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Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined-and Redefined-Nature - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined-and Redefined-Nature

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From the first dog to the first beefalo, from farming to CRISPR, the human history of remaking nature
 
When the 2020 Nobel Prize was awarded to the inventors of CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing tool, it underlined our amazing and apparently novel powers to alter nature. But as biologist Beth Shapiro argues in Life as We Made It, this phenomenon isn’t new. Humans have been reshaping the world around us for ages, from early dogs to modern bacteria modified to pump out insulin. Indeed, she claims, reshaping nature—resetting the course of evolution, ours and others’—is the essence of what our species does.
 
In exploring our evolutionary and cultural history, Shapiro finds a course for the future. If we have always been changing nature to help us survive and thrive, then we need to avoid naive arguments about how we might destroy it with our meddling, and instead ask how we can meddle better.
 
Brilliant and insightful, Life as We Made It is an essential book for the decades to come.
 

ISBN-13: 9781541644182

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Basic Books

Publication Date: 10-19-2021

Pages: 352

Product Dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)

Beth Shapiro is a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where her work has centered on the analysis of ancient DNA. The author of How to Clone a Mammoth, which won the AAAS science writing award, she lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Table of Contents

Prologue - Providence 1

Part I The Way It Is

Chapter 1 Bone Mining 13

Chapter 2 Origin Story 43

Chapter 3 Blitzkrieg 69

Chapter 4 Lactase Persistence 103

Chapter 5 Lake Cow Bacon 135

Part II The Way It Could Be

Chapter 6 Polled 171

Chapter 7 Intended Consequences 215

Chapter 8 Turkish Delight 259

Acknowledgments 293

Bibliography and References 297

Index 329