by Steve Jones (2000)
"Charles Darwin's masterpiece, The Origin of Species, is probably the best-known, least-read book. Unquestionably one of the most important achievements of the millennium, the book caused a sensation when it was published in 1859, because it forced mankind to see itself as part of the animal world - a notion that hundreds of millions still deny. Writing as "Darwin's ghost," the well-known geneticist Steve Jones has drawn on our ever-expanding scientific knowledge and the brilliant logic set out in The Origin to restate evolution's case for the twenty-first century." "Using contemporary examples - the AIDS virus, the rules of the American Kennel Club, the sheep who never forget a face and the garbage that floats in the Pacific - he shows the power and immediacy of Darwin's great argument."--BOOK JACKET.
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin's seminal work laying the foundations for the principles of evolutionary biology via natural selection, based on evidence that he collected during his expedition on *HMS Beagle* in the 1830s.
John L. Ingraham
By unlocking the evolutionary information contained in cells, biologists have been able to construct the Tree of Life and show that its three main stems are dominated by microbes. Plants and animals constitute a small upper branch in one stem. Soon we may know how life began over 3.5 billion years ago. John Ingraham tells this story of discovery.--
Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin
There have been five great extinctions in the long history of life on earth, the most recent 65 million years ago, when all dinosaur species perished in an astonishingly brief period of time. Each of these great extinctions was unimaginably catastrophic - at least 65 percent of all species living vanished in a geological instant; in the Permian extinction, nearly 95 percent of all species were obliterated. The agency for these extinctions, the why, is hotly debated - sudden climate change, asteroids, evolutionary inadequacy - but the patterns are remarkably consistent. Now, as Leakey and Lewin show with inarguable logic based on irrefutable scientific evidence, the sixth great extinction is underway. And this time the cause is beyond dispute: By the lowest estimate, thirty thousand species are wiped out by human agency every year - a rate that matches the patterns of the other five great extinctions with frightening exactitude. As the authors show, such dramatic and overwhelming extinction threatens the entire complex fabric of life on earth, including the species at fault, Homo sapiens. Unless we come to realize the devastating consequence of our rapacious behavior, we will follow the mastodon, the great auk, the carrier pigeon, and our other victims into the oblivion of extinction.
Roy A. Gallant
Presents the theories, controversies, and latest scientific thinking on how the Solar System, the Earth, and the first biological organisms came to be and how the latter changed and adapted for survival. Includes a glossary of terms.