Transcendence

How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time

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Humans are a planet-altering force. Our closest living relatives, the now-endangered chimpanzees, continue to live as they have for millions of years. Yet we evolved through the same process. What are we then?

Gaia Vince argues that our unique ability to determine the course of our own destiny rests on a special relationship between our genes, environment and culture going back into deep time. It is our collective culture, rather than our individual intelligence, that makes humans unique. Vince shows how four evolutionary drivers - Fire, Language, Beauty and Time - are further transforming our species into a transcendent superorganism: a hyper-cooperative mass of humanity that she calls Homo omnis. Drawing on leading-edge advances in population genetics, archaeology, palaeontology and neuroscience, Transcendence compels us to reimagine ourselves, and shows us to be on the brink of something grander - and potentially more destructive.

A hugely enjoyable sprint through human evolutionary history . . . Read it.
Tim Radford, Nature

About Gaia Vince

Gaia Vince is an honorary senior research fellow at UCL and a science writer and broadcaster interested in the interplay between humans and the planetary environment. She has held senior editorial posts at Nature and New Scientist, and her writing has appeared in the Guardian, The Times and Scientific American. Her research takes her across the world: she has visited more than 60 countries, lived in three and is currently based in London. In 2015, she became the first woman to win the Royal Society Science Book of the Year Prize solo for her debut, Adventures in the Anthropocene.

Details

Imprint: Penguin
Published: 05/11/2020
ISBN: 9780141984209
Length: 320 pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 18mm x 129mm
Weight: 236g
Price: £10.99

All editions

Transcendence

How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time

Format:

Buy the book from:

A hugely enjoyable sprint through human evolutionary history . . . Read it.

Beautifully written . . . At her best Vince takes dizzying leaps, making connections between archaeology, anthropology, genetics and psychology. She is especially good on the delicate interplay between genes, environment and culture. Vince steps with lightness.

The storming success of Yuval Noah Harari's books has inspired many others that aim to span the epic sweep of human history with grand theories and cor-blimey factoids. This book does both.

Here is the miraculous creature we are: unlikely, poignant, astonishing ... Much to think about. This book gives rise to many such thoughts and is written with merciful clarity.

Wonderful ... enlightening.

Richly informed by the latest research, Gaia Vince's colourful survey fizzes like a zip-wire as it tours our species' story from the Big Bang to the coming age of hypercooperation.

An imaginative and inspiring adventure into the origins and evolution of what we hold most dear: our human culture.

This book goes from the Big Bang to the Hundred Thousand Genome Project to make a convincing case that Homo sapiens has become a super-organism. I learned a lot from it and so will you.

About Gaia Vince

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