The author dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors he feels are responsible for history's broadest patterns.

"A Short History of Progress is nothing less than a concise history of the world since Neanderthal times, elegantly written, brilliantly conceived, and stunningly clear in its warning to us now. Wright shows how human beings have a way of walking into "progress traps," beginning with the worldwide slaughter of big game in the Stone Age. The same pattern of overconsumption then took a new from, as many of the world's most creative civilizations - Mesopotamia,...

Based on a lifetime of pioneering research, preeminent naturalist Edward O. Wilson gives us a new history of human evolution, presented in an elegant and provocative narrative that promises to have reverberations in fields as diverse as anthropology and social psychology, neuroscience and 21st-century intellectual and religious history. Wilson begins by addressing three "fundamental questions" of religion and philosophy that have fascinated thinkers...

Taking the reader around the world, stopping in France to examine 30,000-year-old cave paintings, in Africa to see where our earliest ancestors left their bones, and in remote forests to spy on our closest relatives, the great apes, Tattersall keeps his focus on the big questions. This book is thus not only about evolution but about the meaning of our existence on this planet and our relationship to the living world. Tattersall breathes life into...

"At the beginning of Nonzero, Robert Wright sets out to "define the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial soup to the World Wide Web." Twenty-two chapters later, after a sweeping and vivid narrative of the human past, he has succeeded - and has mounted a powerful challenge to the conventional view that evolution and human history are aimless." "Ingeniously employing game theory - the logic of "zero-sum" and "non-zero-sum" games - Wright...

An epic detective story that offers a gripping expose on why the world is so unequal. Professor Jared Diamond traveled the globe for over 30 years trying to answer this question. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? Diamond dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible...

"A controversial, idea-driven book that challenges everything you know about sex, marriage, family, and society"--Provided by publisher Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. But this narrative is collapsing. Here, renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, while debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, offer a bold alternative explanation. Ryan and Jethá's central contention...