This book looks back at the simpler versions of mental life in apes, Neanderthals, and our ancestors, back before our burst of creativity started 50,000 years ago. William H. Calvin takes stock of what we have now and then explains why we are nearing a crossroads, where mind shifts gears again.

This book nicely straddles the interface between popular neurobiology, paleoanthropology, and consciousness studies.

A major refutation of the almighty status of genes in evolution and human behavior.

As the title promises, this is all about sex, but not the way you might think.

We want to think of the family as a haven, a sheltered port from the maelstrom of social forces that rip through our lives. Within the family, we like to think, everyone starts out on equal footing.

In this groundbreaking book, Dalton Conley shows us that inequality in families is not the exception but the norm.

This pecking order is not necessarily determined by the natural abilities of each individual, and not even by the intentions or will of the parents. It is determined by the larger social forces that envelop the family.

Edited by John Brockman, "Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist" is a fascinating collection of essays from twenty-seven of the world's most interesting scientists about the moments and events in their childhoods that set them on the paths that would define their lives.

What makes a child decide to become a scientist?

Everyone knows that while different cultures may think about the world differently, they use the same equipment for doing their thinking.

But what if everyone is wrong?

As Richard Nesbitt shows, people actually think about -- and even see -- the world differently because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China and that have survived into the modern world.

Nature is full of complex and complicated systems in any shade of color, consistency and complexity, from quasars to quarks, galaxies to snowflakes and microbes to minds.

How and why did the world become so marvelously complex?

Revolutions in evolution are possible because evolution gets stuck from time to time when a large fitness barrier is reached. Evolution waits until massive catastrophes break these barriers or single agents are able to cross them.through a tunneling process. The emergence of complexity has a price.

As biotechnology defines the new millennium, genetic codes and computer codes increasingly merge -- life understood as data, flesh rendered programmable. Where this trend will take us, and what it might mean, is what concerns Eugene Thacker in this timely book, a penetrating look into the intersection of molecular biology and computer science in our day and its likely ramifications for the future.

In this wide-ranging exploration of American medical culture, John Harley Warner offers the first in-depth study of a powerful intellectual and social influence: the radical empiricism of the Paris Clinical School.

After the French Revolution, Paris emerged as the most vibrant center of Western medicine, bringing fundamental changes in understanding disease and attitudes toward the human body as an object of scientific knowledge. Between the 1810s and the 1860s, hundreds of Americans studied in Parisian hospitals and dissection rooms, and then applied their new knowledge to advance their careers at home and reform American medicine.

By reconstructing their experiences and interpretations, by comparing American with English depictions of French medicine, and by showing how American memories of Paris shaped the later reception of German ideals of scientific medicine, Warner reveals that the French impulse was a key ingredient in creating the modern medicine American doctors and patients live with today.

The people in Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank and Gaza live in a constant state of water scarcity.

A widely used rule of thumb is that a population is considered to be in a state of "water stress" if the average annual per capita availability of water is below 1,000 cubic meters.

Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian average annual per capita availabilities are all significantly below that level. Israel, which has the most advanced water infrastructure and water management capabilities in the region, has an average annual availability of only some 250-300 cubic meters per capita. Jordan, at some 170-200 cubic meters per capita, and the Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza, at some 70-90 cubic meters per capita, are under even greater water stress.