Reddit mentions of Symbiotic Planet: A New Look At Evolution

I'll stick to recommending science communication books (those that don't require a deep background on biological concepts):

• On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection - Charles Darwin, bonus points if you can get a 1st edition reprint (before his colleagues made him change a lot of important things); it is a must-read but it might need quite some time to truly understand it, it is a heavy read.
  
  
• A lot of people recommend the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins but that one is one of his most controversial books and if you decide to read it, you should take everything with a pinch of salt; for Dawkins I prefer to recommend the Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution and the Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. Just beware of Dawkins, he's a little dogmatic in his approach.
  
  
• The Dialectical Biologist - Richard Levins & Richard Lewontin.
  
  
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn, this one will change forever your conception of science as a whole.
  
  
• The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley.
  
  
• Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, and the Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History - Stephen J. Gould.
  
  
• The Ghosts of Evolution: Non-sensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms - Connie Barlow.
  
  
• Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? - Frans de Waal, this one is about animal cognition but has an incredible underline of all the deficiencies and prejudges on science.
  
  
• Microbe Hunters - Paul de Kruif.
  
  
• Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, and What is Life? - Lynn Margulis.
  
  
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan.
  
  
• A Short Story of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson.
  
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  For books that everyone studying biology ends up reading, my candidate would be Lehninger's Principles of Biochemistry, by Nelson & Cox but that's a textbook.

I love this talk! The overall message reminds me of some concepts I've read in Lynn Margulis' work, particularly in the book [Symbiotic Planet] (http://www.amazon.com/Symbiotic-Planet-New-Look-Evolution/dp/0465072720). There's also a paper she co-authored, Proprioception: When the Environment Becomes the Body. She writes about Gaia Theory - viewing the Earth more literally as a living organism by any way we can define the word "alive". She also talks about proprioception: the way different parts of a body can feel one another and react to one another. As an example, touch your finger to your nose. How did you do that? Did you nose smell your finger's way? No, you knew the status of different parts due to proprioception, another major sense of a living body. Margulis talks about how Earth has similar senses that react to one another, such as the mechanisms that facilitate temperature regulation.

I see the human race advancing in Earth-wide proprioception, to the point where when people across the world are in pain, I immediately feel it - mainly via the internet (think: Arab Spring revolutions; human rights abuses in China or Syria). Every major advancement in technology has further strengthened our ability to feel what others feel at ever-greater distances: first books, then radio, telephones, television, and now the internet. It seems we are growing to understand and eventually replicate the all-encompassing information sharing/immediate feedback network of our planet. If we can cultivate this proprioception, we can advance enough to take responsibility for what we can do to help each other and the planet during our lifetime.