Humans took a wrong evolutionary turn when they invented agriculture, argues geneticist and geographer Spencer Wells in Pandora's Seed (Allen Lane, 2010). Our hunter-gatherer bodies are ill-equipped for the overly structured life ushered in by managed food production: grain crops have made us sedentary overbreeders, and animal husbandry has entrenched disease. The societal hierarchies that formed to control food resources and maintain inequality have led to the stress-related illnesses of today. Wells suggests that we should instead match our lifestyle to our genetic inheritance.

Death writ large is the subject of How it Ends (W. W. Norton, 2010) by astronomer Chris Impey. From individuals to species, our planet and the Universe, the book uses the thread of extinction to poke at issues such as the extension of human life, evolutionary competition and cosmology. Impey cautions that we cannot escape the Sun's eventual dimming and the disintegration of space-time, but takes a holistic rather than a mournful view, seeing existence as a fleeting joy.

Vanished Ocean (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010) pieces together the story of Tethys, a vast equatorial waterway that disappeared some 6 million years ago when the continents shifted. Only small pools such as the Caspian Sea remain. Geologist Dorrik Stow explains the detective work that has unearthed Tethys's shadow in rocks from Morocco to China. He relates this ocean's significance for the fossil record, from dinosaurs to the organisms that formed oil, and how its disappearance holds lessons for understanding environmental change today. Stow also recalls the drying up and refilling of the Mediterranean, highlighting the impact of shifting oceans on climate.