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Scientists have examined the four universal challenges that every adolescent on our planet must face on the journey to adulthood: how to be safe, how to navigate hierarchy, how to find potential mates, and how to leave the nest. Become a young penguin or humpback whale, or even an octopus tapping a shrimp on the shoulder - for parents, predators and prey alike, this is a powerfully revelatory read
About the author
Dr Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, is a Visiting Professor at Harvard University in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. She is also professor of medicine/cardiology at UCLA, where she co-founded the Evolutionary Medicine program. She is the co-author of Zoobiquity and Wildhood.
Kathryn Bowers is a science journalist who has taught medical narrative and comparative literature at UCLA. She’s a Future Tense Fellow at New America in Washington, DC, and was an editor at Zócalo Public Square in Los Angeles. She is the co-author of Zoobiquity and Wildhood
Summary
A revelatory investigation of human and animal adolescence from the New York Times bestselling authors of Zoobiquity.
Teenagers: behind the banter, the tediously repetitive games and clicks, the moping and screaming, the fast living, and the jockeying and preening lie the rules of the entire animal kingdom. Based on their popular Harvard University course, latest research, and worldwide travels, Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers examine the four universal challenges that every adolescent on our planet must face on the journey to adulthood: how to be safe, how to navigate hierarchy, how to court potential mates, and how to leave the nest. Safety, status, sex, and survival.
For parents and children, predators and prey alike, this is a powerfully revelatory book, entertainingly written. To become, as its reader does, for a while, a young penguin or a young humpback whale, or even an octopus tapping a shrimp on the shoulder or an orca silencing their victim, is a giddying experience. The authors open up horizons for their ordinary human readers as they go about their daily animal lives, and permit them to look afresh at the confusing and exhilarating experience of adolescence. Even your average teen will not get bored.
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Praise for Zoobiquity:
‘Illuminating … This very engaging book is difficult to put down. It provides lots of information in an easy-to-understand manner that doesn’t feel overwhelming, perhaps because of the liberal use of humour throughout. Reading Zoobiquity gave this reader a totally new perspective on his furred and feathered neighbors.’
