How To Milk Your Dinosaur

Why do we get sick? Why hasn’t natural selection, over millions of years, prevented us from getting cancer, heart disease, and depression?

The science of evolutionary medicine says that our bodies have evolved over millions of years as a set of compromises, largely in pursuit of reproductive fitness. Put concisely, whatever gets you to survive and have kids is going to persist in the gene pool, even if it causes you lots of disease and pain in adult life. Learn more about the evolutionary roots of obesity, infectious disease, aging, and depression.

A foundational work in the field of biology, On the Origin of Species revolutionized the way we look at life on Earth. Published in 1859 by the naturalist Charles Darwin, this work explains and argues for the theory of evolution—that organisms weren’t created separately in their current forms, but that each species evolved gradually from other species over the course of millions of years.

Our guide explains the key mechanisms behind evolution and explores how it shapes the world. We’ll take a closer look at the objections raised against Darwin's theory by his colleagues and at Darwin's rebuttals. We’ll also explore why animals in Australia are all different from those in Asia, what happens when you try to breed two closely related species, and why human embryos have gill slits. Finally, we’ll extend Darwin's theories with updates from contemporary biology.

Why do so many marriages end in divorce? In Sex at Dawn, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá (a husband-and-wife team) offer a surprising answer: For most of our evolutionary history, humans lived in societies that encouraged casual sex with multiple partners. According to the authors, humans evolved to be naturally promiscuous and only reluctantly embraced monogamy about 10,000 years ago when we stopped foraging for food and started farming.

In this guide, we’ll learn why everything we think we know about prehistoric human sexuality is wrong. We’ll draw on evidence from great apes (our closest evolutionary cousins), remote hunter-gatherer societies, and modern human biology to show that humans evolved to be promiscuous, not monogamous. Along the way, we’ll cover what other evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists have to say about Ryan and Jethá’s ideas.

In The Sixth Extinction, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert argues that by drastically changing the shape of the earth and the composition of the atmosphere, humans have set in motion a sixth mass extinction that may one day be our undoing. The book revisits five previous mass extinction events spanning five hundred million years and compares them to the rapid, widespread extinctions underway today of a range of species including frogs, corals, birds, and rhinos.

These extinctions are a consequence of human-created global warming and ocean acidification, the destruction and fragmentation of forests, and our spread of invasive species around the world. What’s more, these actions will determine the course of life on the planet long after our species is gone.

Have you always wanted to understand the natural world but found science classes tedious and science textbooks difficult to understand? Author Bill Bryson can relate—that was his motivation for researching and writing A Short History of Nearly Everything. The book is an accessible overview of the natural sciences that describes not only the important discoveries but also the unknowns and controversies that still exist in the sciences, like the mystery of missing mass in the universe and the puzzling details of human evolution.

In this guide, we’ve organized key topics from Bryson’s book into a concise chronology covering the origins of the universe, the geologic history of planet Earth, and the history of life on Earth. We’ll also analyze the scientific issues that Bryson brings up in light of recent scientific papers and compare his perspective to that of scientists like Stephen Hawking.

A foundational work in the field of biology, On the Origin of Species revolutionized the way we look at life on Earth. Published in 1859 by the naturalist Charles Darwin, this work explains and argues for the theory of evolution—that organisms weren’t created separately in their current forms, but that each species evolved gradually from other species over the course of millions of years.

Our guide explains the key mechanisms behind evolution and explores how it shapes the world. We’ll take a closer look at the objections raised against Darwin's theory by his colleagues and at Darwin's rebuttals. We’ll also explore why animals in Australia are all different from those in Asia, what happens when you try to breed two closely related species, and why human embryos have gill slits. Finally, we’ll extend Darwin's theories with updates from contemporary biology.

Most features of the human body are just complex versions of those in simpler creatures that, at first glance, seem totally unlike us. As professor and paleontologist Neil Shubin explains in Your Inner Fish, understanding how a shark’s head, a reptile’s brain, and a fish’s fins developed makes sense of complicated and confounding human anatomy. Casting new light on the human family tree, Shubin explains how ancient fossils, embryos, and DNA all provide clues to a story of human development stretching back 3.5 billion years.

Have you always wanted to understand the natural world but found science classes tedious and science textbooks difficult to understand? Author Bill Bryson can relate—that was his motivation for researching and writing A Short History of Nearly Everything. The book is an accessible overview of the natural sciences that describes not only the important discoveries but also the unknowns and controversies that still exist in the sciences, like the mystery of missing mass in the universe and the puzzling details of human evolution.

In this guide, we’ve organized key topics from Bryson’s book into a concise chronology covering the origins of the universe, the geologic history of planet Earth, and the history of life on Earth. We’ll also analyze the scientific issues that Bryson brings up in light of recent scientific papers and compare his perspective to that of scientists like Stephen Hawking.

A foundational work in the field of biology, On the Origin of Species revolutionized the way we look at life on Earth. Published in 1859 by the naturalist Charles Darwin, this work explains and argues for the theory of evolution—that organisms weren’t created separately in their current forms, but that each species evolved gradually from other species over the course of millions of years.

Our guide explains the key mechanisms behind evolution and explores how it shapes the world. We’ll take a closer look at the objections raised against Darwin's theory by his colleagues and at Darwin's rebuttals. We’ll also explore why animals in Australia are all different from those in Asia, what happens when you try to breed two closely related species, and why human embryos have gill slits. Finally, we’ll extend Darwin's theories with updates from contemporary biology.

Most features of the human body are just complex versions of those in simpler creatures that, at first glance, seem totally unlike us. As professor and paleontologist Neil Shubin explains in Your Inner Fish, understanding how a shark’s head, a reptile’s brain, and a fish’s fins developed makes sense of complicated and confounding human anatomy. Casting new light on the human family tree, Shubin explains how ancient fossils, embryos, and DNA all provide clues to a story of human development stretching back 3.5 billion years.

In The Sixth Extinction, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert argues that by drastically changing the shape of the earth and the composition of the atmosphere, humans have set in motion a sixth mass extinction that may one day be our undoing. The book revisits five previous mass extinction events spanning five hundred million years and compares them to the rapid, widespread extinctions underway today of a range of species including frogs, corals, birds, and rhinos.

These extinctions are a consequence of human-created global warming and ocean acidification, the destruction and fragmentation of forests, and our spread of invasive species around the world. What’s more, these actions will determine the course of life on the planet long after our species is gone.