New Books in Biology and Evolution

Francisco Aboitiz is a professor at the Medical School and the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Neuroscience at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness (MIT Press, 2024) tells the story of life and nervous systems. It introduces the conceptual framework and terminology of evolution, gives a great overview...

Which society was the first to domesticate the horse? It’s a difficult question. The archaeological record is spotty, with only very recent advancements in genetics and carbon dating allowing scientists to really test centuries-old legends about where horses came from. For example, historians argued that the Botai civilization in Kazakhstan provided some of the earliest evidence of horse domestica...

Dive into the world of animals with Whitney Barlow Robles in her captivating new book, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History (Yale UP, 2023). Can corals truly build worlds? Do rattlesnakes possess a mystical charm? What secrets do raccoons hold? These questions reflect how animals have historically challenged human attempts to control nature, particularly during the Enlightenment—a tim...

Many historical figures have their lives and works shrouded in myth, both in life and long after their deaths. Charles Darwin (1809–82) is no exception to this phenomenon and his hero-worship has become an accepted narrative. Darwin Mythology: Debunking Myths, Correcting Falsehoods (Cambridge UP, 2024) unpacks this narrative to rehumanize Darwin's story and establish what it meant to be a 'genius'...

Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of pers...

Butterflies have long captivated the imagination of humans, from naturalists to children to poets. Indeed it would be hard to imagine a world without butterflies. And yet their populations are declining at an alarming rate, to the extent that even the seemingly ubiquitous Monarch could conceivably go the way of the Passenger Pigeon. Many other, more obscure, butterfly species are already perilousl...

Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates...

It was an astounding discovery in the early 1980's that the same genetic sequence, the homeobox, controlled the development of basic body plans across the animal kingdom, whether the result was a flatworm, an octopus, a mouse, or a human. This discovery of the conservation of a key developmental mechanism across phyla and vast stretches of evolutionary time helped launch the interdisciplinary fiel...

In Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity (U Chicago Press, 2024), music scholar Gavin Steingo examines significant cases of attempted communication beyond the human--cases in which the dualistic relationship of human to non-human is dramatically challenged. From singing whales to Sun Ra to searching for alien life, Steingo charts the many ways we have attempted to think about...

On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done (Princeton UP, 2020) is a look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions—and how this shapes our everyday lives.  Why is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mentally exhausting? Why can your child expertly fix the computer and yet still forget...

In Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Monika Krause asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods, and regions in the social sciences and humanities. It is well known that biologists focus on particular organisms, such as mice, fruit flies, or particular viruses when they st...

Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals (Fordham UP, 2023) examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the cultural for...

At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans (Columbia UP, 2024) takes readers on a journey from California tidepools to Antarctic poles, showcasing myriad efforts to research and protect marine environments. Through insightful interviews, oceanographer Tessa Hill and science journalist Eric Simons offer a compelling exploration of humanity's relationship with the ocean. They shed...

In Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science (University of California Press, 2024), Duana Fullwiley has penned an intimate chronicle of laboratory life in the genomic age. She presents many of the influential scientists at the forefront of genetics who have redefined how we practice medicine and law and understand ancestry in an era of big data and waning privacy. E...

Today’s book is: At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans (Columbia UP, 2024), by Tessa Hill and Eric Simons, which takes readers beneath the waves and along the coasts, to explore how climate change and environmental degradation have spurred the most radical transformations in human history. The world’s oceans are changing at a drastic pace. In response, the people who know th...

Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on Earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some o...

If you're interested in memory, you'll find a lot in Memory Makes the Brain: The Biological Machinery That Uses Experiences To Shape Individual Brains (World Scientific, 2021), from cellular processes to unique and interesting perspectives on autism. Detailed descriptions of cellular processes involved in forming a memory. Connecting those cellular processes to everyday experiences - like the memo...

A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters (Doubleday, 2024), pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, he reveals the surprising ways our br...

Most of us appreciate the importance of the immune system yet have very little knowledge about how it actually works. If you fall into this camp and are curious to learn more about this intricate system, Bobby Cherayil's book is an excellent resource. The Logic of Immunity: Deciphering an Enigma was published in January 2024 by John Hopkins University Press. It gives a great overview of this compl...

What did historical evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary theories? What were the values and limits of these evolutionist turns of thought, and in what ways have they endured in present-day music research?  Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human (Oxford UP, 2024) is a critic...

Situated at the intersection of natural science and philosophy, Our Genes: A Philosophical Perspective on Human Evolutionary Genomics (Cambridge University Press, 2023) explores historical practices, investigates current trends, and imagines future work in genetic research to answer persistent, political questions about human diversity. Readers are guided through fascinating thought experiments, c...

A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains (Mariner Books, 2023) tells two fascinating stories. One is the evolution of nervous systems. It started 600 million years ago, when the first brains evolved in tiny worms. The other one is humans' quest to create more and more intelligent systems. This story begins in 1951 with the first reinforcement...

What people ultimately want from music-drama, audience research suggests, is to be absorbed in a story that engages their feelings, even moves them deeply, and that may lead them to insights about life and, perhaps, themselves. Joseph Cone's Seeing Opera Anew: A Cultural and Biological Perspective (Routledge, 2023) shows how both human biology and culture cause these effects. Cone, a lifelong oper...

C. S. Sherrington said “All the brain can do is to move things". The Brain in Motion: From Microcircuits to Global Brain Function (MIT Press, 2023) shows how much the brain can do "just" by moving things. It gives an amazing overview of the large variety of motor behaviors and the cellular basis of them. It reveals how motor circuits provide the underlying mechanism not just for walking or jumping...

Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises--and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox. "Should we eat...