Art Biology

– Don’t sit to defecate. Sitting causes a muscle to constrict your colon so your poop can’t come out easily. We’ll tell you how to relax it. – Read about the 100 trillion aliens living in your gut and without their help digesting food, you’d starve. – Did you know that wombat dung comes out in cubes, and swallowing a pill containing someone else’s excrement could save your life, and that the astronauts’ own poop will protect them on their long journey to Mars? – Find out why Elvis died while sitting on the toilet, and that Martin Luther’s bowel movement inspired a new ...

Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the interplay of beauty, art, and culture in evolution. Taking inspiration from Darwin's observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have innate appreciation for beauty - and why nature is, indeed, beautiful.