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"Many animals and plants eke out seemingly unremarkable lives. Passive, constrained, modest, threatened. Then, in a blink of evolutionary time, they flourish spectacularly. Once we start to look, these "sleeping beauties" crop up everywhere. But why? Looking at the book of life, from apex predators to keystone crops, and informed by his own cutting-edge experiments, renowned scientist Andreas Wagner demonstrates that innovations can come frequently...
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531 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
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The most controversial and famous anthropologist of modern time describes his seminal lifelong research among the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon basin and how his startling observations provoked admiration among many fellow anthropologists and outrage among others.
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Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series. Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved....
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vi, 302 pages ; 22 cm
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"Why do men talk and women gossip, and which is better for you? Why is monogamy a drain on the brain? And why should you be suspicious of someone who has more than 150 friends on Facebook?" "We are the product of our evolutionary history, and this history colors our everyday lives£from why we joke to the depth of our religious beliefs. In How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Robin Dunbar uses groundbreaking experiments that have forever changed...
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xxi, 520 pages, 8 pages of plates : illustrations (some color), map ; 25 cm
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"For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all our inventions -- our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations -- we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society. In Blueprint, Nicholas...
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Life for early humans wasn't easy. They may have been able to walk on two feet and create tools 4 million years ago, but they couldn't remember or communicate. Fortunately, people got smarter, and things got better. They remembered on-the-spot solutions and shared the valuable information of their experiences. Clubs became swords, caves became huts, and fires became ovens. Collectively these new tools became technology. As the 21st century unfolds,...
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"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...
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2 videodiscs (165 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in.
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An epic detective story that offers a gripping expose on why the world is so unequal. Professor Jared Diamond traveled the globe for over 30 years trying to answer this question. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? Diamond dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible...
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