its location unknown to modern man...until now. A team led by slacker archaeologist, Harrison "Hank" Boyd, is called in to investigate the find. In way over his head, Hank must lead his team through countless dangers and survive brutal encounters with enemies both human and inhuman alike. And if that's not bad enough, a shadowy group with a thirst for violence and a blind ambition is hot on their heels and will stop at nothing to obtain what has been found. Hank and company should have heeded the warning left by the ancient ...

Just over 125,000 years ago, humanity was going extinct until a dramatic shift occurred—Homo sapiens started tracking the tides in order to eat the nearby oysters. Before long, they’d pulled themselves back from the brink of extinction. The human brain, and its evolutionary journey, is unlike anything else in history. In A History of the Human Brain, Bret Stetka takes listeners through that far-reaching journey. He also tackles the question of where the brain will take us next, exploring the burgeoning con­cepts of epigenetics and new technologies like CRISPR.

With humanity out in the open, Eve and her sisters are now the subject of worldwide adoration—and constant surveillance. With Eve as humanity’s spokeswoman, it’s up to her to bargain for the freedom she craves. But Eve’s pleas fall on deaf ears. Hers is only one voice, lost in a committee of robots hundreds of years her senior. No amount of earnestness can overcome the crushing inertia of the Human Committee. With no prospect of gaining room to breathe within the rules, Eve hatches a plot to escape and finds out exactly why the robots have tried so hard to keep the humans safe.

World renowned scientist Carl Sagan and acclaimed author Ann Druyan have written a Roots for the human species, a lucid and riveting account of how humans got to be the way we are. It shows with humor and drama that many of our key traits - self-awareness, technology, family ties, submission to authority, hatred for those a little different from ourselves, reason, and ethics - are rooted in the deep past, and illuminated by our kinship with other animals.

Geophysicist Jack Greer believes he may finally have found the resting place of the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. A few miles off the Yucatán coast, Jack and a team of scientists tow an aging drilling platform over the impact crater with the aim of securing a sample. But buried deep beneath the earth lies a shocking discovery that threatens to shatter everything we think we know about the origins of our species.

Among the estimated 100 billion solar systems in the known universe, evolving life is surely abundant. That evolution is a process of "becoming" in each case. Since Newton, we have turned to physics to assess reality. But physics alone cannot tell us where we came from, how we arrived, and why our world has evolved past the point of unicellular organisms to an extremely complex biosphere.

Everything you were taught about evolution is wrong. In this shocking book, Berkeley-educated doctor of biology Jonathan Wells lets you in on scientific discoveries you won't learn about from college and high-school textbooks - and reveals a dirty little secret known only to some of his fellow biologists.

Now that the truth of the genetic experiments on Mars has been revealed, new missions are on their way to gain control of this extraordinary technology. In the process, they seek to exploit and enslave the colonists—turning them into nothing more than lab rats. Worse, these newcomers are well armed, and prepared to go to war with each other to win control of the colony and its people.