Sean B. Carroll Books

A mixture of spirit and deed -- Introduction: Humboldt's gifts -- Part 1: The making of a theory. Reverend Darwin's detour ; Drawing a line between monkeys and kangaroos ; Life imitates life -- Part 2: The loveliest bones. Java man ; To the big bang, on horseback ; Where the dragon laid her eggs ; The day the mesozoic died ; Dinosaurs of a feather ; It's a fishapod! -- Part 3: The natural history of humans. Journey to the Stone Age ; Clocks, trees, and H-bombs ; CSI: Neander Valley -- Afterword: The shape of things to come

An award-winning 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 its age was vague and vastly off the mark, and much of the knowledge of our own species’ history was a set of fantastic myths and fairy tales. In the tradition of The Microbe Hunters and Gods, Graves, and Scholars, Sean Carroll leads a rousing voyage that recounts the most important discoveries in two centuries of natural history: from Darwin’s trip around the world to Charles Walcott’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.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One of Publishers Weekly’s “Most Anticipated Books of the Fall” As you read these words, copies of you are being created. Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist and one of this world’s most celebrated writers on science, rewrites the history of 20th century physics. Already hailed as a masterpiece, Something Deeply Hidden shows for the first time that facing up to the essential puzzle of quantum mechanics utterly transforms how we think about space and time. His reconciling of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of relativity changes, well, everything. Most physicists haven’t even recognized the uncomfortable truth: physics has been in crisis since 1927. Quantum mechanics has always had obvious gaps—which have come to be simply ignored. Science popularizers keep telling us how weird it is, how impossible it is to understand. Academics discourage students from working on the dead end of quantum foundations. Putting his professional reputation on the line with this audacious yet entirely reasonable book, Carroll says that the crisis can now come to an end. We just have to accept that there is more than one of us in the universe. There are many, many Sean Carrolls. Many of every one of us. Copies of you are generated thousands of times per second. The Many Worlds Theory of quantum behavior says that every time there is a quantum event, a world splits off with everything in it the same, except in that other world the quantum event didn't happen. Step-by-step in Carroll's uniquely lucid way, he tackles the major objections to this otherworldly revelation until his case is inescapably established. Rarely does a book so fully reorganize how we think about our place in the universe. We are on the threshold of a new understanding—of where we are in the cosmos, and what we are made of.

“A beautiful and very important book.”―Lewis Wolpert, American Scientist For over a century, opening the black box of embryonic development was the holy grail of biology. Evo Devo―Evolutionary Developmental Biology―is the new science that has finally cracked open the box. Within the pages of his rich and riveting book, Sean B. Carroll explains how we are discovering that complex life is ironically much simpler than anyone ever expected.

The author team welcomes a new coauthor, Sean B. Carroll, a recognized leader in the field of evolutionary development, to this new edition of Introduction to Genetic Analysis (IGA). The authors’ ambitious new plans for this edition focus on showing how genetics is practiced today. In particular, the new edition renews its emphasis on how genetic analysis can be a powerful tool for answering biological questions of all types.

"From acclaimed writer and biologist Sean B. Carroll, a rollicking, awe-inspiring story of the surprising power of chance in our lives and the world. Why is the world the way it is? How did we get here? Does everything happen for a reason or are some things left to chance? Philosophers and theologians have pondered these questions for millennia, but startling scientific discoveries over the past half century are revealing that we live in a world driven by chance. A Series of Fortunate Events tells the story of the awesome power of chance and how it is the surprising source of all the beauty and diversity in the living world. Like every other species, we humans are here by accident. But it is shocking just how many things-any of which might never have occurred-had to happen in certain ways for any of us to exist. From an extremely improbable asteroid impact, to the wild gyrations of the Ice Age, to invisible accidents in our parents' gonads, we are all here through an astonishing series of fortunate events. And chance continues to reign every day over the razor-thin line between our life and death. This is a relatively small book about a really big idea. It is also a spirited tale. Drawing inspiration from Monty Python, Kurt Vonnegut, and other great thinkers, and crafted by one of today's most accomplished science storytellers, A Series of Fortunate Events is an irresistibly entertaining and thought-provoking account of one of the most important but least appreciated facts of life"-- Provided by publisher

Nachdem das Genom des Menschen und vieler anderer Tiere vollständig entschlüsselt ist, bekommt man durch einen Vergleich völlig neuartige Einblicke in den Prozess der Evolution. Sean B. Carroll, einer der renommiertesten Forscher auf dem Gebiet der vergleichenden DNA-Forschung, erzählt in seinem spannenden Buch von uralten, 'unsterblichen' Genen, die alle Lebewesen besitzen, von 'fossilen' Rest-Genen, die ihre Funktion nicht mehr ausüben, sowie von der verblüffenden Tatsache, dass der Genvergleich zeigt, wie die Evolution sich selbst wiederholt. Entstanden ist ein unterhaltsamer und faszinierender Einblick in die neueste Forschung zur Entstehung und Entwicklung des Lebens.