(Part 3) Top products from r/evolution

I know for a fact that the second hypothesis (increased brain size-> increased social complexity) has been put forward by a number of scientists (I'm a psychologist so I' m more into human behaviour and differential traits). I don't remember particular references as I did my degree 6 years ago but I remember books like this, or this had a huge impact on me. For a fact, a huge step in our evolution has been the frontal lobe. It is what facilitates the creation of memories, gives us a clearly defined personality that can be expressed through language and internalizes the moral/ethical/religious rules we live by (it is where the filter for inhibition lives in our brain-to put it very simplistically).

However, let me be devil's advocate for a minute. How do you define intelligence? Sure we have a referential language, we travel at the speed of sound, we have created complicated machines etc. This is not entirely unexpected considering the size of our brain, our opposable thumbs, our physique and biological makeup etc.

However, if intelligence is the ability to adapt in order to maximize survival, is it fair to say that human intelligence is superior to the great apes'? (ex. if you threw me in a jungle I don't think I'd be able to adapt soon enough to survive. That doesn't mean necessarily that I am a stupid human being but to the average great ape I'd look like an absolute idiot!)

Ernst Mayer, Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins have written some decent books broadly covering the evidence for evolution. Donald Prothero's Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters fits into that general category, and does a good job of outlining the evidence for evolution as well, in particular from a paleontological perspective.




Astrobiologist / Paleontologist Peter Ward has written a ton of fantastic books. I'd start with Rare Earth, which outlines the Rare Earth hypothesis, ie complex life is likely rare in the universe. If you read Rare Earth, you'll come away with a better understanding of the abiotic factors which influence the evolution of life on Earth. If you end up enjoying Rare Earth, I'd highly recommend Ward's other books.




Terra, by paleontologist Michael Novacek describes the evolution of the modern biosphere, in particular from the Cretaceous onwards, and then discusses environmental change on a geological scale to modern environmental challenges facing humanity. It's one of those books which will change the way you think about the modern biosphere, and the evolution in the context ecosystems, as opposed to individual species.




Another book by a paleontologist is When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, looking at the Permian mass extinction, which was the most catastrophic mass extinction of the Phanerozoic wiping out 95%+ of all species. More focused on the geology than the other books I mentioned, so if you're not into geology you probably wont enjoy it so much.



Biochemist Nick Lane has written some great books. Life ascending would be a good one to start off with. Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life is really excellent as well.




The Origins of Life and the Universe is written by molecular biologist Paul Lurquin. It mostly focuses on the origin of life. It's pretty accessible for what it covers.




Another couple of books I would recommend to people looking for something more advanced are: Michael Lynch's Origins of Genome Architecture, which covers similar stuff to much of his research, although takes a much broader perspective. Genes in conflict is a pretty comprehensive treatment of selfish genetic elements. Fascinating read, although probably a bit heavy for most laypeople.

Well, consider an example from within religion itself, so here's an apologists perspective, may I recommend a little reading material.

• Christianity and Evolution - Pierre de Chardin
  
• The Monk in the Garden - Robin Marantz Henig
  
  
  
• In the liturgy itself, there is 2nd Peter 3:8 - If we consider that God evidently can patiently wait out for thousands of years as minutes and expand out time, then about the only thing Peter suggests God can't do is go back and fix the timeline. But it suggests (strongly) that God's plan is executed as a natural one, and this explains the extreme age of the Earth, how geological processes can (by way of science) be seen to take millions or billions of years.
  
  So too with evolution, there is nothing to contradict the idea that evolutionary processes are used by God to effect the desired outcomes over VAST amounts of time.
  
  
• Or point out that two major characters in philosophy and science around the matter were in fact paid by the church to perform the fundamental basic science. While not in the business of funding the scientific effort expicitly, the church has in more than one field of scientific inquiry provided priests (Father Pierre Tielhard (major 20th century philosopher/apologist), and Abbott Gregor Mendel) (founder of Genetics) and nuns Abbess Hildegard von Bingen (Music Theory) the ability to develop the basics of their efforts, that we use hundreds of years later.
  
  
• Abbott Gregor Mendel - was paid by the church for upwards of 30 years and he founded what today is considered the basis of genetics, and the principles of heredity. He additionally personally analysed and collated over 300,000 results (although the exact number of samples are disputed), what is not disputed is that the numbers were large, and would - even today - be considered rigorous as an analytical/quantitative approach to inferring a rule. Effectively, Mendel was one of the first people (perhaps the first) to use what we might call "big data", trying (sometimes successfully and sometimes not) letting the data show him what the answer was.

I'd also suggest getting some cheap used books such as: Sex, Evolution and Behavior or Haldane's classic:The Causes of Evolution. Other authors worth checking out would be Dawkins, Darwin and Zahavi. Between free online courses and erudite but still very accessible books you can get a solid foundation on the basics, for much much less than a single college course, and perhaps find a particular field that really intrigues you. Lastly, there are a number of great blogs out there, John Hawkes is a favourite. I'd suggest steering clear of Gould, but The spandrels of San Marco is a classic, and wrestling with Gould's semantic-based arguments and being able, to your own satisfaction, refute them using facts, is a worthy exercise.

Oh, and I'd be remiss without throwing out Trivers or Lieberman

I'll second /u/Deadlyd1001's recommendation... The Singularity Trap was good and interesting, but the Bobiverse series is one of the best books/series I've read in years.

He has a new series coming soon that is also worth checking out if you like those two. The audiobook of the first book is available now, but the print version will be released in a couple weeks. It's also not as good as the Bobiverse books, but it was a fun read (well, listen).

Get "The Big Bang" by Simon Singh. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0007162200/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i4

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This is a fantastic history of astronomy and science, working it's way from the very beginning and explaining what people believed, why it made sense at the time (!) and why we believe something different now. From Ptolemy to Copernicus, Gallileo, Newton, Einstein to Hubble and beyond. It'd be appropriate for the second half of high school, language and complexity wise, I guess. It's seriously the best and most easily accessible primer for layman's interest in modern astronomy.

It is thought that altruistic behavior is actually innate and passed down genetically and thus a product of natural selection, it's part of our survival behavior that actually got us (a bunch of pretty weak apes) this far...

Here's a great book on the genetics and altruism Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley

Campbell's biology textbook is the best university level biology textbook I've seen.


https://www.amazon.com/Campbell-Biology-11th-Lisa-Urry/dp/0134093410

Basically all of biology is relevant to understanding evolution (as well as a general understanding of chemistry, physics being also useful).

For something a bit harder (but requiring some more basic science knowledge), molecular biology of the cell is good.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26879/

"Why Evolution Is True" by Jerry A. Coyne (who is also a doctor) gives a pretty comprehensive and concise account of all the evidence for evolution from fossils to genetics. Amazon link here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Evolution-True-Jerry-Coyne/dp/0199230854

This is a pretty solid and very enjoyable book about our current understanding of Dinosaurs, including the evolution of birds which came out last year: https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Dinosaurs-History-World/dp/0062490427

Hey, you are a philosopher, so read philosophy, or actually history. Read Will Provine's The origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. It is a great read, and it is history, not math, so it is very accessible.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Origins-Theoretical-Population-Genetics/dp/0226684644

I read a great book on this recently, Samir Okasha's Evolution and the Levels of Selection.

I find it interesting that the major transitions came about usually when lower levels of selection reached a point of cooperation within groups of individuals so that they ended up cohering as individual entities.

Referring to OP's first three points, I just want to say a little (not too much, just to get a discussion going a bit):

• Selection can act on any level in which individuals produce other similar individuals. So DNA can produce more DNA, cells can split to produce more cells, multi-celled organisms can produce similar multi-celled organisms, etc, and these can be considered levels of selection. Note that even though, for example, organs can technically be selected for or against, they can not be considered a level of selection as they do not reproduce. Species level selection can also be seen, not in the sense that individuals show a trait for the good of the species, moreover that an actual trait of the species (eg sexual selection) favours speciation rate.
  
  
• Selection has not always acted on the same level. This can be shown by the fact that there are different levels of selection. This can also be highlighted by conflict between levels of selection (intra-genomic conflict; intra-group cooperation vs. selfish individual gains; etc) to produce equilibria.
  
  
• Altruism can be seen as a consequence of selection on genes, arising through inclusive fitness and kin selection, or as a result of selection on groups. It could be both, with effects filtering up and down between levels. A nice example would be cyanobacteria Anabaena, a single celled, filamentous-colony forming bacteria, which forms nitrogen-fixing heterocysts in a low-nitrogen environment. The heterocysts are formed when low nitrogen levels induce genetic changes in vegetative cells so they permanently change state then inhibit other cells from doing so.
  Genetics allows the individual to undergo change to altruistically provide nitrogen to the rest of the filament, yet the mere existence of a colony provides an environment in which the individual cells can behave altruistically. This isn't maybe the best example, and I might be able to provide more, but maybe after a sleep.

I wouldn't bother arguing with them. It's notoriously difficult to reason someone out of a position they didn't use reason to get into in the first place.

If you're interested in evolution, by all means learn more about it, but do it for yourself. You can start here for an overview:

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-evolution.html

http://evolutionfaq.com/

And these books will explain in more depth:

https://smile.amazon.com/Why-Evolution-True-Jerry-Coyne/dp/0143116649?sa-no-redirect=1

https://smile.amazon.com/Blind-Watchmaker-Evidence-Evolution-Universe/dp/0393351491?sa-no-redirect=1

https://smile.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Popular-Science/dp/0192860925?sa-no-redirect=1

> Tiktaalik was not a direct ancestor of modern theropods.

Therapods came 170m years later. I think this is a typo and you meant to write tetrapods?

> What you have provided is not equivalent in any way to finding "a rabbit in the Precambrian".

Sure. It just shows that the sequence has no order. At any given time in history, there are millions of species with hundreds of suitable morphological intermediates between most taxonomics level. Take this guy who connects amphibians and nematodes. Now go to the fossil record, where something like only 5% of an organism's phenotype is preserved, and you can make it tell any story you want. Coyne makes an excellent point of this:

1. "Artificial selection clearly has created forms that, if found in the fossil record, or if you saw them and didn’t know they were products of artificial selection, would clearly be regarded as different species. ... All seven descendant vegetables have the same common ancestor, and were bred for various traits (the odious Brussels sprout, for example, for small unopened heads). Does anybody doubt that if we found fossil impressions of these, or saw them growing as wild plants in nature, they’d be regarded as different species, or even different genera? ... there is much more variation among living breeds of dogs--artificially selected within the past 10,000 years at most--than there is among the wild species of canids in nature. If dog breeds like the two above were found in the fossil record, they’d be regarded at least as different species, or even different genera (remember that Australopithecus and Homo are different genera)."
   
   > These results provide us with the earliest direct evidence of kinematically human-like bipedalism
   
   You can find paleoanthropologists on both sides of the bipedalism debate--some ignore the laetoli prints and put the australopiths as our ancestors, others the opposite and put the origin of bipedalism much later. My point is that the fossil data is contradictory, far beyond "one fossil was to be found in the strata where it did not belong"
   
   > a bird before reptiles
   
   Some are doubting that birds are even descended from dinosaurs, "birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from. That's a pretty serious problem, and there are other inconsistencies with the bird-from-dinosaur theories."
   
   Also from Cladistics and the Origin of Birds: A Review and Two New Analyses, Ornithological Monographs, 2009
   
   
2. On the basis of our results, the next two major challenges are to evaluate further the possibility that some maniraptorans in fact be long within Aves, rather than the reverse, and to further explore whether birds may have been de­rived from theropods, “early archosaurs,” or cro­codylomorphs, the three most likely candidates given current evidence. At present, the origin of birds is an open question.
   
   It's interesting to see how flexible these relationships actually are.
   
   > Let us imagine that the fossil record had no particular order.
   
   It does indeed have order to it. Fish, arthropods, and several other types appear over a period of about 10m years in the cambrian at 530m years ago, tetrapods at 400m years, and mammals and birds roughly 200m years ago. The fossil record shows sudden appearances, long term stasis, and then extinction. It seems to be the enemy of every view.
   
   
3. "The fossil record, like the stratigraphical record, is thought to be episodic with long periods of quiescence separated by short periods of explosive evolution, expropriations and extinctions ... The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find' over and over again' not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another.", Derek V. Ager, The Nature of the Fossil Record, Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, 1976
   
4. "There is a striking lack of correspondence between genetic and evolutionary change. Neo-Darwinian theory predicts a steady, slow continuous, accumulation of mutations that produces a progressive change in morphology leading to new species, genera, and so on. But macroevolution now appears to be full of discontinuities, so we have a mismatch of some importance. That is, the fossil record shows mostly stasis, or lack of change, in a species for many millions of years; there is no evidence there for gradual change even though, in theory, there must be a gradual accumulation of mutations at the micro level." The coming Kuhnian revolution in biology, Nature Biotechnology, 1997
   
5. "In virtually all cases a new taxon appears for the first time in the fossil record with most definitive features already present, and practically no known stem-group forms." Fossils and Evolution, Kemp, Oxford University Press, 1999, p246
   
6. "Microevolution provides no satisfactory explanation for the extraordinary burst of novelty during the late Neoproterozic-Cambrian radiation, nor the rapid production of novel plant architectures associated with the origin of land plants during the Devonian, followed by the origination of most major insect groups. Each burst was followed by relative quiescence, as the pace of morphological innovation fell. Non-random appearance of major groups continues at lower taxonomic levels as well.". Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution, Evolution and Development, 2000
   
7. "The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal "types" seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate "grades" or intermediate forms between different types are detectable. ... The Cambrian explosion in animal evolution during which all the diverse body plans appear to have emerged almost in a geological instant is a highly publicized enigma. Although molecular clock analysis has been invoked to propose that the Cambrian explosion is an artifact of the fossil record whereas the actual divergence occurred much earlier, the reliability of these estimates appears to be questionable.", Koonin, The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution, Biology Direct, 2007

Link to the book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0141017775?pc_redir=1404880277&robot_redir=1

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199267944/?coliid=I3BETERVS0FSIY&colid=I7EQL06MGW4X&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Ghost-Origin-Species-Updated/dp/0375501037

This book is the reason why I chose Ecology and Evolutionary Biology as my major.

Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives by David Sloan Wilson.

> “Jeremy’s work represents potentially interesting exercises in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of simple abstract systems.” Any claims that it has to do with biology or the origins of life, he added, are “pure and shameless speculations.”

most important sentence. I really fail to see how his equations are qualitatively different than any of the examples posited by Stuart Kauffman years ago about how entropy can generate ever-changing patterns.

eg - https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Order-Self-Organization-Selection-Evolution/dp/0195079515

You might be interested in this book, The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived.

The title is a little misleading as the book primarily focuses on early anatomically modern humans and not Neanderthals (plus some of the science pertaining to neanderthals is a bit out of date by this point). However, he primarily addresses your question, focusing on environmental changes that took place during this planetary era of cohabitation.