Discipline
Biology
Lessons across the journey that lean on biology, in the order they appear in the story.
- 3.4 Why carbon?Draft
Bonding, chains and rings: why carbon chemistry is the chemistry of complexity.
- 3.5 Molecules in spaceDraft
Dust, ice and organic molecules between the stars.
- 3.7 Are you really made of stardust?Draft
The famous claim, tested element by element.
- 5.1 What is life?Draft
Why the most obvious question in biology has no agreed answer.
- 5.2 How chemistry became biologyDraft
The hypotheses and evidence for the origin of life, and why the honest answer is that nobody knows.
- 5.3 Evolution by natural selectionDraft
The one mechanism that turns chemistry into everything else.
- 5.4 The Great Oxidation EventDraft
How life poisoned the planet, and why we breathe the waste.
- 5.5 The complex cellDraft
The merger that happened once and made everything bigger than a bacterium.
- 5.6 The Cambrian explosionDraft
Why animal bodies appear suddenly in the rocks, and whether they really appeared suddenly.
- 5.7 Mass extinctionsDraft
Five times the biosphere nearly ended, and what actually did the killing.
- 5.8 Mammals in the shadowsDraft
A hundred and fifty million years of not being important, and what happened when the competition vanished.
- 6.1 Primates and homininsDraft
Where we branch off, and why standing up came before big brains.
- 6.2 From habilis to sapiensDraft
How many kinds of human there were, and why only one is left.
- 6.3 Fire, tools and cookingDraft
How an outside stomach paid for an expensive brain.
- 6.4 Language and symbolic thoughtDraft
The one thing that leaves no fossils, and how we look for it anyway.
- 6.5 Collective learningDraft
The threshold: why a species that forgets nothing beats a species that thinks faster.
- 6.6 Out of Africa, into IndiaDraft
How our species spread across the world, and what the genetics of the subcontinent actually show.
- 6.7 Foraging lifewaysDraft
How people lived for ninety-five percent of human history, and why we keep getting it wrong.
- 7.1 Why farm?Draft
The worst decision anyone ever made, taken independently at least eleven times.
- 7.2 DomesticationDraft
What we did to plants and animals, and what they did to us.
- 7.5 The price of farmingDraft
The bill for cities: disease, inequality, patriarchy, slavery and soil.
- 8.1 The Columbian ExchangeDraft
Two worlds meet, and the deadliest thing that crosses is invisible.
- 8.2 The Scientific RevolutionDraft
Not a discovery but a method, and not invented anywhere in particular.
- 8.4 The Great AccelerationDraft
Twenty-four graphs that all bend at the same moment, and what that moment cost.
- 8.5 The AnthropoceneDraft
A proposed geological epoch that was formally rejected in 2024, and why that rejection changes nothing about the evidence.
- 9.3 Machines that learnDraft
Chapter 6 said collective learning made us. This lesson asks, carefully, whether this counts.
- 9.4 Editing lifeDraft
The first CRISPR cure works. It treats a disease concentrated in the places least able to pay for it.
- 9.5 Leaving EarthDraft
Space is one of the most valuable things we do, and almost all of its value points back at Earth.
- 9.6 The deep futureDraft
Earth has about a billion years of biosphere left, not five, and that is only the first paragraph.