The renowned biologist and thinker Richard Dawkins presents his most expansive work in this revised edition that offers a comprehensive look at evolution. Loosely based on the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dawkins's tale takes us modern humans back through four billion years of life on our planet. As the pilgrimage progresses, we join with other organisms at the forty "rendezvous points" where we find a common ancestor. The band of pilgrims...

Boarding everyone onto the Magic School Bus for a class trip back to prehistoric times when a student requests more information for his family tree, Ms. Frizzle hosts a special tour through the evolution of cells, mammals, and early humans.

Although Charles Darwin's theory of evolution laid the foundations of modern biology, it did not tell the whole story. Most remarkably, The Origin of Species said very little about, of all things, the origins of species. Darwin and his modern successors have shown very convincingly how inherited variations are naturally selected, but they leave unanswered how variant organisms come to be in the first place. In Symbiotic Planet, renowned scientist...

In this dazzling companion to the most important PBS television series this fall, award-winning journalist Carl Zimmer collaborates with leading scholars to tell the compelling story of the theory of evolution-from Darwin to 21st century science Darwin's The Origin of Species was breathtaking-beautifully written, staunchly defended, defiantly radical. Yet it emerged long before modern genetics, molecular biology, and contemporary findings in paleontology. ...

"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 walked upright long before we acquired large brains, and new evidence from molecules that enable scientists to decipher the tree of life as never before. The...

"For readers of Inside of a Dog and The Soul of an Octopus, a fascinating, charming, and revelatory look at the science behind why animals play that shows how life-at its most fundamental level-is playful. In Kingdom of Play, critically acclaimed science writer David Toomey takes us on a fast-paced and entertaining tour of playful animals and the scientists who study them. From octopuses on Australia's Great Barrier Reef to meerkats in the Kalahari...

An acclaimed biologist discusses how morality, religion, and the creative arts are biological in nature and defends his theory that the origin of the human condition is due to group, not family, selection.