The Origin of Species is the most famous book in science but its stature tends to obscure the genius of Charles Darwin's other works. The Beagle voyage, too, occupied only five of the fifty years of his career. He spent only five weeks on the Galapagos and on his return never left Britain again. Darwin wrote six million words, in nineteen books and innumerable letters, on topics as different as dogs, barnacles, insect-eating plants, orchids, earthworms, apes and human emotion. Together, they laid the foundations of modern biology. In this beautifully written, witty and illuminating book, Steve Jones explores the domestic Darwin, the sage of Kent, and brings his work up to date. Great Britain was Charles Darwin's other island, its countryside as much, or more, a place of discovery than had been the Galapagos. It traces the great naturalist's second journey across its modest landscape: a voyage not of the body but of the mind.

As genetic manipulation comes to dominate medical science, a timely and trenchant history of eugenics. How did the notions of "race" and "ethnic group", under the cover of scientific legitimacy, get used for political ends? This work retraces the history of biological conceptions of society and their racist and eugenicist applications from the end of the nineteenth century to the post second world war epoch. Andre Pichot analyses the relationship between science, politics and ideology, through the examination of specific cases: from Nazism to the various eugenicist research programs launched or financed by eminent scientific organizations from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards. And, today with the mapping of the human genome and rapid advances in gene therapies, he warns that the dream of a 'pure society' is in danger of resuurection.

This is a book about the lengths people will go to nuzzle out some pleasure - and the scientific reasons that lie behind those impulses. Martin will look at changing attitudes to pleasure over the centuries‚ including religious and philosophical lawgiving on the subject‚ before moving on to the scientific hardwiring that supports all this human frenzy. He will look too at chemical pleasures‚ all our attempts to bottle the pleasure-giving principle for easy access and regular self-medication -- from caffeine to heroin‚l from tobacco to glue. Which brings us to addiction‚ and the darker side of pleasure?s many moons... Before coming back full circle to the therapeutic bliss of pleasure‚ its key role in an individual?s health‚ and that least-promoted‚ most-undervalued but most satisfying daily pleasure of all - sweet sleep.

NOW IN PAPERBACK. No life form has had a greater impact upon this planet than the human male. What is it that has made his legacy so utterly distinct from that of all other life forms, including even the human female? Following on from the international success of The Naked Woman, Desmond Morris investigates this intriguing evolutionary success story. The Naked Man is a study of the masculine body from head to toe, examining biological features of the male anatomy in illuminating detail and describing the many ways in which these features have been modified, suppressed, or exaggerated by local customs and changes in social fashions. This is a natural history of man, viewing him as a fascinating specimen of a far from rare, but nevertheless endangered species. As with its companion title, The Naked Man is written from a zoologist's perspective and packed full of scientific fact, engaging anecdote and thought-provoking conclusions, including a controversial chapter examining male sexuality.

This book tells the amazing story of one of history's most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods of scientific discovery. An enlightening, enthralling and in-depth exploration, it charts a religious empire's scientific heyday, its intellectual demise and the numerous debates that now surround it. Between the 8th and 14th centuries, scholars and researchers working in Islamic territories pushed the boundaries of knowledge in astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine, philosophy and more. They invented clocks and cameras, discovered how blood circulates, created algebra, and even found time to debate the origins of life. Science journalist Ehsan Masood describes the circumstances which created this revolution in scientific thinking, the places where they occurred, the scientists themselves and their awe-inspiring achievements.

Darwin's Armanda is both a gripping adventure story and a brilliantly enlightening work of history, for the first time portraying the Darwinian revolution as a collective enterprise forged in Australasia. These four remarkable men, Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley & Alfred Wallace, did what one alone could not – combed the world for evidence of evolution by natural selection, and then fought tirelessly in the social and intellectual battle that followed its famous publication 150 years ago.

In this highly original, ground-breaking book, Terence Kealey presents an evolutionary and economic history of humanity, showing how the roots of barter, trade and contract are embedded in human nature and how markets work on the evolutionary principles of natural selection. Richly multi-disciplinary, the book ranges across human history from neolithic times, through Ancient Egypt and the European explorers of the Renaissance, to the failure of the Soviet economy, to show how an understanding of biology and natural selection can radically transform our view of economics, business, technology, and the economic history of our species. Witty, brilliant, thought-provoking and provocative, this is an important and controversial book.

For readers of Frans de Waal and Diane Ackerman, The Well-Dressed Ape is a gleeful naturalist's extensive, profound, and entertaining biological description of a much-vaunted mammal, the human, including a treasure-trove of factoids about every species that shares this planet with us, and fresh answers to age-old human questions: Who are we, animally speaking? How do we compare? Where do we fit in?

Visionary, inventor, radical, free thinker and soon-to-be space traveller, Jim Lovelock is an iconic figure in British science, and a prophet whose prophecies are now coming true. This is his definitive, authorized biography. Lovelock is best known as the 'father' of Gaia theory, the idea of our planet as a self-regulating organism, which is now established as the most useful way of understanding the dramatic changes happening to the environment of the Earth. But few people know about his early work as a chemist and inventor – work which included inventing the detectors used to search for life on Mars, and blowing the whistle on the depletion of the ozone layer. In his personal life, he was a Quaker and conscientious objector in the Second World War (later changing his mind in view of the evils of Nazism), supported his family for a time by selling his own blood, and gave up a salary and security to become an independent scientist based in an English village – from which all his best-known work emerged. As Lovelock approaches his ninetieth birthday, looking forward to flying into the stratosphere in a rocket, this book truly reveals an independent, original and inspiring life.

Every day we make decisions: about the things that we buy or the meals we eat; about the investments we make or our children's health and education; even the causes that we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. We are all susceptible to biases that can lead us to make bad decisions that make us poorer, less healthy and less happy. And, as Thaler and Sunstein show, no choice is ever presented to us in a neutral way. By knowing how people think, we can make it easier for them to choose what is best for them, their families and society. Using dozens of eye-opening examples the authors demonstrate how to nudge us in the right directions, without restricting our freedom of choice. Nudge offers a unique new way of looking at the world for individuals and governments alike.

In fascinating stories of extraordinary adaptive behaviours in a range of bird species, leading writers draw on ideas in both science & the humanities to tell the stories of birds & people in the world's driest inhabited continent. The authors draw on the natural history of Australia’s charismatic birds to explore the relations between fauna, people and environment. They consider changing ideas about deserts and how these have helped to understand birds and their behaviour in this driest of continents. The book describes the responses of animals and plants to environmental variability and stress. It is also a cultural concept, capturing the patterns of change wrought by humans in Australia.