W.M. Adams and K.H. Redford— On Gough Island, a steep speck of land deep in the South Atlantic, giant mice eat albatross chicks as they sit on their nests. They are house mice, accidental arrivals on the ships of long-dead sealers. But they have lost their secretive, timid, mousy ways.
Agustín Fuentes— We all believe. But we are not all religious. Belief is an evolved capacity that incorporates our neurobiology, our behavior, our cultures, our histories, our individual development and experiences. This enables humans to live in the here and now, in the moment, in the material world, and to
Meir Kryger— It is 3 a.m. You awaken sweating, your heart pounding. Your mind is racing, reminding you that you have to get up early to drop the kids off at daycare, then dash to work for an important meeting. Obsessed with your personal and work issues, you eventually fall
Jenny Diski— The great advantage over real live creatures that my Three Bears had in common with Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, aside from not needing to be fed or produce droppings, was neoteny. Mickey and my ursine family looked only glancingly like a mouse or brown bears, and much more like babies.
Scott Solomon— In today’s world, it’s easy to imagine that the evolutionary forces that gave rise to our species are no longer at work. Nature may be “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson observed, but the callous forces of nature seem hardly to affect us when we live in
In the landmark 1986 book Origins of Sex, biologist Lynn Margulis and science writer Dorion Sagan trace the first appearance of sex back billions of years, to bacteria. Here, they describe the complex evolutionary history that their book will seek to untangle. The following is an excerpt from the introduction.
Benny Shilo— Traditional science regards the body as a collection of cells all carrying identical genetic information. The body cells generate specialized tissues that orchestrate the activity of an entire body. This view has been recently challenged, with new scientific findings showing that the microorganisms we carry in and on
This month, we’re giving away three books on Goodreads – Michael S. Roth‘s Beyond The University, Linda R. Wires‘ The Double-Crested Cormorant and Becoming Freud, by Adam Phillips. Whether you’re hoping to read about American intellectual history, conservation biology, the art of biography and psychoanalysis, or just something fascinating and altogether different, we’ve got plenty of books
The world comes alive again each spring: the bloom of nature and the return of busy outdoor activities. We’re inviting readers of the Yale University Press list to further explore our offering of titles on biology, nature, and biography to help us celebrate the renewal and span of life throughout
Follow @yaleSCIbooks In the epigram to Christian de Duve’s Genetics of Original Sin: The Impact of Natural Selection on the Future of Humanity we find a verse from the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible where “the woman” eats the forbidden fruit of the tree, then gives it to the