Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe - Hardcover

This is a truly exceptional piece of work.--Tim Crane, Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge

John Hands is an astute observer of recent trends in scientific ideas bold enough to point out what he sees as sense and nonsense and intelligently explain why. Even in cases where one might disagree, the arguments are thought-provoking.--Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Princeton University

A magisterial, persuasive and thought provoking survey of the horizons of modern science.--Dr James Le Fanu, author of The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine

A major accomplishment--Professor James Shapiro, author of Evolution: A View From The 21st Century

Any conventional Darwinist (and I am one of them) will find a lot to take exception to: but disagreement is the fuel of progress and if you enjoy an argument this is the book for you.--Professor Steve Jones, author of The Language of the Genes

A fine book...brave, very wide ranging, synoptic.--Professor Stuart Kauffman, author of At Home in the Universe

A compendious work that will intrigue serious readers

A thoughtful, well-written volume

[A] Book of astonishing ambition and scope.

Hands wants to create here a grand synthesis of the history of scientific research in such fields as astronomy, physics, and evolutionary biology. He lays out a sharply lucid picture of each of these disciplines and expertly summarizes the latest thinking on each.

Specialist scientific fields are developing at incredibly swift speeds, but what can they really tell us about how the universe began and how we humans evolved to play such a dominant role on Earth?John Hands’s extraordinarily ambitious quest is to bring together this scientific knowledge and evaluate without bias or preconception all the theories and evidence about the origin and evolution of matter, life, consciousness, and humankind.This astonishing book provides the most comprehensive account yet of current ideas such as cosmic inflation, dark energy, the selfish gene, and neurogenetic determinism. In the clearest possible prose it differentiates the firmly established from the speculative and examines the claims of various fields such as string theory to approach a unified theory of everything. In doing so it challenges the orthodox consensus in those branches of cosmology, biology, and neuroscience that have ossified into dogma.Its striking analysis reveals underlying patterns of cooperation, complexification, and convergence that lead to the unique emergence in humans of a self-reflective consciousness that enables us to determine our future evolution.This groundbreaking book is destined to become a classic of scientific thinking.(67 black and white illustrations)