'An insightful book with sparkling wit and humour that will appeal to new and seasoned readers of palaeontology.' Dr Anjana Khatwa, TV presenter and Earth Scientist It is difficult to conceive of the vast scale of the history of life on Earth, from the very first living organisms sparking into life in hydrothermal deep-sea vents to the dizzying diversity of life today. The evolution of life is a sweeping epic of a tale, with twists and turns, surprising heroes and unlikely survivors. The Earth beautifully distils this complex story into a meaningful scale. In taking a closer look at 47 carefully selected organisms over fifteen periods in our planetary history, this book tells the whole story of life on Earth, and the interconnectedness that unites us through our ecosystems and planetary history. Prepare to be confounded by the ingenuity of evolutionary biologies, humbled by our own brief part in this epic history, and disquieted by our disproportionate impact on the world we call home. 'An extraordinarily accessible and informative biography of life seen through the many forms it has generated and preserved in stone, beautifully presented. From tales of the well-known stars of palaeontology like Archaeopteryx to the many-sided cultural stories of the earliest bee fossil, everyone will learn something new.' Thomas Halliday, bestselling author of Otherlands: A World in the Making

This is the past as we've never seen it before. Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours.

Award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns.

Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.

Researchers who study ancient human diets tend to focus on meat eating, since the practice of butchery is very apparent in the archaeological record. In this volume, Julie Lesnik brings a different food source into view, tracing evidence that humans and their hominin ancestors also consumed insects throughout the entire course of human evolution. Lesnik investigates the role of insects in the diets of hunter-gatherers and our nonhuman primate cousins in order to deduce what insect consumption looked like in the past. She approaches the question from the perspectives of primatology, sociocultural anthropology, reproductive physiology, and paleoanthropology. Lesnik posits that women would likely spend more time foraging for and eating insects than men, arguing that this pattern is important to note because women are too often ignored in reconstructions of ancient human behavior. Because of the abundance of insects and the low risk of acquiring them, insects were a reliable food source that mothers used to feed their families over the past five million years. Although they are consumed worldwide to this day, insects are not usually considered to be food in Western societies. Tying together ancient history with our modern lives, Lesnik points out that insects are a highly nutritious and very sustainable food. Lesnik believes that if we accept that edible insects are a part of the human legacy, we may have new conversations about what is good to eat-both in past diets and for the future of food.

Virtually all aspects of human behavior show enormous variation both within and between cultural groups, including material culture, social organization and language. Thousands of distinct cultural groups exist: about 6,000 languages are spoken today, and it is thought that a far greater number of languages existed in the past but became extinct. Using a Darwinian approach, this book seeks to explain this rich cultural variation. There are a number of theoretical reasons to believe that cultural diversification might be tree-like, that is phylogenetic: material and non-material culture is clearly inherited by descendants, there is descent with modification, and languages appear to be hierarchically related. There are also a number of theoretical reasons to believe that cultural evolution is not tree-like: cultural inheritance is not Mendelian and can indeed be vertical, horizontal or oblique, evidence of borrowing abounds, cultures are not necessarily biological populations and can be transient and complex. Here, for the first time, this title tackles these questions of cultural evolution empirically and quantitatively, using a range of case studies from Africa, the Pacific, Europe, Asia and America. A range of powerful theoretical tools developed in evolutionary biology is used to test detailed hypotheses about historical patterns and adaptive functions in cultural evolution. Evidence is amassed from archaeological, linguist and cultural datasets, from both recent and historical or pre-historical time periods. A unifying theme is that the phylogenetic approach is a useful and powerful framework, both for describing the evolutionary history of these traits, and also for testing adaptive hypotheses about their evolution and co-evolution. Contributors include archaeologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and linguists, and this book will be of great interest to all those involved in these areas.

Wallace noticed on expeditions to the Amazon and the Malay archipelego that mammals in Southeast Asia are more advanced than their Australian cousins. His suggestion was that the two continents had split before the better adapted mammals had evolved in Asia. The isolated Australian marsupials were able to thrive, whilst those in Asia were driven to extinction by competition from more advanced mammals. This led to his theory of natural selection, which he presented to the Linnean Society in 1858 with Charles Darwin. This volume reprints those papers presented to the Linnean Society.

Evolution: The Whole Story contains everything you need to know about the development and survival of life on Earth. Each chapter of this accessible and lavishly illustrated book takes a major living group and presents thematic essays discussing the evolution of particular subgroups as they appeared on Earth with reference to detailed comparative anatomy, evolutionary legacies, and the breakthrough theories of eminent scientists. Accompanying the essays are amazing photographic features that investigate the characteristics of individual organisms in detail: in some, remarkable fossils, assembled skeletons, and lifelike reconstructions are presented and analyzed; while in others, living species are depicted and compared in detail to their direct ancestors, creatures that may have lived millions of years ago.

Dieses inspirierende und motivierende Lehrbuch zeichnet facherubergreifend ein beeindruckendes Gesamtbild der biologischen Vielfalt. Spannende Aspekte der Evolution der Erde und des Lebens werden durch interdisziplinare Verknupfung geowissenschaftlicher und biowissenschaftlicher Aspekte aus einer ganz neuen Perspektive anschaulich vermittelt. Der Schwerpunkt liegt hierbei - unter Einbeziehung aktuellster wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse - auf dem Verstandnis von Konzepten und Mechanismen. Dieses Buch richtet sich an Studierende der Bio- und Geowissenschaften und an alle an der Vielfalt des Lebens interessierten Leser. Das innovative Lehrbuchkonzept regt - gleichzeitig als Lesebuch, Bilderbuch und Lexikon der organismischen Biologie - sowohl Anfanger als auch Fortgeschrittene zu einem visuellen und intuitiven Lernen an. Jede Doppelseite bietet ein in sich geschlossenes, anschaulich bebildertes Kapitel mit themenbezogenem Glossar und weiterfuhrenden Verweisen. Fur Dozenten und Lehrer, fur Schule und Hochschule bietet dieses Buch ein reichhaltiges Nachschlagewerk und einen umfassenden Fundus an didaktisch durchdachten und lernfreundlich illustrierten Lehrmaterialien. Der Inhalt reicht von der Entstehung der Erde uber die geowissenschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen und die Verknupfung zwischen biologischer und geologischer Evolution bis zur Entstehung des Menschen von grundlegenden Mechanismen der Entstehung und Erhaltung der Diversitat bis zur globalen Verteilung der heutigen Biodiversitat von den Anfangen der biologischen Systematik in der griechischen Philosophie und der Bibel uber die darwinsche Evolution und die Struktur und Funktion von Arten und Organismen bis zu den modernen Erkenntnissen der Megasystematik und Phylogenie. Mit diesem einzigartigen Konzept verschafft dieses Lehrbuch einen soliden UEberblick uber die Erdgeschichte und Biodiversitat. Die Verknupfung der verschiedenen Fachdisziplinen foerdert das Verstandnis ubergeordneter Prinzipien und naturwissenschaftlicher Zusammenhange.

The discovery in the 1920s of a huge cache of fossils in the Gobi Desert fuelled a mania for dinosaurs that continues to the present. But the original goal of the expedition was to search for the origins of man. Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935), director of the American Museum of Natural History, stood at the forefront of the debate over human evolution and the expedition aimed to prove his theory of human origins. Osborn rejected the idea of primate ancestry and constructed a non-Darwinian theory that the evolution of man was the long adventurous story of individuals and groups exerting personal will-power and inborn characteristics to achieve both biological and spiritual success. It is an idea that still echoes today. Study of Osborn's thinking, however, has been obscured by the perception that racism influenced his theories. Brian Regal paints a different and more textured picture in this book - he shows that Osborn's views on race, like his political ideas, were motivated by his science, itself grounded in religious doctrine. His belief in the Central Asian origins of man, his role as an activist for eugenic reform and immigration controls, his support for Nordicism, his place in the 'New' versus 'Old' biology debate, his role in the Christian Fundamentalist controversy, the Scopes Monkey trial, and finally his construction of the 'Dawn Man' hypothesis - all stemmed from his desire to support his human evolution theory, and point the way to salvation. This biography charts Osborn's intellectual development, from its roots in the eclectic Christianity of his mother, through his student days with Arnold Guyot, James McCosh, and T.H. Huxley, to his mature work at the American Museum. It examines his trials and tribulations, friendships and conflicts, and the world in which he lived: all contributed to the construction of his theory. It is the dramatic story of a man holding onto ideas that for him represented the very meaning of life itself.

Here is a book for everyone who has an interest in how our planet works, what has happened during its 4,550 million year history and what might happen in the future. It tells how Earth scientists study the pattern of events that have shaped the planet and guided the evolution of life on Earth. In clear and simple language it describes how the effects of these events are measured and the careful detective work needed to unravel the extraordinary complexity of Earth history. The latest advances in dating methods, including the detection of regular patterns of global climate change, are explained and illustrated with real case histories. Our environment is unexpectedly unstable.
Dramatic and catastrophic changes in the environment have directed the evolution of life and the rise of Man, and we can expect similar events in the future. If we are to control their effects, we will have to understand what to expect - and what could happen if we try to intervene in the 'natural' development of our home, the Earth.

Evolutionary science is critical to an understanding of integrated human biology and is increasingly recognised as a core discipline by medical and public health professionals. Advances in the field of genomics, epigenetics, developmental biology, and epidemiology have led to the growing realisation that incorporating evolutionary thinking is essential for medicine to achieve its full potential. This revised and updated second edition of the first comprehensive textbook of evolutionary medicine explains the principles of evolutionary biology from a medical perspective and focuses on how medicine and public health might utilise evolutionary thinking. It is written to be accessible to a broad range of readers, whether or not they have had formal exposure to evolutionary science. The general structure of the second edition remains unchanged, with the initial six chapters providing a summary of the evolutionary theory relevant to understanding human health and disease, using examples specifically relevant to medicine. The second part of the book describes the application of evolutionary principles to understanding particular aspects of human medicine: in addition to updated chapters on reproduction, metabolism, and behaviour, there is an expanded chapter on our coexistence with micro-organisms and an entirely new chapter on cancer. The two parts are bridged by a chapter that details pathways by which evolutionary processes affect disease risk and symptoms, and how hypotheses in evolutionary medicine can be tested. The final two chapters of the volume are considerably expanded; they illustrate the application of evolutionary biology to medicine and public health, and consider the ethical and societal issues of an evolutionary perspective. A number of new clinical examples and historical illustrations are included. This second edition of a novel and popular textbook provides an updated resource for doctors and other health professionals, medical students and biomedical scientists, as well as anthropologists interested in human health, to gain a better understanding of the evolutionary processes underlying human health and disease.

Fitness and adaptation are fundamental characteristics of plant and animal species, enabling them to survive in their environment and to adapt to the inevitable changes in this environment. This is true for both the genetic resources of natural ecosystems as well as those used in agricultural production.

Extensive genetic variation exists between varieties/breeds in a species and amongst individuals within breeds. This variation has developed over very long periods of time. A major ongoing challenge is how to best utilize this variation to meet short-term demands whilst also conserving it for longer-term possible use.

Many animal breeding programs have led to increased performance for production traits but this has often been accompanied by reduced fitness. In addition, the global use of genetic resources prompts the question whether introduced genotypes are adapted to local production systems. Understanding the genetic nature of fitness and adaptation will enable us to better manage genetic resources allowing us to make efficient and sustainable decisions for the improvement or breeding of these resources.

This book had an ambitious goal in bringing together a sample of the world s leading scientists in animal breeding and evolutionary genetics to exchange knowledge to advance our understanding of these vital issues.

Evolutionary ethics - the application of evolutionary ideas to moral thinking and justification - began in the nineteenth century with the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but was subsequently criticized as an example of the naturalistic fallacy. In recent decades, however, evolutionary ethics has found new support among both the Darwinian and the Spencerian traditions. This accessible volume looks at the history of thought about evolutionary ethics as well as current debates in the subject, examining first the claims of supporters and then the responses of their critics. Topics covered include social Darwinism, moral realism, and debunking arguments. Clearly written and structured, the book guides readers through the arguments on both sides, and emphasises the continuing relevance of evolutionary theory to our understanding of ethics today.

A noted conflict-resolution expert explores dignity, its role in human conflict, and its power to improve relationships "This book is a must read for those who want to experience peace in their everyday lives and peace in the world around them. . . . If you want peace, be sure everyone's dignity is intact."-Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu "Anyone who understands the importance of personal feelings and their fuel for conflict should consider Dignity as a powerful advisory and motivational guide."-Midwest Book Review Drawing on her extensive experience in international conflict resolution and on insights from evolutionary biology, psychology, and neuroscience, Donna Hicks explains what the elements of dignity are, how to recognize dignity violations, how to respond when we are not treated with dignity, how dignity can restore a broken relationship, why leaders must understand the concept of dignity, and more. By choosing dignity as a way of life, Hicks shows, we open the way to greater peace within ourselves and to a safer and more humane world for all. For the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Dignity, Hicks has written a new preface that reflects on her experience helping communities and individuals understand the power of dignity and how it can lead to a more peaceful world. Winner of the 2012 Educator's Award, given by the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International.

All humans share three origins: the beginning of our individual lives, the appearance of life on Earth, and the formation of our planetary home. Life through Time and Space brings together the latest discoveries in both biology and astronomy to examine our deepest questions about where we came from, where we are going, and whether we are alone in the cosmos. A distinctive voice in the growing field of astrobiology, Wallace Arthur combines embryological, evolutionary, and cosmological perspectives to tell the story of life on Earth and its potential to exist elsewhere in the universe. He guides us on a journey through the myriad events that started with the big bang and led to the universe we inhabit today. Along the way, readers learn about the evolution of life from a primordial soup of organic molecules to complex plants and animals, about Earth's geological transformation from barren rock to diverse ecosystems, and about human development from embryo to infant to adult. Arthur looks closely at the history of mass extinctions and the prospects for humanity's future on our precious planet. Do intelligent aliens exist on a distant planet in the Milky Way, sharing the three origins that characterize all life on Earth? In addressing this question, Life through Time and Space tackles the many riddles of our place and fate in the universe that have intrigued human beings since they first gazed in wonder at the nighttime sky.

From two of the world's leading authorities on dogs, an imaginative journey into a future of dogs without people What would happen to dogs if humans simply disappeared? Would dogs be able to survive on their own without us? A Dog's World imagines a posthuman future for dogs, revealing how dogs would survive-and possibly even thrive-and explaining how this new and revolutionary perspective can guide how we interact with dogs now. Drawing on biology, ecology, and the latest findings on the lives and behavior of dogs and their wild relatives, Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff-two of today's most innovative thinkers about dogs-explore who dogs might become without direct human intervention into breeding, arranged playdates at the dog park, regular feedings, and veterinary care. Pierce and Bekoff show how dogs are quick learners who are highly adaptable and opportunistic, and they offer compelling evidence that dogs already do survive on their own-and could do so in a world without us. Challenging the notion that dogs would be helpless without their human counterparts, A Dog's World enables us to understand these independent and remarkably intelligent animals on their own terms.

The Anthropocene defines the here-and-now time period on Earth of indelible (and possibly irreversible) human disturbance to the natural world, from habitat destruction and mass extinction to global climate change. To ameliorate and repair the damage that threatens the world's dwindling resources and our very existence, humanity is enacting massive interventions to fuse modern technologies with long established natural processes. Advances in genetic engineering have put us on the cusp of directly shaping the DNA of every living organism (including ourselves), as well as determining the evolution of completely novel species. The author invites the reader to explore how humans have manipulated the ancient forces of evolution and the future possibilities of genetic engineering for conservation and rewilding, de-extinction, and even the creation of viable populations of entirely new species. To entertain such possibilities of synthetic biology, he forces us to wrestle with the threats and ethical conundrums that surround the unintended consequences, as well as the values that humanity places on authenticity in nature. In so doing, this accessible and thought-provoking book explores the potential future of life on planet Earth.

This volume reaches beyond the controversy surrounding the teaching and learning of evolution in the United States, specifically in regard to the culture, politics, and beliefs found in the Southeast. The editors argue that despite a deep history of conflict in the region surrounding evolution, there is a wealth of evolution research taking place-from biodiversity in species to cultural evolution and human development. In fact, scientists, educators, and researchers from around the United States have found their niche in the South, where biodiversity is high, culture runs deep, and the pace is just a little bit slower.

Darwin's nineteenth-century writings laid the foundations for modern studies of evolution, and theoretical developments in the mid-twentieth century fostered the Modern Synthesis. Since that time, a great deal of new biological knowledge has been generated, including details of the genetic code, lateral gene transfer, and developmental constraints. Our improved understanding of these and many other phenomena have been working their way into evolutionary theory, changing it and improving its correspondence with evolution in nature. And while the study of evolution is thriving both as a basic science to understand the world and in its applications in agriculture, medicine, and public health, the broad scope of evolution--operating across genes, whole organisms, clades, and ecosystems--presents a significant challenge for researchers seeking to integrate abundant new data and content into a general theory of evolution. This book gives us that framework and synthesis for the twenty-first century. The Theory of Evolution presents a series of chapters by experts seeking this integration by addressing the current state of affairs across numerous fields within evolutionary biology, ranging from biogeography to multilevel selection, speciation, and macroevolutionary theory. By presenting current syntheses of evolution's theoretical foundations and their growth in light of new datasets and analyses, this collection will enhance future research and understanding.

The genome's been mapped.
But what does it mean?

Arguably the most significant scientific discovery of the new century, the mapping of the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that make up the human genome raises almost as many questions as it answers. Questions that will profoundly impact the way we think about disease, about longevity, and about free will. Questions that will affect the rest of your life.

"Genome" offers extraordinary insight into the ramifications of this incredible breakthrough. By picking one newly discovered gene from each pair of chromosomes and telling its story, Matt Ridley recounts the history of our species and its ancestors from the dawn of life to the brink of future medicine. From Huntington's disease to cancer, from the applications of gene therapy to the horrors of eugenics, Matt Ridley probes the scientific, philosophical, and moral issues arising as a result of the mapping of the genome. It will help you understand what this scientific milestone means for you, for your children, and for humankind.

There is nothing more life-affirming than understanding death in all its forms. Natural selection depends on death; little would evolve without it. Every animal on Earth is shaped by its presence and fashioned by its spectre. We are all survivors of starvation, drought, volcanic eruptions, meteorites, plagues, parasites, predators, freak weather events, tussles and scraps, and our bodies are shaped by these ancient events. Some animals live for just a few hours as adults, others prefer to kill themselves rather than live unnecessarily for longer than they are needed, and there are a number of animals that can live for centuries. There are parasites that drive their hosts to die awful deaths, and parasites that manipulate their hosts to live longer, healthier lives. There is death in life. Amongst all of this, there is us, the upright ape; perhaps the first animal in the history of the universe fully conscious that death really is going to happen to us all in the end. With a narrative featuring a fish with a fake eye, the oldest animal in the world, the immortal jellyfish and some of the world's top death-investigating biologists, Death on Earth explores the never-ending cycle of death and the impact death has on the living, and muses on how evolution and death affect us every single day. Why are we so weird about death? Where does this fear come from? Why are we so afraid of ageing? And how might knowledge of ageing in other animals help us live better lives, free of the diseases of old age?

"Riveting. ... Pattison's uncanny ability [is] to write evocatively about science. ... In this, he is every bit as good as the best scientist writers." -New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) "Brilliant. ... A work of staggering depth." -Minneapolis Star Tribune A decade in the making, Fossil Men is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body: the first full-length account of the discovery of a startlingly unpredicted human ancestor more than a million years older than Lucy It is the ultimate mystery: where do we come from? In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White uncovered a set of ancient bones in Ethiopia's Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the resulting skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus-nicknamed "Ardi"-was an astounding 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than the world-famous "Lucy." The team spent the next 15 years studying the bones in strict secrecy, all while continuing to rack up landmark fossil discoveries in the field and becoming increasingly ensnared in bitter disputes with scientific peers and Ethiopian bureaucrats. When finally revealed to the public, Ardi stunned scientists around the world and challenged a half-century of orthodoxy about human evolution-how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today's chimpanzee. But the discovery of Ardi wasn't just a leap forward in understanding the roots of humanity--it was an attack on scientific convention and the leading authorities of human origins, triggering an epic feud about the oldest family skeleton. In Fossil Men, acclaimed journalist Kermit Pattison brings us a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including White, an uncompromising perfectionist whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant whose deep expertise about teeth rivaled anyone on Earth; Owen Lovejoy, a onetime creationist-turned-paleoanthropologist with radical insights into human locomotion; Berhane Asfaw, who survived imprisonment and torture to become Ethiopia's most senior paleoanthropologist; Don Johanson, the discoverer of Lucy, who had a rancorous falling out with the Ardi team; and the Leakeys, for decades the most famous family in paleoanthropology. Based on a half-decade of research in Africa, Europe and North America, Fossil Men is not only a brilliant investigation into the origins of the human lineage, but the oldest of human emotions: curiosity, jealousy, perseverance and wonder.

By focusing on the cellular mechanisms that underlie ontogeny, phylogeny and regeneration of complex physiologic traits, Evolution, the Logic of Biology demonstrates the use of homeostasis, the fundamental principle of physiology and medicine, as the unifying mechanism for evolution as all of biology. The homeostasis principle can be used to understand how environmental stressors have affected physiologic mechanisms to generate condition-specific novelty through cellular mechanisms. Evolution, the Logic of Biology allows the reader to understand the vertebrate life-cycle as an intergenerational continuum in support of effective, on-going environmental adaptation. By understanding the principles of physiology from their fundamental unicellular origins, culminating in modern-day metazoans, the reader as student, researcher or practitioner will be encouraged to think in terms of the prevention of disease, rather than in the treatment of disease as the eradication of symptoms. By tracing the ontogeny and phylogeny of this and other phenotypic homologies, one can perceive and understand how complex physiologic traits have mechanistically evolved from their simpler ancestral and developmental origins as cellular structures and functions, providing a logic of biology for the first time. Evolution, the Logic of Biology will be an invaluable resource for graduate students and researchers studying evolutionary development, medicine and biology, anthropology, comparative and developmental biology, genetics and genomics, and physiology.

A surprising look at the role of menopause in human history-and why we should change the ways we think about it Are the ways we look at menopause all wrong? Susan Mattern says yes and, in The Slow Moon Climbs, reveals just how wrong we have been. From the rainforests of Paraguay to the streets of Tokyo, Mattern draws on historical, scientific, and cultural research to show how perceptions of menopause developed from prehistory to today. Introducing new ways of understanding life beyond fertility, Mattern examines the fascinating "Grandmother Hypothesis," looks at agricultural communities where households relied on postreproductive women for the family's survival, and explores the emergence of menopause as a medical condition in the Western world. The Slow Moon Climbs casts menopause in the positive light it deserves-as an essential juncture and a key factor in human flourishing.