Evolution category: 1570 books

Mudskippers are amphibious fishes native to the Indo-West Pacific and tropical western Africa. Unlike most fishes, mudskippers emerse to forage, find mates, and defend territories. Adaptations to their morphology, physiology and behavior enable mudskippers to accommodate both aquatic and terrestrial...

Love's Story of Why We Are Here This book sets out to answer one big question about our lives, and indeed all of life on our planet. That question is: Why are we here? And also to propose, if we know why we are here, what we can do about it. In his first book, Life and...

The Malay Archipelago is a book by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace that chronicles his scientific exploration, during the eight year period 1854 to 1862, of the southern portion of the Malay Archipelago including Malaysia, Singapore, the islands of Indonesia, then known as the Dutch...

This volume explores the interactions between organisms and their environments and how this “entanglement” is a fundamental aspect of all life. It brings together the work and ideas of historians, philosophers, biologists, and social scientists, uniting a range of new perspectives, methods, and...

This book details a model of consciousness supported by scientific experimental data from the human brain. It presents how the Corollary Discharge of Attention Movement (CODAM) neural network model allows for a scientific understanding of consciousness as well as provides a solution to the Mind-Body...

In just a half century, humanity has made an astounding leap in its understanding of life. Now, one of the giants of biological science, Christian de Duve, discusses what we've learned in this half century, ranging from the tiniest cells to the future of our species and of life itself. With wide-ranging...

In 1837 a young Charles Darwin took his notebook, wrote "I think" and then sketched a rudimentary, stick-like tree. Each branch of Darwin's tree of life told a story of survival and adaptation – adaptation of animals and plants not just to the environment but also to life with other living things....

This book constitutes the first serious message of the genetic catastrophe and the possibility of derailed evolution. Moreover, this book contains the first dictionary of genetic damage to be published.

Parrotfish are found on almost every coral reef in the world. This ubiquity and uniqueness of their feeding action make them one of the most important groups of fishes within coral reef ecosystems. But why, exactly, are parrotfish so important to reefs? Can the evolution of a particular jaw morphology...

Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863) has been considered the most important of Thomas Huxley’s Darwinian writings. Despite warnings from friends that publishing an argument in support of evolution could ruin his career, it in fact did the opposite. This book did much to facilitate the general...

The evolutionary history of life includes two primary components: phylogeny and timescale. Phylogeny refers to the branching order (relationships) of species or other taxa within a group and is crucial for understanding the inheritance of traits and for erecting classifications. However, a timescale...

The book is the most in-depth account of the fossil skull anatomy and evolutionary significance of the 3.6-3.0 million year old early human species Australopithecus afarensis. Knowledge of this species is pivotal to understanding early human evolution, because 1) the sample of fossil remains of A....

[Illustrated jacket] Introduced by Richard Dawkins. Easily the most influential book published in the nineteenth century, Darwin’s The Origin of Species is also that most unusual phenomenon, an altogether readable discussion of a scientific subject. On its appearance in 1859 it was...

After a career in the academy, Canadian-born Grant Allen struck out on his own to make his name as a writer. His early focus was on scientific topics, though he later expanded into fiction, as well. Allen was an early proponent of Darwin's theory of evolution and helped to popularize the idea through...