The authors have a humorous and engaging writing style, posing both thoughtful and amusing questions to the reader throughout the text, while also explaining phenomena like belief perseverance and confirmation bias that impact scientific research ... The book is teeming with curious facts and interesting anecdotes around topics including animal form and function, the end of the world, and animal senses and perception. Detailed sidebars (many more than a page in length) are included throughout to highlight specific scientific examples; footnotes appear throughout to add detail and author commentary. The book concludes with a list of web links to references for specific research, articles, and studies cited in the text. The science is detailed and comprehensive in this fun and fascinating read, originally published in the UK.
... informative and entertaining ... Fry (a mathematician who specializes in patterns in human behavior) and Rutherford (a geneticist) are well-equipped to guide readers through this maze of thought, perception, and knowledge. Their writing is clever and personable, and they incorporate immersive stories of culture, art, and rudimentary science to explain seemingly complex topics (e.g., the theory of time) in consumable morsels. They reference several academic papers, but only to highlight some of the most entertaining research that has been done in the name of science ... This book will appeal to fans of Rutherford and Fry’s podcast and to general popular science readers.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
