Your 7-Day Guided Tour of That Total Black Box: Your Body

Our journey begins with a grand, accessible tour. This book is the perfect starting point, taking you through every system of your body with humor and awe. It will give you the foundational appreciation and context for everything that follows.

After the grand tour of the body, we zoom into the master blueprint: the gene. This classic book provides the powerful, gene's-eye view of evolution. It's the essential—and controversial—framework for understanding the 'why' behind all biological life.

Building on the theoretical framework of The Selfish Gene, this book tells the human story of its discovery. It's a sweeping history of genetics, from Mendel to the Human Genome Project, showing how our understanding of the blueprint has evolved.

Now that we understand the genetic code, let's see how it manifests in the brain. This magnum opus explains human behavior by synthesizing neuroscience, hormones, and genetics. It’s the ultimate guide to how our biology creates our actions.

After the deep dive into the biology of behavior from Behave, this book tackles the philosophical implications. It's a powerful argument that our biology and evolutionary history—our 'human nature'—profoundly shape our minds and societies.

With a strong understanding of our 'human nature,' we can now ask why it so often fails us. This book uses evolutionary biology to explain why we're vulnerable to disease. It's a fascinating look at the body as a series of evolutionary trade-offs.

For our finale, we focus on our most formidable biological foe. After a week of understanding how the body works, this 'biography' of cancer is a profound and moving synthesis of science, history, and the human struggle against our own rebelling cells.