Here are 100 books that A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology fans have personally recommended if you like
A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology.
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Even before I became a philosopher I was wondering about everything—life the universe and whatever else Douglas Adams thought was important when he wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe. As a philosopher, I’ve been able to spend my life scratching the itch of these questions. When I finally figured them out I wrote The Atheist’s Guide to Reality as an introduction to what science tells us besides that there is no god. In How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories I apply much of that to getting to the bottom of why it’s so hard for us, me included, to really absorb the nature of reality.
Easier to read than On the Origin of Species, this book connects Darwin’s overwhelmingly significant explanatory insight to the last fifty years of advance in our understanding of biology, psychology, social science, and the nature of the mind. Dennett is a brilliantly ingenious builder of images and metaphors that really enable you to grasp Darwin’s breakthrough, one at least as important as Newton’s and Einstein’s, but more relevant to understanding the meaning of life.
In Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life Daniel C. Dennett argues that the theory of evolution can demystify the miracles of life without devaluing our most cherished beliefs.
From the moment it first appeared, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has been controversial: misrepresented, abused, denied and fiercely debated. In this powerful defence of Darwin, Daniel C. Dennett explores every aspect of evolutionary thinking to show why it is so fundamental to our existence, and why it affirms - not threatens - our convictions about the meaning of life.
Sam Kean is the New York Times bestselling author of five books, including The Bastard Brigade, The Dueling Neurosurgeons, and The Disappearing Spoon. He edited The Best American Nature and Science Writing in 2018, and his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, and Slate. His work has been featured on NPR’s “Radiolab,” “Science Friday,” “All Things Considered,” and “Fresh Air,” and his podcast, The Disappearing Spoon, debuted at #1 on the iTunes charts for science podcasts.
The ultimate big-picture book. Wilson outlines how fields like history and the humanities can incorporate insights from biology and the study of human nature—to the benefit of both science and the arts. A bracing look at the future of human knowledge.
In this groundbreaking new book, one of the world's greatest living scientists argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for what he calls consilience, the composition of the principles governing every branch of learning. Edward O Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, once again breaks out of the conventions of current thinking. He shows how our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos. It is a vision that found its apogee in the…
I’ve always loved how science deepens my appreciation of nature and fills me with awe and wonder. I’ve been a science teacher, a documentary producer for National Geographic and Discovery, and the author of What's Gotten Into You: The Story of Your Body's Atoms, from the Big Bang Through Last Night's Dinner. I’m astounded by how much scientists have been able to learn about how our world works and how they have revealed surprising and strange beauty. Their stories of wrestling with the unknown, marked by unexpected twists and great perseverance, captivate and inspire me.
I knew the Manhattan Project was big, but I never realized how immense it truly was. This book left me in awe of how scientists recognized and unleashed the power of the atom. Rhodes makes the technical details as compelling as the personalities and relationships he weaves into this sprawling saga.
My favorite character is Leo Szilard, who conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction while waiting at a traffic light. He secretly donated his patent on atomic chain reactions to the British government and convinced Einstein to co-sign a letter warning President Roosevelt about German efforts to develop the bomb. The stakes were incredibly high, and Rhodes' storytelling is masterful.
With a brand new introduction from the author, this is the complete story of how the bomb was developed. It is told in rich, human, political, and scientific detail, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly -- or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity there was a span of hardly more than twenty-five years. What began as merely an interesting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan…
Sam Kean is the New York Times bestselling author of five books, including The Bastard Brigade, The Dueling Neurosurgeons, and The Disappearing Spoon. He edited The Best American Nature and Science Writing in 2018, and his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, and Slate. His work has been featured on NPR’s “Radiolab,” “Science Friday,” “All Things Considered,” and “Fresh Air,” and his podcast, The Disappearing Spoon, debuted at #1 on the iTunes charts for science podcasts.
Imagine a medieval bestiary of whimsical creatures, but with a twist. Instead of being imaginary, the animals here really exist. The book moves alphabetically from axolotl to zebrafish, with a new delight on every page. It’s a perfect reminder of what biologist J.B.S. Haldane once said: that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine.
From Axolotl to Zebrafish, discover a host of barely imagined beings: real creatures that are often more astonishing than anything dreamt in the pages of a medieval bestiary. Ranging from the depths of the ocean to the most arid corners of the earth, Caspar Henderson captures the beauty and bizarreness of the many living forms we thought we knew and some we could never have contemplated, inviting us to better imagine the precarious world we inhabit.
A witty, vivid blend of pioneering natural history and spiritual primer, infectiously celebratory about life's sheer ingenuity and variety, The Book of Barely Imagined…
I love to hear stories about how people solve problems, and I have been curious about how science works since I was 12 years old. A decade later, when I was 22 years old, some of my friends joked that I "spoke DNA," and it’s true that I have been obsessed with trying to understand the physical structures of DNA for more than four decades now. I live my life vicariously through my students and help them to learn to tinker, troubleshoot, and recover from their failures.
I love François Jacob’s book. One of my favorite quotes from this is, "Evolution is a tinkerer."
I think that this is a great insight from one of the founders in the field, who shared the Nobel prize in 1965, for showing how genetic information flows from DNA to RNA to protein and that the control or regulation of this could come from proteins binding to regions of DNA upstream from genes.
"The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written."-Michel Foucault
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francois Jacob's The Logic of Life is a landmark book in the history of biology and science. Focusing on heredity, which Jacob considers the fundamental feature of living things, he shows how, since the sixteenth century, the scientific understanding of inherited traits has moved not in a linear, progressive way, from error to truth, but instead through a series of frameworks. He reveals how these successive interpretive approaches-focusing on visible structures, internal structures (especially cells), evolution, genes, and DNA and other molecules-each have their own…
I’ve always been fascinated by the quest to understand how nature works and to find patterns amid complexity. This drew me towards physics, which seemed unparalleled in its ability to uncover general rules. In contrast, biology seemed merely descriptive, and despite a fondness for wildlife, I stayed away from the subject in school. It turns out, however, that physics and biology are perfect companions; a whole field, biophysics, explores how physical principles are central to the workings of living things. I became a biophysicist, researching topics like the organization of gut microbes and teaching and writing about biophysics more broadly, at scales from DNA to ecosystems.
Once upon a time, we were unaware of DNA. We could tell that taller parents have taller kids, we could select tomato plants for sweeter fruit, and we could even construct plausible relationships between long-extinct animals and their descendants. Still, the nature of the stuff from which these links are made and how it works or fails to work remained a mystery.
Solving this mystery is one of humanity’s most remarkable achievements, and Mukherjee tells the tale with style and humor, weaving in recollections of his family’s encounters with mental illness. Despite my familiarity with the end result, the modern picture of genes, I found much of the history surprising and surprisingly colorful, full of dead ends and creative leaps. The last third of the book, on complex traits like intelligence and illnesses like schizophrenia, isn’t quite as good as the rest, but that takes us to our second…
Selected as a Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Economist, Independent, Observer and Mail on Sunday
THE NEW YORK TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK
`Dramatic and precise... [A] thrilling and comprehensive account of what seems certain to be the most radical, controversial and, to borrow from the subtitle, intimate science of our time... He is a natural storyteller... A page-turner... Read this book and steel yourself for what comes next' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
The Gene is the story of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our…
I first read Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene in 1980. It blew me away and precipitated my transformation from bee breeder into evolutionary geneticist. Later, I realised almost all evolutionary biologists of my generation were similarly drawn to their careers by Dawkins’ book. Why? People like Dawkins have the astonishing ability to transform complex theories into engaging narratives, to ferret out weird and wonderful examples from nature, and to exploit them for their explanatory power. My "best books" all have this in common. Big ideas about evolution and genetics illustrated by examples. I think they are the best kind of ‘pop science’ in that they are written for lay people, yet they inspire professionals.
Is it nature or nurture that makes a person? Well, it depends on the trait. Many things (e.g., number of noses or biological sex) are genetically determined. Other traits like IQ are about 50/50 genes and environment. Still others, like language, are entirely environmental.
Humans are fascinated by genetic determinism and its contributions to race, gender, feeble-mindedness, disease. Witness the popularity of 23 and Me. Zimmer’s wonderful book gives an even-handed and sometimes brave account of the history of our obsession with heredity and some of the terrible things that have emerged from it: eugenics, forced sterilization, concern about human "mongrels," the concept of racial purity.
I was fascinated by the details he dug up, explaining the life experiences of individual people who fell afoul of government programs to "improve" the human population.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
'Elegantly written, wittily constructed . . . My science book of the year.' Robin McKie, Observer, 'Best Books of 2018'
She Has Her Mother's Laugh presents a profoundly original perspective on what we pass along from generation to generation. Charles Darwin played a crucial part in turning heredity into a scientific question, and yet he failed spectacularly to answer it. The birth of genetics in the early 1900s seemed to do precisely that. Gradually, people translated their old notions about heredity into a language of genes. As the technology for studying…
I am an unusual scientist in the sense that I have doctorates in both biology and anthropology, so I am very interested in the dichotomy between what our bodies truly want (biology) and how we are supposed to behave, or tell others to behave, in our cultural settings (cultural anthropology). Amazingly, studies show that we spend more time and attention in our lives living for others for what they think of us, than doing what we truly want, and that we often regret that, when we are close to dying. These books make us reconsider that way of living, so we can change this before it is too late.
The book is surprising not only because of the very strong amount of scientific data compiled showing that in terms of health and also various other traits, women do indeed often outperform men but also because it shows that many of the discoveries related to those scientific data were actually done by women, contrary to the false or at least biased stories we often read about, in the literature.
One of the strengths of the book is precisely how it talks about these untold stories in science and how it connects them to the main topic being discussed. I have this book assigned to my undergraduate biology course at Howard University.
From an award-winning medic and scientist, the game-changing case that genetic females have greater resilience, immunity, endurance and more, compared with males
'A powerful antidote to the myth of a "weaker sex"' Gina Rippon, author of The Gendered Brain
From birth, genetic females are better at fighting viruses, infections and cancer. They do better at surviving epidemics and famines. They live longer, and even see the world in a wider variety of colours. These are the facts; they are simply stronger than men at every stage of life. Why? And why are we taught the opposite?
I have loved story since I was little, and I’ve curated a life where it has always taken center stage in some or another. I was a high school English teacher for ten years, and have been a college professor for eight. But what really inspires me to write the books I do is my PhD in mythological studies. As a mythologist, I’m lucky enough to be able to see why stories resonate with us for so long and use those same themes and metaphors to write my own.
Medema writes in-verse as well as uses emails, texts, and Google searches to tell the story of a teen who finds out that yes, she really is the odd one out in her family because her dad is not actually her father. She and the heart-wrenching Kodiak Jones take us through what it means to find the people you love, whether they are actual blood-relations or not. If you’re not sobbing at the end of this book…
"A heart-wrenching quest for identity every YA reader will relate to, and a deep dive into the meaning of family." -Ellen Hopkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author
Debut author Dante Medema explores the emotional fallout after a teenage girl discovers she is the product of an affair. Told through a series of poems, text messages, and emails, this contemporary YA is perfect for fans of Gaby Dunn and Allison Raskin.
Seventeen-year-old Cordelia Koenig intended to breeze through her senior project. While her peers stressed, Cordelia planned to use the same trace-your-roots genealogy idea her older sister used years prior.…
I love to hear stories about how people solve problems, and I have been curious about how science works since I was 12 years old. A decade later, when I was 22 years old, some of my friends joked that I "spoke DNA," and it’s true that I have been obsessed with trying to understand the physical structures of DNA for more than four decades now. I live my life vicariously through my students and help them to learn to tinker, troubleshoot, and recover from their failures.
I love the way that this book puts solving the genetic code in the
context of the development of the "information age" in the 1950s.
This
book explains the origins of the popular (but wrong) idea that DNA is the "book of life" and some sort of advanced information
system. I call this a ‘one-dimensional’ view of life (as opposed to a four-dimensional view, which takes into account not just sequence but
secondary and tertiary structures and how they change with time).
I use
this book in my introductory bioinformatics
lectures to help get across the "new" concept that, contrary to
popular cultural beliefs, DNA is not a language, nor is it a
'sophisticated computer code’. Biology is messy and complicated and
very much contextual.
This is a detailed history of one of the most important and dramatic episodes in modern science, recounted from the novel vantage point of the dawn of the information age and its impact on representations of nature, heredity, and society. Drawing on archives, published sources, and interviews, the author situates work on the genetic code (1953-70) within the history of life science, the rise of communication technosciences (cybernetics, information theory, and computers), the intersection of molecular biology with cryptanalysis and linguistics, and the social history of postwar Europe and the United States.
