Books by Gísli Pálsson
“Two British people went to Iceland to find the last of the auks in the 1840s, which were reportedly on an outlying island. Extinction was a known phenomenon, but was thought to be something that happened to inferior species—they were kind of doomed to go extinct anyway, and not by human causes. In this case, through their very careful investigations and oral histories—interviewing people around Iceland who had seen auks or heard about them— as well as looking at the physical evidence, they discovered the great auk had gone extinct. It’s a powerful story of how people who love birds discovered a world-changing perspective on what we can do to the environment—that we, our greed, can destroy a species. That’s a pretty humbling revelation.” Read more...
Interviews where books by Gísli Pálsson were recommended
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1
Everything is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World
by Tom Chivers -
2
Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
by Cat Bohannon -
3
Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Startup Dismantling Your Privacy
by Kashmir Hill -
4
The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction
by Gísli Pálsson -
5
Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality
by Venki Ramakrishnan -
6
A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
The Best Popular Science Books of 2024, recommended by John Hutchinson
The Best Popular Science Books of 2024, recommended by John Hutchinson
Every year, the judges of the Royal Society Science Book Prize put together a shortlist of the smartest, sharpest, funniest science books of the previous twelve months. We asked the chair of the 2024 panel—the leading evolutionary biomechanics researcher Professor John Hutchinson—to talk us through their picks of the best new popular science books.
