When HMS Beagle sailed out of Devonport on 27 December 1831, Charles Darwin was twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime. This title shows a naturalist making patient observations concerning geology, natural history, people, places and events.

An account of a revolution in our understanding of life's history, this book tells how three obscure British scientists completely changed our view of evolution by discovering a unique group of 530 million year-old creatures in the Burgess Shale fossil deposit in the Rockies.

One of the most brilliant scientists of our age gives us his definitive work: a synthesis of his comprehensive vision of life.

This text is a metaphor for the way individuals and unpredictable events influence history. In response history, suggests the author, is the best model for evolution. The author explores the science of improbable outcomes in this wide ranging book written on the evolutionary theme.

How could such an intricate object as the human eye - so complex and so precise - have come about by chance? This title builds a carefully reasoned argument for evolutionary adaptation as the force behind the various life forms on earth.

Darwin's theory of natural selection is also a humane and inspirational vision of ecological inter-relatedness revealing the almost unthinkably complex and mutual inter-dependencies between animal and plant life, climate and physical environment and - by implication - the human world.