San Antonio College Library

How did the human race populate the world? A group of geneticists have worked on the question for a decade, arriving at a startling conclusion: the "global family tree" can be traced to one African man who lived 60,000 years ago. Dr. Spencer Wells hosts this innovative series, featuring commentary by expert scientists, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists.

"Are we still evolving? Or has our mastery of the environment stopped natural selection in its tracks? In Children of Prometheus, biologist Christopher Wills gives a surprising answer: that the evolution of Homo sapiens is actually accelerating. To make this controversial case, Wills takes us to the far reaches of the planet. To the Tibetan plateau, where the severe climate has prompted rapid, short-term evolutionary change. To Africa, where human-caused...

In this video lesson, Paul Andersen describes genetic drift as a mechanism for evolutionary change. A population genetics simulator is used to show the importance of large population size in neutralizing random change. The near extinction of the northern elephant is used as an example of the bottleneck effect. The high incidence of total colorblindness due to a typhoon that hit the small island of Pingelap is also included.--Publisher.

A scientist describes how he linked the DNA found in the remains of a five-thousand-year-old man to modern-day relatives and explains how all modern individuals can trace their genetic makeup back to prehistoric times to seven primeval women.

"What does science say about race? In this book a ... research geneticist [posits] that traditional notions about distinct racial differences have little scientific foundation. In short, racism is not just morally wrong; it has no basis in fact, [and] the author ... describes in detail the factors that have led to the current scientific consensus about race"--Amazon.com.

"Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was among the first to ask whether the genes of modern populations contain a historical record of the human species. Cavalli-Sforza and others have answered this question - anticipated by Darwin - with a decisive yes. Genes, Peoples, and Languages comprises five lectures that serve as a summation of the author's work over several decades, the goal of which has been nothing less than tracking the past 100,000 years of human...

Science tells us we're all related - one vast family sharing a common ancestor who lived in Africa 60,000 years ago. But countless questions remain about our great journey from the birthplace of Homo sapiens. How and when did we end up where we are? Why do we display such a wide range of skin, hair, and eye colors and diverse physical features? The fossil record offers some answers, but new research reveals many more, since our DNA carries a chronicle...

"This book is about a growing and dangerous mismatch affecting the developed world: a mismatch that originates in our evolutionary history; that is influenced by development processes in the womb, and takes its toll as we grow to adulthood." "Our evolution designed us for a world very different from that which we have constructed for ourselves. Within a mere instant, in evolutionary terms, we have transformed our environment. But the widening mismatch...

Thomas H. Kunz is a professor of biology and director of the Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology at Boston University. He is the editor of Bat Biology and Conservation and Bat Ecology. Stuart Parsons is a senior lecturer in biological sciences at the University of Auckland, New Zealand -- Jacket.

"What can we learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Pääbo's mission to answer that question, beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009. From Pääbo, we learn how Neanderthal genes offer a unique window into the lives of our hominin relatives and may hold the key to unlocking the...