'Intimate and thoughtful... Exciting... [A] sweeping evolutionary history.' Science The author of the bestselling Your Inner Fish gives us a brilliant, up-to-date account of the great transformations in the history of life on Earth. This is a story full of surprises. If you think that feathers arose to help animals fly, or lungs to help them walk on land, you'd be in good company. You'd also be entirely wrong. Neil Shubin delves deep into the mystery of life, the ongoing revolutions in our understanding of how we got here, and brings us closer to answering one of the great questions - was life on earth inevitable...or was it all an accident?

Humans are the only mammals to walk on two, rather than four, legs. From an evolutionary perspective, this is an illogical development, as it slows us down. But here we are, suggesting there must have been something tremendous to gain from bipedalism. First Steps takes our ordinary, everyday walking experience and reveals how unusual and extraordinary it truly is. The seven-million-year-long journey through the origins of upright walking shows how it was in fact a gateway to many of the other attributes that make us human-from our technological skills and sociality to our thirst for exploration. DeSilva uses early human evolution to explain the instinct that propels a crawling infant to toddle onto two feet, differences between how men and women tend to walk, physical costs of upright walking, including hernias, varicose veins and backache, and the challenges of childbirth imposed by a bipedal pelvis. And he theorises that upright walking may have laid the foundation for the traits of compassion, empathy and altruism that characterise our species today and helped us become the dominant species on this planet.

From the animal world to the forces that make things go, young minds have big questions about how the world works. The answers to these questions wait in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Unlock the world around you with STEM and Me.

A focus throughout on lifespan perspectives and a consideration of palliative care across all ages. Consideration of different cultural perspectives, beliefs, thoughts and practices outside Western societies and dominant paradigms. Integrates primary research throughout, including a focus on contemporary research from social media. Complements mainstream psychological approaches to life-limiting illness by exploring death, dying and palliative care with a critical health psychology lens.

The coronavirus pandemic forces us to rethink our contemporaneity. It has brought to the surface dimensions of human fragility that partially contradict the euphoria and human hubris of the fourth industrial revolution (artificial intelligence). It has also aggravated the social inequality and racial discrimination that characterize our societies. The book argues that the virus, rather than an enemy, must be viewed as a pedagogue. It is trying to teach us that the deep causes of the pandemic lie in our dominant mode of production and consumption. The systemic overload of natural resources creates a metabolic rift between society and nature that destabilizes the habitat of wild animals and the vital cycles of natural regeneration whereby pandemics become an increasingly recurrent phenomenon. In trying to take seriously this lesson the book proposes a paradigmatic shift from the current civilizatory model to a new one guided by a more equitable relationship between nature and society and the priority of life, both human and non-human.

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.

This book examines depression as a widely diagnosed and treated common mental disorder in India and offers a significant ethnographic study of the application of a traditional Indian medical system (Ayurveda) to the very modern problem of depression. Based on over a year of fieldwork, it investigates the Ayurvedic response to the burden of depression in the Indian state of Kerala as one of the key processes of the local appropriation or glocalization of depression. More broadly, Lang considers: What happens with the category of depression when it leaves the West and travels to South Asia? How is depression appropriated in a South Asian society characterized by medical pluralism? She explores on the level of ideas, institutions and materialities how depression interacts with and changes local worlds, clinical practice and knowledge and subjectivities. As depression travels from 'the West' to South India, its ontology, Lang argues, multiplies and thus leads to what she calls 'depression multiple'.

This volume presents state-of-the-art empirical studies working in a paradigm that has become known as human behavioral ecology. The emergence of this approach in anthropology was marked by publication by Aldine in 1979 of an earlier collection of studies edited by Chagnon and Irons entitled Evolutionary Biology and Human Social Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective. During the two decades that have passed since then, this innovative approach has matured and expanded into new areas that are explored here.

The book opens with an introductory chapter by Chagnon and Irons tracing the origins of human behavioral ecology and its subsequent development. Subsequent chapters, written by both younger scholars and established researchers, cover a wide range of societies and topics organ-ized into six sections. The first section includes two chapters that provide historical background on the development of human behavioral ecology and com-pare it to two complementary approaches in the study of evolution and human behavior, evolutionary psychology, and dual inheritance theory. The second section includes five studies of mating efforts in a variety of societies from South America and Africa. The third section covers parenting, with five studies on soci-eties from Africa, Asia, and North America. The fourth section breaks somewhat with the tradition in human behavioral ecology by focusing on one particularly problematic issue, the demographic transition, using data from Europe, North America, and Asia. The fifth section includes studies of cooperation and helping behaviors, using data from societies in Micronesia and South America. The sixth and final section consists of a single chapter that places the volume in a broader critical and comparative context.

The contributions to this volume demonstrate, with a high degree of theoretical and methodological sophistication--the maturity and freshness of this new paradigm in the study of human behavior. The volume will be of interest to anthropologists and other professions working on the study of cross-cultural human behavior.

In the United Kingdom, as in the United States, race relations are surrounded with taboos defined by the politically correct concepts of what Ray Honeyford calls the race relations lobby. This lobby, championed by the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) has a vested interest in depicting the United Kingdom as a society rotten with endemic racism, and its ethnic minorities as victims doomed to failure. An outgrowth of the Race Relations Act of 1976, the Commission was founded in response to worthy concerns about race and patterned after its American prototype, the Congress of Racial Equality. Its constant demands for increased powers have only increased with the coming into power of the New Labour Party. That makes Ray Honeyford's critique all the more urgent. Honeyford exposes the policies and practices of the Commission to public view, encouraging informed debate about its need to exist. The CRE possesses considerable legal powers-powers which seriously undermine the great freedoms of association, contract, and speech as-sociated with the United Kingdom. Without denying the presence of racial prejudice, Honeyford shows that the picture of the United Kingdom as a divisive nation is a serious misrepresentation. Placing the CRE in its historical and political context, Honeyford outlines its powers, and analyzes its formal investigations in the fields of education, employment, and housing. He also examines its publicity machine and its effect on public and educational libraries. He points out the danger of uncritically replicating the American experience. According to Honeyford, Americans have replaced a melting-pot notion of society, with all citizens loyal to a national ideal, with a "tossed-salad" concept which encourages the creation of self-conscious, separate, and aggressive ethnic groups, each claiming special access to the public purse, and having little regard for national cohesion and individual liberties.

This new edition of Sarah Franklin's classic monograph on the development of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) includes two entirely new chapters reflecting on the relevance of the book's findings in the context of the past two decades and providing a 'state-of-the-art' review of the field today. Over the past 25 years, both the assisted conception industry and the academic field of reproductive studies have grown enormously. IVF, in particular, is belatedly becoming recognised as one of the most influential technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a far-reaching set of implications that have to date been underestimated, understudied and under-reported. This pioneering text was the first to explore the emergence of commercial IVF in the United Kingdom, where the technique was originally developed. During the 1980s, the British Parliament devised a unique system of comprehensive national regulation of assisted reproduction amidst fractious public and media debate over IVF and embryo research. Franklin chronicles these developments and explores their significance in relation to classic anthropological debates about the meanings of kinship, gender and the 'biological facts' of parenthood. Drawing on extensive personal interviews with women and couples undergoing IVF, as well as ethnographic fieldword in early IVF clinics, the book explores the unique demands of the IVF technique. In richly detailed chapters, it documents the 'topsy-turvy' world of IVF, and how the experience of undergoing IVF changes its users in ways they had not anticipated. Franklin argues that such experiences reveal a crucial feature of translational biomedical procedures more widely - namely, that these are 'hope technologies' that paradoxically generate new uncertainties and risks in the very space of their supposed resolution. The final chapter closely engages with the 'hope technology' concept, as well as the idea of 'having to try' and uses these frames to link contemporary reproductive studies to core sociological and anthropological arguments about economy, society and technology. In the context of rapid fertility decline and huge growth in the fertility industry, this volume is even more relevant today than when it was first published at the dawn of what Franklin calls the era of 'iFertility'. Embodied Progress is an essential read for all social science academics and students with an interested in the burgeoning new field of reproductive studies. It is also a valuable resource for practitioners working in the fields of reproductive health, biomedicine and policy.

The novelist Joseph Conrad expressed a great truth when he said: "The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future," Our evolutionary history of noble acts and foul deeds, leading to survival and reproduction, guarantees that we understand the most essential facets of our physical and social environment. The nature of our struggles--our lusts, our fears, our objectivity, our irra-tionality--lies embedded in our cellular DNA and the neurons of our mind, there to play itself out much like it did in the past and much like it will in the future. Many have seen the links between our minds and the universe, the common thread of our existence and the inevitability of our loves and hates. This book includes many demonstrations that our nature has been on the minds and lips of many--poets, play-wrights, philosophers, historians, novelists, kings, slaves, religious leaders, and the great-est of knaves. From Ralph Waldo Emerson to Arthur Schopenhauer, from Aldous Huxley to Arthur Conan Doyle, from Aristotle to William Shakespeare, the truths about our-selves have come tumbling out. Reflecting on their thoughts we see ourselves. The universal nature of our being reflects our common origins and our bittersweet destiny. In A Sociobiology Compendium, Del Thiessen mines the richness of biological inves-tigations of human behavior, comparing current views of human behavior with expres-sions by non-scientists who have, in one way or another, touched the evolutionary strings of men and women. He begins each section with a brief account of biological notions of human behavior. The book shows in astonishing ways how the earlier thoughts of men and women from all cultures anticipate the biological observations about our being. A Sociobiology Compendium will be engaging reading for all psychologists, sociologists, and biologists.

Official statistics about ethnicity in advanced societies are no better than those in less developed countries. An open industrial society is inherently fluid, and it is as hard to interpret social class and ethnic groups there as in a nearly static community. In consequence, the collection and interpretation of ethnic statistics is frequently a battleground where the groups being counted contest each element of every enumeration. William Petersen describes how ethnic identity is determined and how ethnic or racial units are counted by official statistical agencies in the United States and elsewhere. The chapters in this book cover such topics as: "Identification of Americans of European Descent," "Differentiation among Blacks," "Ethnic Relations in the Netherlands," "Two Case Studies: Japan and Switzerland," and "Who is a Jew?"

Petersen argues that the general public is overly impressed by assertions about ethnicity, particularly if they are supported by numbers and graphs. The flood of American writings about race and ethnicity gives no sign of abatement. "Ethnicity Counts" offers an indispensible background to meaningful interpretation of statistics on ethnicity, and will be important to sociologists, historians, policymakers, and government officials.

What really differentiates us from our relatives in the animal world? And what can they teach us about ourselves? Taking these questions as his starting point, Norbert Sachser presents fascinating insights into the inner lives of animals, revealing what we now know about their thoughts, feelings and behaviour. By turns surprising, humourous and thought-provoking, Much Like Us invites us on a journey around the animal kingdom, explaining along the way how dogs demonstrate empathy, why chimpanzees wage war and how crows and ravens craft tools to catch food. Sachser brings the science to life with examples and anecdotes drawn from his own research, illuminating the vast strides in understanding that have been made over the last 30 years. He ultimately invites us to challenge our own preconceptions - the closer we look, the more we see the humanity in our fellow creatures.

From an award-winning medic and scientist, the game-changing case that genetic females have greater resilience, immunity, endurance and more, compared with males 'A powerful antidote to the myth of a "weaker sex"' Gina Rippon, author of The Gendered Brain From birth, genetic females are better at fighting viruses, infections and cancer. They do better at surviving epidemics and famines. They live longer, and even see the world in a wider variety of colours. These are the facts; they are simply stronger than men at every stage of life. Why? And why are we taught the opposite? Drawing on his wide-ranging experience and cutting-edge research as a medic, geneticist and specialist in rare diseases, Dr Sharon Moalem set out to understand why women are consistently more likely than men to thrive. The answer, he reveals, lies in our genetics: the female's double XX chromosomes offer a powerful survival advantage. Moalem explains why genetic females outperform males when it comes to immunity, resilience, stamina and much more. And he calls for a long-overdue reconsideration of our male-centric, one-size-fits-all view of the body and of how we prescribe medications - a view that still frames women through the lens of men. Revolutionary, captivating and utterly persuasive, The Better Half will make you see women, men and the survival of our species anew.

Were humans created by "God" as Slaves? Was Abraham the first human Spy? Was Jesus an accidental Messiah? The author takes readers on a remarkable odyssey of the true origins of humankind in which he: draws clear and startling analogies between new discoveries in genetic engineering and ancient archaeological finds...; highlights emerging scientific information overlooked in the past... ; unravels the Bible's often obscure stories by linking these to their original forms in Sumerian clay tablets and other pre-historic writings..; provides explicit answers to why our modern world has become so senseless and chaotic by revealing the very secrets of our prehistory... While shattering myths about evolution and God, Michael Tellinger's "Slave Species of God" enables evolutionists and creationists to finally co-exist in one pond. The arguments are compelling, simple and refreshing, retracing the path of human evolution from the murky distant past to the religious dogma that haunts humankind today.;The question of who we are and where we come from takes on a new meaning as we discover that our DNA may have been manipulated by our Creator some 200,000 years ago to produce a less intelligent 'primitive species'.

'A stunner ... If you haven't got this book in your house, I don't know why' Chris Evans 'A startling wake-up call . . . Writing with the vim of a Bill Bryson and the technical knowledge of a scientist, Steele gives us a chance to grasp what's at stake' Independent 'An exhilarating journey . . . Steele is a superb guide' Telegraph 'A fascinating read with almost every page bursting with extraordinary facts . . . Read it now' Mail on Sunday Ageless is a guide to the biggest issue we all face. Ageing - not cancer, not heart disease - is the world's leading cause of death and suffering. What would the world be like if we could cure it? Living disease-free until the age of 100 is achievable within our lifetimes. In prose that is lucid and full of fascinating facts, Ageless introduces us to the cutting-edge research that is paving the way for this revolution. Computational biologist Andrew Steele explains what occurs biologically as we age, as well as practical ways we can slow down the process. He reveals how understanding the scientific implications of ageing could lead to the greatest discovery in the history of civilisation - one that has the potential to improve billions of lives, save trillions of dollars, and transform the human condition.

This book provides a timely, critical, and thought-provoking analysis of the implications of the disruption of COVID-19 to the foreign aid and development system, and the extent to which the system is retaining a level of relevance, legitimacy, or coherence. Drawing on the expertise of key scholars from around the world in the fields of international development, political science, socioeconomics, history, and international relations, the book explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on development aid within an environment of shifting national and regional priorities and interactions. The response is specifically focused on the interrelated themes of political analysis and soft power, the legitimation crisis, poverty, inequality, foreign aid, and the disruption and re-making of the world order. The book argues that complex and multidirectional linkages between politics, economics, society, and the environment are driving changes in the extant development aid system. COVID-19 and Foreign Aid provides a range of critical reflections to shifts in the world order, the rise of nationalism, the strange non-death of neoliberalism, shifts in globalisation, and the evolving impact of COVID as a cross-cutting crisis in the development aid system. This book will be of interest to researchers and students in the field of health and development studies, decision-makers at government level as well as to those working in or consulting to international aid institutions, regional and bilateral aid agencies, and non-governmental organisations.

Anthropologist Donald Joralemon asks whether America is really, as many scholars claim, a death-denying culture that prefers to quarantine the sick in hospitals and the elderly in nursing homes. His answer is a reasoned "no." In his view, Americans are merely struggling to find cultural scripts for the exceptional conditions of dying that our social world and medical technologies have thrust upon us. The book: is written in the first-person for a broad audience by a senior anthropologist, making it an authoritative yet accessible textbook for courses on death and dying and American culture; includes contemporary debates about highly visible cases, the definition of death, the status of human remains, aging, and the medicalization of grief; demonstrates persuasively that arguments over death and dying are in fact arguments about what it means to be human in modern America.

Anthropologist Donald Joralemon asks whether America is really, as many scholars claim, a death-denying culture that prefers to quarantine the sick in hospitals and the elderly in nursing homes. His answer is a reasoned "no." In his view, Americans are merely struggling to find cultural scripts for the exceptional conditions of dying that our social world and medical technologies have thrust upon us. The book: is written in the first-person for a broad audience by a senior anthropologist, making it an authoritative yet accessible textbook for courses on death and dying and American culture; includes contemporary debates about highly visible cases, the definition of death, the status of human remains, aging, and the medicalization of grief; demonstrates persuasively that arguments over death and dying are in fact arguments about what it means to be human in modern America.

Exam Board: SQA Level: Higher Subject: Human Biology First Teaching: August 2018 First Exam: May 2019 Get your best grade with comprehensive course notes and advice from Scotland's top experts, fully updated for the latest changes to SQA Higher assessment. How to Pass Higher Biology Second Edition contains all the advice and support you need to revise successfully for your Higher exam. It combines an overview of the course syllabus with advice from top experts on how to improve exam performance, so you have the best chance of success. - Revise confidently with up-to-date guidance tailored to the latest SQA assessment changes - Refresh your knowledge with comprehensive, tailored subject notes - Prepare for the exam with top tips and hints on revision techniques - Get your best grade with advice on how to gain those vital extra marks

With contributions from 70 experienced practitioners from around the world, this second edition of the authoritative Handbook of Forensic Archaeology and Anthropology provides a solid foundation in both the practical and ethical components of forensic work. The book weaves together the discipline's historical development; current field methods for analyzing crime, natural disasters, and human atrocities; an array of laboratory techniques; key case studies involving legal, professional, and ethical issues; and ideas about the future of forensic work--all from a global perspective. This fully revised second edition expands the geographic representation of the first edition by including chapters from practitioners in South Africa and Colombia, and adds exciting new chapters on the International Commission on Missing Persons and on forensic work being done to identify victims of the Battle of Fromelles during World War I. The Handbook of Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology provides an updated perspective of the disciplines of forensic archaeology and anthropology.

The past few years have seen a revolution in our ability to map whole genome DNA from ancient humans. With the ancient DNA revolution, combined with rapid genome mapping of present human populations, has come remarkable insights into our past. This important new data has clarified and added to our knowledge from archaeology and anthropology, helped resolve long-existing controversies, challenged long-held views, and thrown up some remarkable surprises. The emerging picture is one of many waves of ancient human migrations, so that all populations existing today are mixes of ancient ones, as well as in many cases carrying a genetic component from Neanderthals, and, in some populations, Denisovans. David Reich, whose team has been at the forefront of these discoveries, explains what the genetics is telling us about ourselves and our complex and often surprising ancestry. Gone are old ideas of any kind of racial 'purity', or even deep and ancient divides between peoples. Instead, we are finding a rich variety of mixtures. Reich describes the cutting-edge findings from the past few years, and also considers the sensitivities involved in tracing ancestry, with science sometimes jostling with politics and tradition. He brings an important wider message: that we should celebrate our rich diversity, and recognize that every one of us is the result of a long history of migration and intermixing of ancient peoples, which we carry as ghosts in our DNA. What will we discover next?

"Principles of Human Evolution" presents an in-depth introduction to paleoanthropology and the study of human evolution. Focusing on the fundamentals of evolutionary theory and how these apply to ecological, molecular genetic, paleontological and archeological approaches to important questions in the field, this timely textbook will help students gain a perspective on human evolution in the context of modern biological thinking.

The second edition of this successful text features the addition of Robert Foley, a leading researcher in Human Evolutionary Studies, to the writing team. Strong emphasis on evolutionary theory, ecology and behavior and scores of new examples reflect the latest evolutionary theories and recent archaeological finds. More than a simple update, the new edition is organized by issue rather than chronology, integrating behavior, adaptation and anatomy. A new design and new figure references make this edition more accessible for students and instructors.
New author, Robert Foley - leading figure in Human Evolutionary Studies - joins the writing team.
Dedicated website - www.blackwellpublishing.com/lewin - provides study resources and artwork downloadable for Powerpoint presentations.
Beyond the Facts boxes - explore key scientific debates in greater depth.
Margin Comments - indicate the key points in each section.
Key Questions - review and test students' knowledge of central chapter concepts and help focus the way a student approaches reading the text.
New emphasis on ecological and behavioral evolution - in keeping with modern research.
Fully up to date with recent fossil finds and interpretations; integration of genetic and paleoanthropological approaches.

Provides a critical and comprehensive overview of theorising and debate about the role of race and ethnicity in contemporary societies. This book intends to explore the evolution of race and ethnicity as subjects of both scholarly and political debate. It is of interest to students and scholars of race and ethnicity alike.

Attempting to reconstruct the life of early societies, particular emphasis is laid upon social behaviour among primates, as well as approaches from ethnology, prehistoric archaeology, geography, genetics, human stress biology and psychology. First published in 1962.