Evolution

For decades, the medical community has looked to a variety of reasons for why we age, and the consensus is that no-one dies of old age; they die of age-related diseases....

Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it....

Why do human beings behave as they do? We are capable of savage acts of violence but also spectacular feats of kindness: is one side of our nature destined to win out over the other? Find out...

In a book that is both groundbreaking and accessible, Daniel C. Dennett focuses his unerringly logical mind on the theory of natural selection....

The nation’s greatest voice, David Attenborough, reads a brand-new edition of Life on Earth, now available as an audiobook for the first time....

In this mesmerizing debut, award-winning palaeontologist Thomas Halliday gives us a breath-taking up close encounter with worlds that are normally unimaginably distant....

In the Rutherford and Fry's comprehensive guidebook, they tell the complete story of the universe and absolutely everything in it - skipping over some of the boring parts.... 

Fifty thousand years ago, we were not the only species of human in the world. There were at least four others, including the Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans. At the forefront of the latter's ground-breaking discovery was Oxford Professor Tom Higham....

Alice Roberts takes you on the most incredible journey, revealing your path from a single cell to a complex embryo to a living, breathing, thinking person....

Richard Dawkins takes on creationists, including followers of 'Intelligent Design' and all those who question the fact of evolution through natural selection....

Why can humans alone invent? In The Pattern Seekers, Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen makes a case that autism is as crucial to our creative and cultural history as the mastery of fire....

Can we trust our senses to tell us the truth? Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally....

A bold, provocative exploration of the tension between our evolutionary history and our modern woes and what we can do about it....

A behind-the-scenes account of the discovery of the oldest skeleton of a human ancestor, named "Ardi"—a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution....

Here is a pilgrimage back through time - a journey on which we meet up with fellow pilgrims as we converge on our common ancestors. Chimpanzees join us at about six million years in the past....

The New York Times best-selling author of Darwin’s Doubt presents groundbreaking scientific evidence of the existence of God, based on breakthroughs in physics, cosmology, and biology....

Sentient assembles a menagerie of zoological creatures - from land, air, sea and all four corners of the globe - to understand what it means to be human....

The Book of Humans tells the story of how we became the creatures we are today, bestowed with the unique ability to investigate what makes us who we are....

Our senses are at the heart of how we navigate the world. Whittling this high-powered and deliciously varied palette down to just five does a great disservice to the sensory experience, Sensational argues....

In Metazoa, Peter Godfrey-Smith, author of the best-selling Other Minds looks beyond the octopus to the complexity of the whole animal kingdom, exploring the origins of consciousness and grappling with the greatest mystery of evolution....

In this landmark book of popular science, Daniel E. Lieberman gives us a lucid and engaging account of how the human body evolved over millions of years....

Presenting scientific evidence from diverse fields, including anthropology, biology, and psychology, Fuentes devises a myth-busting toolkit to dismantle persistent fallacies about the validity of biological races, the innateness of violence, and the nature of monogamy, sex, and gender....

A place of exceptional diversity, rapid change and high energy, for the past 100 million years Europe has literally been at the crossroads of the world. By virtue of its geology and geography, evolution in Europe proceeds faster than elsewhere....

What is animal welfare? This concise and accessible guide is for anyone who is interested in animals and who has wondered how we can assess their welfare scientifically....

When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought he had explained every clue but one. Darwin knew there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain....

The Mesozoic Era, which lasted from about 252 to 66 million years ago, is divided into three periods, the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. During this era, one type of life came to dominate the planet more completely and for a longer period than had been seen before or since; this was the Age of Reptiles. Beginning in the Triassic but especially in the Jurassic period, reptiles came to dominate the oceans, the land and even the skies.

Over a century after Darwin published the Origin of Species, Darwinian theory is in a "vibrantly healthy state," writes Stephen Jay Gould, its most engaging and illuminating exponent. Exploring the "peculiar and mysterious particulars of nature," Gould introduces the listener to some of the many and wonderful manifestations of evolutionary biology.

Prepare for a mind-expanding journey. Discover how intelligence evolved, starting from DNA and RNA genesis, all the way to the rise of machines. Imagine a world where evolutionary principles influence machine learning algorithms, crafting Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This provocative exploration delves deep into evolution, unlocking parallels between natural selection and the birth of computing intelligence. The narrative charts an exhilarating course from the dawn of life to an AGI-dominated future.

Sex, after hunger, may be the most powerful motivating force in our lives. It drives us to seek intimate contact with others and to form relationships that may be fleeting or lifelong, blissful or troubled. Yet many mysteries surround sex and sexuality: Why don't we reproduce by virgin birth? Why does so much of our sexual behavior have nothing to do with reproduction? Why isn't everyone heterosexual? How does the brain create sexual arousal? How do sexual kinks develop? Is porn harmful? What is the relationship between sex and love?

It is rare for life to change Earth, yet three organisms have profoundly transformed our planet over the long course of its history. Elemental reveals how microbes, plants, and people used the fundamental building blocks of life to alter the climate, and with it, the trajectory of life on Earth in the past, present, and future. Taking listeners from the deep geologic past to our current era of human dominance, Stephen Porder focuses on five of life’s essential elements—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus.

Evolutionary theory in the theme that binds together these essays on such seemingly disparate topics as the feeding habits of flamingos, flowers and snails that change from male to female and sometimes back again, and the extinction from baseball of the .400 hitter.

As biologist Jeremy Griffith explains in THE Interview (which psychiatrist Professor Harry Prosen described as “the most important interview of all time”), while we humans lacked the explanation for our two-million-year corrupted human condition, we had no choice but to deny that our distant ape ancestors lived in a state of cooperative and loving innocence. But with the good reason for our corrupted condition now finally found, our species’ original state of innocence can at last be admitted.

What defines who we are? For decades, the biological answer has been our genes. In The Master Builder, leading biologist Alfonso Martinez Arias breaks with decades of scientific and popular tradition to make a bold argument: what defines us is our cells. Drawing on new research from his lab and others, Martinez Arias reveals that we are composed of a thrillingly complex, constantly rearranging symphony of cells that know how to count, feel, and ultimately give form to our bodies.

From breasts and orgasms to periods, pregnancies, and menopause—A Brief History of the Female Body is a fascinating science book explaining the mysteries of the female body through an evolutionary lens.

As biologist Jeremy Griffith explains in The Interview (which psychiatrist Professor Harry Prosen described as the most important interview of all time), while we humans lacked the explanation for our 2-million-year corrupted human condition we had no choice but to deny that our distant ape ancestors lived in a state of cooperative and loving innocence.