Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time

Description

A TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2019- the astonishing story of how culture enabled us to become the most successful species on Earth Humans are a planet-altering force. Our closest living relatives, the now-endangered chimpanzees, continue to live as they have for millions of years. Yet we evolved through the same process. What are we then? Gaia Vince argues that our unique ability to determine the course of our own destiny rests on a special relationship between our genes, environment and culture going back into deep time. It is our collective culture, rather than our individual intelligence, that makes humans unique. Vince shows how four evolutionary drivers - Fire, Language, Beauty and Time - are further transforming our species into a transcendent superorganism- a hyper-cooperative mass of humanity that she calls Homo omnis. Drawing on leading-edge advances in population genetics, archaeology, palaeontology and neuroscience, Transcendence compels us to reimagine ourselves, and shows us to be on the brink of something grander - and potentially more destructive.

Gaia Vince is a science writer and broadcaster interested in the interplay between humans and the planetary environment. She has held senior editorial posts at Nature and New Scientist, and her writing has featured in newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, The Times and Scientific American. She also writes and presents science programmes for radio and television. Her research takes her across the world- she has visited more than 60 countries, lived in three and is currently based in London. In 2015, she became the first woman to win the Royal Society Science Book of the Year Prize solo for her debut, Adventures in the Anthropocene- A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made. She blogs at WanderingGaia.com and tweets at @WanderingGaia.

A hugely enjoyable sprint through human evolutionary history . . . Read it. -- Tim Radford * Nature * Beautifully written . . . At her best Vince takes dizzying leaps, making connections between archaeology, anthropology, genetics and psychology. She is especially good on the delicate interplay between genes, environment and culture. Vince steps with lightness. -- Tom Whipple * The Times * The storming success of Yuval Noah Harari's books has inspired many others that aim to span the epic sweep of human history with grand theories and cor-blimey factoids. This book does both. -- The Times * Best Science and Medicine Books of the Year * Here is the miraculous creature we are: unlikely, poignant, astonishing ... Much to think about. This book gives rise to many such thoughts and is written with merciful clarity. -- Sebastian Barry Wonderful ... enlightening. -- Robin Ince Richly informed by the latest research, Gaia Vince's colourful survey fizzes like a zip-wire as it tours our species' story from the Big Bang to the coming age of hypercooperation. -- Richard Wrangham, Professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University and author of The Goodness Paradox An imaginative and inspiring adventure into the origins and evolution of what we hold most dear: our human culture. -- Uta Frith, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development UCL This book goes from the Big Bang to the Hundred Thousand Genome Project to make a convincing case that Homo sapiens has become a super-organism. I learned a lot from it and so will you. -- Steve Jones, Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics UCL, author of Almost Like a Whale