New Books in Biology and Evolution
Interviews with biologists and evolutionary scientists about their new books
- Update frequency
- every 6 days
- Average duration
- 54 minutes
- Episodes
- 445
- Years Active
- 2009 - 2025
Samir Okasha, "Agents and Goals in Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Evolutionary biologists standardly treat organisms as agents: they have goals and purposes and preferences, and their behaviors and adaptive traits contribute to the achievement of their goals. This …
00:59:44 |
Fri 09 Aug 2019
Lukas Rieppel, "Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle" (Harvard UP, 2019)
After the discoveries of dinosaur fossils in the American West in the late nineteenth century, the United States became world renown for vertebrate paleontology. In his new book Assembling the Dinosa…
00:56:12 |
Fri 02 Aug 2019
Donna Dickenson, "Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good" (Columbia UP, 2016)
Personalized healthcare―or what the award-winning author Donna Dickenson calls "Me Medicine"―is radically transforming our longstanding "one-size-fits-all" model. Technologies such as direct-to-consu…
00:20:21 |
Fri 26 Jul 2019
Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of …
00:37:00 |
Fri 26 Jul 2019
John D. Hawks, "Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story" (National Geographic, 2017)
John D. Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human populations, and the chall…
00:33:27 |
Fri 19 Jul 2019
Robin Scheffler, “A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history. In fact, efforts to develop a cancer vaccine drew more money than the Human…
00:38:05 |
Thu 04 Jul 2019
Nara Milanich, "Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father" (Harvard UP, 2019)
Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fact”…
01:06:02 |
Tue 11 Jun 2019
Stephan Bullard, "A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the 2013-2016 Ebola Outbreak" (Springer, 2018)
Why did Ebola, a virus so deadly that it killed or immobilized its victims within days, have time to become a full-blown epidemic? That’s what happened in 2013 in when the virus, already well-known t…
00:28:47 |
Fri 07 Jun 2019
Elliott Sober, "The Design Argument" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
The story goes: you are walking in the woods and see a wrist-watch on the ground; you don’t know how it got there or why it has come to be abandoned here, but you can surmise that someone somewhere d…
00:43:13 |
Mon 28 Jan 2019
Steve Stewart-Williams, "The Ape That Understood the Universe: How Mind and Culture Evolve" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
In this episode, cross-posted from from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Yael Schonbrun takes a dive into evolutionary psychology with professor and author, Dr. Steve Stewart-Williams. St…
00:53:35 |
Wed 26 Dec 2018
Stephan J. Guyenet, "The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat" (Flatiron Books, 2017)
In this this interview, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill talks with Dr. Stephan J. Guyenet, neurobiologist and obesity researcher, about the unconscious syste…
01:04:28 |
Wed 19 Dec 2018
Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, "The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
The prologue to The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 2018) begins by provocatively invoking a question American…
01:01:03 |
Wed 28 Nov 2018
David P. Barash, “Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are” (Oxford UP, 2018)
Human beings have long seen themselves as the center of the universe, as specially-created creatures who are anointed as above and beyond the natural world. Professor and noted scientist David P. Bar…
01:21:52 |
Tue 13 Nov 2018
Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (MIT Press, 2017)
For most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and government efforts to promote a pure Aryan race. This view is…
01:08:23 |
Mon 15 Oct 2018
Theodore M. Porter, “Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity” (Princeton UP, 2018)
In Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton University Press, 2018), Theodore Porter uncovers the unfamiliar origins of human genetics in the asylums of Europe and N…
00:54:58 |
Thu 11 Oct 2018
S. Hayes and D. S. Wilson, “Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: An Integrated Framework for Understanding, Predicting, and Influencing Human Behavior” (Context Press, 2018)
Evolution science and behavioral science both have strong theories that can help us understand humans in context, and yet, until now, the two fields have been mostly separate. In this episode, cross-…
01:14:45 |
Thu 27 Sep 2018
Megan Raby, “American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science” (UNC Press, 2017)
American science and empire have a long mutual history. In American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Megan Raby takes us to Caribbean s…
00:39:26 |
Tue 18 Sep 2018
Dan Siegel, “Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence” (TarcherPerigee, 2018)
In this episode, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill interviews Dr. Dan Siegel about his new book, Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence (TarcherPerigree, …
00:59:25 |
Fri 14 Sep 2018
Andrew J. Hogan, “Life Histories of Genetic Disease: Patterns and Prevention in Postwar Medical Genetics” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)
How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes the subtle argument that a process described by sc…
00:34:09 |
Thu 13 Sep 2018
Sabina Leonelli, “Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study” (U Chicago Press, 2016)
Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening back to the aspirations of Enlightenment empiricis…
00:41:40 |
Fri 27 Jul 2018
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