Here are 100 books that Life Unfolding fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have wondered about what goes on in the brains of animals and people since I was a youth. My research career began by studying how some genes affect behavior. Little surprise, it turns out, that many such “behavioral” genes influence the way the brain is built. So, I began to study brain development using embryos from a variety of experimental laboratory animals and developed a university course on this topic. When I retired, I decided to share what I learned. The other books on this list are great examples of readable books that would likely be exciting to anyone else interested in the story of how the human brain is built.
This book picks up brilliantly from where Zero to Birth leaves off. It’s the story of how the brain encodes the reality of the world outside the womb, how our experiences change the brain, and how we acquire knowledge, skills, and sociability.
I found this book to be extremely readable. It’s full of fascinating and illustrative examples of how the human brain continues to change to function effectively in the real world.
'This is the story of how your life shapes your brain, and how your brain shapes your life.'
Join renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman on a whistle-stop tour of the inner cosmos. It's a journey that will take you into the world of extreme sports, criminal justice, genocide, brain surgery, robotics and the search for immortality. On the way, amidst the infinitely dense tangle of brain cells and their trillions of connections, something emerges that you might not have expected to see: you.
I have wondered about what goes on in the brains of animals and people since I was a youth. My research career began by studying how some genes affect behavior. Little surprise, it turns out, that many such “behavioral” genes influence the way the brain is built. So, I began to study brain development using embryos from a variety of experimental laboratory animals and developed a university course on this topic. When I retired, I decided to share what I learned. The other books on this list are great examples of readable books that would likely be exciting to anyone else interested in the story of how the human brain is built.
Not only does this book provide an up-to-date account of where science is at in terms of our basic understanding of how the brain works, but it also succeeds in putting this knowledge into a compelling history of basic discoveries. I really enjoyed this aspect of Cobb's book and tried to incorporate it into my book.
So, I found it to be an excellent introduction to neuroscience and a great book about the process of how science progresses in jumps. It engenders real excitement in this still very lively field of study and celebrates the key advances in our conceptual understanding of the brain.
This is the story of our quest to understand the most mysterious object in the universe: the human brain.
Today we tend to picture it as a computer. Earlier scientists thought about it in their own technological terms: as a telephone switchboard, or a clock, or all manner of fantastic mechanical or hydraulic devices. Could the right metaphor unlock the its deepest secrets once and for all?
Galloping through centuries of wild speculation and ingenious, sometimes macabre anatomical investigations, scientist and historian Matthew Cobb reveals how…
I am a scientist who has worked at the coal face of the debate around the origin of animals and ‘Snowball Earth’ his entire career, using a combination of experimental and descriptive science. Over three decades, I have witnessed first-hand how careful attention to detail in study after study has removed doubt from once provocative, even crazy, ideas that are now widely accepted. I love reading popular science from the perspective of the hands-on scientist who has witnessed the debate first-hand and contributed to received knowledge by conceiving new experiments, amassing data, and, more than often, in entirely unexpected ways through sheer curiosity.
I cherish this book as I can dip into any part of it and will always learn something new.
I have always been fascinated by the origin of things, and there is nothing more fundamental than the origin of life itself. Nick Lane is on the front line of such research and brings a lot to bear down on this question, from his own laboratory experiments to theoretical biochemistry, all without a hint of condescension. Nick wants to take the reader with him on a personal journey to discover why we are here, and this is a journey I wouldn’t miss for the world.
The Earth teems with life: in its oceans, forests, skies and cities. Yet there's a black hole at the heart of biology. We do not know why complex life is the way it is, or, for that matter, how life first began. In The Vital Question, award-winning author and biochemist Nick Lane radically reframes evolutionary history, putting forward a solution to conundrums that have puzzled generations of scientists.
For two and a half billion years, from the very origins of life, single-celled organisms such as bacteria evolved without changing their basic form. Then, on just one occasion in four billion…
Everybody knows that all animals—bats, bears, sharks, ponies, and people—start out as a single cell: the fertilized egg. But how does something no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence give rise to the remarkable complexity of each of these creatures?
As any software developer knows, architecture matters. This applies to metaphysics as much as it does to physics. Traditional metaphysics, based on sacred texts that are thousands of years old, is burdened with a considerable amount of tech debt. My goal was to refresh the topic by presenting a metaphysics of entropy, followed by a metaphysics of Darwinism, followed by a metaphysics of memes. The ground covered is the same—how did we get from the dawn of creation to the present day—but the path through the territory is modern, not ancient. I have sought to show that this pathway is fully supportive of traditional ethics, the values we have cherished for thousands of years.
Brockman has collected a portfolio of big ideas that warrant profound explanations, and each one provides an intellectual journey that both teaches and delights.
The reader is continually reminded that depth, beauty, and elegance play the same role in theories as they do in software architecture. They signal quality, reliability, and sustainability.
In This Explains Everything, John Brockman, founder and publisher of Edge.org, asked experts in numerous fields and disciplines to come up with their favorite explanations for everyday occurrences. Why do we recognize patterns? Is there such a thing as positive stress? Are we genetically programmed to be in conflict with each other? Those are just some of the 150 questions that the world's best scientific minds answer with elegant simplicity. With contributions from Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Taleb, Brian Eno, Steven Pinker, and more, everything is explained in fun, uncomplicated terms that make the most complex concepts easy to…
As any software developer knows, architecture matters. This applies to metaphysics as much as it does to physics. Traditional metaphysics, based on sacred texts that are thousands of years old, is burdened with a considerable amount of tech debt. My goal was to refresh the topic by presenting a metaphysics of entropy, followed by a metaphysics of Darwinism, followed by a metaphysics of memes. The ground covered is the same—how did we get from the dawn of creation to the present day—but the path through the territory is modern, not ancient. I have sought to show that this pathway is fully supportive of traditional ethics, the values we have cherished for thousands of years.
The essence of complexity is to extract new capabilities from existing subsystems to generate outcomes that emerge from their interactions. The ratchet principle is core to all innovation at scale.
Essentially, all systems are built upon the underpinning of prior systems, which is why you can still find business processes coded in Assembler running on mainframes.
Life is an enduring mystery. Yet, science tells us that living beings are merely sophisticated structures of lifeless molecules. If this view is correct, where do the seemingly purposeful motions of cells and organisms originate? In Life's Ratchet , physicist Peter M. Hoffmann locates the answer to this age-old question at the nanoscale.Below the calm, ordered exterior of a living organism lies microscopic chaos, or what Hoffmann calls the molecular storm,specialized molecules immersed in a whirlwind of colliding water molecules. Our cells are filled with molecular machines, which, like tiny ratchets, transform random motion into ordered activity, and create the…
I have wondered about what goes on in the brains of animals and people since I was a youth. My research career began by studying how some genes affect behavior. Little surprise, it turns out, that many such “behavioral” genes influence the way the brain is built. So, I began to study brain development using embryos from a variety of experimental laboratory animals and developed a university course on this topic. When I retired, I decided to share what I learned. The other books on this list are great examples of readable books that would likely be exciting to anyone else interested in the story of how the human brain is built.
This is a wonderful book by one of the great pioneers of Evo-Devo. The title comes from the last lines of Darwin’s classic Origin of the Species, and the book fittingly illustrates how the theory of evolution is related to the development of plants and animals.
The lessons in this book are fundamental to my appreciation of biology and provide excellent context to the evo-devo stories in my book.
For over a century, opening the black box of embryonic development was the holy grail of biology. Evo Devo-Evolutionary Developmental Biology-is the new science that has finally cracked open the box. Within the pages of his rich and riveting book, Sean B. Carroll explains how we are discovering that complex life is ironically much simpler than anyone ever expected.
Citizen Scientist begins with this extraordinary statement by the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, “Study any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than anyone else on the planet.”
As the author chases the obscure Western red-bellied tiger beetle across New…
I have wondered about what goes on in the brains of animals and people since I was a youth. My research career began by studying how some genes affect behavior. Little surprise, it turns out, that many such “behavioral” genes influence the way the brain is built. So, I began to study brain development using embryos from a variety of experimental laboratory animals and developed a university course on this topic. When I retired, I decided to share what I learned. The other books on this list are great examples of readable books that would likely be exciting to anyone else interested in the story of how the human brain is built.
This is a truly excellent book on brain evolution, mostly from the vertebrate and mammalian perspective. It is quite academic, though I found it much easier to read than most university-level textbooks. The flow is logical, and it covers a huge range of issues from a conceptual point of view.
I really enjoyed learning about how different animals evolved to possess different mental skills and capacities and how these abilities are linked to particular structures in the brain, such as the cerebral cortex.
Brain Evolution is a complex weave of species similarities and differences, bound by diverse rules or principles. This book is a detailed examination of these principles, using data from a wide array of vertebrates but minimizing technical details and terminology. It is written for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and more senior scientists who already know something about 'the brain,' but want a deeper understanding of how diverse brains evolved. The book opens with a brief history of evolutionary neuroscience, then introduces the various groups of vertebrates and their major brain regions. The core of the text explores: what aspects of…
I spent my career in developmental biology: the science of how embryos develop. My main discovery was the discovery of one of the signals that controls development, called the fibroblast growth factor. Stem cell biology grew up on the basis of previous discoveries in developmental biology, and now, every day, people around the world use fibroblast growth factor among other substances to control the development of their stem cells. From 2007-2012 I was Director of the Stem Cell Institute at the University of Minnesota, so I got a good inside view of the whole field.
This is a beautiful book written by a great team from Utrecht in the Netherlands. It starts with a potted introduction to cell and developmental biology. I like this because, as a developmental biologist myself, I know that it is the basic science underpinning stem cell biology. It explains embryonic stem cells and cloning. Before covering transplantation therapy it explains about immune rejection of grafts and how this is dealt with. Unlike most books on stem cells, it covers non-therapeutic applications such as the study of human development or the use of stem cell-derived cells for safety testing of drugs.
The first and second editions had fabulous colour pictures all the way through. Sadly the 3rd edition has been downgraded to black and white.
Stem Cells: Scientific Facts and Fiction, Third Edition, provides a state-of-the-art overview on the field of stem cells and their current applications. The book incorporates the history and firsthand commentaries in the field from clinical and research leaders, covering interesting topics of note, including the first clinical trials to treat Parkinson disease, macular degeneration, and corneal replacement, the cloning of monkeys, the organoid field, and CRISPR-edited genomics. In addition, coverage of adult, embryonic stem cells and iPS cells is included. This new edition distinguishes itself from the multiplicity of websites about stem cells with a broad view of the field.
I'm an experimental social psychologist and Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. I grew up in Hungary, and after an adventurous escape I ended up in Sydney. I received my DPhil and DSc degrees from the University of Oxford, and I spent various periods working at Oxford, Stanford, Heidelberg, and Giessen. For my work I received the Order of Australia, as well as the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, the Alexander von Humboldt Prize, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. As somebody who experienced totalitarian communism firsthand, I am very interested in the reasons for the recent spread of totalitarian, tribal ideologies, potentially undermining Western liberalism, undoubtedly the most successful civilization in human history.
This book is a real tour de force, applying the rationale of self-governing and naturally emerging evolutionary mechanisms to explain a wide variety of social, biological, cultural, and civilizational processes.
The book offers wonderful insights into such topics as the emergence of creative ideas, the growth of cities, the evolution of language, why state-controlled health care and education systems are often inefficient, the resilience of free-market economies, the rise of morality and trust as a consequence of natural social interactions, and much more besides.
Readable, entertaining, and full of incredibly useful information.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimist and Genome returns with a fascinating, brilliant argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world.
The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch—the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes from science, economics, history, politics and philosophy, Matt Ridley’s wide-ranging, highly opinionated opus demolishes conventional assumptions that major scientific and social imperatives are dictated by those on high, whether in government, business, academia,…
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
We're all in this together: public health for all people, no matter their status or wealth, is one of humanity's great achievements. Favoring reason over faith, science over anecdote, and the group over the individual, has led to lowered infant mortality, improved health, and longer human lifespans. During pandemics, however, evidence and reason are often discarded, as people panic and try to save themselves. The odd human behavior we have seen during the Covid-19 pandemic has multiple precedents in the past. Quack cures, snake-oil sales, conspiracy theories, suspicion of authority, the emergence of cults with eccentric, bizarre, and inexplicable beliefs: again and again, this has been the human response to the unknown.
This is my favorite book on parasites, which I have recommended hundreds of times in international school and university classrooms worldwide. Zimmer is a science writer with a gift for making a horrific subject fascinating and memorable. Zimmer introduced me to a hidden, parallel universe where parasites control their hosts, manipulate their evolution, hide behind their host’s own bodily chemicals, and on occasion turn them into the living dead.
For decades parasites were the pariahs of science. Only recently have biologists begun to appreciate that these diverse and complex organisms are the most highly evolved life forms on earth. In this work, Carl Zimmer takes the reader on a tour of the strange and bizzare world that parasites inhabit, and recounts the voyages of these wonders of creation. Parasites can: rewrite DNA; rewire the brain; genetically engineer viruses as weapons; and turn healthy hosts into the living dead. This book follows researchers in parasitology as they attempt to penetrate the mysteries of these omnipotent creatures who control evolution, ecxosystems,…
