Hints and tips:
...In Richard Powers’ 13th novel, a gifted but troubled child undergoes experimental therapy....
...Music — more precisely, singing — probably served homo sapiens as courtship ritual....
...Reading thinkers such as Richard Dawkins converted him to atheism. That gave him a sense of urgency: without an afterlife, problems had to be solved in this world....
...But on Tuesday, with just weeks to go before it had to make an acquisition or be wound up, SCH bought a 49 per cent stake in Sir Richard Branson’s space tourism company Virgin Galactic....
...“Humans or homo sapiens didn’t invent walking. But walking invented human beings. So, of course, now we go into a time where we walk less and less,” he says, squatting by his cooker....
...Sir Richard Branson Founder, Virgin Group I loved Yuval Noah Harari’s delve into our species’ past, Sapiens (Vintage), and his predictions on our future, Homo Deus (Vintage)....
...Richard Powers’ 12th novel is a rare specimen: a Great American Eco-Novel....
...Doing so required swimming against the scientific current of the time, which was epitomised by works such as Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene(1976)....
...The Long ’68, by Richard Vinen, Allen Lane, RRP£20 A prizewinning historian on the wave of protests 50 years ago that shook governments in France and beyond....
...If others don’t observe this civilised custom, which emphasises respect, then it is their loss and a sign of not taking the trouble to be tribal, which underpins our behaviour as homo sapiens....
...But Richard Leakey — Kenyan conservationist, palaeontologist and arguably the most respected white man in Africa — has got there first....
...In 1967 Leakey’s father Richard made yet another discovery: fossil-rich sediments near Lake Turkana, the world’s largest desert lake, which stretches 180 miles from the Omo delta into the arid scrubland...
...Caroline Daniel Editor of FT Weekend Richard Thaler is a bon vivant provocateur. His character and his latest book, Misbehaving (Allen Lane/WW Norton), were forged in the University of Chicago....
...Yuval Noah Harari Author of ‘Sapiens’ Until 1979 few American soldiers had lost their lives in the Middle East, but since 1979 few have lost their lives anywhere else....
...Like early creatures leaving the sea on their way to becoming homo sapiens, London rises up as well as spreading wide....
...Immortality was in the air, too, with the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari speculating in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity on what might happen if advances in bioengineering and artificial intelligence...
...Stephen Witt Author of ‘How Music Got Free’ In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harvill Secker/ Harper), Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests that currencies, laws, religions and even nation-states...
...… The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan, Chatto & Windus, RRP£16.99/ Knopf, RRP$26.95 Winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize, this exquisitely written novel by the Australian author Richard...
...One emphasises complexity, with lots of hominid species evolving and dying out until Homo sapiens was left alone and triumphant 20,000 to 30,000 years ago....
...Keanu Reeves, wearing his Homo Sapiens cap, as distinct from his Anthropithecus Action-hokum, mediates a symposium about the changeover from celluloid to digital film. Sounds dry? Quite the opposite....
...As the great physicist Richard Feynman once said: “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.”...
...Pagel reconciles the “selfish gene” philosophy associated with Richard Dawkins with the advantages of group selection: people can compete more effectively by co-operating....
...Controlled fires and cooking date back at least 300,000 to 400,000 years – before the emergence of Homo sapiens....
...He traces the tortuous path from free-living cells, fighting for survival, to the most sophisticated creature to have evolved so far on earth, Homo sapiens....
...If Richard Dawkins is wrong and there is a God, I am reminded of Woody Allen’s quip that God’s idea of a joke is “watching humans make plans for the future”....
International Edition