100 Best Evolution Books of All Time

Barack Obama

Former USA President

Fact or fiction, the president knows that reading keeps the mind sharp. He also delved into these non-fiction reads. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Both Melinda and I read this one, and it has sparked lots of great conversations at our dinner table. Harari takes on a daunting challenge: to tell the entire history of the human race in just 400 pages. He also writes about our species today and how artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and other technologies will change us in the future. Although I found things to disagree with—especially Harari’s claim that humans were better off before we started farming—I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who’s interested in the history and future of our species. [source]

Reid Hoffman

CEO/LinkedIn

A grand theory of humanity. [source]

Charles T. Munger

Vice Chairman/Berkshire Hathaway

recommends this book in the second edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack. [source]

Matt Ridley

Turned evolutionary biology on its head and was written like a great detective story. [source]

Phil Libin

CEO/Evernote

Had a profound influence on me pretty early on. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Fascinating.... Lays a foundation for understanding human history. [source]

Daniel Ek

A brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning book about how the modern world was formed, analyzing how societies developed differently on different continents. [source]

Simon Sinek

Author

I’m a fan of books that challenge our assumptions, and Diamond offers us a new and remarkably simple way of looking at our world. Learning to challenge existing assumptions is core to effective leadership for it trains us to keep an open mind. [source]

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Astrophysicist, Author & Science Communicator

Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on planet? … On the Origin of Species (Darwin) to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth. If you read all of the above works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world. [source]

Mark Kurlansky

It is one of the most important books written, and I always urge people to read it. [source]

Adam Maloof

For me (and many others) this book forms the foundation for modern biology. It is all about humans’ concept of themselves. [source]

James Randi

They talk about the blind watchmaker not being able to make a watch, but if you’re given an almost infinite number of combinations and permutations of materials and situations, the world will come about. Or it may not. In our case, it came about. You’re here, I’m here, and I’m very happy about that. [source]

Jerry Coyne

If I had to pick just one self-contained book that lays out Dawkins’s philosophy and methodology, and shows his literary skills, I would have to pick this one. [source]

Kenneth Miller

In the Dawkins book I chose, The Blind Watchmaker, he brilliantly explains how complex mechanisms and structures are put together by the process of evolution. It is true that he makes certain theological points that I don’t agree with. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Harari’s new book is as challenging and readable as Sapiens. Rather than looking back, as Sapiens does, it looks to the future. I don’t agree with everything the author has to say, but he has written a thoughtful look at what may be in store for humanity. [source]

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

I certainly wouldn’t consider myself a big reader of paleontology or anthropology – not good words for us dyslexics! – but I enjoy learning about how society has unfolded and history has developed in an exciting, easy to read way. The sequel, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, is a fascinating look into the future too. While these aren’t traditional business or leadership books, they are all about people – and learning how to work with, live with, interact with people and get the best out of them is what leadership is all about. [source]

Vinod Khosla

Co-Founder/Sun Microsystem

Not that I agree with all of it, but it is still mind-bending speculation about our future as a follow-up to a previous favorite, Sapiens. It’s directionally right. [source]

Antonio Eram

This book was recommended by Antonio when asked for titles he would recommend to young people interested in his career path. [source]

Susan Jacoby

Richard Dawkins is very funny. One of the reasons for reading The God Delusion is that it will disabuse you of the idea – which is a common stereotype of atheists – that they are utterly humourless. You hear this over and over again. I’m often invited to college campuses to give lectures, and often they’re religious schools – not fundamentalist schools, but colleges of a historically religious type. And very often I will hear: “Oh I expected you to be small and dark-haired and wear glasses!” The image of the atheist woman is kind of like what the image of the feminist used to be, someone too ugly to get a man. But part of it is also humorlessness. People will often say to me, “Oh you’re so funny.” “Well, yeah!” [source]

Vote Dem For The Planet

@KimBledsoe14 @Goodbye_Jesus @Ian313f There were a lot of rebels and drifters in those days against the repressive regime. They had followers. Have you read “The God Delusion”? Great book. [source]

Amanda Palmer

Amanda Palmer recommended this book in the book "Tools of Titans". [source]

David Goldberg

What I really liked about A Short History of Nearly Everything is that it gives an excellent account of a lot of the personalities and the interconnectedness of important discoveries in cosmology and elsewhere. He does such a great job of bringing together our understanding of cosmology, evolution, paleontology, and geology in a very, very fluid way. [source]

Fabrice Grinda

I have lots of books to recommend, but they are not related to my career path. The only one that is remotely related is Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. That said here are books I would recommend. [source]

Barack Obama

Former USA President

The president also released a list of his summer favorites back in 2015: All That Is, James Salter The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert. Climate change is a big problem—one of the biggest we’ll face this century—but it’s not the only environmental concern on the horizon. Humans are putting down massive amounts of pavement, moving species around the planet, over-fishing and acidifying the oceans, changing the chemical composition of rivers, and more. Natural scientists posit that there have been five extinction events in the Earth’s history (think of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs), and Kolbert makes a compelling case that human activity is leading to the sixth. Unlike a lot of people who write about the environment, Kolbert doesn’t resort to hype. She just lays out the facts and wraps them in memorable anecdotes. It’s a sobering but engaging and informative read. [source]

Jeff Bezos

Founder/Amazon

"In his autobiography, Walmart's founder expounds on the principles of discount retailing and discusses his core values of frugality and a bias for action — a willingness to try a lot of things and make many mistakes. Bezos included both in Amazon's corporate values," Brad Stone writes. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

"Mukherjee wrote this book for a lay audience, because he knows that the new genome technologies are at the cusp of affecting us all in profound ways," Gates wrote. Mukherjee is what Gates calls a "quadruple threat." He's a practicing physician, teacher, researcher, and author. [source]

Amit Paranjape

@vikramsathaye @DrSidMukherjee @kiranshaw Great book. [source]

Bryan Johnson

A great book. [source]

Sam Harris

I highly recommend. It really is the most accessible discussion of brain science you will find. [source]

Vinod Khosla

Co-Founder/Sun Microsystem

Among the best insights into our brain and behavior. A top of the charts for me for this year, along with Scale. [source]

Bryan Johnson

Bryan Johnson recommended this book on Twitter. [source]

Noah Kagan

Founder/Sumo

A few months ago, I was drinking a Noah’s Mill whiskey (cute) with my good buddy Brian Balfour and talking about life... During the conversation, we got on the topic of books that changed our lives. I want to share them with you. I judge a book's success if a year later I'm still using at least 1 thing from the book. [source]

Esther Perel

Esther Perel recommended this book as an answer to "What are some resources for couples who want to explore having a more “monogamish” relationship?" [source]

Mark Zuckerberg

Founder/Facebook

This book aims to tell a history of humanity from the perspective of genetics rather than sociology. This should complement the other broad histories I've read this year, as well as follow "Energy" well in focusing on science. I've wanted to read Matt Ridley's books for a while. His recent book "The Rational Optimist" about how progress and the economy evolve is also near the top of my ever-growing pile of books to read. [source]

Naval Ravikant

CEO & Co-Founder/AngelList

Getting into the more evolution, science kind of books, I really highly, highly recommend picking up Genome … . [source]

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]

Ante Shoda

It explains 14 billion years of the evolution of the universe, a sort of engineering experiment on the largest possible scale. It spans all scales of space and time, describing everything from the largest scales of the universe to the smallest scales of molecules and atoms. It’s a good book for putting everything in perspective. [source]

Anurag Ramdasan

This book helped draft a great perspective on the world and the universe at large and made me a fan of the Cosmos!

Carl Zimmer

I chose this because I think it expresses a really important idea. Richard Dawkins wrote this book not long after The Selfish Gene came out. That was his landmark book, in which he argued for a gene-centric view of evolution. Genes build bodies. They build traits, which are known as phenotypes, in order to be replicated in the next generation. [source]

Peter Atkins

Shows a highly imaginative approach to understanding the nature of the biosphere. A very clever book. [source]

Lane Greene

There are two achievements in this book. One is to smuggle Linguistics 101 into a popular book, which is just fantastic. The other is his own argument about the nature of language, and the title says it all. [source]

Simon Baron-Cohen

It’s a really wonderful example of what you can do: take research into something as fundamental to human nature as language and make it accessible to a wide audience. [source]

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]

Adam Hart-Davis

When Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time..his publisher told him that every equation he left in would halve the number of readers [source]

Anurag Ramdasan

My first intro into the world of physics and this got me completely hooked!

Antonio Eram

This book was recommended by Antonio when asked for titles he would recommend to young people interested in his career path. [source]

Mark O'Connell

I wouldn’t be the first to look at him this way but I read Kurzweil’s work as essentially a work of religious mysticism. I think there’s no other way to read it, really. [source]

Steve Aoki

It opened me up to the idea of science fiction becoming science fact. [source]

A.J. Jacobs

All about trying to figure out the gap between the red and blue states – Republican and Democrat – and it’s really interesting. [source]

Akin Oyebode

@eggheader @OnemuVictor1 @JonHaidt Abeg order two. I read Righteous Mind which he also wrote, and that was a very fascinating book. [source]

Andrew M. Mwenda

The best work on this is a book by Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind: Why good People are Divided by Religion and Politics.” He argues that human beings have deeply entrenched moral intuitions which guide their assessment of reality. Facts matter very little if at all. [source]

Barry Estabrook

Michael Pollan looks at food production through four meals. One is a fast-food meal, the other is an industrial-scale organic meal, then there is a small-scale organic meal and finally he actually goes out and either grows or kills, in the case of the meat, the entire meal himself. That is the narrative. [source]

Gabriel Coarna

Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" --more precisely, the first 3rd of it-- was what first made me realize how badly the Earth, as an ecosystem, is out of balance. [source]

Paul Rozin

Michael Pollan is an excellent journalist who specializes in the food domain.He proposes relying more on whole foods and less on processed foods, like Oreo Cookies. He argues that unprocessed foods are more nutritious, more wholistic and better for the environment. [source]

Elizabeth C. Mclaughlin

I've recommended the book White Fragility on here many times, and this interview is a great place to start. If you're a white person who believes you're not racist, please read this article. And then go read the book. https://t.co/S5plH3wS5m [source]

Marshall Kirkpatrick

@jhagel This is a great book btw! [source]

Todd Nesloney

@SarahSuggs13 I love that book, have spoken with the author, and did an entire staff book study. Again, had you even tried to see my work that I do, you'd have learned that. You seek to divide and that is it. Great lesson for our students. [source]

Vinod Khosla

Co-Founder/Sun Microsystem

Reveals incredible scientific breakthroughs about aging and ways we can slow down, or even reverse, the process. [source]

Vinod Khosla

Co-Founder/Sun Microsystem

Reveals incredible scientific breakthroughs about aging and ways we can slow down, or even reverse, the process. [source]

Dave Asprey

Prepare to have your mind blown. You are holding in your hands the precious results of decades of work, as shared by Dr. David Sinclair, the rock star of aging and human longevity. [source]

Isabella Tree

Quammen’s wondrous peregrination of islands takes us on a journey of evolutions and extinctions in order to illustrate how like islands our continents have become. [source]

Sean B Carroll

The book covers the role that islands have played in our thinking about how nature works. [source]

TC Boyle

A brilliant journalist who can tell scientific stories with the kind of panache you’d expect from a novelist. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Yong succeeds in his intention to give us a 'grander view of life' and does so without falling prey to grand, unifying explanations that are far too simplistic. He presents our inner ecosystems in all their wondrous messiness and complexity. And he offers realistic optimism that our growing knowledge of the human microbiome will lead to great new opportunities for enhancing our health. [source]

Eric Schmidt

CEO/Google

When you finish this book, which takes a long time, you conclude that the world is in a much, much better place than it has been in the past. [source]

Mark Zuckerberg

Founder/Facebook

My second book of the year is The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. It's a timely book about how and why violence has steadily decreased throughout our history, and how we can continue this trend. Recent events might make it seem like violence and terrorism are more common than ever, so it's worth understanding that all violence -- even terrorism -- is actually decreasing over time. If we understand how we are achieving this, we can continue our path towards peace. A few people I trust have told me this is the best book they've ever read. It's a long book, so I plan on taking a month to read it rather than two weeks. I'll add a third book in two weeks that will be a shorter read to complement this. If you want to follow along with the books I'm reading and participate in conversations with the authors, you can like the page A Year of Books. [source]

Lilian Ong

I gained clarity and a different perspective of living a life with purpose. I learned that how we are “wired” or our S.H.A.P.E can help us find the purpose of our life. [source]

Robert Katai

I have 2 books that resonate with me and my work. The first one is a book written by Rick Warren called “The Purpose-Driven Life” and the second one is “Purple Cow” by Seth Godin. These are the books that I can read over and over again, because they always remind me what’s my purpose in this life, in my daily job and what I can do with my projects and work to create a purple cow effect. [source]

Theresa Evanoff

Here are some of my favourites around purpose, positive habits, positive thinking, and business goals. I’m a firm believer that subject expertise can be learned, but character-building traits, like perseverance and purposefulness, must be honed. “Purpose Driven Life”, Rick Warren “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey "The Magic of Thinking Big", David J. Schwartz "The Power of Positive Thinking" by Norman Vincent Peale "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz “Good to Great”, Jim Collins “Doing Good Well”, Willie Cheng [source]

Carol Dweck

I was raised in the heyday of the IQ craze. My sixth grade teacher seated us around the room in IQ order and assigned all privileges on the basis of IQ. This book made me realise the effect it had on us and I saw that my work could play a role in bringing that era to a close. [source]

Jerry Coyne

He had this Marxist viewpoint towards biology which in the end made him almost reject natural selection. [source]

Susan Gelman

This is a classic book. It was published in 1981 and got a lot of attention when it came out. Gould just does this beautiful job of laying out the ‘biology as destiny’ idea – and then ripping it to shreds. [source]

Tim White

Darwin is a great writer and an excellent observer so it is a good place to start understanding where we came from, and how we came to that understanding. [source]

Tom Clarke

Darwin sees Valparaiso destroyed by an earthquake erupting and is horrified by the brutality of nature. [source]

Naval Ravikant

CEO & Co-Founder/AngelList

Getting into the more evolution, science kind of books, I really highly, highly recommend picking up … Origins of Virtue. [source]

Paul Seabright

Yes, exactly. In one sense Matt Ridley was restating the message which was already there in The Descent of Man but which had rather been forgotten. What this book did was popularise the idea that cooperation can indeed be favoured by natural selection. [source]

Malcolm Gladwell

Writer & Journalist

Lewis is the finest storyteller of our generation, and this is his best book. Supposedly about football (the title refers to the side of the field a quarterback is blind to), it’s actually an extraordinary story about love and redemption. [source]

Scott Keyes

Other than How To Win Friends And Influence People and Daily Rituals (for the reasons outlined above), I would recommend reading both Malcolm Gladwell’s collection, everything from Tipping Point to David & Goliath, and Michael Lewis’ as well, from Moneyball to The Blind Side. Irrespective of content, both are wonderful writers who use stories in effortless, compelling ways to make larger points. It’s something that can and should be emulated by everyone, not just writers. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Its subject is the history of humanity, focusing on why our species has succeeded and how we should think about the future. [source]

Mark Zuckerberg

Founder/Facebook

My next book for A Year of Books is The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. Two of the books I've read this year -- The Better Angels of Our Nature: and Why Nations Fail -- have explored how social and economic progress work together to make the world better. The Better Angels argues for that the two feed off each other, whereas Why Nations Fail argues that social and political progress ultimately controls the economic progress a society makes. This next book argues the opposite -- that economic progress is the greater force is pushing society forward. I'm interested to see which idea resonates more after exploring both frameworks. This is also the second one of Ridley's books I've read this year. Here's a photo from a few weeks back of me reading his book Genome with my dog Beast. [source]

Marc Andreessen

Co-Founder/Andreessen Horowitz

Sparkling explanation of how the economy evolves, producing the glorious cornucopia of goods and services available all around us. How to feel good about the future even in dark times. [source]

Caspar Henderson

Darwin’s books are a series of masterpieces. From early works such as The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs in 1842, to his last, which has the unpromising title The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, published in 1881, he gives us a truly majestic view of the workings of even the smallest life forms which, however humble they may appear, have global consequences. [source]

Peter Singer

Yes, in the sense that we are descendants of other animals. I like The Descent of Man better than The Origin of Species because Darwin is prepared to be much bolder in The Descent of Man. In The Origin of Species he was still a little bit timid. He presents the idea of how species develop, and that is what we now refer to as evolution. But he didn’t apply it to humans. He really didn’t dare to say that we humans developed from other apes just as horses, for example, developed from early proto-horses. He didn’t use the term ‘evolution’ anywhere in the original editions of The Origin of Species. He does use it in later editions, but that’s around the time when The Descent of Man is published. [source]

Angela Saini

This is a book that demonstrates the misogynistic lens through which some male biologists have viewed the past. Morris routinely and repeatedly peddles the view that women have evolved to be monogamous, stay-at-home caregivers while men have pushed up human intelligence through their actions as hunters and providers. [source]

Stephane Grand

When a look back at my career path, it is the one of an entrepreneur. I have built various businesses, from accounting and financial advisory firms to tech and security businesses. I have also spent most of my adult life in China, a country that is quite hostile to foreigners and very unfair. I have accepted to suffer the hardships of building my business without any investment from anybody, and stick very firmly to my values. I would recommend young people to read about adventure, hardships, and moral choices. Of course, it would be important to also read about the drivers of our humanity, hence the motley list below: … The Naked Ape, Desmond Moriss’s classic zoological study of the human being. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford, has a gift for making science enjoyable. This book is as accessible as the TV series Cosmos is for younger audiences—and as relevant for older audiences. It’s an engaging, well-illustrated science textbook offering compelling answers to big questions, like “how did the universe form?” and “what causes earthquakes?” It’s also a plea for readers of all ages to approach mysteries with rigor and curiosity. Dawkins’s antagonistic (and, to me, overzealous) view of religion has earned him a lot of angry critics, but I consider him to be one of the great scientific writer/explainers of all time. [source]

Vote Dem For The Planet

@EJDuboisL7444 @realDonaldTrump It’s a great book, like all Dawkins’ books. [source]

Barbara Kiser

Quammen is one of the great science journalists, and this is a monument of a book—a masterful retelling of how the ‘tree of life’ was recast in the twentieth century by a band of original thinkers. [source]

Robert Macfarlane

@josephQED @abinadi Quammen’s is a great book. [source]

Steven Raichlen

People have deep emotions about grilling. The act of lighting a fire and creating a barbecue seems to bring a sense of comfort, satisfaction and community that you just don’t get with other cooking methods. Why? There is the pleasure of sitting around a fire, the incredible aromas and flavours you get with cooking over fire and then there’s the long human history of open-fire cooking. [source]

Suzana Herculano-Houzel

Essentially what Richard proposes is that the turning point in human evolutionary history was the invention of cooking. [source]

Gabriel Coarna

David Epstein's "The Sports Gene" made me decide to never tell a child that "if you really really want something, and you work really really hard, then you can achieve your dream" -- not when it comes to sports, at least. [source]

Paul Kedrosky

@fromedome @nkl Start with @DavidEpstein’s terrific book The Sports Gene. Great independently, but many academic references as well. [source]

David George Haskell

Through the stories of four familiar plant species–apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes–he demolishes the erroneous impression that we’re in charge. [source]

Kenneth Cox

You can’t fail to be fascinated by this exposition of the motivations of plants to cuddle up to humans. One of several excellent Michael Pollan books, it’s a fun read. [source]

Ed Stafford

An honour to be asked to do an impromptu little talk tonight after #christophermcdougall. Great to see the big man in the flesh in the UK. #BornToRun was a book that definitely changed the path of my life. #legend @vivobarefoot #barefootrunning https://t.co/3QgVKZ0OQ4 [source]

Turia Pitt

If people are interested in running, I give them this book. [source]

Beth Shapiro

He describes in this book not only the beauty of these animals, but the human landscape they live in and what a disastrous time he has getting to these locations. [source]

Gaia Vince

This is a book obviously for readers but it’s also a book for writers of science to understand how to capture the imagination of readers. [source]

Mark Lynas

For me, Last Chance to See is a real eye-opener, with the idea that you can take a depressing subject – species on the verge of extinction – and present it in a way which is so engaging, so funny and so humane. [source]