https://books2read.com/u/bPw5Ar

“The stories humans tell about how they rose neglect the complexity of biology and the oceans of time during which they evolved. To understand human evolution, we need new stories.” (The Guardian, 2018)
This book started as a plan to compare natural evolution by survival of the fittest with so-called socio-cultural evolution in humans, but it changed when, in trying to understand what is meant by socio-cultural evolution, politics reared its head. 
“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?" (Carl Sagan)

• https://books2read.com/u/b5JrN1
• The background to "Don't Mention the O Word" was a request to the author to write a chapter for a book on bioethics and planetary health.

The decision to use this opportunity to ask why world leaders and those organisations charged with addressing global health problems have failed by their refusal to address the single, basic and most obvious cause was my own.
When asked what are the most obvious planetary health issues the answer is usually a list of seven overlapping problems. This book aims to  address each of these:

• Poverty, wealth disparity and health disparity
• Third world debt and globalisation
• Degradation of the natural environment and biodiversity loss
• Climate change and global warming
• Food and water shortages and resource depletion
• Unemployment and economic migration
• Conflict, ethnic tension and refugees