Books like The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

01

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Elizabeth Kolbert · Science

The Sixth Extinction is Elizabeth Kolbert's account of the mass extinction event currently underway — the sixth in Earth's history, and the first caused by a single species.

Shares extinction and evolution with The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction.

02

The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

David Quammen · Science

The Tangled Tree is David Quammen's account of how molecular biology overturned the traditional picture of the tree of life — the branching diagram, familiar since Darwin, that represents the evolution of all living things from a common ancestor.

Both dig into evolution.

03

Spillover

David Quammen · Science

Spillover is David Quammen's exhaustive investigation into zoonotic disease — illness that jumps from animals to humans — and the ecological and evolutionary logic behind why such spillover events happen.

Shares evolution and ecology with The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction.

04

Silent Spring

Rachel Carson · Science

Silent Spring, published in 1962, is Rachel Carson's investigation of the effects of synthetic pesticides — particularly DDT and related organochlorines — on birds, fish, insects, and the broader ecological web.

Both dig into ecology.

05

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond · Science

Guns, Germs, and Steel is Jared Diamond's attempt to answer a question posed to him by a Papua New Guinean politician named Yali: why did Europeans end up with so much cargo — wealth, technology, power — while other peoples had comparatively little?

A kindred science read.

06

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg · Science

A Crack in Creation is Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg's account of how CRISPR-Cas9 works, what it can do, and why its possibilities should give everyone pause.

Both dig into evolution.

07

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson · Science

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's attempt to understand the scientific story of everything — from the Big Bang to the emergence of modern humans — by spending three years talking to scientists and reading science history.

Both dig into evolution.

08

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Frans de Waal · Science

Frans de Waal's central argument is that we've spent most of the last century asking the wrong questions about animal intelligence.

Both dig into evolution.

09

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Robert M. Sapolsky · Science

Behave is Robert Sapolsky's attempt to explain why humans do what they do — the violence, the altruism, the tribalism, the heroism — by working through every layer of biology that contributes to a single act.

Both dig into evolution.

10

Climbing Mount Improbable

Richard Dawkins · Science

Climbing Mount Improbable is Richard Dawkins's response to the persistent intuition that complex biological structures — the vertebrate eye, insect wings, spider webs — are too improbable to have evolved by chance.

Both dig into evolution.

11

Cosmos

Carl Sagan · Science

Cosmos is Carl Sagan's attempt to tell the full story of the universe and humanity's place in it — from the Big Bang to the origins of life to the rise of science as a way of knowing.

Both dig into evolution.

12

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

William McDonough & Michael Braungart · Science

Cradle to Cradle is William McDonough and Michael Braungart's argument that the conventional approach to environmentalism — reducing, reusing, recycling, being "less bad" — is insufficient and in some ways misleading.

Both dig into ecology.