Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined-and Redefined-Nature

From the first dog to the first beefalo, from farming to CRISPR, the human history of remaking nature

When the 2020 Nobel Prize was awarded to the inventors of CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing tool, it underlined our amazing and apparently novel powers to alter nature. But as biologist Beth Shapiro argues in Life as We Made It, this phenomenon isn’t new. Humans have been reshaping the world around us for ages, from early dogs to modern bacteria modified to pump out insulin. Indeed, sh...