The Evolution of Everything New Edition

Very interesting. The science stuff was better than the human history portion, but generally interesting and informative.Be careful of buying on Kindle. A lot of the book is in tables and a lot of content was cutoff and inaccessible.

This is paleontologist Villmoare’s first book and it’s a good one. He is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In 2013, he was on the team that discovered the oldest fossil specimen of genus Homo. Evolution is not only a very good book, it‘s a very brave one. Because in it, he tries to apply the principles of evolution to everything from the Big Bang to the world we live in today, and not just science but history.Numerous attempts have been made in the past to document scientific regularities in history and with great regularity, they have crashed, mostly because they have produced stunted versions of the richness of human experience that have had sorely limited predictive power. But Villmoare does it right, grounding human history in what we know of human nature and not promising more than he can deliver on a range of topics that include state building, religion and philosophy, on through globalism and modernity. It’s a recipe for disaster but it’s not one, it’s a success.Why? Because he never goes too far once he enters human history. He shows patterns that do have explanatory power and shows that constant individual and group action occurs within them, but he doesn’t overprescribe. Our more conventional view of the content of history fits nicely within his patterns. The patterns add structure to the whole picture.He has written the book as a textbook. Boxed insets abound, explaining particular issues without disrupting the chapters’ narrative flow. Here are three examples, from chapters early, in the middle and near the end of the book. From ch. 1: Introduction, five boxes: 1.1: getting you out of “the bubble”; 1.2: how science progresses; 1.3: what science does and does not do; 1.4: a long piece on medical and non-medical pseudoscience; 1.5: math as the language of nature. Ch. 11: The Genus Homo: 11.1:the anatomy of walking, running and throwing; 11.2: demography and technology; 11.3: language, art and religion: the representation of abstract ideas; 11.4: about Paranthropus, an alternative lineage to ours. Ch. 22: Globalism, Money and Power: 22.1: the power of an incoming dollar; 2.2: the history of money; 22.3: the dangers of a specialized economy; 22.4: the negative and positive sides of an international economy; 22.5: the Belgian Congo; 22.6: unintended consequences; 22.7: banana republics.I have nothing but praise for this book. Whenever a topic arose for which I needed ex-planation or background, there it was , neatly boxed off from but running alongside the text. I’m a voracious and speedy reader but I read this book slowly, forty or fifty pages at a time, usually out in a coffee shop, over breakfast. It made me think, over and over again. Isn’t that what a book like this should do.(This is a good follow-up to the two books by fellow paleontologist Stephen Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs (2018) and The Rise and Reign of the Mammals (2022).)