Sang-Hee Lee explores some of the biggest evolutionary questions from unexpected new angles.

The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary imagination, and new fossil discoveries are often hailed in headlines as revealing the elusive transitional step, the moment when we stopped being "animal" and started being "human." In The Accidental Species...

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined...

The author traces the Big Bang through the rise of civilization, documenting his work with a host of the world's most advanced scientists and mathematicians to explain why things are the way they are.

In setting out to answer his central question "Is evolution progressive?", Dawkins illustrates the human biases that continue to muddle our understanding of just what evolutionary 'progress' means; from early Victorian influences, to contemporary scientific texts which uncritically invoke 'evolutionary scales' and notions of 'higher' and 'lower' organisms. In turn, Dawkins demonstrates the 'human chauvinistic' definition of progress, and why, if progress...