Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin
10 best books like Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin (Robert M. Hazen): Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth, At the Water's Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language, Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction, Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution, Sex, Drugs and DNA: Science's Taboos Confronted
| Author | Andrew H. Knoll |
| ISBN | 0691120293 |
Australopithecines, dinosaurs, trilobites--such fossils conjure up images of lost worlds filled with vanished organisms. But in the full history of life, ancient animals, even the trilobites, form only the half-billion-year tip of a nearly four-billion-year iceberg. Andrew Knoll explores...
| Author | Carl Zimmer |
| ISBN | 0684856239 |
Everybody Out of the Pond
At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is...
| Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
| ISBN | 0674006135 |
The world's most revered and eloquent interpreter of evolutionary ideas offers here a work of explanatory force unprecedented in our time--a landmark publication, both for its historical sweep and for its scientific vision.
With characteristic attention to detail, Stephen Jay Gould...
| Author | John Maynard Smith |
| ISBN | 0198504934 |
When John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary published The Major Transitions in Evolution, it was seen as a major work in biology. Nature hailed it as a book of "grand and daunting sweep.... A splendid and rewarding tour de force." And New Scientist wrote that it captured "the essence of modern biology,"...
| Author | Eugenie C. Scott |
| ISBN | 0520246500 |
The evolution versus creationism conflict is here to stay. Even after their devastating defeat in the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision, advocates of intelligent design and other forms of creationism continue to revise their strategies for undermining the teaching of evolution-and thus of science...
| Author | Barbara Forrest |
| ISBN | 0195319737 |
Forrest and Gross expose the scientific failure, the religious essence, and the political ambitions of "intelligent design" creationism. They examine the movement's "Wedge Strategy," which has advanced and is succeeding through public relations rather than through scientific research. Analyzing...
| Author | Sean B. Carroll |
| ISBN | 0393327795 |
Dnf'd. Not because it is a bad book, boring or not well-written, but because it turns out that my appetite for evolutionary biology does not extend as far as embryology. I just cannot summon up the interest to concentrate and have to keep rereading and looking (again and again) at the illustrations. Maybe...
| Author | Nick Lane |
| ISBN | 0199205647 |
If it weren't for mitochondria, scientists argue, we'd all still be single-celled bacteria. Indeed, these tiny structures inside our cells are important beyond imagining. Without mitochondria, we would have no cell suicide, no sculpting of embryonic shape, no sexes, no menopause, no aging.
In...
| Author | Lynn Margulis |
| ISBN | 0520210646 |
Microcosmos brings together the remarkable discoveries of microbiology of the past two decades and the pioneering research of Dr. Margulis to create a vivid new picture of the world that is crucial to our understanding of the future of the planet. Addressed to general readers, the book provides a beautifully...
Sex, Drugs and DNA: Science's Taboos Confronted
| Author | Michael Stebbins |
| ISBN | 1403993424 |
In a frank, edgy and entertaining style that pulls no punches this book reveals the truth about modern biology and debunks the commonest myths surrounding some of the most controversial topics in science and health. It says what most scientists and politicians are afraid to say about what research...
| Author | Claire Nouvian |
| ISBN | 0226595668 |
On dry land, most organisms are confined to the surface, or at most to altitudes of a hundred meters—the height of the tallest trees. In the oceans, though, living space has both vertical and horizontal dimensions: with an average depth of 3800 meters, the oceans offer 99% of the space on Earth where...
The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview
| Author | Iris Fry |
| ISBN | 0813527406 |
How did life emerge on Earth? Is there life on other worlds? These questions, until recently confined to the pages of speculative essays and tabloid headlines, are now the subject of legitimate scientific research. This book presents a unique perspective--a combined historical, scientific, and...
| Author | Addy Pross |
| ISBN | 0199641013 |
Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrodinger posed a profound question: 'What is life, and how did it emerge from non-life?' This problem has puzzled biologists and physical scientists ever since.
Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently...
In The Blink Of An Eye: How Vision Sparked The Big Bang Of Evolution
| Author | Andrew Parker |
| ISBN | 0465054382 |
About 550 million years ago, there was literally an explosion of life forms, as all the major animal groups suddenly and dramatically appeared. Although several books have been written about this surprising event, known as the Cambrian explosion, none has explained why it occurred. Indeed, none...
| Author | Richard Fortey |
| ISBN | 0375706216 |
With Trilobite, Richard Fortey, paleontologist and author of the acclaimed Life, offers a marvelously written, smart and compelling, accessible and witty scientific narrative of the most ubiquitous of fossil creatures.
Trilobites were shelled animals that lived in the oceans over five...
| Author | Brian Switek |
| ISBN | 1934137294 |
“Switek seamlessly intertwines two types of evolution: one of life on earth and the other of paleontology itself.”—Discover Magazine
““In delightful prose, [Switek] . . . superbly shows that ‘[i]f we can let go of our conceit,’ we will see the preciousness of life in all its...
| Author | Donald R. Prothero |
| ISBN | 0231139624 |
Over the past twenty years, paleontologists have made tremendous fossil discoveries, including fossils that mark the growth of whales, manatees, and seals from land mammals and the origins of elephants, horses, and rhinos. Today there exists an amazing diversity of fossil humans, suggesting we...
Science: Good Bad, and Bogus
| Author | Martin Gardner |
| ISBN | 0879755733 |
This book has not aged well, but if you remember the mystical movements of the 1970s you may very well find it relevant. In my case, I went through a Uri Geller phase in the 70s, and the existence of the Rhine Institute originally associated with Duke University, and the existence of the Division of Parapsychology...
| Author | Janet Browne |
| ISBN | 0691026068 |
Few lives of great men offer so much interest--and so many mysteries--as the life of Charles Darwin, the greatest figure of nineteenth-century science, whose ideas are still inspiring discoveries and controversies more than a hundred years after his death. Yet only now, with the publication of Voyaging,...
| Author | Steve Jones |
| ISBN | 0345422775 |
Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species is probably the best-known, least-read book. One of the most important achievements of the past millennium, it did for biology what Galileo did for astronomy: made it into a single science rather than a collection of unrelated facts. Important though Origin...
| Author | Paul G. Falkowski |
| ISBN | 0691155372 |
For almost four billion years, microbes had the primordial oceans all to themselves. The stewards of Earth, these organisms transformed the chemistry of our planet to make it habitable for plants, animals, and us. Life's Engines takes readers deep into the microscopic world to explore how these marvelous...
