Over half a billion years ago life on earth took an incredible step in evolution, when animals learned to build skeletons. Using many different materials, from calcium carbonate and phosphate, and even silica, to make shell and bone, they started creating the support structures that are now critical to most living forms, providing rigidity and strength. Manifesting in a vast va...(展开全部)

Andrew Kirk was educated at Oxford University and worked in publishing for over twent years before becoming a writer. His previous titles have included books on ancient history and a study of Thoreau. This is his sixth book.

The Robin has now been voted Britain's favourite bird – a friendly presence in thousands of gardens, year round. Its life was hardly understood when David Lack – who has been called Britain's most influential ornithologist – started his scientific observations of robins while a schoolteacher at Dartington. It was Lack who established that robins sing to defend their territory; ...(展开全部)

"It is now forty years," Walter Houghton writes, "since Lytton Strachey decided that we knew too much about the Victorian era to view its culture as a whole." Recently the tide has turned and the Victorians have been the subject of sympathetic "period pieces," critical and biographical works, and extensive studies of their age, but the Victorian mind itself remains blurred for...(展开全部)

"It is now forty years," Walter Houghton writes, "since Lytton Strachey decided that we knew too much about the Victorian era to view its culture as a whole." Recently the tide has turned and the Victorians have been the subject of sympathetic "period pieces," critical and biographical works, and extensive studies of their age, but the Victorian mind itself remains blurred for...(展开全部)

大卫·古德赛尔（David S. Goodsell） 美国加州斯克里普研究中心（The Scripps Research Institute）分子生物学系教授，当代最为著名的科学插画师之一。 他的作品最令人着迷之处是：利用X射线晶体学技术获得准确的分子结构，然后用水彩画将它们完美地展现出来，使人们获得对分子精微世界的具象认识如此感性而又具有科学的准确性。作为一名分子生物学家，古德赛尔在承袭了欧洲数世纪以来科学绘画的伟大传统的同时，利用现代尖端技术获得分子世界的准确数据，将这些新科学、新技术所揭示的自然存在一一展现在科学家和普罗大众面前。他的著作包括《The Machinery of Life》《Our Molecular Nature》《Bionanotechnology: Lesson from Nature》等。

What is a life worth? In the wake of eugenics, new quantitative racist practices that valued life for the sake of economic futures flourished. In The Economization of Life, Michelle Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a...(展开全部)

In "The Logic of Life", Francois Jacob looks at the way our understanding of biology has changed since the sixteenth century. He describes four fundamental turning points in the perception of the structure of living things: the discoveries of the functions of organs, cells, chromosomes and genes, and DNA.

The eminent Harvard naturalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Wilson marshals all the prodigious powers of his intellect and imagination in this impassioned call to ensure the future of life. Opening with an imagined conversation with Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, he writes that he has come "to explain to you, and in reality to others and not least to myself, what has h...(展开全部)

Our world is far richer than previously conceived, yet so ravaged by human activity that half its species could be gone by the end of the 21st century. These two contrasting themes - unexpected magnificence and underestimated peril - have originated since the 1980s. In this book, scientist E.O. Wilson describes exactly what treasures of the natural world we are about to lose fo...(展开全部)