Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

 This is the only book you need to read to understand the human condition.  It is brilliant. Humans have big brains, and flexible hands that get us into trouble. The blue-footed booby evolved on the Galapagos to have smaller wings and dive much better for fish. Here humans evolve to better adapt to the environment. A must read.

The 10,000 Year Explosion by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending

 The authors explain that the genes in a population can vary quickly if they are successful. For example blue eyes spread rapidly as humans moved north. It takes larger populations for the effect to propagate rapidly and agriculture allowed population to grow. 

They also explain how the Ashkenazi Jews got their smarts. Jews in other parts of the world were not known for intelligence. They suggest that genetic variants facilitate the nervous system. With only one copy of the gene the nervous system is improved but theat gene causes disease with two copies, such as Tay-Sachs and others prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews. This is similar to the gene causing sickle-cell anemia among Africans. The 3/4 standard-deviation IQ difference means the Ashkenazi population has six times as may highly intelligent members 

Lee and Grant by Gene Smith

 This is a fascinating dual biography. Grant failed in everything he did until 1860. He became a great general in the Civil War. His fame spurred him to the presidency at which he wasn't very good. He was superlative at one thing, winning the war.

"Cause Unknown" The Epidemic Of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022 by Edward Dowd.

Every statement is documented. There are many photos of actual cases.

Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Science by John Archibald Wheeler

 Wheeler, a genius who always strived to understand, combines his personal development with the general knowledge of the time in a readable, fascinating story. His student Hugh Everett developed a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. "All of the things that might happen (with various probabilities) are in fact happening." This avoids the idea that classical measurements chooses one of these different quantum paths. 

In the chapter It From Bit Wheeler states "When a photon is absorbed, and thereby 'measured'--until its absorption, it had no true reality--an unsplittable bit of information is added to what we know of the world, and, at the same time, that bit of information determines the structure of one part of the world. It creates the reality of the time and place of that photon's interaction."   

In the chapter The End of Time. Time-reversal invariance means that for any motion that does occur or can occur, the motion is reverse is also possible. For large-scale events such as ripping a piece of paper in half, the reversal is possible but extremely unlikely so we won't experience it. Disorder is more probable that order so entropy increases. "The electron pays for its freedom to move forward and backward in time be remembering neither future nor past. We remember the past and are trapped in one-way motion through time." "It is more to be compared with temperature or entropy, concepts that take their meaning only when large numbers of particles are involved. Time, we must conclude, is of statistical origin, valid only when dimensions are large enough and conditions are not too extreme."