Fans pick 100 books like The Origins of Order

We, who live in one clearly delineated body, think we know what an organism is. Social insects challenge this, making us wonder whether the organism is the ant or the anthill. This book, about how individuals add together to make a new being at a larger scale, is fascinating for biology but also nudges us, as readers, to ask questions about what lives are being led within us, by all the cells that make us, and also whether we are ourselves part of a being so much larger than ourselves we cannot see it for what it is any more than one ant can see the colony for what it is. Reading this made me much more open to the idea of multiple, nested levels of being.

This book presents a fascinating theory that life created an atmosphere favorable to life. The sun is much hotter than when life began. Life kept the temperature beneficial to life by removing greenhouse gasses from the air. Organisms created an atmosphere high in oxygen.

The book is exciting and educates the reader on the interaction of life and the geophysical environment. This book is relevant to and influenced my theory that all species increase biodiversity, the theory about which I wrote the two books I am featuring here.

When I was an undergraduate, the editor of Nature called this book "the best candidate for burning there has been for many years". I therefore rushed out to buy a copy to see why, and I have treasured the book and recommended it ever since. Almost every idea between its covers is wrong, but marshalling evidence to refute the ideas makes readers ask the most fundamental questions about biology and why they believe what they do. I am eternally grateful to Sheldrake for making me justify my opinions properly, with evidence, not just because they were what I read or heard in some classroom. And he will do the same for anyone else: heretics like Sheldrake are really important for testing mainstream science.

This is the best scientific novel I have ever read. The story is fiction (not 'science fiction' in the sense of fantasy, but a story that could easily take place in the real world right now), but its portrayal of how science is done, by a bunch of completely believable characters, is really true-to-life. It's a great way for young people considering a research career to taste what they are really like, and a great way for everyone to ask why we do science the way we do, while enjoying a well-paced multi-layer story, that is written with real wit. [Declaration for transparency: I know the author as a scientific collaborator, but this is nothing to do with my recommendation of her fiction]. 

As a microbial ecologist, I didn’t need to be convinced that microbes make all life on Earth possible. I knew that Falkowski, a preeminent biological oceanographer, would be a trustworthy guide in the microbial world. What makes this book so much fun to read is how Falkowski mixes science with snippets of history, both his own and of early scientists.  

Yet, the science is the main story here and is fascinating. Microbes, specifically cyanobacteria, are the engines that first put oxygen in the atmosphere around 2.4 billion years ago, which set the stage for the evolution of more complicated lifeforms, including, eventually, Homo sapiens.  Microbes are also the ancestral source of what Falkowski calls nanomachines, which continue to power all organisms today. Falkowski convincingly argues that microbes are what make life on Earth possible. 

We can’t understand ourselves, unless we understand our evolutionary history. In his book Evolution for Everyone, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson outlines the principles behind our biology, history, culture, and morality. In order to understand how these processes came to be, we must view evolution through a multi-level and multi-dimensional lense, which is not only central to our modern understanding of evolution, but provides an extended evolutionary synthesis that allows evidence-based psychotherapists to view themselves as applied evolution scientists. David Sloan Wilson describes these processes and more in an accessible and engaging manner – all inside this volume.

Last and First Men is an imagined history of the human race over two-billion years into the future. The beauty of this work is its ability to give the human race meaning and significance, whereas most other works of such scope instead seek to dwarf humanity and its significance under the scale of the universe. Stapledon achieves this by infusing his narrative with compassion, and with an underlying admiration for the process of evolution. Moreso than Darwinian evolution, the process humanity undergoes is more aligned with Hegelian, idealist dialectical movements, and implicitly evokes many questions about the nature of consciousness, our place in the universe, and what is essential about humanity. Though I cannot quite say why, the book has a refreshingly optimistic quality. I read this book shortly after being diagnosed with cancer, and it brought me much vitality.

I like this book because it challenges conventional scientific thinking, advocating for a more open-minded and exploratory approach to scientific inquiry.

I find it interesting because it delves into various scientific disciplines, from physics to biology, highlighting instances where entrenched dogma and ignorance have hindered progress. It argues for the necessity of questioning established paradigms and embracing curiosity-driven research to foster genuine innovation.

As I’m interested in the intersection of philosophy, history, and science I find this book very compelling, as it offers fresh perspectives on how scientific breakthroughs occur and the importance of intellectual humility in the pursuit of knowledge.

Where and why did the modern idea of “the scientific method” show up? The somewhat disturbing answer is that it emerged from highly rhetorical attempts—mainly in one U.S. pop sci magazine in the early twentieth century—to distance wonderful “science” (in its modern sense, which was invented in the 1870s) from anything merely humanistic. The details of this hidden history leave you with the vertiginous sense that the very words we use in this area—science, rational, evidence, know—constitute a kind of fog of evidence-free non-rational assumptions.

This collection of essays takes a different position to mine on the question of chance in evolution. This book boldly approaches the study of evolution with the assumption that there is a large element of chance, contingency, and randomness in the process. Bringing together biologists, and philosophers of science, it explores many aspects of the theory as well as its implications for the existence of life on earth, and especially for the emergence of Homo sapiens. Along the way, the authors tackle such topics as genetic drift, mutation, and parallel evolution. By engaging in collaboration across biology, history, philosophy, and theology, the book offers a comprehensive overview of the history of chance in evolution and at the same time prompts readers to push further the central question as to what the existence of genuine chance would mean for our understanding of nature.