Evolution: the history of life on earth

World without evolution: Creation, religions, and the age of the Earth

Astronomy and physics pose major challenges to church doctrines

Geologists postulate an ancient earth

"New Geology": Lyell and Darwin

Problem of fossils

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the transmutation of species

Erasmus Darwin and the "Living Filament"

Natural theology and "Intelligent design"

Linnaeus and the classification of life

Thomas Malthus and the threat of overpopulation

Building the foundations: Voyages of Darwin and Wallace: Voyage of the Beagle

Geological discoveries, fossils, and extinctions

Life in space and time

Barnacles and experiments

Alfred Russel Wallace in the Spice Islands

Theory is made public

Who really discovered evolution?

Theory and society's response: Recipe for new species

Natural selection versus bottlenecks

Misinterpretations of evolution

Initial reactions to evolution

Herbert Spencer and the evolution of society

Francis Galton and positive eugenics

Negative eugenics

Eugenics and the Holocaust

Evolution in schools and the Scopes "Monkey Trial"

Synthesis between evolution and genetics: Mendel's work and its rediscovery

First attempts to link genetics and evolution

Quest for mutations: Thomas Morgan's fly lab

Understanding populations through mathematics

Beginnings of unification / Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright

Recipes for isolation / J.B.S. Haldane

Peppered moths and finches

Rise of new species / Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr

Evolution as a game / John Maynard Smith

"Punctuated equilibrium" / Steven Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge

Evolution from the gene's point of view / Richard Dawkins

Evolution of human behavior

Evolution in the age of DNA: DNA and the molecular basis of evolution

New theories of the origins of life

From single cells to multicellular organisms

Reading human evolution from fossils

Major eras in the development of plant and animal life

Fossil DNA

Evolution in the age of genomes: From the evolution of genes to genomes

Growing and shrinking genomes

Phylogeny: Updating the "tree of life"

Minimal genomes and the last universal common ancestor

Origins of genetic diseases

From sequencing organisms to sequencing the world

Coevolution

Evolutionary developmental biology

Evolutionary origins of complex organs

From genes to forms

understanding nature's toolbox

Future questions and reflections

Chronology

Glossary

Further resources

Index.