New Books in Biology and Evolution

How the ground-breaking discovery of a new material form in chemistry—matter in a dynamic kinetic state—is helping to explain life’s unique characteristics. The materialist view of nature has guided scientific thinking since Galileo—reality can be measured, modeled, and explained. Nature is objective. But our everyday life experiences just don’t seem to fit in with that view. Purpose, desire, and consciousness are real, but not objective. How could natural processes have led to such unnatural consequences? The physical nature of living matter, a material form that has totally overwhelmed our planet, remains inexplicably unresolved. Biology, never mind psychology, simply does not make basic physical sense. Until now. In Life’s Chemical Secret: The Origin of Purpose and Mind (MIT Press, 2026), Addy Pross offers at last a scientific explanation for life’s greatest puzzle. Through the discovery of a new dimension in chemical possibility, Pross and his collaborators have opened a new door to understanding life’s fundamental nature. The emergence of cognition, mind, and purpose is now comprehensible through the existence of dynamic kinetic states of matter. Some four billion years after life on earth first appeared, living forms can now understand how the universe was able to discover itself.

Tune in to this discussion about How Real Is Race?: Unraveling Race, Biology, and Culture by Carol C. Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda T. Moses (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025) Biologically speaking, there is no such thing as race. Yet this seems to contradict the experiences of people in the United States and other countries where racial classification is used daily, by individuals and institutions. Race still matters, whether in wealth accumulation, educational achievement, health, the legal system, or in personal safety. How can race not be real when we experience its effects every day? Mukhopadhyay, Henze, and Moses systematically deconstruct the myth of race as biology and address the reality of race as a cultural invention, drawing on biocultural, historical, and cross-cultural anthropological perspectives. In doing so, they shed light on the intricate interplay among race, biology, culture, power, and stratification. Part I, “The Fallacy of Race as Biology,” unravels the myth that races are biologically valid divisions of humanity. Part II, “Culture Creates Race,” explores race as a social construction; the emergence of the racial worldview as ideological justification for inequality; and how social processes, especially restrictions on interracial sex and marriage, maintained visible markers of racial hierarchy. Part III, “Contemporary Issues,” examines current manifestations of racial stratification including the educational achievement gap, health disparities, and how the language of race embodies and reinforces a racial worldview. Dr. Mukhopadhyay is a cultural anthropologist whose specialties are gender, family, sexuality, race, cultural diversity, multicultural education, cognitive anthropology, ethnographic decision-modeling, theory and methodology. Her research has focused on gendered activities, in households, politics, music, and science & engineering (STEM). This has involved fieldwork in both the United States and India. Dr. Rosemary Henze is an educational anthropologist whose teaching, research, and educational projects seek to enhance social justice and equity in education. She applies concepts and methods from anthropology and linguistics to the study of race relations, immigration and multilingualism, Islamophobia, and the spread of English, among other topics. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

Embodied Intelligence: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Natural, Artificial, and Hybrid Systems (MIT Press, 2026) explores a radical transformation taking place in intelligence research. Rather than focusing exclusively on brains and computer code, the book examines the important role that embodiment plays in producing intelligent, goal-directed behavior.

With senses that often seem alien to us, bees navigate complex decisions about where to find food, when to fight or flee, and how to work together. The Language of Bees (Princeton University Press, 2026) invites readers into the hidden world of bee communication, a realm where creatures less than an inch long use scent, vibration, movement, and sound to cooperate, share information, and survive.

In Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species (Prometheus Books, 2024), Will M. Gervais, a global leader in the psychological study of atheism, shows that the ubiquity of religious belief and the peculiarities of atheism are connected pieces in the puzzle of human nature. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD candidate at Université Laval in Quebec City. [email protected] @carrielynnland.bsky.social