I am a college professor and paleoanthropologist–I study human fossils and the evolution of the human lineage. My field site is in the Afar region of Ethiopia, and I regularly spend a month or so wandering across the desert, picking up fossils. I view myself very much as a scientist and believe that the scientific view is the most reliable in some important ways. However, I came to science fairly late in life–I was an undergraduate philosophy and English literature student and didn’t go to graduate school until I was 30. Because of my liberal arts background, I have always felt it was important to bridge the science-humanities divide.
I wrote
The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History
My father gave me a copy of this book when I was in 6th grade and it introduced the world of natural science to me. This was the first in a series of volumes that collected his monthly essays written for Natural History magazine.
Gould has an eye for unusual scientific phenomena that illuminate a deeper truth about the relationship between humanity and the natural world. He was not afraid to tackle moral issues, such as eugenics and the science of IQ, recognizing the importance of the popular scientist as more than just a translator.
But the most important thing for the 11-year-old me was that he was such a clear writer–I could follow all of his arguments without knowing anything about genetics, statistics, or anatomy. I still have the copy my father gave me–it is dog-eared, and the spine is long broken, but when I thumb through it, I can still see what I saw then–a brilliant scientist speaking directly to me.
Ever Since Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould's first book, has sold more than a quarter of a million copies. Like all succeeding collections by this unique writer, it brings the art of the scientific essay to unparalleled heights.
I read this book as a young adult and immediately passed it on to all my friends. This book is a popular explanation of sociobiology (sometimes called behavioral ecology) that focuses on how evolution might be selected for aggression.
It is one of the most compelling explorations of why evolutionary biology is so important for the average person to understand. Ironically, it is exactly the kind of thing that Stephen Jay Gould hated–he was a staunch opponent of sociobiology, partly because he feared the potential social implications.
But here, I think Gould was wrong and Wrangham largely correct. It is simply a fact that males are more violent (in every society ever studied), and understanding why so that we can attenuate its effect might be one of the most important things a society can do. In a clear and reasonable voice, this book makes the argument for sociobiology difficult to reject.
"Remarkable and utterly fascinating" (Jane Goodall), author Dale Peterson and Harvard University biological anthropology professor Richard Wrangham's Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence is a groundbreaking study on human violence.
Whatever their virtues, men are more violent than women. Why do men kill, rape, and wage war, and what can we do about it?
Based on human evolution studies and about our closest living relatives, the great apes, Demonic Males presents a compelling argument that the secrets of a peaceful society may well be, first, a sharing of power between males and females, and second, a high…
This book is set in Montauk, under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land. Everyone in town has a…
This book came out just as I was starting grad school and caused quite a bit of academic consternation. Diamond, a Harvard anthropologist, steps way outside the normal academic lanes to link geography, biology, technology, and history to answer one of the big academic questions: why was Europe able to conquer Africa and South Africa in the 16th-19th centuries? Even asking the question is to face challenges to morality, politics, and identity issues that are still radioactively hot topics in the modern political and academic world.
His mechanistic explanation of the advantages of climate and geography enraged many academics who specialized in narrow aspects of the question because it seemingly rendered them, at worst, irrelevant or, at best–simple foot soldiers providing data for Wrangam’s deeper, yet broader, causal explanations.
Historians detested his deterministic and scientifically amoral approach to a historical question. Yet his essential thesis has held up, and no coherent alternative models have even come close to answering the big historical questions he posed. His fearless scientific approach to a politically weighted historical question is still an inspiration to me, personally.
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, a classic of our time, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for its broadest patterns.
The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China,…
Geology can be a tough sell for the popular science audience. It can seem boringly commonplace yet remote in relevance to our day-to-day lives. But it is probably the most important science for understanding how and where we live.
In this beautifully written compilation, McPhee drives across North America, generally in the company of a local geologist, exploring the deep past and our modern relationship with it through roadcuts, quarries, eroded exposures, volcanoes, and mountains pushing up through the sediments.
McPhee is a New Yorker writer, with all that implies–his work is meticulously written, detailed, and literary. This book is simply a visceral pleasure to read–I recommend you find a hammock and a few days.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years
Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World.
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
This is simply one of the best books on natural history ever written, and I read it in two sittings. The title is subtlety deceptive: instead of the straightforward story of the dodo's extinction, this explores the interrelationship of evolution, biogeography, and humanity across time and space.
The book covers the American West, Amazonia, and New Guinea, documenting and explaining the relationship between ecological fragmentation and the natural world. From pygmy elephants to marsupial carnivores to rats, evolution has responded to geography in marvelous yet scientifically understandable ways since the appearance of life.
If you want to understand how the natural world is responding to natural geological changes and our own incursions and fragmentations of the planet without being hit over the head with ‘important moral lessons,’ this is the book for you.
“Compulsively readable—a masterpiece, maybe the masterpiece of science journalism.” —Bill McKibben, Audubon
A brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope and far-reaching in its message, The Song of the Dodo is a crucial book in precarious times. Through personal observation, scientific theory, and history, David Quammen examines the mysteries of evolution and extinction and radically alters our understanding of the natural world and our place within it.
In this landmark of science writing, we learn how the isolation of islands makes them natural laboratories of evolutionary extravagance, as seen in the dragons of Komodo, the elephant birds of Madagascar, the…
The purpose of my book is to present the scientific perspective of, well, everything. Humans are animals—social, smart, cultural, and relatively long-lived—but animals nonetheless. We are sometimes accustomed to treating ourselves as special and different, but in anatomy and behavior, we follow the rules of nature.
Though I've aimed for a literary style and made the book accessible, my goal is fundamentally scientific. I want readers to understand our origins and behaviors. As a scientist, I believe science best explains the world and ourselves. My work spans astronomy, evolutionary biology, macroeconomics, and history, focusing on the underlying causes of events and patterns. When you finish the book, I want you to be able to look at almost anything and understand how it came to be.
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
From the author of Washington’s Spies, the thrilling story of two rival secret agents — one Confederate, the other Union — sent to Britain during the Civil War.
The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was ordered to acquire a clandestine fleet intended to break Lincoln’s blockade, sink Northern…
