Here are 48 books that Endless Forms Most Beautiful fans have personally recommended if you like
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Like most children, I adored baby animals from an early age. I bonded deeply with a pet kitten; I campaigned (unsuccessfully but perennially) for a puppy; I delighted in caterpillars. In college, my biology classes introduced me to a profusion of marine larval forms, and a fascination with the true diversity of animal babies fully gripped me. I eventually earned a PhD in the biology of squid babies and, shortly afterward, produced two human babies of my own. I now live with my human family, a cat, and a garden full of grubs, caterpillars, maggots, and innumerable other babies. I read and write about science and nature, especially the intersection of the weird and the adorable.
I laughed so hard and learned so much from this collection of science-based answers to fictional letters from animals.
The author uses an “agony aunt” advice column format to describe bizarre reproductive acts and the evolutionary history behind them. I found the structure incredibly easy to read, and I kept wanting to share snippets with my friends and family.
Compared to reading newspaper advice columns, this book provides all the schadenfreude and none of the guilt since these animals didn’t actually write in for advice and don’t care whether or not you judge them for cannibalizing their mates.
If you have ever wondered why women always bite your head off or why one guy gets all the girls, if you have ever pondered why some men bring you balloons while others leave you their genitals, then Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation is the book for you. It explains all this and much more. It discloses the best time to have a sex change, how to have a virgin birth, when to seduce your sisters or eat your lover. Quirky and brilliant, it takes as its starting point all creatures great and small worried about their bizarre…
Like most children, I adored baby animals from an early age. I bonded deeply with a pet kitten; I campaigned (unsuccessfully but perennially) for a puppy; I delighted in caterpillars. In college, my biology classes introduced me to a profusion of marine larval forms, and a fascination with the true diversity of animal babies fully gripped me. I eventually earned a PhD in the biology of squid babies and, shortly afterward, produced two human babies of my own. I now live with my human family, a cat, and a garden full of grubs, caterpillars, maggots, and innumerable other babies. I read and write about science and nature, especially the intersection of the weird and the adorable.
This book made me look at something familiar—a bird’s egg—with delightful new depth and wonder. Like all the best science writing, it reminded me how research, far from decreasing our awe at the natural world, can immeasurably increase it.
I loved learning both answers to everyday questions (what are those bits of white on a chicken yolk?) and aspects of the world I’d never have guessed (cuckoo mothers can match their egg color to the color of host eggs).
'I think that, if required on pain of death to name instantly the most perfect thing in the universe, I should risk my fate on a bird's egg'
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1862
How are eggs of different shapes made, and why are they the shape they are? When does the shell of an egg harden? Why do some eggs contain two yolks? How are the colours and patterns of an eggshell created, and why do they vary? And which end of an egg is laid first - the blunt end or the pointy end?
These are just some of the…
Like most children, I adored baby animals from an early age. I bonded deeply with a pet kitten; I campaigned (unsuccessfully but perennially) for a puppy; I delighted in caterpillars. In college, my biology classes introduced me to a profusion of marine larval forms, and a fascination with the true diversity of animal babies fully gripped me. I eventually earned a PhD in the biology of squid babies and, shortly afterward, produced two human babies of my own. I now live with my human family, a cat, and a garden full of grubs, caterpillars, maggots, and innumerable other babies. I read and write about science and nature, especially the intersection of the weird and the adorable.
I read this book when I was a new mom myself, and I was fascinated to learn how much I had in common with animal parents all over the world. In the process of birthing, feeding, protecting, cleaning, and teaching our offspring, we all face similar challenges and tradeoffs and reap remarkable rewards.
Several stories from this book have stuck with me for years, like the one about breastfeeding bat moms needing to offload their milk into any willing mouth, whether it’s their own baby or someone else’s, just to lighten their load enough to fly!
Being a mom is a tough job-but imagine doing it in the jungle or out on the safari, faced by the ravages of the elements, a scarcity of resources and the threat of predators prowling at all times of the day and night. In Wild Moms, Dr. Carin Bondar takes readers on an enthralling tour of the animal kingdom as she explores the phenomenon of motherhood in the wild.
A journey through motherhood for the animal kingdom-from the initial phases of gestation and pregnancy through breastfeeding and toddler-rearing and trying to parent a teenager through empty nest syndrome (which, in…
Like most children, I adored baby animals from an early age. I bonded deeply with a pet kitten; I campaigned (unsuccessfully but perennially) for a puppy; I delighted in caterpillars. In college, my biology classes introduced me to a profusion of marine larval forms, and a fascination with the true diversity of animal babies fully gripped me. I eventually earned a PhD in the biology of squid babies and, shortly afterward, produced two human babies of my own. I now live with my human family, a cat, and a garden full of grubs, caterpillars, maggots, and innumerable other babies. I read and write about science and nature, especially the intersection of the weird and the adorable.
Similar to Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice, this book made me laugh and gasp at scandalous true stories of reproductive biology. What really captured my attention, though, were the unexpected ways that human actions are affecting the courtship, mating, and spawning of animals that might seem beyond our reach.
Knowing that we can unintentionally inhibit the intimate lives of other species through pollution and climate change really brings home the importance of reforming our behavior.
Forget the Kama Sutra. When it comes to inventive sex acts, just look to the sea. There we find the elaborate mating rituals of armored lobsters; giant right whales engaging in a lively threesome whilst holding their breath; full moon sex parties of groupers and daily mating blitzes by blueheaded wrasse. Deep-sea squid perform inverted 69s, while hermaphrodite sea slugs link up in giant sex loops. From doubly endowed sharks to the maze-like vaginas of some whales, Sex in the Sea is a journey unlike any other to explore the staggering ways life begets life beneath the waves. Beyond a…
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.
As a young sociologist, I shunned explanations of human behavior informed by psychology and biology, but over the years my research showed me that individual predispositions and capacities influence social structure, as well as the other way around. Books like those I recommend helped me recognize how evolutionary dynamics gave rise to our intensely social nature and so explain many social processes. And as I began this intellectual journey, events in my own life ripped off the psychological seal I had constructed over my childhood experiences of maternal abandonment and paternal suicide and finally enabled me to make sense of them. We can improve our individual and societal health by increasing our understanding of our fundamental social needs.
In clear, captivating prose, Blueprint provides a dazzling body of evidence in support of the need for explanations of human behavior to take account of genes as well as environment, neurotransmitters as well as social norms, our species’ hunter-gatherer past as well as its technology-enabled present. Distinguished sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis argues that the genes selected in our evolutionary past produced a group-oriented human nature—the “social suite”—that prizes love for partners and offspring, friendship and cooperation, relative egalitarianism, and social learning and teaching, and recognition of individual identity, as well as in-group bias. Whether shipwrecked sailors or utopian communities, online or in-person networks, Christakis demonstrates that human groups function better and survive longer when they reflect elements of the social suite and recognize the fungibility of “in-group” boundaries.
"A dazzlingly erudite synthesis of history, philosophy, anthropology, genetics, sociology, economics, epidemiology, statistics, and more" (Frank Bruni, The New York Times), Blueprint shows why evolution has placed us on a humane path -- and how we are united by our common humanity.
For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all of our inventions -- our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations -- we carry…
I’m an evolutionary biologist and a Wenner-Gren Fellow at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University, Sweden. My research focuses on the biology of genetic conflicts and what they can tell us about the evolution of conflict and cooperation more generally. I develop population genetic theory and perform comparative analyses to ask how and why such conflicts occur and how they fit into models of social evolution. I also work on the foundations of the so-called gene’s-eye view of evolution, also known as selfish gene theory. I studied at Edinburgh and Toronto and was a postdoc at Cornell and Harvard.
I did my PhD in biology, but one of the books that affected my thinking the most was written by a philosopher: Samir Okasha’s Evolution and the Levels of Selection. I came to biology not through a love of natural history, but through a fascination with the logic of evolution by natural selection. The debate over the gene’s-eye fitted perfectly into this and it led me into the huge literature in the philosophy of biology that deals with the so-called levels of selection debate – does natural selection act on genes, individuals, or groups? Okasha’s book is a great demonstration of how philosophy can help science.
Does natural selection act primarily on individual organisms, on groups, on genes, or on whole species? Samir Okasha provides a comprehensive analysis of the debate in evolutionary biology over the levels of selection, focusing on conceptual, philosophical and foundational questions. A systematic framework is developed for thinking about natural selection acting at multiple levels of the biological hierarchy; the framework is then used to help resolve outstanding issues. Considerable attention is paid to the concept of causality as it relates to the levels of selection, in particular the idea that natural selection at one hierarchical level can have effects that…
I am Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Bristol. I am interested in most areas of contemporary philosophy, in particular the interplay between philosophy and the natural and social sciences. Much of my recent work has focused on evolutionary biology, a science that is replete with implications for traditional philosophical debates about human nature, knowledge, and our place in the world.
This short, clearly written book offers a penetrating analysis of the foundations of evolutionary biology. Godfrey-Smith develops a novel conceptual framework for understanding evolution based on the concept of a “Darwinian population,” which refers to any collection of entities capable of evolving by natural selection, and a “Darwinian individual,” which is a member of such a population. He uses this framework to shed light on topics including reproduction, symbiosis, culture, and transitions between levels of organization. The book is a perfect illustration of why science sometimes needs philosophy.
In 1859 Darwin described a deceptively simple mechanism that he called "natural selection," a combination of variation, inheritance, and reproductive success. He argued that this mechanism was the key to explaining the most puzzling features of the natural world, and science and philosophy were changed forever as a result. The exact nature of the Darwinian process has been controversial ever since, however. Godfrey-Smith draws on new developments in biology, philosophy of science, and other fields to give a new analysis and extension of Darwin's idea. The central concept used is that of a "Darwinian population," a collection of things with…
I am a scientist and technologist, trained in theoretical quantum physics, who became an Emeritus Professor of Network Technology from Oslo’s metropolitan university. I’ve strenuously tried to communicate the wonder of science to students and industry throughout my career. I’ve been privileged to know some of the great movers and shakers of science in my lifetime and it always gives me great pleasure to open someone’s mind to new ideas. These books have been an integral part of my own intellectual journey. I hope these recommendations will inspire the youngest and the oldest readers alike.
This selection is as much about its author as the book itself. It is one of a series of books, written in Dawkins superbly approachable style, on the subject of Darwinian evolution.
Dawkins began writing with his groundbreaking book The Selfish Gene. Unfortunately, the latter was rewritten so many times as to lose its initial impact, and this overshadowed the much better book The Extended Phenotype due to the forces of popular science publishing.
This newer book, with illustrations by his then-wife Laila Ward (of Dr Who fame) is a fine example from the man who brought us the Selfish Gene theory of forward evolutionary selection and multi-scale thinking. It’s a wild ride, written by a great writer and explainer whose role in modern science writing should not be underestimated.
The human eye is so complex and works so precisely that surely, one might believe, its current shape and function must be the product of design. How could such an intricate object have come about by chance? Tackling this subject-in writing that the New York Times called "a masterpiece"-Richard Dawkins builds a carefully reasoned and lovingly illustrated argument for evolutionary adaptation as the mechanism for life on earth.
The metaphor of Mount Improbable represents the combination of perfection and improbability that is epitomized in the seemingly "designed" complexity of living things. Dawkins skillfully guides the reader on a breathtaking journey…
I’m a scientist at the University of Cambridge who’s worked on
environmental research topics such as jet streams and the Antarctic
ozone hole. I’ve also worked on solar physics and musical acoustics.
And other branches of science have always interested me. Toward the
end of my career, I became fascinated by cutting-edge issues in
biological evolution and natural selection. Evolution is far
richer and more complex than you’d think from its popular description
in terms of ‘selfish genes’. The complexities are central to
understanding deep connections between the sciences, the arts, and
human nature in general, and the profound differences between human
intelligence and artificial intelligence.
It’s a powerful update on Noble’s book, zooming in on the workings
of the biomolecular circuits surrounding the DNA.
Some of the
circuits are studied in great detail, looking closely at how they
work, and at how they evolve in response to mutations in the DNA. A
disadvantageous mutation is eliminated by natural selection. But as
well as advantageous mutations it turns out that ‘neutral’ mutations,
conferring no immediate advantage, are important and indeed crucial.
That resolved one of the dichotomized disputes noted in Wills’ book.
The power of Darwin's theory of natural selection is beyond doubt, it explains how useful adaptations are preserved over generations. But evolution's biggest mystery eluded Darwin: how those adaptations arise in the first place. Can random mutations over a 3.8 billion years be solely responsible for wings, eyeballs, knees, photosynthesis, and the rest of nature's creative marvels? And by calling these mutations 'random', are we not just admitting our own ignorance? What if we could now uncover the wellspring of all biological innovation?
Renowned evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner presents the missing piece in Darwin's theory. Using cutting-edge experimental and computational…