"The author of the best-selling Your Inner Fish, now gives us a lively and accessible account of the great transformations in the history of life, that enable us to further understand whether our presence on this planet is an accident or inevitable. The great transformations in the history of life brought about whole scale shifts in how animals live and how their bodies are organized: the evolution of fish to land-living creature, the origin of birds,...

"In the tradition of E.H. Gombrich, Stephen Hawking, and Alan Weisman-an entertaining and uniquely informed narration of Life's life story. In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien place-in constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions. Amid all this tumult and disaster, life began. The earliest living things were no more than membranes stretched across microscopic gaps in...

Presents three linked novellas set in a heroic, bronze-age world, where mammalian courage against reptile cunning will determine who inherits the Earth.

Traces the impact of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species on a diverse group of writers, abolitionists, and social reformers, including Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott, against a backdrop of growing tensions and transcendental idealism in 1860 America.

Darwin's Brave New World is the story of how four young voyagers to the Southern Hemisphere, Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace, revolutionized science and gave birth to an extraordinary theory about the evolution of life on earth. Darwin's voyage to the Southern Hemisphere in the 1830s changed him from a directionless rich kid bound for a career in the Church, into one of the most incendiary thinkers of our age....