Evolution's Purpose PDF Download

Author: Steve McIntosh
Publisher: SelectBooks, Inc.
ISBN: 1590792483
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
"Presents the author's view of the scientific story of our evolutionary origins to show how evolution's progressive generation of emergent value reveals a larger purpose within the process. He demonstrates how this purpose can be felt within each of us as the evolutionary impulse to make things better--to grow toward ever-widening realizations of beauty, truth, and goodness"--Provided by publisher

Author: Christoph Schoenborn
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1681490854
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn's article on evolution and creation in The New York Times launched an international controversy. Critics charged him with biblical literalism and 'creationism'. In this book, Cardinal Schönborn responds to his critics by tackling the hard questions with a carefully reasoned "theology of creation". Can we still speak intelligently of the world as 'creation' and affirm the existence of the Creator, or is God a 'delusion'? How should an informed believer read Genesis? If God exists, why is there so much injustice and suffering? Are human beings a part of nature or elevated above it? What is man's destiny? Is everything a matter of chance or can we discern purpose in human existence? In his treatment of evolution, Cardinal Schönborn distinguishes the biological theory from 'evolutionism', the ideology that tries to reduce all of reality to mindless, meaningless processes. He argues that science and a rationally grounded faith are not at odds and that what many people represent as 'science' is really a set of philosophical positions that will not withstand critical scrutiny. Chance or Purpose? directly raises the philosophical and theological issues many scientists today overlook or ignore. The result is a vigorous, frank dialogue that acknowledges the respective insights of the philosopher, the theologian and the scientist, but which calls on them to listen and to learn from each another.

Author: Adam Hart
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472971019
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
'A gripping and sobering reminder of how much we are all governed by our genetic inheritance. So much for free will.' The Mail on Sunday Stress, obesity, poor mental health, drug addiction, bowel diseases, violence and fake news; a stark checklist of modern world problems and every one of them is an echo of our evolutionary past. In Unfit for Purpose, biologist and broadcaster Adam Hart explores the mismatch between our fundamental biology and the modern world we have created. In each chapter Adam reveals the many ways in which biological adaptations that evolved to help us survive and thrive now work against us. For example, in the modern world stress is a killer but how did 'fight or flight' instincts turn from life-savers to life-takers? Obesity is a disease now but is it also just a side-effect of our evolutionary past? Whether it's the derailing of microbes in our gut, the rise of gluten and lactose intolerance, problems of social media or drug addiction, we always seem to have one foot in the modern world and the other firmly in our evolutionary past. Adam explores science, archaeology, medicine, genetics, sociology and more, to show how, in a modern world of our own making, we find ourselves 'unfit for purpose'. But all is not lost! In unpicking the causes of our current woes, he unearths some secrets of evolutionarily informed treatments that will change the way we think about ourselves and our future.

Author: Eugene V. Koonin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1475737831
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Sequence - Evolution - Function is an introduction to the computational approaches that play a critical role in the emerging new branch of biology known as functional genomics. The book provides the reader with an understanding of the principles and approaches of functional genomics and of the potential and limitations of computational and experimental approaches to genome analysis. Sequence - Evolution - Function should help bridge the "digital divide" between biologists and computer scientists, allowing biologists to better grasp the peculiarities of the emerging field of Genome Biology and to learn how to benefit from the enormous amount of sequence data available in the public databases. The book is non-technical with respect to the computer methods for genome analysis and discusses these methods from the user's viewpoint, without addressing mathematical and algorithmic details. Prior practical familiarity with the basic methods for sequence analysis is a major advantage, but a reader without such experience will be able to use the book as an introduction to these methods. This book is perfect for introductory level courses in computational methods for comparative and functional genomics.

Author: Michael Ruse
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674016316
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
In clear, non-technical language, Ruse offers a full and fair assessment of the status of the argument from design in light of both the advances of modern evolutionary biology and the thinking of today’s philosophers—with special attention given to the supporters and critics of “intelligent design.”

Author: Samir Okasha
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192546732
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Samir Okasha approaches evolutionary biology from a philosophical perspective in Agents and Goals in Evolution, analysing a mode of thinking in biology called agential thinking. He considers how the paradigm case involves treating an evolved organism as if it were an agent pursuing a goal, such as survival or reproduction, and seeing its phenotypic traits as strategies for achieving that goal or furthering its biological interests. As agential thinking deliberately transposes a set of concepts--goals, interests, strategies--from rational human agents and to the biological world more generally, Okasha's enquiry firstly looks at the justification for this: is it mere anthropomorphism, or does it play a genuine intellectual role in the science? From this central question, key points are considered such as: how do we identify the 'goal' that evolved organisms will behave as if they are trying to achieve? Can agential thinking ever be applied to groups rather than to individual organisms? And how does agential thinking relate to the controversies over fitness-maximization in evolutionary biology? In addition, Okasha examines the relation between the adaptive and the rational by considering whether organisms can validly be treated as agent-like. Should we expect their evolved behaviour to correspond with that of rational agents as codified in the theory of rational choice? If so, does this mean that the fitness-maximizing paradigm of the evolutionary biologist can be mapped directly to the utility-maximizing paradigm of the rational choice theorist? All of these important questions are engagingly raised and discussed at length.

Author: Jacob Klapwijk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521493406
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Jacob Klapwijk considers the stark choice many believers and non-believers face between religious notions concerning the origins of life and the contemporary findings of evolutionary science. He offers an alternative to both and an attempt to bridge the gap between them, via the idea of 'emergent evolution'.

Author: Jerry A. Coyne
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019164384X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
For all the discussion in the media about creationism and 'Intelligent Design', virtually nothing has been said about the evidence in question - the evidence for evolution by natural selection. Yet, as this succinct and important book shows, that evidence is vast, varied, and magnificent, and drawn from many disparate fields of science. The very latest research is uncovering a stream of evidence revealing evolution in action - from the actual observation of a species splitting into two, to new fossil discoveries, to the deciphering of the evidence stored in our genome. Why Evolution is True weaves together the many threads of modern work in genetics, palaeontology, geology, molecular biology, anatomy, and development to demonstrate the 'indelible stamp' of the processes first proposed by Darwin. It is a crisp, lucid, and accessible statement that will leave no one with an open mind in any doubt about the truth of evolution.

Author: Ronald de Sousa
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019518985X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
In this short and accessible book, Ronald de Sousa shows us that in order to understand what is truly important about our reasoning capacity, we need to change our thinking about what rationality actually is.

Author: Ted Chu
Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
ISBN: 1579830234
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
For millennia, great thinkers have contemplated the meaning and purpose of human existence; but while most assumed that humanity was the end point of creation or the pinnacle of evolution, Ted Chu makes the provocative claim that the human race may in fact be a means rather than an end—that humankind will give rise to evolutionary successors. In this wide-ranging and authoritative work, Chu reexamines the question of human purpose in light of the extraordinary developments of science and technology. Arguing that a deep understanding of our place in the universe is required to navigate the magnitude of the choices that lie ahead, he surveys human wisdom from both East and West, traces the evolutionary trajectory that has led to this point, and explores the potentials emerging on the scientific frontier. The book addresses the legitimate fears and concerns of “playing God” but embraces the possibility of transcending biological forms and becoming or creating entirely new life-forms.