In Theory co-host Simon Brown interviews Nasser Zakariya , Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, about his book A Final Story: Science, Myth, and Beginnings (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

The book explores how scientists and their readers have turned to narrative forms of natural history, myth and epic to explain how the sciences relate to one another and to the human past. His book ranges over systematic treatises of the early nineteenth century, to popular science in the early twentieth century, to TV documentaries in the 1980s. We talk about scholarship and popularization, theology and myth-making, and where humans have fit in our natural histories.