The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language
10 best books like The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language (John Maynard Smith): The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory Of The Origin Of Species, The History and Geography of Human Genes, Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin, The Insect Societies, The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview, In The Blink Of An Eye: How Vision Sparked The Big Bang Of Evolution, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, The Variety of Life: A Survey and a Celebration of All the Creatures that Have Ever Lived, Evolution
The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution
| Author | Stuart A. Kauffman |
| ISBN | 0195079515 |
Stuart Kauffman here presents a brilliant new paradigm for evolutionary biology, one that extends the basic concepts of Darwinian evolution to accommodate recent findings and perspectives from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. The book drives to the heart of the exciting...
| Author | Lynn Margulis |
| ISBN | 0465043925 |
How do new species evolve? Although Darwin identified inherited variation as the creative force in evolution, he never formally speculated where it comes from. His successors thought that new species arise from the gradual accumulation of random mutations of DNA. But despite its acceptance in every...
| Author | Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza |
| ISBN | 0691029059 |
Hailed as a breakthrough in the understanding of human evolution, The History and Geography of Human Genes offers the first full-scale reconstruction of where human populations originated and the paths by which they spread throughout the world. By mapping the worldwide geographic distribution...
| 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 | Edward O. Wilson |
| ISBN | 0674454952 |
Edward Osborne Wilson is an American biologist, researcher, theorist, and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, a branch of entomology. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, Wilson is known for his career as a scientist, his advocacy for environmentalism,...
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...
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 | Ernst W. Mayr |
| ISBN | 0674364465 |
No one in this century can speak with greater authority on the progress of ideas in biology than Ernst Mayr. And no book has ever established the life sciences so firmly in the mainstream of Western intellectual history as The Growth of Biological Thought. Ten years in preparation, this is a work of epic...
| Author | Colin Tudge |
| ISBN | 0198503113 |
Here, between the covers of one capacious book, is an illustrated summary of all the creatures that have ever lived, a vast compendium of earth's current and former inhabitants in all their dazzling and infinite diversity.
Colin Tudge argues that we are entering a new phase of biology in which,...
| Author | Mark Ridley |
| ISBN | 1405103450 |
Mark Ridley's Evolution has become the premier undergraduate text in the study of evolution. Readable and stimulating, yet well-balanced and in-depth, this text tells the story of evolution, from the history of the study to the most revent developments in evolutionary theory.
The third edition...
| Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
| ISBN | 0674024443 |
In 1972 Stephen Jay Gould took the scientific world by storm with his paper on punctuated equilibrium, written with Niles Eldredge. Challenging a core assumption of Darwin's theory of evolution, it launched the career of one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of our time--perhaps the...
| Author | Jacques Monod |
| ISBN | 0394718259 |
This radical book by Nobel laureate Monod is an important intellectual event. Chance and Necessity is a philosophical statement whose intention is to sweep away as both false and dangerous the animist conception of man that has dominated virtually all Western worldviews from primitive cultures...
| Author | Helena Cronin |
| ISBN | 0521457653 |
The "ant" and the "peacock" stand for two puzzles in Darwinism--altruism and sexual selection. How can natural selection favor those, such as the worker ant, that renounce tooth and claw in favor of the public-spirited ways of the commune? And how can "peacocks"--flamboyant, ornamental and apparently...
| Author | George C. Williams |
| ISBN | 0691023573 |
Biological evolution is a fact--but the many conflicting theories of evolution remain controversial even today. In 1966, simple Darwinism, which holds that evolution functions primarily at the level of the individual organism, was threatened by opposing concepts such as group selection, a popular...
The Second Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions
| Author | Martin Gardner |
| ISBN | 0226282538 |
This delightful collection from the magician of math introduces readers to magic squares, the Generalized Ham Sandwich Theorem, origami, digital roots, an update of the Induction Game of Eleusis, Dudeney puzzles, the maze at Hampton Court palace, and many more mathematical puzzles and principles.
"Gardner...
Principles of Development
| Author | Lewis Wolpert |
| ISBN | 0199275378 |
Completely updated and revised in a new edition, Principles of Development presents major principles and concepts in the field for an undergraduate audience. Emphasizing gene control as the key to understanding development, the third edition is written in accessible prose, utilizing an impressive...
Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life
| Author | M.A. Nowak |
| ISBN | 0674023382 |
At a time of unprecedented expansion in the life sciences, evolution is the one theory that transcends all of biology. Any observation of a living system must ultimately be interpreted in the context of its evolution. Evolutionary change is the consequence of mutation and natural selection, which...
| Author | Francis Crick |
| ISBN | 0465091385 |
I guess the risk of reading autobiographies is that you might come out not enjoying the book because you don't like the person.
In James Watson's 'The Double Helix' Francis Crick is painted as brilliant, impatient, prone to irritate others with his bumptious nature and unwelcome knowledge-sharing....
| Author | A.G. Cairns-Smith |
| ISBN | 0521398282 |
A general, generic understanding of the origin of life is that organic chemicals came together by chance in just the right way so that replication occurred. Then random variation and natural selection took it from there and favored the better replicators. Cairns-Smith doubts this speculative account...
