June 19: Books Published Today

Eye of the Shoal: A Fish-Watcher’s Guide to Life, the Ocean and Everything by Helen Scales

Marine biologist Helen Scales shares the secrets of fish, unhitching them from their reputation as cold, unknowable beasts and reinventing them as clever, emotional, singing, thoughtful creatures, and challenging readers to rethink these animals.

Publishers Weekly says, “Popular science books don’t get much better than this accessible and eye-opening look at fish.”

Troublesome Science: The Misuse of Genetics and Genomics in Understanding Race by Rob DeSalle

The stark lines that humans insist on drawing between their own racial groups and others are nothing but a mixture of imagination and ideology. Troublesome Science demonstrates conclusively that modern genetic tools, when applied correctly to the study of human variety, fail to find genuine differences between what we refer to as “race.”

The Equations of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution by Charles S. Cockell

Biologist Charles S. Cockell makes the forceful argument that the laws of physics narrowly constrain how life can evolve, making evolution’s outcomes predictable. The Equations of Life is a groundbreaking argument for why alien life will evolve to be much like life here on Earth. If we were to find on a distant planet something very much like a lady bug eating something like an aphid, we shouldn’t be surprised.

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-bubbles – The Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

Algorithms are running our society, and we don’t even realize how our data has been used against us. Featuring interviews with those working at the cutting edge of algorithm, Outnumbered explains how mathematics and statistics work in the real world.

Kirkus Reviews calls it “a deliciously insightful, mildly skeptical analysis of internet data manipulation.”