The recognition of animal pain and stress, once controversial, is now acknowledged by legislation in many countries, but there is no formal recognition of animals' ability to feel pleasure. Pleasurable Kingdom is the first book for lay-readers to present new evidence that animals--like humans--enjoy themselves. It debunks the popular perception that life for most is a continuous, grim struggle for survival and the avoidance of pain. Instead it suggests that creatures from birds to baboons ...

The New York Times–bestselling "exploration of the world from a piscine perspective . . . makes a persuasive case that what fish know is quite a lot" (Elizabeth Kolbert, The New York Review of Books).Do fishes think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognize the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water? In What a Fish Knows, ethologist Jonathan Balcombe addresses these questions and more, revealing th...

**Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History and a New York Times Editors Choice Pick"After reading Super Fly, you will never take a fly for granted again. Thank you, Jonathan Balcombe, for reminding us of the infinite marvels of everyday creatures."—Sy Montgomery, Author of How to Be a Good Creature**From an expert in animal consciousness, a book that will turn the fly on the wall into the elephant in the room.

As Charles Darwin suggested more than a century ago, the differences between animals and humans are of degree and not of kind.” Not long ago, ethologists denied that animals had emotions or true intelligence. Now, we know that rats laugh when tickled, magpies mourn as they cover the departed with greenery, female whales travel thousands of miles for annual reunions with their gal pals, seals navigate by the stars, bears hum when happy, and crows slide down snowy rooftops for fun.I...

"Engaging. . . . Balcombe demonstrate[s] that animals do indeed experience the world as richly as us and may well feel and suffer more intensely than we do." — New ScientistFor centuries, the idea that animals had feelings was either dismissed or considered heresy. Today, that's all changing. New scientific studies of animal behavior reveal perceptions, intelligences, awareness and social skills that would have been deemed fantasy a genera...

A quirky, intimate, and eye-opening look into the ways of thinking like a fish.An extract from the much-loved modern classic on the subject of fish consciousness, What a Fish Knows.Do fishes think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognize the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water? Jonathan Balcombe dives in among our marine cousins to explore the essential questio...

A New York Times BestsellerDo fishes think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognize the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water? In What a Fish Knows, the myth-busting ethologist Jonathan Balcombe addresses these questions and more, taking us under the sea, through streams and estuaries, and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal the surprising capabilities of fishes. Although there are more than thirty thousand species ...

**Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History and a New York Times Editors Choice Pick"After reading Super Fly, you will never take a fly for granted again. Thank you, Jonathan Balcombe, for reminding us of the infinite marvels of everyday creatures."—Sy Montgomery, Author of How to Be a Good Creature**From an expert in animal consciousness, a book that will turn the fly on the wall into the elephant in the room.

Bestselling author and PhD of ethology Jonathan Balcombe argues for a new perspective on nature—one that rejects the idea of the wild as cruel and savage and instead highlights the cooperation and compassion between species—and examines the role humans play in it.Turn on a nature documentary, and you’re likely to see the wild at its most brutal: terrified wildebeests crossing crocodile-infested rivers, or sharks snapping at chum in bloody frenzies. Since Charles Da...

Your heart is a miracle in motion, a marvel of construction unsurpassed by any human-made creation. It beats 100,000 times every day—if you were to live to 100, that would be more than 3 billion beats across your lifespan. Despite decadesof effort in labs all over the world, we have not yet been able to replicate the heart’s perfect engineering. But, as Sian Harding shows us in The Exquisite Machine, new scientific developments are opening up the mysteries of the heart.And th...

A spirited, engaging investigation into the concept of character, an enduring human obsession in literature, psychology, politics, and everyday lifeWhat is “character”? How can it be measured, developed, or built? Are character traits fixed or changeable? Is character innate, or can it be taught?Since Aristotle’s Poetics, philosophers, moralists, artists, and scientists have engaged with the enigma of human character. In its oldest usage, “character” derives from a word fo...

How deep learning–from Google Translate to driverless cars to personal cognitive assistants–is changing our lives and transforming every sector of the economy.The deep learning revolution has brought us driverless cars, the greatly improved Google Translate, fluent conversations with Siri and Alexa, and enormous profits from automated trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Deep learning networks can play poker better than professional poker players and defeat a wo...