- The Accidental Mind
- A guide to the strange and often illogical world of neural function, this book shows how the brain is not an optimized, general-purpose problem-solving machine, but rather a weird agglomeration of ad-hoc solutions that have been piled on through millions of years of evolutionary history.
- Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2008
- The Ape in the Tree
- This book offers a unique insider's perspective on the unfolding discovery of a crucial link in our evolution. It is written in the voice of Walker, whose involvement with Proconsul began when his graduate supervisor analyzed the tree-climbing adaptations in the arm and hand of this extinct creature. Today, Proconsul is the best-known fossil ape in the world and its attributes have profound implications for the very definition of humanness.
- Hardcover 2005
- Bird Coloration, Volume 1, Mechanisms and Measurements
- How birds produce the brilliant and striking coloration of their feathers and other body parts is the focus of this first volume of Bird Coloration. It has been more than 40 years since the mechanisms of color production of birds have been reviewed and synthesized. Geoffrey Hill and Kevin McGraw have assembled the world's leading experts in perception, measurement, and control of bird coloration to contribute to this book. This sumptuously illustrated volume synthesizes more than 1,500 technical papers in this field.
- Hardcover 2006
- Bird Coloration, Volume 2, Function and Evolution
- In this companion volume to Bird Coloration: Volume 1, Mechanisms and Measurements, Geoffrey E. Hill and Kevin J. McGraw explain the function of the colorful displays of birds and examine the factors that shape the evolution of color signals. This sumptuously illustrated book will be essential reading for biologists studying animal coloration, but it will also be treasured by anyone curious about why birds are colorful and how they got that way.
- Hardcover 2006
- The Case of the Female Orgasm
- Why women evolved to have orgasms--when most of their primate relatives don't--is a persistent mystery among evolutionary biologists. In pursuing this mystery, Lloyd arrives at another: How could anything as inadequate as the evolutionary explanations of the female orgasm have passed muster as science? A judicious and revealing look at all twenty evolutionary accounts of the trait of human female orgasm, Lloyd's book is at the same time a case study of how certain biases steer science astray.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
- Chimpanzee and Red Colobus
- This book, the first long-term field study of a predator-prey relationship involving two wild primates, documents a six-year investigation into how the risk of predation molds primate society. Taking us to Gombe National Park in Tanzania, a place made famous by Jane Goodall's studies, the book offers a close look at how predation by wild chimpanzees--observable in the park as nowhere else--has influenced the behavior, ecology, and demography of a population of red colobus monkeys.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2001
- China and Charles Darwin
- This study evaluates Darwin's theory of evolution as a stimulus to Chinese political changes and philosophic challenge to traditional Chinese beliefs. Pusey bases his analysis on a survey of journals issued from 1896 to 1910 and, after a break for revolutionary action, from 1915 to 1926, with emphasis on the era between the Sino-Japanese War and the Republician Revolution.
- Hardcover 1983
- The Creationists
- In light of the embattled status of evolutionary theory, particularly as "intelligent design" makes headway against Darwinism in the schools and in the courts, this now classic account of the roots of creationism assumes new relevance. Expanded and updated to account for the appeal of intelligent design and the global spread of creationism, The Creationists offers a thorough, clear, and balanced overview of the arguments and figures at the heart of the debate.
- Paperback 2006
- Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge
- Bringing together evolutionary biology, psychology, and philosophy, Henry Plotkin presents a new science of knowledge that traces an unbreakable link between instinct and our ability to know. Since our ability to know our world depends primarily on what we call intelligence, intelligence must be understood as an extension of instinct. The capacity for knowledge is deeply rooted in our biology and, in a special sense, is shared by all living things.
- Hardcover 1994 / Paperback 1997
- Darwin and Design
- In clear, non-technical language, Ruse offers a full and fair assessment of the status of the argument from design in light of both the advances of modern evolutionary biology and the thinking of today's philosophers--with special attention given to the supporters and critics of "intelligent design." The first comprehensive history and exposition of Western thought about design in the natural world, this important work suggests directions for our thinking as we move into the twenty-first century.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2004
- Darwin and the Novelists
- Darwin’s theory thrust human life into time and nature and subjected it to naturalistic rather than spiritual or moral analysis. Insisting on gradual and regular–lawful–change, Darwinian thought nevertheless requires acknowledgment of chance and randomness for a full explanation of biological phenomena. George Levine shows how these conceptions affected nineteenth–century novelists—from Dickens and Trollope to Conrad—and draws illuminating contrasts with the pre–Darwinian novel and the perspective of natural theology.
- Hardcover 1988
- Evolution
- Spanning evolutionary science from its inception to its latest findings, from discoveries and data to philosophy and history, this book is the most complete, authoritative, and inviting one-volume introduction to evolutionary biology available.
- Hardcover 2009
- Evolution and the Diversity of Life
- The diversity of living forms and the unity of evolutionary processes are themes that have permeated the research and writing of Ernst Mayr, a Grand Master of evolutionary biology. The essays collected here are among his most valuable and durable: contributions that form the basis for much of the contemporary understanding of evolutionary biology.
- Hardcover 1976 / Paperback 1997
- The Evolution of Racism
- Through the original controversy over evolutionary theory in Darwin's time; the corruption of evolutionary theory into eugenics; the conflict between laboratory research in genetics and fieldwork in physical anthropology and biology; and the continuing controversies over the heritability of intelligence, criminal behavior, and other traits, this book explains both prewar eugenics and postwar taboos on letting the insights of genetics and evolution into the study of humanity.
- Paperback 2002
- The Evolution-Creation Struggle
- In his latest book, Ruse uncovers surprising similarities between evolutionist and creationist thinking. Exploring the underlying philosophical commitments of evolutionists, he reveals that those most hostile to religion are just as evangelical as their fundamentalist opponents. But more crucially, and reaching beyond the biblical issues at stake, he demonstrates that these two diametrically opposed ideologies have, since the Enlightenment, engaged in a struggle for the privilege of defining human origins, moral values, and the nature of reality.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
- Evolutionary Dynamics
- At a time of unprecedented expansion in the life sciences, evolution is the one theory that transcends all of biology. In this book, Martin Nowak draws on the languages of biology and mathematics to outline the mathematical principles according to which life evolves. His book makes a clear and compelling case for understanding every living system--and everything that arises as a consequence of living systems--in terms of evolutionary dynamics.
- Hardcover 2006
- The Evolving World
- Today, evolutionary biology is much more than an explanatory concept. It is indispensable to the world we live in. This book provides the first truly accessible and balanced account of how evolution has become a tool with applications that are thoroughly integrated, and deeply useful, in our everyday lives and our societies, often in ways that we do not realize. The Evolving World convinces us as never before that evolutionary biology has become absolutely necessary for human existence.
- Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2007
- Good Natured
- Frans de Waal takes on those who have declared ethics uniquely human. Making a compelling case for a morality grounded in biology, he shows that ethical behavior, in humans and animals alike, is as much a matter of evolution as any other trait.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1997
- Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language
- What Robin Dunbar suggests--and his research, whether in the realm of primatology or in that of gossip, confirms--is that humans developed language to serve the purpose that grooming served, but far more efficiently. From the nit-picking of chimpanzees to our chats at coffee break, from neuroscience to paleoanthropology, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language offers a provocative view of what makes us human.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1998
- A Guinea Pig's History of Biology
- Hardcover 2007
- Hierarchy in the Forest
- The political flexibility of our species is formidable: we can be quite egalitarian, we can be quite despotic. Hierarchy in the Forest traces the roots of these contradictory traits in chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and early human societies. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm looks at the loose group structures of hunter-gatherers, then at tribal segmentation, and finally at present-day governments to see how these conflicting tendencies are reflected. He postulates that egalitarianism is in effect a hierarchy in which the weak combine forces to dominate the strong.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001
- Historical Biogeography
- This book makes sense of the profound revolution that historical biogeography has undergone in the last two decades, and of the resulting confusion over its foundations, basic concepts, methods, and relationships to other disciplines of comparative biology. Using case studies, the authors explain and illustrate the fundamentals and the most frequently used methods of this discipline. They show the reader how to tell when a historical biogeographic approach is called for, how to decide what kind of data to collect, how to choose the best method for the problem at hand, how to perform the necessary calculations, how to choose and apply a computer program, and how to interpret results.
- Hardcover 2003
- Keywords and Concepts in Evolutionary Developmental Biology
- Keywords and Concepts in Evolutionary Developmental Biology is the first comprehensive reference work for this expanding field. Covering more than fifty central terms and concepts in entries written by leading experts, it offers an overview of all that is embraced by this new subdiscipline of biology, providing the core insights and ideas that show how embryonic development relates to life-history evolution, adaptation, and responses to and integration with environmental factors.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2006
- Lessons from an Optical Illusion
- This book is a bold, modern recasting of the age-old nature-nurture debate, informed by revolutionary insights from brain science, artificial intelligence, psychiatry, linguistics, evolutionary biology, child development, ethics, and even cosmology.
- Hardcover 1995 / Paperback 1997
- Lucy’s Legacy
- We cannot be certain that Lucy was female--the bones themselves do not tell us. However, we do know, as Alison Jolly points out, that the females who came after Lucy--more adept than their males in verbal facility, sharing food, and migrating among places and groups--played as crucial a role in the human evolutionary process as "man" ever did. In a book that takes us from the first cell to global society, Jolly shows us that to learn where we came from and where we go next, we need to understand how sex and intelligence, cooperation and love, emerged from the harsh Darwinian struggle in the past.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001
- Men
- Men presents a new approach to understanding the human male by drawing upon life history and evolutionary theory.
- Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
- The Mermaid’s Tale
- Although relentless competitive natural selection is widely assumed to be the primary mover of evolutionary change, this book shows how life more generally works on the basis of cooperation. The book reveals that the focus on competition and cooperation is largely an artifact of the compression of time—a distortion that dissolves when the nature and origins of adapted life are viewed primarily from developmental and evolutionary time scales.
- Hardcover 2009
- Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons
- Bowler doesn't minimize the hostility of many of the faithful toward evolution, but he reveals the less well-known existence of a long tradition within the churches that sought to reconcile Christian beliefs with evolution by finding reflections of the divine in scientific explanations for the origin of life. By tracing the historical forerunners of these rival Christian responses, Bowler provides a valuable alternative to accounts that stress only the escalating confrontation.
- Hardcover 2007
- Ontogeny and Phylogeny
- "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" was Haeckel's answer--the wrong one--to the most vexing question of nineteenth-century biology: what is the relationship between individual development (ontogeny) and the evolution of species and lineages (phylogeny)? In this, the first major book on the subject in fifty years, Stephen Gould documents the history of the idea of recapitulation from its first appearance among the pre-Socratics to its fall in the early twentieth century.
- Paperback 1985
- Organization of Insect Societies
- In this volume, an international group of scientists has synthesized their collective expertise and insight into a newly unified vision of insect societies and what they can reveal about how sociality has arisen as an evolutionary strategy.
- Hardcover 2009
- Phylogeography
- Phylogeography is a discipline concerned with various relationships between gene genealogies--phylogenetics--and geography. The word "phylogeography" was coined in 1987, and since then the scientific literature has reflected an exploding interest in the topic. Yet, to date, no book-length treatment of this emerging field has appeared. Phylogeography fills that gap. It captures the conceptual and empirical richness of the field, and also the sense of genuine innovation that phylogeographic perspectives have brought to evolutionary studies.
- Hardcover 2000
- Primeval Kinship
- In this account of the dawn of human society, Chapais shows that our knowledge about kinship and society in nonhuman primates supports, and informs, ideas first put forward by the distinguished social anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Chapais contends that only a few evolutionary steps were required to bridge the gap between the kinship structures of our closest relatives—chimpanzees and bonobos—and the human kinship configuration.
- Hardcover 2008
- Promiscuity
- Males are promiscuous and ferociously competitive. Females--both human and of other species--are naturally monogamous. That at least is what the study of sexual behavior after Darwin assumed, perhaps because it was written by men. Only in recent years has this version of events been challenged. Females, it has become clear, are remarkably promiscuous and have evolved an astonishing array of strategies, employed both before and after copulation, to determine exactly who will father their offspring. Tim Birkhead reveals a wonderful world in which males and females vie with each other as they strive to maximize their reproductive success.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
- Punctuated Equilibrium
- In 1972 Stephen Jay Gould took the scientific world by storm with his paper on punctuated equilibrium. Challenging a core assumption of Darwin's theory of evolution, it launched the controversial idea that the majority of species originates in geological moments (punctuations) and persists in stasis. Now, thirty-five years later, Punctuated Equilibrium offers his only book-length testament on a theory he fiercely promoted, repeatedly refined, and tirelessly defended.
- Paperback 2007
- Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings
- Analytic philosophers once pantomimed physics, trying to understand the world by breaking it down. Thinkers from the Darwinian sciences now pose alternatives to this simplistic reductionism. In a tour of essays spanning thirty years, Wimsatt argues that scientists seek to atomize phenomena only when necessary to understand how entities, events, and processes articulate at different levels. This book offers a philosophy for error-prone humans trying to understand messy systems in the real world.
- Hardcover 2007
- Sexual Selection and Animal Genitalia
- Paperback / Hardcover
- The Singing Neanderthals
- In The Singing Neanderthals, Steven Mithen draws together strands from archaeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience and musicology to explain why we are so compelled to make and hear music. Mithen explores music as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species. The result is a fascinating work--and a succinct riposte to those who have dismissed music as a functionless evolutionary byproduct.
- Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2007
- The Social Biology of Ropalidia marginata
- Hardcover 2001
- Sociobiology
- View a collection of videos on Professor Wilson entitled "On the Relation of Science and the Humanities"
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.
- Paperback 2000 / Hardcover 2000
- Sparks of Life
- How, asks James E. Strick, could spontaneous generation--the idea that living things can suddenly arise from nonliving materials--come to take root for a time (even a brief one) in so thoroughly unsuitable a field as British natural theology? No less an authority than Aristotle claimed that cases of spontaneous generation were to be observed in nature, and the idea held sway for centuries. Beginning around the time of the Scientific Revolution, however, the doctrine was increasingly challenged; attempts to prove or disprove it led to important breakthroughs in experimental design and laboratory techniques, most notably sterilization methods, that became the cornerstones of modern microbiology and sped the ascendancy of the germ theory of disease.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
- Symmorphosis
- Are animals designed economically? The theory of symmorphosis predicts that the size of the parts in a system must be matched to the overall functional demand. In Symmorphosis, Ewald Weibel show how animals as different as shrews, pronghorns, dogs, goats--even humans--all develop from essentially the same blueprint by variation of design. This is a hidden beauty of the animal kingdom, which can be uncovered by a rigorous investigation of the quantitative relations of form and function.
- Hardcover 2000
- Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle
- Hardcover 1987 / Paperback
- Timewalkers
- Gamble reconsiders the remarkable record of geographical expansion that began with the early hominids of sub-Saharan Africa. Through this astonishing dispersal of humans, which exceeds that of all other mammals, he traces calculated responses to variations in climate and environment.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- The Tinkerer's Accomplice
- Physiologist Scott Turner argues eloquently that the apparent design we see in the living world only makes sense when we add to Darwin's towering achievement the dimension that much modern molecular biology has left on the gene-splicing floor: the dynamic interaction between living organisms and their environment. Only when we add environmental physiology to natural selection can we begin to understand the beautiful fit between the form life takes and the way life works.
- Hardcover 2007
- Toward a New Philosophy of Biology
- Paperback 1989
- Toward an Evolutionary Biology of Language
- In this forcefully argued book, the leading evolutionary theorist of language provides a framework for studying the evolution of human language and cognition. Philip Lieberman asserts that the widely influential theories of language's development are inconsistent with principles and findings of evolutionary biology and neuroscience. In his view, the human language ability is the confluence of a succession of separate evolutionary developments, jury-rigged by natural selection to work together for an evolutionarily unique ability.
- Hardcover 2006
- Tree of Origin
- Nine of the world's top primate experts compose the most extensive picture to date of what the behavior of monkeys and apes can tell us about our own evolution as a species.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
- The Triple Helix
- One of our most brilliant evolutionary biologists, Richard Lewontin here provides a concise, accessible account of what his work has taught him about biology and about its relevance to human affairs. In the process, he exposes some of the common and troubling misconceptions that misdirect and stall our understanding of biology and evolution. Rejecting the notion that genes determine the organism, which then adapts to the environment, he explains that organisms, influenced in their development by their circumstances, in turn create, modify, and choose the environment in which they live.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
- Unto Others
- No matter what we do, however kind or generous our deeds may seem, a hidden motive of selfishness lurks--or so science has claimed for years. This book, a detailed case studyof scientific change, tells us differently. In Unto Others philosopher Elliott Sober and biologist and biologist Sloan Wilson demonstrate once and for all that unselfish behavior is in fact an important feature of both biological and human nature. Their book provides a panoramic view of altruism throughout the animal kingdom--from self-sacrificing parasites, to insects that subsume themselves in the superorganism of a colony, to the human capacity for selflessness--even as it explains the evolutionary sense of such behavior.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 1999
- The Woman That Never Evolved
- Hailed as a ground-breaking synthesis of feminism and evolutionary theory when first published, The Woman That Never Evolved is a bold and refreshing answer to contemporary versions of social Darwinism that shoehorn female nature into narrow stereotypes. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a leader in modern primatology, argues that evolutionary theorists' emphasis on sexual competition among males for access to females overlooks selection pressures on females themselves. In a vivid account of what female primates themselves actually do to secure their own reproductive advantage, she demolishes myths about sexually passive, "coy," compliant, exclusively nurturing females. Her lucid and compelling account of the great range of behaviors in many species of primates expands the concept of female nature to include the full range of selection pressures on females, and reminds us of the true complexity and dynamism of the evolutionary story.
- Paperback 1999