'Informative, powerful' VOGUE 'A fascinating and friendly guide for you to understand you better' MELISSA HEMSLEY 'Amy's book is everything I should have learned at school' EMMA GANNON Hormones were something Amy Thomson, founder and CEO of leading women's health app and tech service Moody, never paid attention to, until one day her periods stopped. When she discovered that her hormonal burnout was driven by stress, she quit her job and focused on trying to understand how our hormones can work for twenty-first-century survival. In this eye-opening guide, Thomson draws upon leading research from nutritionists, gynaecologists, endocrinologists, personal trainers and others to explain how understanding our systems and cycles can help you avoid burnouts, build better and healthier routines and optimise your life.

Primate Sexuality provides an authoritative and comprehensive synthesis of current research on the evolution and physiological control of sexual behaviour in the primates - prosimians, monkeys, apes, and human beings. This new edition has been fully updated and greatly expanded throughout to incorporate a decade of new research findings. It maintains the depth and scientific rigour of the first edition, and includes a new chapter on human sexuality, written from a comparative perspective. It contains 2600 references, almost 400 figures and photographs, and 73 tables.

Primate Sexuality provides an authoritative and comprehensive synthesis of current research on the evolution and physiological control of sexual behaviour in the primates - prosimians, monkeys, apes, and human beings. This new edition has been fully updated and greatly expanded throughout to incorporate a decade of new research findings. It maintains the depth and scientific rigour of the first edition, and includes a new chapter on human sexuality, written from a comparative perspective. It contains 2600 references, almost 400 figures and photographs, and 73 tables.

In The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, sixty leading scholars present critical accounts of every aspect of the field. Its five parts are devoted to insights from comparative animal behavior; the biology of language evolution (anatomy, genetics, and neurology); the prehistory of language (when and why did language evolve?); the development of a linguistic species; and language creation, transmission, and change.
Research on language evolution has burgeoned over the last three decades. Interdisciplinary activity has produced fundamental advances in the understanding of language evolution and in human and primate evolution more generally. The book presents a wide-ranging summation of work in all the disciplines involved. It highlights the links in different lines of research, shows what has been achieved to date, and considers the most promising directions for future work.
The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution will be valued by everyone interested in one of the most productive and fascinating fields in natural and cognitive science.

A hot cup of tea, coffee or cocoa is calming and comforting-but how can holding a warm mug affect our emotions? In Heartwarming, social psychologist Hans Rocha IJzerman explores temperature through the long lens of evolution. Besides breathing, regulating body temperature is one of the fundamental tasks for any animal. Like huddling penguins, we humans have long relied on each other to maintain our temperatures; over millennia, this instinct for thermoregulation has shaped our lives and culture. As IJzerman illuminates how temperature affects human sociality, he examines fascinating new questions: How will climate change impact society? Why are some chronically cold and others overheated? Can thermoregulation keep relationships closer, even across distance? The answers offer new insights for all of us who want to better understand our bodies, our minds and each other. Heartwarming takes readers on an engaging journey through the world, seen from the perspective of coldness and warmth.

A Brief History of Brains bridges the gap between AI and neuroscience by telling the evolutionary story of how the brain came to be. The entirety of the human brain’s 4-billion-year story can be summarised as the culmination of five evolutionary breakthroughs, starting from the very first brains, all the way to the modern human brains. Each breakthrough emerged from new sets of brain modifications, and equipped animals with a new suite of intellectual faculties. These five breakthroughs are the organising map to this book, and they make up our itinerary for our adventure back in time. Each breakthrough also has fascinating corollaries to breakthroughs in AI. Indeed, there will be plenty of such surprises along the way. For instance: the innovation that enabled AI to beat humans in the game of Go – temporal difference reinforcement learning – was an innovation discovered by our fish ancestors over 500 million years ago. The solutions to many of the current mysteries in AI – such as ‘common sense’ – can be found in the tiny brain of a mouse. Where do emotions come from? Research suggests that they may have arisen simply as a solution to navigation in ancient worm brains. Unravelling this evolutionary story will reveal the hidden features of human intelligence and with them, just how your mind came to be.

The science of language evolution appeared at the end of the last century but topically belongs to language origins - the domain of investigation that is concerned with the beginnings and diversification of language. Language evolution as a research area contrasts with the antiquity of language origins, which can be traced back to the earliest forms of traditional reflection. Language evolution emphasises its scientific orientation, whereas throughout most of its history language origins constituted a complex mixture of mythology, philosophy of language, as well as religiously and scientifically inspired speculation. This work is the first book-long attempt to document the whole history of language origins and situate language evolution in this wide intellectual context.

This comprehensive synthesis of current medical and evolutionary literature addresses key questions about the role body fat plays in human biology. It explores how body energy stores are regulated, how they develop over the life-course, what biological functions they serve, and how they may have evolved. There is now substantial evidence that human adiposity is not merely a buffer against the threat of starvation, but is also a resource for meeting the energy costs of growth, reproduction and immune function. As such it may be considered as important in our species evolution as other traits such as bipedalism, large brains, and long life spans and developmental periods. Indeed, adiposity is integrally linked with these other traits, and with our capacity to colonise and inhabit diverse ecosystems. It is because human metabolism is so sensitive to environmental cues that manipulative economic forces are now generating the current obesity epidemic.

Over millions of years in the fossil record, hominin teeth preserve a high-fidelity record of their own growth, development, wear, chemistry and pathology. They yield insights into human evolution that are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve through other sources of fossil or archaeological data. Integrating dental findings with current debates and issues in palaeoanthropology, this book shows how fossil hominin teeth shed light on the origins and evolution of our dietary diversity, extended childhoods, long lifespans, and other fundamental features of human biology. It assesses methods to interpret different lines of dental evidence, providing a critical, practical approach that will appeal to students and researchers in biological anthropology and related fields such as dental science, oral biology, evolutionary biology, and palaeontology.

Reticulate Evolution and Humans is the first book to describe the effect of genetic exchange on the origin and evolution of our own species as well as those species with which we have and continue to interact closely, both evolutionarily and culturally. After demonstrating how genetic exchange has affected H. Sapiens, the book goes on to describe how the same processes have structured the evolution of organisms on which the human species depends for shelter, sustenance and companionship. It also considers the "dark-side" of gene transfer as it pertains to the evolution and adaptation of human disease vectors and diseases.
The development of the central thesis of this book - that reticulate evolution via introgressive hybridization and lateral gene transfer has been a pervasive factor in the evolution and cultural development of H. sapiens, its ancestors, sister taxa and associated organisms - reveals the extent of these processes across the widest of taxonomic, temporal and spatial bounds. We cannot escape the conclusion that we are constantly fed, entertained, sheltered, attacked and killed by organisms that possess mosaic genomes reflective of widespread genetic exchange during evolutionary diversification.

Human Success: Evolutionary Origins and Ethical Implications examines human success from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, with contributions from leading paleobiologists, anthropologists, geologists, philosophers of science, and ethicists. It considers how the human species grew in success-linked metrics, such as population size and geographical range, and how it came to dominate ecological systems across the globe. It probes whether the consequences of that dominance, such as human-driven climate change and the destruction of biodiversity, mandate a rethinking of the meaning of human success. The essays in this book urge us to reflect on what has led to our apparent evolutionary success—and, most importantly, what this success implies for the future of our species.

Kepler's successful solution to the problem of vision early in the seventeenth century was a theoretical triumph as significant as many of the more celebrated developments of the scientific revolution. Yet the full import of Kepler's arguments can be grasped only when they are viewed against the background of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance visual theory. David C. Lindberg provides this background, and in doing so he fills the gap in historical scholarship and constructs a model for tracing the development of scientific ideas.
David C. Lindberg is professor and chairman of the department of the history of science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

This reprint of Bernard Wood's best-selling 2-volume encyclopedia is now available as a single-volume paperback. It is ideal for grad students and individual researchers wanting to purchase their own desk copy of this comprehensive work. This comprehensive A to Z encyclopedia provides extensive coverage of important scientific terms related to improving our understanding of how we evolved. Specifically, the 5,000 entries cover evidence and methods used to investigate the relationships among the living great apes, evidence about what makes the behavior of modern humans distinctive, and evidence about the evolutionary history of that distinctiveness, as well as information about modern methods used to trace the recent evolutionary history of modern human populations. This text provides a resource for everyone studying the emergence of Homo sapiens. Visit the companion site www.woodhumanevolution.com to browse additional references and updates from this comprehensive encyclopedia.

Race, while drawn from the visual cues of human diversity, is an idea with a measurable past, an identifiable present, and an uncertain future. The concept of race has been at the center of both triumphs and tragedies in American history and has had a profound effect on the human experience. "Race Unmasked" revisits the origins of commonly held beliefs about the scientific nature of racial differences, examines the roots of the modern idea of race, and explains why race continues to generate controversy as a tool of classification even in our genomic age.

Through rigorous historical research, "Race Unmasked" reveals how genetics and related biological disciplines formed and preserved ideas of race and, at times, racism throughout the twentieth century. Surveying the work of some of the twentieth century's most notable scientists, the book tests and then proves the limitations of a racial worldview. This new work is a gripping history of science and scientists that throws the contours of our current and evolving understanding of human diversity into sharp relief.

A radically new cosmological view from a groundbreaking neuroscientist who places the human brain at the center of humanity's universe Renowned neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis introduces a revolutionary new theory of how the human brain evolved to become an organic computer without rival in the known universe. He undertakes the first attempt to explain the entirety of human history, culture, and civilization based on a series of recently uncovered key principles of brain function. This new cosmology is centered around three fundamental properties of the human brain: its insurmountable malleability to adapt and learn; its exquisite ability to allow multiple individuals to synchronize their minds around a task, goal, or belief; and its incomparable capacity for abstraction. Combining insights from such diverse fields as neuroscience, mathematics, evolution, computer science, physics, history, art, and philosophy, Nicolelis presents a neurobiologically based manifesto for the uniqueness of the human mind and a cautionary tale of the threats that technology poses to present and future generations.

Urban Evolutionary Biology fills an important knowledge gap on wild organismal evolution in the urban environment, whilst offering a novel exploration of the fast-growing new field of evolutionary research. The growing rate of urbanization and the maturation of urban study systems worldwide means interest in the urban environment as an agent of evolutionary change is rapidly increasing. We are presently witnessing the emergence of a new field of research in evolutionary biology. Despite its rapid global expansion, the urban environment has until now been a largely neglected study site among evolutionary biologists. With its conspicuously altered ecological dynamics, it stands in stark contrast to the natural environments traditionally used as cornerstones for evolutionary ecology research. Urbanization can offer a great range of new opportunities to test for rapid evolutionary processes as a consequence of human activity, both because of replicate contexts for hypothesis testing, but also because cities are characterized by an array of easily quantifiable environmental axes of variation and thus testable agents of selection. Thanks to a wide possible breadth of inference (in terms of taxa) that may be studied, and a great variety of analytical methods, urban evolution has the potential to stand at a fascinating multi-disciplinary crossroad, enriching the field of evolutionary biology with emergent yet incredibly potent new research themes where the urban habitat is key. Urban Evolutionary Biology is an advanced textbook suitable for graduate level students as well as professional researchers studying the genetics, evolutionary biology, and ecology of urban environments. It is also highly relevant to urban ecologists and urban wildlife practitioners.

In this authoritative three-volume reference work, leading researchers bring together current work to provide a comprehensive analysis of the comparative morphology, development, evolution, and functional biology of the skull.

Can we give Grandma a Viking funeral? Why don't animals dig up all the graves? Will my hair keep growing in my coffin after I'm buried? Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. Here she offers her factual, hilarious and candid answers to thirty-five of the most interesting, sharing the lore and science of what happens to, and inside, our bodies after we die. Why do corpses groan? What causes bodies to turn strange colours during decomposition? and why do hair and nails appear longer after death? The answers are all within . . .

Covers much of the acoustics a student needs, without mathematics or scientific background. Choice Outstanding Academic Title A survey of intervals and scales, tone pitch, loudness and time in Western music raises many questions about the hearing mechanism and throws doubt on the conventional role of harmonics. James Beament's account of how musical sounds are coded by the ear and the brain's processing units, provides answers to most of these questions. It concludes that music started with simple instruments which voices imitated, and that the need to know sound direction determined the characteristics of hearing. This book will interest students, practising musicians and music psychologists, and assumes no scientific knowledge. The late ProfessorSir JAMES BEAMENT was a distinguished scientist and musician, who taught and examined music students at Cambridge University.

An exploration of the cosmic origins of human beings and the evolutionary laws which govern their development. Armin Husemann applies musical principles as a method of gaining insight into the structure of the human body and the forces that work on it. He draws on our experience of music and explain the physiological and anatomical relationships in the body, as well as illuminating the spiritual influences which determine physical development. Drawing on artistic exercises set out by Rudolf Steiner to develop a better understanding of these influences, the book explores the cosmic origins of human beings and the evolutionary laws which govern their development.

Linguists, biological anthropologists, and cognitive scientists come together in this book to explore the origins and early evolution of phonology, syntax, and semantics. They consider the nature of pre- and proto-linguistic communication, the internal and external triggers that led to its transformation into language, and whether and how language may be considered to have evolved after its inception. Evidence is drawn from many domains, including computer simulations of language emergence, the songs of finches, problem-solving abilities in monkeys, sign language, and the structure of languages today.

Linguists, biological anthropologists, and cognitive scientists come together in this book to explore the origins and early evolution of phonology, syntax, and semantics. They consider the nature of pre- and proto-linguistic communication, the internal and external triggers that led to its transformation into language, and whether and how language may be considered to have evolved after its inception. Evidence is drawn from many domains, including computer simulations of language emergence, the songs of finches, problem-solving abilities in monkeys, sign language, and the structure of languages today.

In social relationships-whether between mates, parents and offspring, or friends-we find much of life's meaning. But in these relationships, so critical to our well-being, might we also detect the workings, even directives, of biology? This book, a rare melding of human and animal research and theoretical and empirical science, ventures into the most interesting realms of behavioral biology to examine the intimate role of endocrinology in social relationships. The importance of hormones to reproductive behavior-from breeding cycles to male sexual display-is well known. What this book considers is the increasing evidence that hormones are just as important to social behavior. Peter Ellison and Peter Gray include the latest findings-both practical and theoretical-on the hormonal component of both casual interactions and fundamental bonds. The contributors, senior scholars and rising scientists whose work is shaping the field, go beyond the proximate mechanics of neuroendocrine physiology to integrate behavioral endocrinology with areas such as reproductive ecology and life history theory. Ranging broadly across taxa, from birds and rodents to primates, the volume pays particular attention to human endocrinology and social relationships, a focus largely missing from most works of behavioral endocrinology.

John Dupré warns that our understanding of human nature is being distorted by two faulty and harmful forms of pseudo-scientific thinking. Not just in the academic world but increasingly in everyday life, we find one set of experts seeking to explain the ends at which humans aim in terms of evolutionary theory, and another set of experts using economic models to give rules of how we act to achieve those ends. Dupré demonstrates that these theorists' explanations do not work, and furthermore that if taken seriously their theories tend to have dangerous social and political consequences. For these reasons, it is important to resist scientism - an exaggerated conception of what science can be expected to do for us. Dupré restores sanity to the study of human nature by pointing the way to a proper understanding of humans in the societies that are our natural and necessary environments. Anyone interested in science and human nature will enjoy this book, unless they are its targets.