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Andrew Scott's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Andrew Scott recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Andrew Scott's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
One of the fundamental questions of our existence is why we are so smart. There are lots of drawbacks to having a large brain, including the huge food intake needed to keep the organ running, the frequency with which it goes wrong, and our very high infant and mother mortality rates compared with other mammals, due to the difficulty of giving birth to offspring with very large heads. So why did evolution favour the brainy ape? This question has been widely debated among biological anthropologists, and in recent years, Maslin and his colleagues have pioneered a new theory that might just be... more
Recommended by Andrew Scott, and 1 others.

Andrew Scottintegrates not only geology, palaeontology and archeology but also climate and vegetation change. An excellent summary of how much we have learned over the past forty years (Source)

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2
This is the story of a single pebble. It is just a normal pebble, as you might pick up on holiday - on a beach in Wales, say. Its history, though, carries us into abyssal depths of time, and across the farthest reaches of space.

This is a narrative of the Earth's long and dramatic history, as gleaned from a single pebble. It begins as the pebble-particles form amid unimaginable violence in distal realms of the Universe, in the Big Bang and in supernova explosions and continues amid the construction of the Solar System. Jan Zalasiewicz shows the almost incredible complexity present...
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Recommended by Andrew Scott, and 1 others.

Andrew ScottThe book is a real gem. It illustrates not only how all the sciences are involved in unraveling the history of our planet but the sheer excitement of the discoveries and that there is a story for us all to unravel. (Source)

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3
Australopithecines, dinosaurs, trilobites--such fossils conjure up images of lost worlds filled with vanished organisms. But in the full history of life, ancient animals, even the trilobites, form only the half-billion-year tip of a nearly four-billion-year iceberg. Andrew Knoll explores the deep history of life from its origins on a young planet to the incredible Cambrian explosion, presenting a compelling new explanation for the emergence of biological novelty.


The very latest discoveries in paleontology--many of them made by the author and his students--are integrated...
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Richard ForteyIt’s very important, when we muck around with the atmosphere as we’re doing, to realise that what we have is actually a product of this ineffable and long period of planetary evolution. (Source)

Andrew ScottKnoll shows the intimate relationship between the evolution of life and the evolution of the planet. (Source)

Paul FalkowskiWhat Andy has done is really exposed us to the world before animals and plants, when there was strong evidence of life but the world was totally controlled by single celled organisms, the protists. (Source)

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4
Global warming is contentious and difficult to measure, even among the majority of scientists who agree that it is taking place. Will temperatures rise by 2C or 8C over the next hundred years? Will sea levels rise by 2 or 30 feet? The only way that we can accurately answer questions like these is by looking into the distant past, for a comparison with the world long before the rise of mankind. We may currently believe that atmospheric shifts, like global warming, result from our impact on the planet, but the earth's atmosphere has been dramatically shifting since its creation. Drawing on... more
Recommended by Jonathan Silvertown, Andrew Scott, and 2 others.

Jonathan SilvertownThe Emerald Planet is a serious talking to about why plants must not be ignored. (Source)

Andrew ScottBeerling clearly shows that plants shaped the world in which we live and played a more important role on the evolution of our planet that is often acknowledged. (Source)

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