This week's #NewBooks at the library:
- For my birthday back in December, I treated myself to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein from The Folio Society.
- A review copy of Simon Lamb's The Oldest Rocks on Earth: A Search for the Origins of Our World from Columbia University Press (a review is forthcoming).
- A second-hand copy of Peter Godfrey-Smith's Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection from Oxford University Press. This one was withdrawn from the holdings of the nearby Devon Libraries, but has found a welcome home with me.
#Books #Scicomm #Geology #EarthSciences #Evolution #EvolutionaryBiology #Bookstodon @bookstodon
evolution
New review! As this handsomely illustrated book shows, the evolutionary history of mammals in Africa is far more interesting than you would think at first blush.
https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2026/05/26/book-review-the-rise-of-mammals-in-africa/
#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Evolution #Paleontology #Palaeontology #Fossils #Mammals #Biogeography #Scicomm @bookstodon
The April 2026 issue of Genome Biology and Evolution is now live, with our recent article on the genomics of Svalbard reindeer by Dussex et al. on the cover.
🔗 https://academic.oup.com/gbe/issue/18/4
📷 Brage B. Hansen
This study is featured in GBE's new virtual collection on “Conservation Genomics”:
This week's #NewBooks at the library: Another three books from our January clearance sale, some of which have been review candidates for some time now.
- Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything – and Endangered the World, a shocking and eye-opening reportage written by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman and published by Hurst Publishers.
- Making Faces: The Evolutionary Origins of the Human Face, written by Adam S. Wilkins, published by Belknap Press. Not one I was planning to review, but I find it very hard to pass up a bargain on an interesting book on human evolution and physical anthropology.
- Unfit for Purpose: When Human Evolution Collides with the Modern World, written by Adam Hart, published by Bloomsbury Sigma. One of several books that explores the mismatch between our evolutionary legacy and the modern world we have created for ourselves. I expect them to be amusing reads all!
#Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #EnvironmentalIssues #PalmOil #PlantationForestry #FoodAdditives #Evolution #HumanEvolution #PhysicalAnthropology #Anatomy #PopularScience @bookstodon
This week's #NewBooks at the library: Three more books from the January clearance sale of my employer:
- The Rise of Horses: 55 Million Years of Evolution from Johns Hopkins University Press (one I might just review in tandem with a more recent book on horse evolution. At some point.)
- Extraction to Extinction: Rethinking our Relationship with Earth's Natural Resources from @sarabandbooks.
- The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World from WH Allen. Somewhere there is a review series brewing about long-term thinking (no, not *that* sort of long-termism!)
#Evolution #Horses #NaturalResources #ResourceExtraction #Environmentalism #Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon @bookstodon
This week's #NewBooks at the library: Three more books from our January clearance sale
- Jellyfish Age Backwards: Nature's Secrets to Longevity by Nicklas Brendborg, published by Hodder & Stoughton.
- Ancestors in Evolutionary Biology: Linear Thinking about Branching Trees, a more technical volume by Ronald A Jenner, published by Cambridge University Press as part of their series of Systematics Association Special Volumes (@SystAssn).
- #Acrocanthosaurus Inside and Out by Kenneth Carpenter, published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
#Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #MolecularBiology #EvolutionaryBiology #Evolution #Paleontology #Palaeontology #Fossils #Dinosaurs @bookstodon
This week's #NewBooks at the library: Who is excited about the next few books he will be reviewing?
- After an impressive debut, I am looking forward to reading Cal Flyn's second book, The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness, published by HarperCollins.
- Time for another deep dive into the history of my favourite discipline, #EvolutionaryBiology. I really enjoyed Costa's annotated version of Wallace's notebook, and am very excited about delving into this annotated version of #CharlesDarwin's The Descent of Man, beautifully published here by @princetonupress. Expect me to go dark for a while, it's over 760 pages!
- And for context, I will be adding a review of Jeremy DeSilva's A Most Interesting Problem: What #Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong about #HumanEvolution, published a few years back, also by Princeton.
#Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #Evolution #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci @bookstodon
This week's #NewBooks at the library:
- Another second-hand volume to my growing collection of The Correspondence of #CharlesDarwin, this one Volume 26: 1878, published by Cambridge University Press.
- #Warhammer: The Art of #GamesWorkshop, a rather rare exhibition catalogue of grimdark artwork that I bought via eBay.
- I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in #NaturalHistory, the final of the essay bundles from #StephenJayGould, published by Harmony Books.
#Books #Bookstodon #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Evolution #EvolutionaryBiology #Scicomm @bookstodon
The thing about the Autistic outsized ‘sense of justice,’ well there’s a few things, it’s not some
fuzzy abstraction, it’s something real, but the point is that I see exactly where the majority sort’s sense of justice went!
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They’re trying to find where our sense for this came from: they punish it out of everyone from the day they can walk enough to get into trouble by touching things or needing something. You lose your sense of justice when you are assaulted by your parents and told THAT is something like justice.
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If you can’t see this simplest of psychological causality, I’m sorry, it may be too late for you, perhaps many, many generations too late. It took its toll, ran part of its course in your parents and your grandparents.
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If you can’t even postulate it, if you can’t imagine that this experience of being spanked might produce that effect in maybe some circumstances, if someone like me is trying to tell you that when you let go of the apple it will fall towards the Earth and we’ve lost you already, for you the apple simply disappears and reappears on the ground or something (that analogy is better than I expected), then that is something long term thing, evolution has somehow allowed this sense to atrophy. It’s a neurotype matter, but not an Autistic matter.
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all the tags #ND #ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #Evolution #Psychology #Philosophy @autistics
This week's #NewBooks at the library:
- The last of the books from the NHBS January sale: Michael Ruse's The #Philosophy of Human #Evolution, published by Cambridge University Press
- A lovely version of Humphrey Carpenter's highly praised J. R. R. #Tolkien: A Biography, published by HarperCollins
- A second-hand copy of Ant Ecology, published by Oxford University Press
#HumanEvolution #Anthropology #Fantasy #LOTR #LordOfTheRings #Myrmecology #Ecology #Insects #Entomology #Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm @bookstodon
This week's #NewBooks at the library: Three more books from the NHBS January sale
- The Mandrill: A Case of Extreme Sexual Selection, a scientific monograph by Alan F. Dixson, published by Cambridge University Press.
- Plant Love: The Scandalous Truth About the Sex Life of #Plants, a popular science book on #Botany by Michael Allaby, published by Filbert Press.
- Unnatural Companions: Rethinking Our Love of Pets in an Age of Wildlife #Extinction, a difficult but necessary book by Peter Christie, published by Island Press.
#Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #Primatology #Evolution #EvolutionaryBiology #SexualSelection #ConservationBiology @bookstodon
New review: From Archaeopteryx then, to ten thousand species now: The Story of Birds sees Brusatte skillfully and captivatingly recount another chapter of life's evolutionary history.
#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Evolution #Paleontology #Palaeontology #Fossils #Birds #Ornithology #Scicomm @bookstodon
This week's #NewBooks at the library:
- The final part of the #HPLovecraft Collected Fiction, A Variorum Edition, Volume 4: Revisions and Collaborations, by S. T. Joshi, published by Chiroptera Press.
- Christopher Tolkien's The Bovadium Fragments, published by HarperCollins.
- A second-hand copy of Evolution and the Machinery of Chance: Philosophy, Probability, and Scientific Practice in Biology, published by the University of Chicago Press.
#Books #Bookstodon #Scicomm #Tolkien #Evolution @bookstodon
Sapolsky Thursday
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there's some stuff about identities and being biracial but I don't think there's anything needs a warning. I mean I maybe could have used one, but I think folks are used to it - you'll see in the first comment or two 😬
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OK, here's the warning: there's all these studies that show group dynamics already at work very early in life, kind of even too early for my wholeview
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it's all trolling me, so I gotta lotta comments
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/1
#Evolution #Psychology #NTPsychology #ActuallyAutistic #ND #AuDHD @autistics
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https://youtu.be/5ib2QbIfx7k?si=nAJ3rDvOhiOLnjAC
Edited 55d ago
This week's #NewBooks at the library:
- I found a much reduced copy of Contesting Earth's History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860–1935: Believers and Visionaries on the Borderlines of #Geology and #Palaeontology, published by Oxford University Press
- I was so taken with Guillermo del Toro's visual take on #Frankenstein, I bought the book on the making of the movie by Sheila O'Malley, published by Titan Books.
- I found a second-hand copy of The Spirit of System: #Lamarck and #EvolutionaryBiology, published by Harvard University Press, which should come in handy for a future review on Lamarck.
#Books #Bookstodon #Paleontology #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Evolution #Scicomm @bookstodon
RE: https://mstdn.social/@archaeology/116942317256778474
My point is, what is the point of trying to show the violence is forever except to justify it today? What good does it do us to think that it’s forever?
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#Evolution #Psychology #NTPsychology #Philosophy #ActuallyAutistic #ND #AuDHD @autistics
New review: The Inquisitive Biologist reaches back in time and finally reads The Ascent of Birds to find a fascinating foray into bird evolution and the many different mechanisms of speciation.
#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Birds #Ornithology #Evolution #EvolutionaryBiology #Scicomm @bookstodon
Evolving tastes. #grickledoodle #evolution #fish #snacks #cartoon #art #drawing #funny #humor
Way ahead of you, Baron-Cohen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phqIVUoy70k My take here
https://nikolaskozloff.substack.com/p/reflections-on-autism-evolution-and #autism #autistic #ASD #evolution #politics #science #psychology #trump #fascism #neurodiversity
Hmmm, no book reviews in August. Do you still have a pulse?
Yes, dear readers, I might have mentioned that once I get my teeth stuck in Darwin's Descent of Man, they would remain firmly lodged there. Here is a progress shot as I am grinding my way through over 700 pages of Victorian English and effectively a separate book of dense annotations. No shortcuts here, just reading books cover to cover before writing a review, so I beg your patience.
And those books on the left? I am settling in for a deep dive into this topic.
#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Bookstodon #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #Evolution #SexualSelection #CharlesDarwin #HistSci #Scicomm @bookstodon @princetonupress @princetonnature
