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Nature and Science February 2020
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| Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time by Gaia VinceWhat it does: Examines human evolution through four key "drivers": Fire, Language, Beauty and Time, while arguing that it is collective culture, not individual intelligence, that sets humans apart.
About the author: Journalist Gaia Vince won the Royal Society Insight Investment Prize for her debut, Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made.
For fans of: Diane Ackerman's The Human Age. |
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The Uninhabitable Earth : Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
It is worse, much worse, than you think. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century. The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.
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| A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. SternbergWhat it's about: CRISPR-Cas9, a genome editing technique that makes possible permanent modifications within an organism's DNA.
Why you might like it: This balanced and accessible book describes the research that led to this groundbreaking discovery and examines the potential applications (and implications) of a revolutionary new technology.
What sets it apart: Written by the scientists who discovered this "molecular machine," A Crack in Creation argues that we shouldn't use it without first addressing the serious bioethical issues involved. |
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The Lost Family : How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are
by Libby Copeland
A journalist investigates the business practices of companies like Ancestry and 23andMe and explores the stories of individuals who participated in home genetic testing and had their lives turned upside down by the results.
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| The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha MukherjeeWhat it's about: Describing the concept of heredity as a form of information transmission, physician and science writer Siddhartha Mukherjee considers the gene, its long and winding road to discovery, and its future as bioengineering becomes more common.
Why you might like it: From Mendel and Darwin to the Human Genome Project, this sweeping, thought-provoking book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Emperor of Maladies artfully explores both the scientific and cultural significance of genes. |
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| A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold through Our Genes by Adam Rutherford; foreword by Siddhartha MukherjeeWhat it's about: "Geneticists have suddenly become historians," observes author Adam Rutherford, citing discoveries that have transformed our understanding of human evolution.
Contains: the (roughly) 2 million year history of the Homo genus, an accessible primer on genomics, and a discussion of what DNA can (and can't) tell us about ourselves.
About the author: Geneticist and journalist Adam Rutherford is the author of Humanimal: How Homo Sapiens Became Nature's Most Paradoxical Creature. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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