Looks at the complex interrelationships between human culture and the nature. Covering the period from the beginning of agriculture right up to the present day, it focuses on issues relating to human health and well-being and the state of our natural environment. From his vast survey, author Stephen Boyden draws some key conclusions critical to the future of humanity.

A compelling investigation into the relationships between our biological past and cultural progress, "Cells to Civilizations" presents a remarkable story of living change.

This fifth volume abridgement of Joseph Needham's monumental work is concerned with the staggering civil engineering feats made in early and medieval China.

Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.

Papers from a symposium held on 11-12 September 1968 at Canberra, sponsored by the Australian Academy of Science.

A compelling evolutionary narrative that reveals how human civilization follows the same ecological rules that shape all life on Earth Offering a bold new understanding of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going, noted ecologist Mark Bertness argues that human beings and their civilization are the products of the same self-organization, evolutionary adaptation, and natural selection processes that have created all other life on Earth. Bertness follows the evolutionary process from the primordial soup of two billion years ago through today, exploring the ways opposing forces of competition and cooperation have led to current assemblages of people, animals, and plants. Bertness's thoughtful examination of human history from the perspective of natural history provides new insights about why and how civilization developed as it has and explores how humans, as a species, might have to consciously overrule our evolutionary drivers to survive future challenges.