検索キーワード： 進化・遺伝学

Palaeontologist Steve Brusatte weaves together the history and evolution of our mammal forebears with stories of the scientists whose fieldwork and discoveries underlie our knowledge, both of iconic mammals like the mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers of which we have all heard, and of fascinating species that few of us are aware of. For what we see today is but a very limited range of the mammals that have existed; in this fascinating and groundbreaking book, Steve Brusatte tells their—and our—story.

We humans are the inheritors of a dynasty that has reigned over the planet for nearly 66 million years, through fiery cataclysm and ice ages: the mammals. Our lineage includes saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, armadillos the size of a car, cave bears three times the weight of a grizzly, clever scurriers that outlasted Tyrannosaurus rex, and even other types of humans, like Neanderthals.

Racist pseudoscience is on the rise - fueling hatred, feeding nationalism, and seeping into our discourse on everything from sports to intelligence. Even the well-intentioned repeat stereotypes based on "science", because cutting-edge genetics are hard to grasp - and all too easy to distort. Paradoxically, misconceptions are multiplying amid today's unprecedented surge of research on human genetics. We've never had a clearer picture of who we are and where we come from, and the science, when accurately understood, is a powerful and definitive ally against racism.

The scientific evidence behind why maintaining a lifestyle more like that of our ancestors will restore our health and well-being. In Go Wild, Harvard Medical School Professor John Ratey, MD, and journalist Richard Manning reveal that although civilization has rapidly evolved, our bodies have not kept pace.

Сто тысяч лет назад Homo sapiens был одним из как минимум шести видов человека, живших на этой планете, — ничем не примечательным животным, которое играло в экосистеме роль не большую, чем гориллы, светлячки или медузы. Но около семидесяти тысяч лет назад загадочное изменение когнитивных способностей Homo sapiens превратило его в хозяина планеты и кошмар экосистемы. Как человек разумный сумел покорить мир? Что стало с другими видами человека? Когда и почему появились деньги, государства и религия? Как возникали и рушились империи?

When attorney Chris Hansen learned that the U.S. government was issuing patents for human genes to biotech companies, his first thought was, How can a corporation own what makes us who we are? Then he discovered that women were being charged exorbitant fees to test for hereditary breast and ovarian cancers, tests they desperately needed—all because Myriad Genetics had patented the famous BRCA genes. So he sued them.

Partiendo de un momento extraordinariamente difícil de la vida del autor, este audiolibro empieza con una pregunta fascinante: ¿llevamos la felicidad escrita en nuestros genes? Tomando esta pregunta como hilo conductor a lo largo de 14 capítulos, López-Otín nos presenta los momentos estelares de la historia de la vida sobre la Tierra, nos explica cómo llegamos hasta aquí y por qué una serie de adversidades nos trajo la enfermedad como amenaza universal contra la felicidad.

Astrobiology is an exciting new subject, and one, arguably, more interdisciplinary than any other. Astrobiologists seek to understand the origin and evolution of life on Earth in order to illuminate and guide the search for life on other planets. In this Very Short Introduction, David C. Catling introduces the subject through our understanding of the factors that allowed life to arise and persist on our own planet, and for the signs we are looking for in the search for extraterrestrial life.

In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum - reviving Darwin's own views - thinks not.

In Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a practicing psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, argues that beauty is neither a cultural construction, an invention of the fashion industry, nor a backlash against feminism - it's in our biology.

The Big Ratchet is the story of the ratchets: the technologies and innovations, big and small, that propelled our species from hunters and gatherers on the savannahs of Africa to shoppers in the aisles of the supermarket. Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3,000 calories every day. This is such an astonishing thing in the history of life as to verge on the miraculous. The Big Ratchet is the story of how it happened.

High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It holds the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived—a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book, Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.

Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity - but we don't. Where is everybody? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: Is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?

In the aftermath of an asteroid impact, Earth’s power grid is damaged nearly beyond recovery. The survival of our world may well depend on energy sources collected from an abandoned undersea settlement beneath the icy surface of Enceladus. Earth-raised Colonel Carter Rhodes, in charge of Earth’s recovery efforts, calls upon Gwen Baré, a Venusian engineer, to regain control of the deserted moon outpost and collect fuel for Earth’s collapsing power grids.

First published in 1871, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex sees Darwin apply his evolutionary theory to the human race, controversially placing apes in our family tree. The book covers a range of adjacent themes, including differences between different peoples, the dominance of women in mate choice, and the relevance of evolutionary theory to general society.

Why can humans alone invent? In The Pattern Seekers, Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen makes a case that autism is as crucial to our creative and cultural history as the mastery of fire. Indeed, Baron-Cohen argues that autistic people have played a key role in human progress for 70,000 years, from the first tools to the digital revolution. How? Because the same genes that cause autism enable the pattern seeking that is essential to our species' inventiveness.

Evolution is one of the most important processes in life. It not only explains the detailed history of life on earth, but its scope also extends into many aspects of our own contemporary behavior - who we are and how we got to be here, our psychology, our cultures - and greatly impacts modern advancements in medicine and conservation biology. Perhaps its most important claim for science is its ability to provide an overarching framework that integrates the many life sciences into a single unified whole. Yet, evolution has been, and continues to be, regarded with suspicion by many.

‘What is it like to be a bat?’, the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked concerning consciousness. For biologist Martin Stevens, the question forms the starting point of an exploration of animal senses. In this enthralling account, we learn not only of the wonder of animal senses, but how they work and how scientists go about investigating them. And, throughout, we consider how these senses came to be.

In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos - as dramatic a development in genetics as the cloning of Dolly the sheep was in 1996. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences. Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention.

Brian and Deborah Charlesworth provide a clear and concise summary of the process of evolution by natural selection, and how natural selection gives rise to adaptations and eventually, over many generations, to new species. They introduce the central concepts of the field of evolutionary biology, as they have developed since Darwin and Wallace on the subject, over 140 years ago, and discuss some of the remaining questions regarding processes.