Mining untapped sources, the authors of an acclaimed biography of Darwin offer an astonishing new portrait of the scientific icon. In Darwin's Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore restore the missing moral core of Darwin's evolutionary universe, providing a completely new account of how he came to his shattering theories about human origins. Desmond and Moore's biography of Darwin was described by Stephen Jay Gould as "unquestionably the finest . . . ever written" about him. In their new book, timed to coincide with the worldwide Darwin bicentenary celebrations,Desmond and Moore provide a major reexamination of Darwin's life and work.Drawing on a wealth of fresh manuscripts, unpublished letters, notebooks, diaries, and ships' logs, they argue that the driving force behind Darwin's theory of evolution was not simply his love of truth or personal ambition—it was his fierce hatred of slavery.Darwin's abolitionism had deep roots in his mother's family, and it was reinforced by his voyage on the Beagle as well as by events in America—from the CivilWar to the arrival of scientific racism at Harvard. Compulsively readable and utterly persuasive,Darwin's Sacred Cause will revolutionize our view of the great scientist.

The fascinating journey of a famous naturalist Young Charley Darwin hated school—he much preferred to be outside studying birds' eggs, feathers, and insects. And so, at the age of twenty-one, he boarded a ship called HMS Beagle and spent five thrilling but dangerous years sailing around the world, studying plant and animal life that was beyond anything he could have imagined. Here, just in time for Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his groundbreaking On the Origin of Species, historical novelist Carolyn Meyer tells the story of his unconventional adventures. It's the story of a restless childhood, unrequited teenage love, and a passion for studying nature that was so great, Darwin would sacrifice everything to pursue it.

An award-wining biologist takes us on the dramatic expeditions that unearthed the history of life on our planet. Just 150 years ago,most of our world was an unexplored wilderness.Our sense of how old it was? Vague and vastly off the mark. And our sense of our own species' history? A set of fantastic myths and fairy tales. Fossils had been known for millennia, but they were seen as the bones of dragons and other imagined creatures. In the tradition of The Microbe Hunters and Gods, Graves, and Scholars, Sean Carroll's Remarkable Creatures celebrates the pioneers who replaced our fancies with the even more amazing true story of how our world evolved. Carroll recounts the most important discoveries in two centuries of national history — from Darwin's trip around the world to CharlesWalcott's discovery of pre-Cambrian life in the Grand Canyon; from Louis and Mary Leakey's investigation of our deepest past in East Africa to the trailblazers in modern laboratories who have located a time clock in our DNA. Join him in a rousing voyage of discovery, from the epic journeys of pioneering naturalists to the breakthroughs making headlines today.