Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution
10 best books like Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (Lynn Margulis): Annals of the Former World, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of all Time, Oxygen: The Molecule That Made the World, Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth, The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey Into Earth's Deep History, 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, Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World, The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth's History
| Author | John McPhee |
| ISBN | 0374518734 |
The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years
Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel...
Today it is common knowledge that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite impact 65 million years ago that killed half of all species then living. Far less well-known is a much greater catastrophe that took place at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago: 90 percent of life was destroyed,...
| Author | Nick Lane |
| ISBN | 0198607830 |
In Oxygen, Nick Lane takes the reader on an enthralling journey as he unravels the unexpected ways in which oxygen spurred the evolution of life and death. He shows how oxygen underpins the origin of biological complexity, the birth of photosynthesis, the sudden evolution of animals, the need for two...
| 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 | Jan Zalasiewicz |
| ISBN | 0199569703 |
This is the story of a single pebble, whose history carries us into abyssal depths of time, and across the farthest reaches of space. Indeed, starting from this tiny, common speck, Jan Zalasiewicz offers readers a stimulating tour that begins with the Universe's dramatic birth in the unimaginable...
| 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 | Jessica Snyder Sachs |
| ISBN | 0809050633 |
Making Peace with Microbes
Public sanitation and antibiotic drugs have brought about historic increases in the human life span; they have also unintentionally produced new health crises by disrupting the intimate, age-old balance between humans and the microorganisms that inhabit...
| Author | David Beerling |
| ISBN | 0192806025 |
Global warming is contentious and difficult to measure, even among the majority of scientists who agree that it is taking place. Will temperatures rise by 2 C or 8 C over the next hundred years? Will sea levels rise by 2 or 30 feet? The only way that we can accurately answer questions like these is by looking...
| Author | D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson |
This book is a meticulous work that's both thought provoking and inspiring in its scope. There are plenty of profound, even poetic, insights scattered throughout a density of seemingly sterile precision. An especially interesting holism can be found in the chapter titled 'On the Theory of Transformations,...
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
"Extraordinary. . . . Anyone with the slightest interest in biology should read this book."--The New York Times Book Review
"A marvelous museum of the past four billion years on earth--capacious, jammed with treasures, full of learning...
| Author | Robert M. Hazen |
| ISBN | 0309094321 |
Life on Earth arose nearly 4 billion years ago, bursting forth from air, water, and rock. Though the process obeyed all the rules of chemistry and physics, the details of that original event pose as deep a mystery as any facing science. How did non-living chemicals become alive? While the question is...
| Author | Bert Hölldobler |
| ISBN | 0393067041 |
The Superorganism promises to be one of the most important scientific works published in this decade. Coming eighteen years after the publication of The Ants, this new volume expands our knowledge of the social insects (among them, ants, bees, wasps, and termites) and is based on remarkable research...
| Author | Oliver Morton |
| ISBN | 0007163649 |
A story of a world in crisis and the importance of plants, the history of the earth, and the feuds and fantasies of warring scientists—this is not your fourth-grade science class's take on photosynthesis.
From acclaimed science journalist Oliver Morton comes this fascinating, lively,...
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 | Peter D. Ward |
| ISBN | 0691130752 |
In The Medea Hypothesis, renowned paleontologist Peter Ward proposes a revolutionary and provocative vision of life's relationship with the Earth's biosphere--one that has frightening implications for our future, yet also offers hope. Using the latest discoveries from the geological record,...
| 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 | Richard C. Lewontin |
| ISBN | 0674006771 |
One of our most brilliant evolutionary biologists, Richard Lewontin has also been a leading critic of those--scientists and non-scientists alike--who would misuse the science to which he has contributed so much. In The Triple Helix, Lewontin the scientist and Lewontin the critic come together...
Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell
| Author | Dennis Bray |
| ISBN | 0300141734 |
How does a single-cell creature, such as an amoeba, lead such a sophisticated life? How does it hunt living prey, respond to lights, sounds, and smells, and display complex sequences of movements without the benefit of a nervous system? This book offers a startling and original answer.
In...
Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life
| Author | Eva Jablonka |
| ISBN | 0262600692 |
Ideas about heredity and evolution are undergoing a revolutionary change. New findings in molecular biology challenge the gene-centered version of Darwinian theory according to which adaptation occurs only through natural selection of chance DNA variations. In Evolution in Four Dimensions,...
