New Books in Biology and Evolution

The role of a resident vet in the remote islands of the Falklands, St. Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha encompasses many wonderful complexities: caring for the world’s oldest living land animal (a 200-year-old giant tortoise, denizen of the St. Helena governor’s lawn); pursuing mystery creatures and invasive microorganisms; relocating herds of reindeer; and rescuing animals in extraordinarily rugged landscapes, from subtropical cloud forests to volcanic cliff faces. Dr. Hollins’s tales of island vet life are not only full of ingenuity and astounding fauna—they are also steeped in the unique local cultures, history, and peoples of the islands, far from the hustle of continental life. Our guest is: Dr. Jonathan Hollins, who graduated from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and has been a working vet for four decades. Since the mid-2000s, he has spent long periods as a senior vet overseas in the South Atlantic. He has written for the British national press and presented documentary features for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. He lives on St. Helena. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Doctors By Nature Just Like Family Living Night The Killer Whale Journals The Shark Scientist Endless Forms The Well-Gardened Mind Bugs: A Day in the Life My What-if Year The Climate Change Scientist At Every Depth Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode we discuss the paper "The Unreasonable Likelihood of Being: Origin of Life, Terraforming, and AI" (arXiv, 2025) with Robert Endres. Paper Abstract: The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on information theory and algorithmic complexity. Using estimates grounded in modern computational models, we evaluate the difficulty of assembling structured biological in-formation under plausible prebiotic conditions. Our results highlight the formidable entropic and informational barriers to forming a viable protocell within the available window of Earth’s early history. While the idea of Earth being terraformed by advanced extraterrestrials might violate Occam’s razor from within mainstream science, directed panspermia—originally proposed by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel—remains a speculative but logically open alternative. Ultimately, uncovering physical principles for life’s spontaneous emergence remains a grand challenge for biological physics. Full paper available here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Professor Daniel Langton, author of Darwin in the Jewish Imagination: Jews' Engagement with Evolutionary Theory (Oxford UP, 2026), to explore how Jewish thinkers responded to one of the most disruptive ideas of the modern world: evolutionary theory. Spanning a century of debate, the conversation traces how traditionalists, reformers, secular intellectuals, mystics, and philosophers reimagined Judaism in light of Darwin—from Europe to the United States. Rather than a simple science-versus-religion clash, Langton reveals a rich and creative dialogue shaped by modernity, Jewish-Christian relations, and a distinctive Jewish tendency toward pan(en)theistic thinking—understanding God as deeply intertwined with an evolving universe. Together, Katz and Langton explore how Darwin forced Jewish thinkers to rethink creation, divine action, and morality, and how those debates continue to shape modern Jewish belief and identity. Daniel Langton is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester and a leading scholar of modern Jewish thought and Jewish-Christian relations. His work focuses on how Jews have engaged major intellectual movements of modernity, including science, philosophy, and theology. Rabbi Marc Katz is a congregational rabbi, author, and teacher whose work bridges classical Jewish texts and contemporary cultural questions. He is the author of Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism’s Pragmatic Approach to Life and writes widely on Judaism, ethics, and modern life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While we tend to think of biological individuals in terms of paradigmic cases – a dog, a starfish, a bacterium – our ordinary criteria for distinguishing one individual from another are inadequate for making these distinctions in general. If a starfish can literally split itself in two and each half regenerates into a new starfish, why hold that there was just one starfish to begin with rather than many? In The Units of Life: Kinds of Individual in Biology (Oxford UP, 2025), Ellen Clarke defends the idea of evolutionary individuals: units created and maintained by mechanisms that ensure the parts share a common fate. Such individuals enable good evolutionary bookkeeping, in particular our ability to predict which variations in these individuals will enable natural selection to occur. Clarke, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Leeds, considers the merits of her view in relation to alternatives, how her view explains the emergence of new levels of biological individuality, and how the need for idealization and scientific choice of individual boundaries can avoid conventionalism about biological individuals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A search for the meaning of one of nature's greatest riddles: why do so many creatures transform? “How many creatures walking on this earth / Have their first being in another form?” the Roman poet Ovid asked two thousand years ago. He could not have known the full extent of the truth: today, biologists estimate a stunning three-quarters of all animal species on Earth undergo some form of metamorphosis.But why do tadpoles transform into frogs, caterpillars into butterflies, elvers into eels, immortal jellyfish from sea sprigs to medusae and back again, growing younger and younger in frigid ocean depths? Why must creatures go through massive destruction and remodeling to become who they are? Tracing a path from Aristotle to Darwin to cutting-edge science today, Harman explores that central mystery in Metamorphosis: A Natural and Human History (Basic Books, 2025).Metamorphosis, however, isn’t just a biological puzzle: it takes us to the very heart of questions of being and identity, whatever kind of change we humans may undergo. Metamorphosis is a new classic of natural history: a book that, by unveiling a mystery of nature, causes us to relearn ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are humans really fish? Why are we the only animals with chins? How much of our DNA do we share with the trillions of bacteria in our bodies? For centuries, scientists have chased the secrets of how life on our planet arose, how it assumed its dazzling diversity of forms, and how we humans are related to everything else on earth. With increasingly sophisticated genetic methods now bringing us ever closer to answers, leading evolutionary biologist Max Telford takes us inside one of science's greatest quests. In the intellectually thrilling The Tree of Life: Solving Science's Greatest Puzzle (W. W. Norton, 2025), Telford shows how reconstructing the web of relationships between all our planet's species, from birds and butterflies to mushrooms and moose, allows us to unravel the epic history of life on our planet. In Telford's hands, the many-branched evolutionary trees that biologists assemble--from Charles Darwin's first sketches to the vast computer-generated diagrams scientists are building today--become time machines that take us on a vivid journey through four billion years of life's history. We meet long-lost ancestors, picturing them in the environment of a much younger earth, and discover where we first acquired our backbones and nipples and, conversely, where we lost our tails. We learn how insects are "actually" crustaceans, and how dogs and wolves are more closely related to whales than to the recently extinct Tasmanian wolves they so resemble. Far from a dry representation of the dead, the tree of life is a living, shifting thing that constantly alters our perspective on the past, present, and future of life on earth. For any reader fascinated by evolution and natural history, The Tree of Life is an essential portal to the distant past and a window onto our collective origins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A bold reimagining of life that bridges science, philosophy, cybernetics, and the complexities of biological existence The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI (Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek, 2026) is an intriguing synthesis of decades of interdisciplinary research by eminent mathematician and biological scientist Giuseppe Longo. A unique collaboration between Longo and philosopher of technology Adam Nocek, the volume confronts foundational issues in the history of mathematics, computer science, physics, and theoretical biology. Challenging conventional approaches that apply computational and formalist models to the biological world, Longo reveals how the limitations of these models hinder the understanding of organismic complexity, development, and evolution. Through a critique of dominant scientific paradigms, he emphasizes the need for a new biological theory that accounts for the temporal and spatial intricacies of life. Enhanced by Nocek's comprehensive introduction and a fascinating three-part interview with Longo, The Organism Is a Theory offers a bold rethinking of the biosciences, integrating the work of Alan Turing, Bernhard Riemann, Henri Poincaré, Kurt Gödel, and others into Longo's vision of critical biology. Bridging scientific and philosophical discourses, this book creatively applies insights from mathematics, physics, and computing into the study of the organism to present a new theoretical approach to understanding biological complexity that resists reductive mechanistic and informatic explanations. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with image accompanied by short alt text and/or extended description. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if human intelligence is actually more of a liability than a gift? After all, the animal kingdom, in all its diversity, gets by just fine without it. At first glance, human history is full of remarkable feats of intelligence, yet human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination, and the creation of a world teetering towards climate catastrophe. What if human exceptionalism is more of a curse than a blessing? As Dr. Justin Gregg puts it in his book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity (Little, Brown (US), 2022, Hodder (UK), 2023), there’s an evolutionary reason why human intelligence isn’t more prevalent in the animal kingdom. Simply put, non-human animals don’t need it to be successful. And, miraculously, their success arrives without the added baggage of destroying themselves and the planet in the process. In seven mind-bending and hilarious chapters, Dr. Gregg highlights features seemingly unique to humans – our use of language, our rationality, our moral systems, our so-called sophisticated consciousness – and compares them to our animal brethren. What emerges is both demystifying and remarkable, and will change how you look at animals, humans, and the meaning of life itself. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior (MIT Press, 2025), Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer reveal how scientists studying animal behavior have long projected human norms and values onto animals while seeking to understand them. When scientific studies conclude that these norms and values are natural in animals, it makes it easier to think of them as natural in humans too. And because scientists, historically and to this day, largely belong to elite, powerful segments of society, the norms and values embedded in animal behavior science match those of the already powerful. How can animal behavior science escape this trap of naturalizing dominant culture? Drawing from decades of feminist, antiracist, queer, disability justice, and Marxist contributions—including those of biologists—Kamath and Packer break down persistent assumptions in the status quo of animal behavior science and offer a multitude of alternative approaches. Core concepts in animal behavior science and evolutionary biology—from sex categories and sexual selection to fitness, adaptation, biological determinism, and more—are carefully contextualized and critically reexamined. This unique collaboration between an animal behavior scientist and a feminist science studies scholar is an illuminating and hopeful read for anyone who is curious about how animals behave, and anyone who wants to break free from scientific approaches that perpetuate systems of oppression. Ambika Kamath is trained as a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist. She lives, works, and grows community in Oakland, California, on Ohlone land. Melina Packer is Assistant Professor of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, on Ho-Chunk Nation land. She is the author of Toxic Sexual Politics: Toxicology, Environmental Poisons, and Queer Feminist Futures (NYU Press, 2025). Kyle Johannsen is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University, on Mississauga Anishnaabeg land. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900–1935 by Jim Endersby In the early twentieth century, varied audiences took biology out of the hands of specialists and transformed it into mass culture, transforming our understanding of heredity in the process.In the early twentieth century communities made creative use of the new theories of heredity in circulation at the time, including the now largely forgotten mutation theory of Hugo de Vries. Science fiction writers, socialists, feminists, and utopians are among those who seized on the amazing possibilities of rapid and potentially controllable evolution. De Vries’s highly respected scientific theory only briefly captured the attention of the scientific community, but its many fans appropriated it for their own wildly imaginative ends. Writers from H.G. Wells and Edith Wharton to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, J.B.S. Haldane, and Aldous Huxley created a new kind of imaginary future, which Jim Endersby calls the biotopia. It took the ambiguous possibilities of biology—utopian and dystopian—and reimagined them in ways that still influence the public’s understanding of the life sciences. The Arrival of the Fittest recovers the fascinating, long-forgotten origins of ideas that have informed works of fiction from Brave New World to the X-Men movies, all while reflecting on the lessons—positive and negative—that this period might offer us. Jim Endersby is professor of the history of science at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Orchid: A Cultural History, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science, and A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency--or free will--is an illusion. In Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton UP, 2023), leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose. Traversing billions of years of evolution, Mitchell tells the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice arose from lifeless matter. He explains how the emergence of nervous systems provided a means to learn about the world, granting sentient animals the capacity to model, predict, and simulate. Mitchell reveals how these faculties reached their peak in humans with our abilities to imagine and to be introspective, to reason in the moment, and to shape our possible futures through the exercise of our individual agency. Mitchell's argument has important implications--for how we understand decision making, for how our individual agency can be enhanced or infringed, for how we think about collective agency in the face of global crises, and for how we consider the limitations and future of artificial intelligence. An astonishing journey of discovery, Free Agents offers a new framework for understanding how, across a billion years of Earth history, life evolved the power to choose, and why it matters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Menstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years on end, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Scientists once thought of an individual's period as useless, and some doctors still believe it's unsafe for a menstruating person to swim in the ocean wearing a tampon. Period: The Real Story of Menstruation (Princeton UP, 2023) counters the false theories that have long defined the study of the uterus, exposing the eugenic history of gynecology while providing an intersectional feminist perspective on menstruation science. Blending interviews and personal experience with engaging stories from her own pioneering research, Kate Clancy challenges a host of myths and false assumptions. There is no such a thing as a "normal" menstrual cycle. In fact, menstrual cycles are incredibly variable and highly responsive to environmental and psychological stressors. Clancy takes up a host of timely issues surrounding menstruation, from bodily autonomy, menstrual hygiene, and the COVID-19 vaccine to the ways racism, sexism, and medical betrayal warp public perceptions of menstruation and erase it from public life. Offering a revelatory new perspective on one of the most captivating biological processes in the human body, Period will change the way you think about the past, present, and future of periods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With nearly 1500 species, bats account for more than twenty percent of mammalian species. The most successful and most diverse group of mammals, bats come in different sizes, shapes, and colors, from the tiny bumblebee bat to the giant golden-crowned flying fox. Some bats eat fruit and nectar; others eat frogs, scorpions, or fish. Vampire bats feed on blood. Bats are the only mammals that can fly; their fingers have elongated through evolution to become wings with a unique, super-flexible skin membrane stretched between them. Their robust immune system is one of the reasons for their extreme longevity. A tiny bat can live for forty years.Yossi Yovel, an ecologist and a neurobiologist, is passionate about deciphering the secrets of bats, including using AI to decipher their communication. In The Genius Bat: The Secret Life of the Only Flying Mammal (St. Martin's Press, 2025), he brings to vivid life these amazing creatures as well as the obsessive and sometimes eccentric people who study them–bat scientists. From muddy rainforests to star-covered night deserts, from guest houses in Thailand to museum drawers full of fossils in New York, this is an eye-opening and entertaining account of a mighty mammal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the sun sets, things start to get interesting among wild animals. Wherever we live, whether in the city or suburbs or country, darkness conjures a hidden world of wildlife that most of us rarely glimpse. Foxes, wolves, and bears prowl while skunks, opossums, and porcupines lurk; fireflies send flashing signals to potential mates; raccoons rummage for food; owls and bats fly overhead. Wildlife biologist Sophia Kimmig is our guide to the startling behaviors of these and many more nocturnal creatures. Introducing us to night’s wild inhabitants, she reveals what life for them is like in this parallel world—how it looks, feels, and smells—and the ingenious ways some creatures thrive after sunset. Living Night: On the Secret Wonders of Wildlife After Dark (Experiment, 2025) helps us appreciate how essential darkness is: not just a time but a diverse habitat all to itself—one that we still know too little about, and that we must urgently protect for the benefit of the world’s flora and fauna that depend on the day–night cycle. Our guest is: Dr. Sophia Kimmig, who researches how wild animals adapt to changing habitat conditions at an institute of the Leibniz Society in Berlin. In lectures, journalism, and books, she pursues her goal of bringing people closer to the diversity and value of nature and creating acceptance for nature and species protection. She lives in Berlin. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an experienced writing coach and developmental editor for academics. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Doctors by Nature The Killer Whale Journals Endless Forms Facing Infinity The Light Between Apple Trees In the Garden Behind the Moon The Climate Change Scientist Bugs: A Day in the Life The Shark Scientist The Well-Gardened Mind Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022), Heather Davis traces plastic’s relations to geology, media, biology, and race to show how matter itself has come to be understood as pliable, disposable, and consumable. The invention and widespread use of plastic, Davis contends, reveals the dominance of the Western orientation to matter and its assumption that matter exists to be endlessly manipulated and controlled by humans. Plastic’s materiality and pliability reinforces these expectations of what matter should be and do. Davis charts these relations to matter by mapping the queer multispecies relationships between humans and plastic-eating bacteria and analyzing photography that documents the racialized environmental violence of plastic production. In so doing, Davis provokes readers to reexamine their relationships to matter and life in light of plastic’s saturation. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2016, Ludovic Orlando, a genetics researcher, embarked on the Pegasus Project, an ambitious endeavor to use genetics to discover the origin of the modern horse. There were plenty of theories as to who domesticated horses first–but Ludovic’s team came up with their answer: They emerged on the western Eurasian steppe around 4200 years ago. But that revelation was only the beginning of Ludovic’s work, as he dug into the genetic origins of different kinds of horses, like the Arabian horse, as well as charted how the horse’s genetic diversity changed over time. His research is collected in his new book Horses: A 4,000-Year Genetic Journey Across the World (Princeton UP, 2025) Ludovic Orlando is a CNRS Silver Medal–winning research director and founding director of the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse at the University of Toulouse in France. His work has appeared in leading publications such as Nature, Science, and Cell. He is a recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Newcomb Cleveland Prize. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Horses. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles Watkins joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Trees Ancient and Modern (Reaktion, 2025). This delightful new book explores the relationship between trees and people and reveals how people have used, valued and understood forests over time. While trees are celebrated as symbols of natural beauty, they are increasingly at risk from climate change, disease, fires and urban expansion. Trees Ancient and Modern explores humanity’s deep connection with trees and woodlands, highlighting their beauty and importance and the challenges they face. The book looks at debates about creating new woodlands, exploring questions of location, ownership and management.Using diverse sources such as literature, art, historical records, scientific surveys and oral histories, Charles Watkins reveals how people have used, valued and understood forests over time. He also assesses modern threats to woodlands and considers how best to conserve them. Richly illustrated, this is a global social and cultural history of forests that provides valuable insights for future management. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring: Adventures with the King of Fishes (Hurst, 2025) by Graeme Rigby contains almost everything you didn’t know you needed to know about Atlantic herrings. (Pacific and Baltic varieties are in there too.) Herrings make the world bigger: with spawnings seen from space, a trillion individuals make this one of the tastiest and most abundant vertebrates on Earth. From ‘A Beginning’ to ‘Zuiderzee’, count the wars fought over herrings; don’t forget Scotland vs the Holy Roman Empire. The herring’s high-pitched farts were logged as Soviet submarines, and one herring joke featured in a Jonson play, four Shakespeare plays and the glorious, suppressed fantasia Nashes Lenten Stuffe. Herrings mock taxonomists; physically change with sea temperature and salinity; stuff predators full to bursting, then swim away. The Great Sardine Litigation? The true history of kippers? Bloaters? Reds? Chopped herring? Shuba? All this and more. Between sustainable fishery genetics, sixteenth-century Bavaria’s ‘Herrings, herrings, stinking herrings’, and Van Gogh’s ear, every entry is a story, a comic journey, an adventure. Some even come with recipes. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's the secret to keeping your balance? The ear does more than hear: it helps us stay stable by perceiving movements and gravity. Elegant sensors deep within the skull detect every twist, turn, and tumble, powering swift reflexes that keep vision and balance steady. This is the vestibular system. It's primordial and ubiquitous: every animal has one, and even plants have a rudimentary version. It works so well that we take it for granted--until it fails. How does this remarkable system function? What happens when it goes haywire? How can modern medicine treat vestibular disease? The Great Balancing Act: An Insider's Guide to the Human Vestibular System (Columbia UP, 2025) tells the story of the vestibular system, from T. rex hearing organs to cochlear implants, and from the unsung power of hair cells to inner-ear problems in outer space. Combining neuroscience, history, and medicine, Jeffrey D. Sharon--a vestibular doctor and researcher--explains the sense of balance using accessible language and wry humor. He recounts how pioneering scientists solved the mysteries of the vestibular system and shows why it is necessary for spatial reasoning and abstract thought. Sharon explores the devastating consequences of vestibular problems such as vertigo, dizziness, and imbalance, offering an expert, patient-friendly look at emerging and future treatments. Engaging and entertaining, this book invites readers to discover a little-known yet vital part of ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A leading astrobiologist "demonstrates how becoming a true space-faring species is more than just humanity's future" (Adam Frank, author of The Little Book of Aliens)--it is an evolutionary event at least as important as life's first journey from sea to land The story of life has always been one of great transitions, of crossing new frontiers. The dawn of life itself is one; so, too, is the first time two cells stuck together rather than drifting apart. And perhaps most dramatic were the moves from the sea to land, land to air. Each transition has witnessed wild storms of innovation, opportunity, and hazard. It might seem that there are no more realms for life to venture. But there is one: space. In The Giant Leap: Why Space Is the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Life (Hachette UK, 2025), astrobiologist Caleb Scharf argues that our journey into space isn't simply a giant leap for humankind--it's life's next great transition, an evolution of evolution itself. Humans and our technology are catalysts for an interplanetary transformation, marking a disruption in the story of life as fundamental as life's movement from sea to land, and land to sky. Inspired by Darwin's account of his journey on the Beagle, and packed with stories from the past, present, and future of space travel, The Giant Leap thrills at both life's creativity and the marvels of technology that have propelled us into the cosmos. And it offers an awesome glimpse of the grander vistas that wait in the great beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices