About this item
The book that transforms our understanding of what we are and where we came from.Specialist scientific fields are developing at incredibly swift speeds, but what can they really tell us about how the universe began and how we humans evolved to play such a dominant role on Earth?John Hands's extraordinarily ambitious quest is to bring together this scientific knowledge and evaluate without bias or preconception all the theories and evidence about the origin and evolution of matter, life, consciousness, and humankind.This astonishing book provides the most comprehensive account yet of current ideas such as cosmic inflation, dark energy, the selfish gene, and neurogenetic determinism. In the clearest possible prose it differentiates the firmly established from the speculative and examines the claims of various fields such as string theory to approach a unified theory of everything. In doing so it challenges the orthodox consensus in those branches of cosmology, biology, and neuroscience that have ossified into dogma.Its striking analysis reveals underlying patterns of cooperation, complexification, and convergence that lead to the unique emergence in humans of a self-reflective consciousness that enables us to determine our future evolution.This groundbreaking book is destined to become a classic of scientific thinking.(67 black and white illustrations) 60 b&w diagrams and illustrations
About the Author
John Hands devoted more than ten years to evaluating scientific theories about human evolution from the origin of the universe, resulting in the 700-page Cosmosapiens. He graduated in chemistry from the University of London, where he was the first undergraduate President of the Union. He founded the Society for Co-operative Dwellings, co-authored two research studies, published Housing Co-operatives, and scripted, directed, and presented a documentary More Than a Place to Live broadcast twice on BBC2 Television. He was the founding Director of the UK Government's Co-operative Housing Agency and served on committees appointed by a Minister for Housing, a Secretary of State for the Environment, and a Secretary of State for Industry. He has tutored in both physics and management studies for the Open University and was Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of North London and then Royal Literary Fund Fellow at University College London. He has written three critically acclaimed novels, Perestroika Christi, Darkness at Dawn, and Brutal Fantasies, and been published in 8 countries.
