| | Introduction | p. 3 |
| | A, C, G, T, and You: How to Read a Genetic Score | |
| | Our Animal Past: Making things that Crawl and Frolic and Kill | |
| | Genes and Geniuses : How Humans Became all too Human | |
| | Genes, Freaks, DNA: How Do Living Things Pass Down Traits to Their Children? | p. 13 |
| | The Near Death of Darwin: Why Did Geneticists Try to Kill Natural Selection? | p. 31 |
| | The Machiavelli Microbe: How Much Human DNA Is Actually Human? | p. 138 |
| | Humanzees and Other Near Misses: When Did Humans Break Away from Monkeys, and Why? | p. 178 |
| | Them's the DNA Breaks: How Does Nature Read-and Misread-DNA? | p. 54 |
| | The Musical Score of DNA: What Kinds of Information Does DNA Store? | p. 72 |
| | The Survivors, the Livers: What's Our Most Ancient and Important DNA? | p. 118 |
| | Love and Atavisms: What Genes Make Mammals Mammals? | p. 157 |
| | DNA Vindication: Why Did Life Evolve So Slowly-Then Explode in Complexity? | p. 95 |
| | Scarlet A's, C's, G's, and T's: Why Did Humans Almost Go Extinct? | p. 203 |
| | Size Matters: How Did Humans Get Such Grotesquely Large Brains? | p. 226 |
| | The Art of the Gene: How Deep in Our DNA Is Artistic Genius? | p. 245 |
| | The Past Is Prologue-Sometimes: What Can (and Can't) Genes Teach Us About Historical Heroes? | p. 271 |
| | Three Billion Little Pieces: Why Don't Humans Have More Genes Than Other Species? | p. 294 |
| | Life as We Do (and Don't) Know It: What the Heck Will Happen Now? | p. 336 |
| | Epilogue: Genomics Gets Personal | p. 355 |
| | Acknowledgments | p. 361 |
| | Notes and Errata | p. 363 |
| | Selected Bibliography | p. 385 |
| | Index | p. 391 |
| | The Oracle of Dna: Genetics in the Past, Present, and Future | |
| | Easy Come, Easy Go? How Come Identical Twins Aren't Identical? | p. 314 |