About this item
In the tradition of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens, a winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books shows how four tools enabled has us humans to control the destiny of our species"A wondrous, visionary work." --Tim Flannery, scientist and author of the bestselling The Weather MakersWhat enabled us to go from simple stone tools to smartphones? How did bands of hunter-gatherers evolve into multinational empires? Readers of Sapiens will say a cognitive revolution -- a dramatic evolutionary change that altered our brains, turning primitive humans into modern ones -- caused a cultural explosion. In Transcendence, Gaia Vince argues instead that modern humans are the product of a nuanced coevolution of our genes, environment, and culture that goes back into deep time. She explains how, through four key elements -- fire, language, beauty, and time -- our species diverged from the evolutionary path of all other animals, unleashing a compounding process that launched us into the Space Age and beyond. Provocative and poetic, Transcendence shows how a primate took dominion over nature and turned itself into something marvelous.
About the Author
Gaia Vince is a science writer and broadcaster interested in the interplay between humans and the planetary environment. She has a chemistry degree and writes for newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Times, Scientific American, New Scientist and Nature. She also writes and presents science programmes for radio and television. In 2015, she became the first woman to win outright the Royal Society Science Book of the Year Prize for her debut, ADVENTURES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: A Journey To The Heart Of The Planet We Made. Her latest book, about human cultural evolution, is TRANSCENDENCE: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty And Time. She currently lives in London, where she dreams of the tropics and blogs at WanderingGaia.com.
