Education Evolution

In this groundbreaking work, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. It is a story that spans 13,000 years of human history, beginning when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life.

As powerful centers of subtle energy, the chakras have fascinated humanity for thousands of years. Llewellyn's Complete Book of Chakras is a unique and empowering resource that provides comprehensive insights into these foundational sources of vitality and strength. Discover what chakras and chakra systems are, how to work with them for personal growth and healing, and the ways our understanding of chakras has transformed throughout time and across cultures.

Edward J. Larson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and eminent science historian. This marvelously readable, yet sumptuously erudite work traces the development of the scientific theory of evolution. From Darwin's essential trip to the Galápagos, to the most contemporary studies in sociobiology, this work takes listeners both into the field and laboratories of the world's greatest evolutionary scientists, and shows how the theory of evolution has itself evolved.

In this audiobook, The Human Odyssey, we explore the evolution of those characteristics that make us human. The first section looks at our family tree and why some branches survived and not others. Swings in climate are emerging as a factor in what traits succeeded and failed; meanwhile, DNA analyses show that Homo sapiens interbred with other human species, which played a key role in our survival. 

We have long attributed man's violent, aggressive, competitive nature to his animal ancestry. But what if we are just as given to cooperation, empathy, and morality by virtue of our genes? What if our behavior actually makes us apes? What kind of apes are we?

The dramatic story of the 1925 Scopes trial, which captivated the nation and exposed profound divisions in America that still resonate today—divisions over the meaning of freedom, religion, education, censorship, and civil liberties in a democracy.

From best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes comes a dramatic story of faith, science, and courage unlike any since the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. Monkey Girl takes you behind the scenes of the recent war on evolution in Dover, Pennsylvania, when the town's school board decision to confront the controversy head-on thrust its students, then the entire community, onto the front lines of America's culture wars.

Evolution is one of the most important processes in life. It not only explains the detailed history of life on earth, but its scope also extends into many aspects of our own contemporary behavior - who we are and how we got to be here, our psychology, our cultures - and greatly impacts modern advancements in medicine and conservation biology. Perhaps its most important claim for science is its ability to provide an overarching framework that integrates the many life sciences into a single unified whole. Yet, evolution has been, and continues to be, regarded with suspicion by many.

Brian and Deborah Charlesworth provide a clear and concise summary of the process of evolution by natural selection, and how natural selection gives rise to adaptations and eventually, over many generations, to new species. They introduce the central concepts of the field of evolutionary biology, as they have developed since Darwin and Wallace on the subject, over 140 years ago, and discuss some of the remaining questions regarding processes.

Until very recently, if you were to ask most doctors, they would tell you there were only two kinds of medicine: the quack kind, and the evidence-based kind. The former is baseless, and the latter based on the best information human effort could buy. Well, Eric Topol isn't most doctors, and he suggests you entertain the notion of a third kind of medicine, one that will make the evidence-based state-of-the-art stuff look scarcely better than an alchemist trying to animate a homunculus in a jar.

Everything you were taught about evolution is wrong. In this shocking book, Berkeley-educated doctor of biology Jonathan Wells lets you in on scientific discoveries you won't learn about from college and high-school textbooks - and reveals a dirty little secret known only to some of his fellow biologists.

Don't miss the final part of this breathtaking trilogy from Teri Terry, multi-award-winning author of the Slated trilogy. Shay has followed Xander and joined his mysterious scientific cult at their remote Scottish compound. She's desperately searching for Callie, who went missing before the start of the epidemic that kills 95% of cases, and leaves a tiny number of survivors with astonishing new powers. Can Shay uncover the truth about the origins of the epidemic, find Callie, and perhaps even rekindle her relationship with Kai?

Marooned at the edge of Terran space, engineer Hemlocke Shaw must join forces with his sworn enemy and combat his greatest fears in an effort to save his friends, and the countless other souls on the isolated Outpost 21. And corporate Peacekeeper Paige Angstrom, teenage outcast Volara, and bounty hunter Emrald Re hurtle towards a secret research facility hidden in the volcanic wilds. As they fight to unmask the nefarious forces behind a ring of disappearances and gene-splicing experiments, it becomes clear that their failure will mean the end of humanity itself.

A cargo ship in distress . . . A mysterious stowaway in an SA pod . . . A crash-landing on a distant, unexplored world . . . An unexpected rescue by an equally unexpected friend . . . Captain Scott and his cohorts are lost in space, and time is running out. To make matters worse, the Free Fleet are not the only ones looking for them.

Edward Larson's classic, Summer for the Gods, received the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1998 and is the single most authoritative account of a pivotal event whose combatants remain at odds in school districts and courtrooms. For this edition Larson has added a new preface that assesses the state of the battle between creationism and evolution and points the way to how it might potentially be resolved.

Over the past 20 years, paleontologists have made tremendous fossil discoveries, including fossils that mark the growth of whales, manatees, and seals from land mammals and the origins of elephants, horses, and rhinos. Today there exists an amazing diversity of fossil humans, suggesting we walked upright long before we acquired large brains, and new evidence from molecules that enable scientists to decipher the tree of life as never before.

The Beast Realms are under threat: The land, water, and air are poisoned. Its leaders are power-crazed and its people are divided. Worse still, strange and powerful Beasts have started dropping from the sky, causing carnage. With the Beast Realms in turmoil and a ragtag group of insanely strong assassins on Team Venom’s tail, their chances of survival are slim. Escaping through man-eating jungles, seeking allies in underwater and treetop cities, Art and his team need to forge alliances to grow stronger.

More than 30 years after his landmark book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), biologist Michael Denton revisits his thesis about the inability of Darwinian evolution to explain the history of life. From the origin of life to the origin of human language, the great divisions in the natural order are still as profound as ever, and still unsupported by the series of adaptive transitional forms predicted by Darwin. Denton makes a provocative new argument about the pervasiveness of nonadaptive order throughout biology, order that cannot be explained by the Darwinian mechanism.

Why does writing exist? What does it mean to those who write? Born from the interplay of natural and cultural history, the seemingly magical act of writing has continually expanded our consciousness. Portrayed in mythology as either a gift from heroes or a curse from the gods, it has been used as both an instrument of power and a channel of the divine, a means of social bonding and of individual self-definition.

Hemp Chatsworth has already figured out how 90 percent of the Earth's population became what they are. Now he must find out why some of them are evolving into something else. Something more dangerous. With their families poised to grow, the stakes are now higher than ever for our friends. Each new discovery creates the need for a new defense. Hemp has his hands full as some among the zombie masses appear to be utilizing more of their grey matter in a horrifying way. Only brute force and innovation will save Flex Sheridan and his family and friends from the ever-changing zombie scourge.