Why are people nice to each other? What are the reasons for altruism? This book explains how the human mind has evolved a special instinct for social exchange, offering a lucid and persuasive argument about the paradox of human benevolence.

In 'The Rational Optimist' Ridley offers a counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our age, and proves, however much we like to think to the contrary, that things are getting better.

Sex is a subject as fascinating to scientists as it is to the rest of us. From the contentious problem of why the wasteful reproductive process exists at all, to questions of how individuals choose their mates and what traits they find attractive and why, research into the nature of sex has given rise to a vast range of findings. This book explores these findings, and their implications for the sexual behaviour of our own species, putting forward the metaphor of the red queen (from Alice in Wonderland), who has to run at full speed to stay where she is as a highly effective metaphor for a...

The genome is our 100,000 or so genes. The genome is the collective recipe for the building and running of the human body. These 100,000 genes are sited across 23 pairs of chromosomes. Genome, a book of about 100,000 words, is divided into 23 chapters, a chapter for each chromosome. The first chromosome, for example, contains our oldest genes, genes which we have in common with plants.

'If there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make ... it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is.'