New Books in Biology and Evolution

New Books Network
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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

  1. 2d ago

    Jay Belsky, "Nature of Nurture: Rethinking Why and How Childhood Adversity Shapes Development" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    Children who grow up in troubled circumstances―experiencing deprivation or instability, living in a dangerous neighborhood or an abusive family―are more prone to aggression, recklessness, and sexual promiscuity later in life. To most of us, the lesson is clear: adverse childhood conditions make human development go awry. In The Nature of Nurture: Rethinking Why and How Childhood Adversity Shapes Development (Harvard University Press, 2026), renowned developmental psychologist Jay Belsky challenges this interpretation and offers an exciting alternative based on Darwinian theory. There is no reason to assume, he points out, that the psychology of “well-behaved” people is normal while that of “antisocial” adults is aberrant. Instead, the supposedly dysfunctional behaviors correlated with childhood adversity could well be ingenious adaptations to harsh environments. If you are surrounded by danger and uncertainty, then being quick to lash out at potential threats and having lots of offspring at an early age are good ways to maximize your reproductive chances. From an evolutionary perspective, having just a few children and lavishing care on each works well in a stable world, but not in a perilous one. Belsky exposes the romanticism underlying our idealized notions that “natural” equals “good” and that nature intends to maximize human happiness and well-being. When instead we take seriously the fact that humans, too, have been shaped by evolutionary pressures, we can better understand why, how, and for whom childhood experience shapes later life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  2. 2d ago

    Philippa Gander, "Life in Sync: The Science of Internal Clocks and How We’re Disrupting Them" (Princeton UP, 2025)

    All of life is profoundly shaped by the daily, monthly, and yearly cycles of our planet, and all creatures have internal timekeeping systems that rely on cues from the surrounding environment. With modern technology, we are changing our environments—and by proxy, the ecosystems around us—to override these innate rhythms of life. But at what cost? Life in Sync: The Science of Internal Clocks and How We're Disrupting Them (Princeton University Press, 2025) reveals how Earth’s rotations shape our biology, what human sleep cycles looked like before the advent of artificial light, and why technology can’t free us from the constraints of our circadian clocks. Philippa Gander explores the science behind the biological rhythms that animate us and our world, blending captivating storytelling with illuminating examples ranging from migratory birds and hibernating squirrels to jet-lagged pilots and astronauts in space. She shows how genetic circadian clocks are an ancient evolutionary adaptation that we share with all life on the planet, and how our rapidly expanding use of artificial light at night disrupts the time cues for entire ecosystems. Gander explains why cutting back on sleep adversely affects our well-being, safety, and longevity, and how breakthroughs in sleep science offer solutions to bring our lives more in harmony with nature’s rhythms. An astonishing journey of scientific discovery, Life in Sync unlocks the mysteries of biological time—and offers new perspectives for anyone who has ever given up a good night’s sleep for the sake of their hectic waking hours. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  3. 2d ago

    Rod Phillips, "Cats: A History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)

    For more than 10,000 years, cats have prowled at the edges of human life. But, starting only a few decades ago, hundreds of millions of them became pets. In Cats: A History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Rod Phillips shares a sweeping cultural and social history of felines, tracing their shifting place across societies and centuries, from ancient Egypt's revered hunters to Europe's suspected familiars of witches and from shipboard rodent controllers to cherished internet icons. Professor Phillips illustrates how cats have always occupied spaces both familiar and mysterious and how their perceived independence and disruptive nature—and their associations with women, the supernatural, and outsiders—have shaped humans' attitudes toward these fascinating creatures. Cats have been lauded as companions and vermin-killers, reviled as threats to moral and ecological order, and cherished for the very qualities that make them hard to control. This richly textured portrait of cats explores their significance in religion, politics, gender, literature, warfare, and pop culture. It also provides profound insights into our relationships with other animals, especially dogs and rodents. The many roles that cats have played throughout history illuminate a variety of contradictions in humans' perceptions of them: as affectionate yet aloof, adorable and evil, ordinary and exceptional. This book is the definitive story of the feline presence in human history—an elegant study of how we live with animals whom we see as living by their own rules. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  4. Jul 4

    Sadiah Qureshi, "Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction" (Penguin, 2025)

    Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction? Extinction, Professor Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept—and a phenomenon that’s not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to determine that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans. Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to pervasive, and even inevitable. Yet Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Penguin, 2025) shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s a political choice that has led to devasting consequences. Europeans and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion. Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished weaves together pioneering original research and breath-taking storytelling to show us extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  5. Jun 13

    Philippe Huneman, "When Metaphysics Meets Biology: Kantian Approaches to the Concept of An Organism" (Routledge, 2026)

    Central to modern biology and the study of life is the concept of the organism—roughly, a body with interconnected parts that make specific contributions to the development and functioning of the whole. There are competing organism concepts even today, but the 18th century was a critical period in which thinkers gradually shed prior ideas of life in terms of a body with a principle of spontaneous motion, a body as a mere physical mechanism, or a body infused with vital spirits. In When Metaphysics Meets Biology: Kantian approaches to the concept of organism (Routledge, 2026), Philippe Huneman combines extensive scholarship in the history and philosophy of biology with Kantian critical philosophy and metaphysics to trace Kant’s contributions to the emerging organism concept. Huneman discusses the Critique of the Power of Judgment and other writings in which Kant developed a view of organisms as natural purposes and in which part-whole reasoning by the faculty of judgment is a condition of the possibility of thinking of organisms at all. Huneman, who is director of research at the Institute of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at CNRS and University of Paris 1 – Pantheon-Sorbonne, provides an account of Kant’s thinking that is accessible yet promises to bring this neglected aspect of Kant into dialogue with contemporary Kantian scholarship.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  6. May 18

    Benjamin Dalton, "Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film: Witnessing Plasticity" (Edinburgh UP, 2026)

    Our bodies and brains are radically transformable, mutable and plastic. From the neuroplasticity of the brain to the epigenetic malleability of our bodies and of all organic life, the work of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou invites us to consider our plasticity as both a creative resource and an ethical challenge. Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film: Witnessing Plasticity (Edinburgh UP, 2026) brings Malabou's philosophy into dialogue with contemporary literature and film. It reads conceptions of plasticity and neuroplasticity in Malabou through the mutant bodies of Leos Carax's films; the shape-shifting bodies of Marie Darrieussecq's novels and theatre; the terrifying, traumatic metamorphoses depicted in the fiction of Marie NDiaye; and the anarchic sexualities and identities celebrated in the cinema and writing of Alain Guiraudie. It argues that, in different ways, Malabou's philosophy and literary and filmic texts develop modes of bearing witness to plasticity which can supplement, challenge and extend scientific understandings of biological plasticity, constituting ethical and creative sites of exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  7. May 13

    Rina Bliss, "What's Real About Race: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society" (W.W. Norton, 2025)

    Professor Rina Bliss teaches in the sociology department at Rutgers University, and has written on the social significance of genetic studies on intelligence, race, and social factors.   In What's Real About Race: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society (W.W. Norton, 2025) Bliss explores the history of race as a genetic category, its haphazardness across research, medical, and social contexts, and its implications for knowledge production. In this work, Bliss sheds light on the real impacts of racism on bodies and lives, and on how these myths structure modern science and industries. This interview is a conversation between Rina Bliss and a group of Princeton graduate students/visiting faculty involved in an interdisciplinary (IHUM) STS Reading group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  8. May 12

    Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, "The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us" (Liveright Publishing, 2026)

    MacArthur Fellow and National Humanities Medalist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex and The Mind-Body Problem, returns with a revelatory book about the primal drive that in our species alone has been transformed into one of our most persistent and universal motivations: the longing to matter. Drawing on biology, psychology, and philosophy, in The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us (Liveright Publishing, 2026) Goldstein argues that this need to matter―and the various “mattering projects” it inspires―is the source of our greatest progress and our deepest conflicts: the very crux of the human experience.Goldstein brings this profound idea to life through unforgettable stories of famous and not-so-famous people pursuing their unique mattering projects: the ragtime genius Scott Joplin, whose dedication to his ignored masterpiece, Treemonisha, ended in tragedy; the pioneering psychologist William James, who rose above the depression of his young adulthood to become perhaps the first great theorist of mattering; an impoverished Chinese woman who rescued abandoned newborns from the trash; and a neo-Nazi skinhead who as a young man dealt racial violence to feel he mattered but ultimately renounced that hateful past after realizing that mattering isn’t a zero-sum game. These portraits illuminate how our instinct for significance shapes identity, relationships, culture, and conflict―and they point the way to a future where we all might see that there is, fundamentally, enough mattering to go around.Deeply revealing and insightful, and decades in the making, The Mattering Instinct is a must read for those curious about why we seek to matter to ourselves and others―and how this insatiable longing that drives us apart may be the key to finally understanding each other. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

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