Hoyle, Fred. The Intelligent Universe. London: Michael Joseph Limited,
- Fred Hoyle’s statement of the arguments for “panspermia”: the idea
that life did not evolve on earth, but elsewhere in the cosmos.
Hughes, J. Donald. An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s
Changing Role in the Community of Life. London: Routledge, 2001. One of
the very few books for the general reader that survey the entire history of
human relations with the environment.
Hughes-Warrington, Marnie. “Big History.” Historically Speaking 20
(November 2002): 16–17. A brief survey of the history of big history by a
teacher of big history who is also a historiographer. An expanded version is
available in Social Evolution & History 4, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 7–21.
Johanson, D. C., and M. Edey. Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. A highly readable account of one of the
great anthropological discoveries of the 20th century.
Johnson, Allen W., and Timothy Earle. The Evolution of Human Societies.
2 nd ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. An evolutionary
account of human history from an anthropological perspective. Particularly
interesting on factors that led to increasing social complexity.
Jones, Steve. Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated. London:
Anchor, 2000. A delightful account of what has changed since Darwin’s day
in our understanding of natural selection and the nature of life.
———, ed. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992. Very full coverage and articles by
leading experts.
Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-
Organization and Complexity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Though not always easy reading, this is one of the best introductions to
complexity theory for the nonspecialist.