Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is one of the most important and yet least read scientific works in the history of science. The Annotated Origin is a facsimile of the first edition of 1859, and is accompanied by James T. Costa’s marginal annotations, drawing on his extensive experience with Darwin’s ideas in the field, lab, and classroom. This edition makes available an accessible and practical resource for anyone reading the Origin for the first time or for those who want to reread it with the insights and perspective that a working biologist can provide.

View a collection of videos on Professor Wilson entitled "On the Relation of Science and the Humanities"

This landmark work, the distillation of a lifetime of research by the world's leading myrmecologists, is a thoroughgoing survey of one of the largest and most diverse groups of animals on the planet. Hölldobler and Wilson review in exhaustive detail virtually all topics in the anatomy, physiology, social organization, ecology, and natural history of the ants. In large format, with almost a thousand line drawings, photographs, and paintings, it is one of the most visually rich and all-encompassing views of any group of organisms on earth. It will be welcomed both as an introduction to the subject and as an encyclopedia reference for researchers in entomology, ecology, and sociobiology.

Deserts are becoming increasingly popular tourist destinations. However, the growth of this tourism niche raises particular challenges, jeopardizing their fragile ecosystems and straining scarce resources. This book seeks to analyze the relationship between tourism and the sustainable development of those territories, addressing issues raised by architecture, landscape design, and planning. 

Dr. Altschul has compiled field notes of health and medical interest on over 5,000 species of plants, culled from some 2,500,000 specimens of higher plants collected by field botanists from all over the world and deposited in the combined collections of the Arnold Arboretum and Gray Herbarium of Harvard University. The resulting catalogue represents a unique approach to supplying new investigational leads to researchers seeking biologically active plant principles. Dr. Altschul's meticulous sheet&ndashby–sheet examination of the Harvard collections provides the pharmacognosist, pharmacologist, and others in the medical and health sciences with an extensive firsthand survey of the domestic medicines of many cultures.

In this slim volume, seven world-class scholars discuss the wide range of perspectives that the fields of literature, history, religion, philosophy, environmental ethics, and anthropology bring to the natural environment and our place in it. The book represents a continuation of the Center for the Study of World Religions’ highly regarded Religions of the World and Ecology series.

That rosy tomato perched on your plate in December is at the end of a great journey—not just over land and sea, but across a vast and varied cultural history. This is the territory charted in Fresh. Freidberg takes six common foods from the refrigerator to discover what each has to say about our notions of freshness. Local livelihoods; global trade; the politics of taste, community, and environmental change: all enter into this lively, surprising, yet sobering tale about the nature and cost of our hunger for freshness.

One of the most vigorous sciences of our time, astrophysics constantly changes under the impact of new discoveries about everything from our own sun to the most distant and exotic of extragalactic phenomena. In chapters written especially for this volume, twelve distinguished scientists actively pursuing astrophysical research offer up-to-date reviews and commentary on new developments in their fields.

The worldwide prominence of snakes in religion, myth, and folklore underscores our deep connection to the serpent—but why, when so few of us have firsthand experience? The surprising answer, this book suggests, lies in the singular impact of snakes on primate evolution. Predation pressure from snakes, Lynne Isbell tells us, is ultimately responsible for the superior vision and large brains of primates—and for a critical aspect of human evolution. 

Ronald Numbers has recruited the leading scholars in this new history of science to ­puncture the myths, from Galileo’s incarceration to Darwin’s deathbed conversion to Einstein’s belief in a personal God who “didn’t play dice with the universe.” Each chapter in Galileo Goes to Jail shows how much we have to gain by seeing beyond the myths.

A truly interdisciplinary endeavor, astrobiology looks at the evidence of astronomy, biology, physics, chemistry, and a host of other fields. A grand narrative emerges, beginning from the smallest, most common particles yet producing amazing complexity and order. Lucas Mix is a congenial guide through the depths of astrobiology, exploring how the presence of planets around other stars affects our knowledge of our own planet; how water, carbon, and electrons interact to form life as we know it; and how the processes of evolution and entropy act upon every living thing.

In 1913, Russian imperial marines stormed an Orthodox monastery at Mt. Athos, Greece to haul off monks engaged in a dangerously heretical practice known as Name Worshipping. Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor take us on an exciting mathematical mystery tour as they unravel a bizarre tale of political struggles, psychological crises, sexual complexities, and ethical dilemmas. The men and women of the leading French and Russian mathematical schools are central characters in this absorbing tale that could not be told until now. Naming Infinity is a poignant human interest story that raises provocative questions about science and religion, intuition and creativity.

View a collection of videos on Professor Wilson entitled "On the Relation of Science and the Humanities"

In his new preface E. O. Wilson reflects on how he came to write this book: how The Insect Societies led him to write Sociobiology, and how the political and religious uproar that engulfed that book persuaded him to write another book that would better explain the relevance of biology to the understanding of human behavior.

Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories and how our minds are shaped to understand them. After considering art as adaptation, Boyd examines Homer’s Odyssey and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! demonstrating how an evolutionary lens can offer new understanding and appreciation of specific works. Published for the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, Boyd’s study embraces a Darwinian view of human nature and art, and offers a credo for a new humanism.

In only a few species do males strategically employ violence to control female sexuality. Why are females routinely abused in some species, but never in others? And can the study of such unpleasant behavior help us to understand the evolution of men’s violence against women? The book presents extensive field research and analysis to evaluate sexual coercion in a range of species—including all of the great apes and humans—and to clarify its role in shaping social relationships among males, among females, and between the sexes.

When this classic work was first published in 1975, it created a new discipline and started a tumultuous round in the age-old nature versus nurture debate. The controversy surrounding the book's publication--and surrounding its central claim that human social behavior has a biological foundation--reverberates to this day. In the introduction to this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, Edward O. Wilson shows how research in human genetics and neuroscience over the past quarter of a century has strengthened the case for a biological understanding of human nature.

Written by and about New Englanders, this book is relevant to those attempting to address conservation problems on a regional basis. The stories told here are of people using what they had, setting to work to remedy these conditions, and doing so successfully. At a time of growing concern for the environment both locally and globally, theirs is a story certain to inform and inspire the next generation of conservation leaders.

Whiff is the new novel by David Edwards (Séguier). It derives from an actual experiment performed in Paris at the art and science innovation center, Le Laboratoire. In this latest experiment, the double-Michelin-starred chef Thierry Marx collaborated with the colloidal scientist Jérôme Bibette to introduce a new way of encapsulating flavors. Wishing to present these delectable capsules in an unusual way, Edwards and a group of students developed a new way of eating by aerosol, called whiffing. Whiff is also accompanied by the first “whiffing” recipes.