"When Darwin proposed that females shape evolution by being choosy in their choice of male suitors, his Victorian contemporaries were shocked that he accorded so much importance to women. But this early view of the female role was far from revolutionary: They were simply allowed to be passive 'quality controllers' of male genes. Recent years have shown that the inert 'coy female' is a myth. For a male, a high sex drive and a taste for variety may...

"In the childhood of every human being, and at the dawn of human history, there is an amazing - and until now unexplained - leap from simple, genetically programmed behavior to symbolic thinking, language, and culture. In The First Idea, Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker explore this missing link and offer new insights into two longstanding questions: how human beings first created symbols and how these abilities initially evolved and were subsequently...

What enabled us to go from simple stone tools to smartphones? How did bands of hunter-gatherers evolve into multinational empires? Readers of Sapiens will say a cognitive revolution -- a dramatic evolutionary change that altered our brains, turning primitive humans into modern ones -- caused a cultural explosion. In Transcendence, Gaia Vince argues instead that modern humans are the product of a nuanced coevolution of our genes, environment, and culture...

"How Humanity Came into Being is our story - the collective story of all humankind. Life, from its earliest days, is a constant exploration of our physical, emotional, mental and ultimately spiritual relationship with the world. It is no wonder, then, that we ponder the perennial questions: where did we come from? What is our destiny as a species? Why do we have the miracle of consciousness and self-awareness, a sense of order, morality, purpose,...