Animal Evolution

Finally, the scientific answer to the internet's most hotly debated question! Could 100 average men defeat a single gorilla in combat? This seemingly absurd hypothetical has sparked millions of online debates, heated arguments, and countless memes across social media platforms worldwide. Now, for the first time, we're approaching this question with genuine scientific rigor. What You'll Discover: Evolutionary Analysis - How humans and gorillas developed completely different survival strategies over millions of years Physical Capabilities Breakdown - Detailed comparison of strength, endurance...

For over a century, opening the black box of embryonic development was the holy grail of biology. Evo Devo--Evolutionary Developmental Biology--is the new science that has finally cracked open the box. Within the pages of his rich and riveting book, Sean B. Carroll explains how we are discovering that complex life is ironically much simpler than anyone ever expected.

New York Times best-selling author Jon Katz offers us a deeper understanding of the inner and outer lives of animals and teaches us how we can more effectively communicate with them, made real by his own remarkable research and experiences with a wide array of creatures great and small.

From the man behind the popular Wired series "Absurd Creature of the Week", a fun, fascinating collection of unique animals and the unbelievable evolutionary traits they use to survive the most extreme scenarios: zombie ants mind-controlled by a fungus; beautiful salamanders that can regenerate any part of their bodies including their brains; and much more.

The Territorial Imperative is a work of wit, of literary wealth, of high adventure. The author draws on his inexhaustible knowledge of animal ways and takes his listeners on deep excursions into the ancient animal world, and on deep penetrations of the contemporary human wilderness.

Alys was seven when the soul eaters came to her village. These soul eaters, twin sisters who were abandoned by their father and slowly morphed into something not quite human, devour human souls. Alys, and all the other children, were spared - and they were sent to live in a neighboring village. There the devout people created a strict world where good and evil are as fundamental as the nursery rhymes children sing. Fear of the soul eaters - and of the Beast they believe guides them - rules village life.

In humanity’s more than 100,000 year history, we have evolved from vulnerable creatures clawing sustenance from Earth to a sophisticated global society manipulating every inch of it. In short, we have become the dominant animal. Why, then, are we creating a world that threatens our own species? What can we do to change the current trajectory toward more climate change, increased famine, and epidemic disease?

"A powerfully written work" —Dr. Peter Singer, Princeton University, author of "Animal Liberation" (1975) In this wide-ranging and accessible book, Yunt offers a brief survey of some of the most vital historical, scientific, philosophical, and even religious aspects of animal liberation. Making connections between sexism, racism, homophobia, and speciesism, he shows why nonhuman animals are the last group of sentient beings to gain rights, as well as how the movement to extend basic rights to them—something increasing with each generation—is emerging as the historical and moral end ...

In 1955, on a visit to South Africa, Robert Ardrey became aware of the growing evidence that man had evolved on the African continent from carnivorous, predatory stock - ones who had also, long before man, achieved the use of weapons. A dramatist, Ardrey's interest in the African discoveries sprang less from purely scientific grounds than from the radical new light they cast on the eternal question: Why do we behave as we do? Are we naturally inclined towards war and weapons?

Bruno Littlemore is quite unlike any chimpanzee in the world. Precocious, self-conscious and preternaturally gifted, young Bruno, born and raised in a habitat at the local zoo, falls under the care of a university primatologist named Lydia Littlemore. Learning of Bruno's ability to speak, Lydia takes Bruno into her home to oversee his education and nurture his passion for painting. But for all of his gifts, the chimpanzee has a rough time caging his more primal urges.

More than half a billion years ago, our world was completely covered by glaciers, a "Snowball Earth" that persisted for millions of years. Incredibly, this unimaginable cold led to the remarkable diversification of life on earth known as the Cambrian explosion. With a geologist's eye and a knack for storytelling, Graham Shields explores when and how such inhospitable conditions enabled animals to evolve, radiate, and diversify into our earliest ancestors.

Over the course of a single night in 2052, a homeless man named Cuthbert Handley sets out on an astonishing quest: to release the animals of the London Zoo. When he was a young boy, Cuthbert's grandmother had told him he inherited a magical ability to communicate with the animal world - a gift she called the Wonderments. Ever since his older brother's death in childhood, Cuthbert has heard voices.

As Laurel spent three years traveling the world in search of emotionally disturbed animals and the people who care for them, she discovered numerous stories of recovery: parrots that learn how to stop plucking their feathers, dogs that cease licking their tails raw, polar bears that stop swimming in compulsive circles, and great apes that benefit from the help of human psychiatrists. How do these animals recover?

There are two supreme predators on the planet with the most complex brains in nature: humans and orcas. In the 20th century alone, one of these animals killed 200 million members of its own species, the other killed none. Jeffrey Masson’s fascinating new book begins here: There is something different about us. In Beasts he demonstrates that the violence we perceive in the "wild" is mostly a matter of projection. We link the basest human behavior to animals, to "beasts" ("he behaved no better than a beast"), and claim the high ground for our species.

A bold yet realistic vision of how technology and social change are creating a food system in which we no longer use animals to produce meat, dairy, or eggs. The End of Animal Farming is not a scolding treatise or a prescription for an ascetic diet. Reese invites listeners - vegan and non-vegan - to consider one of the most important and transformational social movements of the coming decades.

‘What is it like to be a bat?’, the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked concerning consciousness. For biologist Martin Stevens, the question forms the starting point of an exploration of animal senses. In this enthralling account, we learn not only of the wonder of animal senses, but how they work and how scientists go about investigating them. And, throughout, we consider how these senses came to be.

History is full of strange animal stories, invented by the brightest and most influential, from Aristotle to Disney, and they reveal as much about us and the things we believe as they do about the animals they misrepresent. We once thought that eels were born from sand, that swallows migrated to the moon, and that bears gave birth to formless lumps that were licked into shape by their mothers.

In Wild Sex, Dr. Carin Bondar takes listeners on an enthralling tour of the animal kingdom as she explores the diverse world of sex in the wild. She looks at the evolution of sexual organs (and how they've shaped social hierarchies), tactics of seduction, and the mechanics of sex. She investigates a wide range of topics, from whether animals experience pleasure from sex to what happens when females hold the reproductive power.

Pets have never been more popular. Over half of American households share their home with either a cat or a dog, and many contain both. This is a huge change from only a century ago, when the majority of domestic cats and dogs were working animals, keeping rodents at bay, guarding property, herding sheep. Nowadays, most are valued solely for the companionship they provide. As mankind becomes progressively more urban and detached from nature, we seem to be clinging to the animals that served us well in the past.

How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts.