In his new book Almost like a Whale, Steve Jones takes on the challenge of going back to the book of the millennium, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Before The Origin, biology was a set of unconnected facts. Darwin made it into a science, linked by the theory of evolution, the grammar of the living world. It reveals ties between cancer & the genetics of fish, between brewing & inherited disease, between the sex lives of crocodiles & the politics of Brazil. Darwin used the biology of the nineteenth century to prove his case. Now, that science has been revolutionized & his case can be reargued using the twentieth century’s astonishing advances. From AIDS to dinosaurs, from conservation to cloned sheep, bursting with anecdotes, jokes & irresistible facts, Almost Like a Whale is a popular account of the science that makes biology make sense. It will catch the millennial mood & tell all those for whom Darwin is merely a familiar name what he really meant. It exposes the Darwinian delusions which try (and fail) to explain human behaviour in evolutionary terms, &, while giving an up-to-date account of our own past, shows how humans are the first species to step beyond the constraints of biology.