NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of the second edition of Carl Zimmer's The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution (Roberts and Company, 2013). The preview consists of the first few pages of chapter 14, "A New Kind of Ape," in which Zimmer presents "the latest consensus about how humans evolved." "We've already encountered fragments of this narrative in previous chapters," he observes. "Here we will synthesize many lines of evidence — from fossils to genomes — to discover our own story."
A columnist for The New York Times, a regular contributor to magazines such as Scientific American and National Geographic, and a recipient of NCSE's Friend of Darwin award, Carl Zimmer is the author of thirteen books, including Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea and Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. Praising the first edition, NCSE's Eugenie C. Scott said, "One rarely says of a textbook, 'I couldn't put it down,' but that was how I felt reading Carl Zimmer's The Tangled Bank."