The most recommended human evolution books

I find crucial the main message of this book: Human evolution is unity in diversity.

I love the story of how the wonderful diversity of the world's cultures and languages, many of which are now extinct or threatened, radiated from a handful of African pioneers. In Homo sapiens, races do not exist. And for me, that's good.

If you can read only one book on human evolution, this is it. “Lucy,” a fossil Australopithecus afarensis, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, is the proverbial “missing link.” About three million years old, she had a chimpanzee-size brain, about 400cc (as opposed to modern humans, about 1200cc), and yet walked upright. Told by Don Johanson, one of the team who discovered her, and science writer Martin Edey, the book is informative, serious, and yet at the same time written with a light touch that makes the tale akin to a thriller like Stephen King. It is a thriller. Our great great grandma was not Eve, eating illicit apples, but a modified monkey roaming the plains of Africa.

Just when I thought the future was bright and sunny (in part due to Kurzweil), I learn from James Barrat that ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) might well mark the end of our species (and the start of an ever-expanding artificial replacement).

I was fascinated by the people Barrat introduces us to like an expert on the psychology of ASI, and his description of a perfect machine and its runaway implications. I realized this is modernity at its best and worst: we push forward to improve the world but are always at the risk of creating new, unseen problems.

The most troubling question of all (to my way of thinking) is that our idea of perfected humanity (both a modern and a pre-modern aim) ends in the vision of machines like Watson playing endless games of Jeopardy among themselves.

This book was the inspiration for my book and was written by a professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. It sets out a convincing argument that cooking may have been started by the earliest humans about 2 million years ago, which is far earlier than most anthropologists believe. Much of Wrangham’s arguments are based on his own research that illustrates how cooking provided better nutrition resulting in the expansion of the human brain by 60% over thousands of years giving humans a head-start over all other living species. 

I can’t think of a better tale of discovery written by a scientist than Shubin’s engaging account of the unearthing of Tiktaalik, the first fish to walk on land.

I remember reading about the find on the front page of The New York Times, and this book is the backstory. By weaving his own boots-on-the-ground experience as a paleontologist with a highly approachable background on the relevant biology, Shubin us a front row seat to one of the most important events in evolution. 

From anthropology and archeology, Douglas Fry and his co-contributors tell us that our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, in small bands, on a five-million-year camping trip around the globe. We had to have adaptations for harmonious communal living. Wary of strangers, we would realize that wanting to fight them was stupid. Man the “killer ape” is fiction. Then, 10,000 years ago, came agriculture, with a population explosion producing abundant goods that others would covet. The consequence was war and prejudice and other vile beliefs and behaviors. Ex-Quaker as I am, I have written a book, Why We Hate: The Roots of Human Conflict, appearing in Spring 2021, arguing that, by making the appropriate cultural moves, we can again attain our natural state of cooperation and peaceful living.

I was at a hospital, waiting to see my mother, who was recovering from an operation. Bored, I walked to a nearby store that sold snacks, magazines, and books, and picked up a paperback that looked interesting. I was thirteen and The Power was the first science-fiction book I read. The book begins with a meeting of a Navy committee for human research, conducting experiments on superior abilities that enhance the performance of military personnel. Before the meeting is over, the men and women attending discover that among them there may be a very unusual person, one so superior as to present an existential threat to lesser humans. Robinson, a Navy veteran of Korea and WWII with degrees in physics and journalism, deftly explores a possible path of human evolution.

This one does not follow children from childhood to adulthood, but rather reveals how 100s of years ago events occurred that radically changed who people interacted with, married and spent their lives relating to.

It is a bold, strikingly original, and epic account of how the co-evolution of psychology and culture created the peculiar Western mind that profoundly shaped the modern world. While Nature matters, what this volume made clear to me is how “big Nurture”, meaning cultural practices, have changed over the past 1,000 years and the dramatic implications of such change for the world we live in today.

I devoured this book because it resonated with many of my spiritual beliefs.

The MC is an evolved being who is the daughter of a goddess, she is reincarnated many times. I loved the higher power and the evolved beings, alongside human evolution as the MC lived through the ages. I am a Spiritualist and I truly believe that we are here on this earth plane to learn and grow.

This book offered a unique perspective on life, and the human psyche. This book left me asking questions about my own life, a deep and meaningful read indeed. 

My father bought this book for me because I write on marriage and relationships.

I was skeptical that a book about the mating habits of birds had much relevance to my own work, yet I found Prum’s arguments about the connections between birds and humans compelling. According to Prum, female mate selection led to changes in the physical attributes and behaviors of birds and these changes can provide insights into the evolution of human sexuality as well.

As a scholar of marriage, I am very familiar with the argument that men choose partners based on physical attributes while women choose partners for economic and social reasons. Consequently, it was refreshing to hear that this difference may be more environmental that innate.

Prum suggests that for much of human evolutionary history, it was female preferences that mattered and that these preferences were so strong, they actually changed male bodies. According to… show more.