Henry Gee ingeniously reveals how contemporary science can explain some of the wonders of Middle Earth, where Tolkien's marvellous fantasy creates a world with an insistent sense of reality. Gee delights in explaining such scientific conundrums as: How does Frodo's coat of mithril chain armour deflect deadly blows How good are Legolas's eyes, he can count the Riders of Rohan at a distance of five leagues, and what does that tell us about the elves How are the orcs reproduced Just because 'Lord of the Rings' is the world's most popular fantasy does not prevent scientific explanations for its wonders.

The Science of Middle Earth

Henry, Gee

Literature & Fiction

Souvenir

The Decline And Fall Of The Human Empire (hardcover)

Pan Macmillan, London

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species is on the Edge of Extinction

Picador

The Elizabethan clergy and the settlement of religion, 1558-1564: with illustrative documents and l

History

BiblioLife

The Reformation Period

<p>As outspoken in his day as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens are today, American freethinker and author ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL (1833-1899) was a notorious radical whose uncompromising views on religion and slavery (they were bad, in his opinion), women's suffrage (a good idea, he believed), and other contentious matters of his era made him a wildly popular orator and critic of 19th-century American culture and public life. As a speaker dedicated to expanding intellectual horizons and celebrating the value of skepticism, Ingersoll spoke frequently on such topics as atheism, freedom from the pressures of conformity, and the lives of philosophers who espoused such concepts. This collection of his most famous speeches includes the lectures: [ "The Gods" (1872) [ "Humboldt" (1869) [ "Thomas Paine" (1870) [ "Individuality" (1873) [ "Heretics and Heresies" (1874)</p>

The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary imagination, and new fossil discoveries are often hailed in headlines as revealing the elusive transitional step, the moment when we stopped being "animal" and started being "human." In The Accidental Species, Henry Gee, longtime paleontology editor at Nature, takes aim at this misleading notion, arguing that it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how evolution works and, when applied to the evolution of our own species, supports mistaken ideas about our own place in the universe. Gee presents a robust and stark challenge to our tendency to see ourselves as the acme of creation. Far from being a quirk of religious fundamentalism, human exceptionalism, Gee argues, is an error that also infects scientific thought. Touring the many features of human beings that have recurrently been used to distinguish us from the rest of the animal world, Gee shows that our evolutionary outcome is one possibility among many, one that owes more to chance than to an organized progression to supremacy. He starts with bipedality, which he shows could have arisen entirely by accident, as a by-product of sexual selection, moves on to technology, large brain size, intelligence, language, and, finally, sentience. He reveals each of these attributes to be alive and well throughout the animal world—they are not, indeed, unique to our species. The Accidental Species combines Gee's firsthand experience on the editorial side of many incredible paleontological findings with healthy skepticism and humor to create a book that aims to overturn popular thinking on human evolution—the key is not what's missing, but how we're linked.

Accidental Species, The

Science & Math

Biological Sciences

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

<p>In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien place―in constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions. Amid all this tumult and disaster, life began. The earliest living things were no more than membranes stretched across microscopic gaps in rocks, where boiling hot jets of mineral-rich water gushed out from cracks in the ocean floor.\nAlthough these membranes were leaky, the environment within them became different from the raging maelstrom beyond. These havens of order slowly refined the generation of energy, using it to form membrane-bound bubbles that were mostly-faithful copies of their parents―a foamy lather of soap-bubble cells standing as tiny clenched fists, defiant against the lifeless world. Life on this planet has continued in much the same way for millennia, adapting to literally every conceivable setback that living organisms could encounter and thriving, from these humblest beginnings to the thrilling and unlikely story of ourselves.\nIn A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth , Henry Gee zips through the last 4.6 billion years with infectious enthusiasm and intellectual rigor. Drawing on the very latest scientific understanding and writing in a clear, accessible style, he tells an enlightening tale of survival and persistence that illuminates the delicate balance within which life has always existed.</p>

A (Very) Short History of Life On E

A (Very) Short History of Life On Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Chapters

Evolution

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Books by Henry, Gee