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Author: Alan Turner Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 9780231119443 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
The Garden of Eden as the ideal and untouched site of life's creation persists in popular thought, even as we have uncovered a lengthy fossil record and developed a scientific understanding of evolution. The continent of Africa is a good candidate for Eden: its generally warm climate, rich vegetation, and variety of animal species lend themselves easily to such a comparison. Yet in the time since the first primates appeared millions of years ago, Africa has undergone profound alterations in physical geography, climate, and biota. Linking the evidence of the past with that of the present, this exquisitely illustrated guide examines the evolution of the mammalian fauna of Africa within the context of dramatic changes over the course of more than 30 million years of primate presence. The book covers such topics as dating, continental drift, and global climate change and the likely motors of evolution as well as the physical evolution of the African continent, including present and past climates, and the major determinants of plant and mammal distributions. The authors discuss human evolution as a part of the larger pattern of mammalian evolution while responding to the unique interest that we have in our own past. The meticulous reconstructions of fossil mammals in this book are the result of detailed anatomical research. Restorations of mammalian musculature and appearance take into account the affinities between fossil forms and extant species in order to make well-founded inferences about unpreserved animal attributes. Environmental reconstructions benefit from the authors' visits to more than a dozen wildlife preserves in five African countries as well as the use of an extensive database of published studies on the evolution of landscapes on the continent. A fascinating read and a visual feast, Evolving Eden lays the foundation for a deeper appreciation of contemporary African wildlife.
Author: Alan Turner Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 9780231119443 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
The Garden of Eden as the ideal and untouched site of life's creation persists in popular thought, even as we have uncovered a lengthy fossil record and developed a scientific understanding of evolution. The continent of Africa is a good candidate for Eden: its generally warm climate, rich vegetation, and variety of animal species lend themselves easily to such a comparison. Yet in the time since the first primates appeared millions of years ago, Africa has undergone profound alterations in physical geography, climate, and biota. Linking the evidence of the past with that of the present, this exquisitely illustrated guide examines the evolution of the mammalian fauna of Africa within the context of dramatic changes over the course of more than 30 million years of primate presence. The book covers such topics as dating, continental drift, and global climate change and the likely motors of evolution as well as the physical evolution of the African continent, including present and past climates, and the major determinants of plant and mammal distributions. The authors discuss human evolution as a part of the larger pattern of mammalian evolution while responding to the unique interest that we have in our own past. The meticulous reconstructions of fossil mammals in this book are the result of detailed anatomical research. Restorations of mammalian musculature and appearance take into account the affinities between fossil forms and extant species in order to make well-founded inferences about unpreserved animal attributes. Environmental reconstructions benefit from the authors' visits to more than a dozen wildlife preserves in five African countries as well as the use of an extensive database of published studies on the evolution of landscapes on the continent. A fascinating read and a visual feast, Evolving Eden lays the foundation for a deeper appreciation of contemporary African wildlife.
Author: Jonathan Silvertown Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226757773 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
At the heart of evolution lies a bewildering paradox. Natural selection favors above all the individual that leaves the most offspring—a superorganism of sorts that Jonathan Silvertown here calls the "Darwinian demon." But if such a demon existed, this highly successful organism would populate the entire world with its own kind, beating out other species and eventually extinguishing biodiversity as we know it. Why then, if evolution favors this demon, is the world filled with so many different life forms? What keeps this Darwinian demon in check? If humankind is now the greatest threat to biodiversity on the planet, have we become the Darwinian demon? Demons in Eden considers these questions using the latest scientific discoveries from the plant world. Readers join Silvertown as he explores the astonishing diversity of plant life in regions as spectacular as the verdant climes of Japan, the lush grounds of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, the shallow wetlands and teeming freshwaters of Florida, the tropical rainforests of southeast Mexico, and the Canary Islands archipelago, whose evolutionary novelties—and exotic plant life—have earned it the sobriquet "the Galapagos of botany." Along the way, Silvertown looks closely at the evolution of plant diversity in these locales and explains why such variety persists in light of ecological patterns and evolutionary processes. In novel and useful ways, he also investigates the current state of plant diversity on the planet to show the ever-challenging threats posed by invasive species and humans. Bringing the secret life of plants into more colorful and vivid focus than ever before, Demons in Eden is an empathic and impassioned exploration of modern plant ecology that unlocks evolutionary mysteries of the natural world.
Author: Daniel J. Fairbanks Publisher: Prometheus Books ISBN: 161614565X Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
In this persuasive, elegantly written book, research geneticist, Fairbanks explains in detail how health, food production, and the environment impact our knowledge of evolution.
Author: Robert M. Price Publisher: Tellectual Press ISBN: 9780985136246 Category : Evolution (Biology) Languages : en Pages : 340
Book Description
The now-indisputable reality of life?s evolutionary origins challenges some foundational doctrines of the Christian faith. The issues range from the nature of God as a creator and guiding hand in the lives of mankind to the Fall of Man as the impetus for the sending of a Savior. With the scientific evidence continuing to pile up, the responses of Christian leaders have themselves evolved into different forms. Biblical literalists remain a loud and stubborn voice of denial, yet they have found themselves in a strange and unwitting alliance with outspoken atheists by denying that evolution is in any way compatible with Christian doctrine. Many concerned believers are left walking a troubled middle path between Genesis and genetics, wary of the perils of losing their cherished faith on the one hand or their intellectual integrity on the other. Numerous science-savvy theologians have emerged to help them on their way, a whole cottage industry of guides working to establish their own different trails through the hostile territory outside Eden?s comforting faith-fairyland. Evolving out of Eden surveys these various efforts and offers its own frank reckoning of evolution?s significance for Christian belief.
Author: Harry Harrison Publisher: Macmillan + ORM ISBN: 146682283X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 491
Book Description
From a Science Fiction Hall of Fame inductee, “intelligent reptiles battle stone age humans for control of an alternate Earth” (Kirkus Reviews). Sixty-five million years ago, a disastrous cataclysm eliminated three quarters of all life on Earth. Overnight, the age of dinosaurs ended. The age of mammals had begun. But what if history had happened differently? What if the reptiles had survived to evolve intelligent life? In West of Eden, bestselling author Harry Harrison has created a rich, dramatic saga of a world where the descendants of the dinosaurs struggled with a clan of humans in a battle for survival. Here is the story of Kerrick, a young hunter who grows to manhood among the dinosaurs, escaping at last to rejoin his own kind. His knowledge of their strange customs makes him the humans’ leader . . . and the dinosaurs’ greatest enemy. West of Eden is a monumental epic of love and savagery, bravery and hope. “A perfectly grand storyteller.” —David Brin, Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of Star Tide Rising “Few commercial writers are more deserving of their popularity than Harrison, a fine writer who occasionally reaches brilliant heights.” —Publishers Weekly
Author: Jordi Agust Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231116411 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
In the 1930s a band of smart and able young men, some still in their twenties, helped Franklin D. Roosevelt transform an American nation in crisis. They were the junior officers of the New Deal. Thomas G. Corcoran, Benjamin V. Cohen, William O. Douglas, Abe Fortas, and James Rowe helped FDR build the modern Democratic Party into a progressive coalition whose command over power and ideas during the next three decades seemed politically invincible. This is the first book about this group of Rooseveltians and their linkage to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Vietnam War debacle. Michael Janeway grew up inside this world. His father, Eliot Janeway, business editor of Time and a star writer for Fortune and Life magazines, was part of this circle, strategizing and practicing politics as well as reporting on these men. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of events and previously unavailable private letters and other documents, Janeway crafts a riveting account of the exercise of power during the New Deal and its aftermath. He shows how these men were at the nexus of reform impulses at the electoral level with reform thinking in the social sciences and the law and explains how this potent fusion helped build the contemporary American state. Since that time efforts to reinvent government by "brains trust" have largely failed in the U.S. In the last quarter of the twentieth century American politics ceased to function as a blend of broad coalition building and reform agenda setting, rooted in a consensus of belief in the efficacy of modern government. Can a progressive coalition of ideas and power come together again? The Fall of the House of Roosevelt makes such a prospect both alluring and daunting.
Author: Jordan Fisher Smith Publisher: Crown ISBN: 0307454266 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 394
Book Description
The fascinating story of a trial that opened a window onto the century-long battle to control nature in the national parks. When twenty-five-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been. The proceedings drew to the witness stand some of the most important figures in twentieth century wilderness management, including the eminent zoologist A. Starker Leopold, who had produced a landmark conservationist document in the 1950s, and all-American twin researchers John and Frank Craighead, who ran groundbreaking bear studies at Yellowstone. Their testimony would help decide whether the government owed the Walker family restitution for Harry's death, but it would also illuminate decades of patchwork efforts to preserve an idea of nature that had never existed in the first place. In this remarkable excavation of American environmental history, nature writer and former park ranger Jordan Fisher Smith uses Harry Walker's story to tell the larger narrative of the futile, sometimes fatal, attempts to remake wilderness in the name of preserving it. Tracing a course from the founding of the national parks through the tangled twentieth-century growth of the conservationist movement, Smith gives the lie to the portrayal of national parks as Edenic wonderlands unspoiled until the arrival of Europeans, and shows how virtually every attempt to manage nature in the parks has only created cascading effects that require even more management. Moving across time and between Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier national parks, Engineering Eden shows how efforts at wilderness management have always been undone by one fundamental problem--that the idea of what is "wild" dissolves as soon as we begin to examine it, leaving us with little framework to say what wilderness should look like and which human interventions are acceptable in trying to preserve it. In the tradition of John McPhee's The Control of Nature and Alan Burdick's Out of Eden, Jordan Fisher Smith has produced a powerful work of popular science and environmental history, grappling with critical issues that we have even now yet to resolve.
Author: Jonathan Silvertown Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com ISBN: 1459627385 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
Jonathan Silvertown here explores the astonishing diversity of plant life in regions as spectacular as the verdant climes of Japan, the lush grounds of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, the shallow wetlands and teeming freshwaters of Florida, the tropical rainforests of southeast Mexico, and the Canary Islands archipelago, whose evolutionary n...
Author: Mauricio Antón Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253010497 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
“A unique review of the many unusual and nearly worldwide occurrences of sabertooths and their relatives over more than 50 million years.” —Choice With their spectacularly enlarged canines, sabertooth cats are among the most popular of prehistoric animals, yet it is surprising how little information about them is available for the curious layperson. What’s more, there were other sabertooths that were not cats, animals with exotic names like nimravids, barbourofelids, and thylacosmilids. Some were no taller than a domestic cat, others were larger than a lion, and some were as weird as their names suggest. Sabertooths continue to pose questions even for specialists. What did they look like? How did they use their spectacular canine teeth? And why did they finally go extinct? In this visual and intellectual treat of a book, Mauricio Antón tells their story in words and pictures, all scrupulously based on the latest scientific research. The book is a glorious wedding of science and art that celebrates the remarkable diversity of the life of the not-so-distant past. “The best paleomammal artist working today [and] his knowledge of sabertooths and their evolution is second to none.” —Lars Werdelin, Swedish Museum of Natural History “Mauricio Antón is one of the best paleoartists. What sets him apart is the fact that he is a great paleontologist in his own right. Probably no one else has thought more about sabertooth than he has. As a result, his illustrations often demonstrate a particular behavior of the extinct mammal that he has personally researched or display a unique point of view.” —Xiaoming Wang, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
Author: Barbara J. King Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022636092X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
The author of How Animals Grieve “contends that religion . . . is a consequence of primate evolution” in this “brilliant book” (Booklist, starred review). Religion has been a central part of human experience since at least the dawn of recorded history. The gods change, as do the rituals, but the underlying desire remains—a desire to belong to something larger, greater, most lasting than our mortal, finite selves. But where did that desire come from? Can we explain its emergence through evolution? Yes, says biological anthropologist Barbara J. King—and doing so not only helps us to understand the religious imagination, but also reveals fascinating links to the lives and minds of our primate cousins. Evolving God draws on King’s own fieldwork among primates in Africa and paleoanthropology of our extinct ancestors to offer a new way of thinking about the origins of religion, one that situates it in a deep need for emotional connection with others, a need we share with apes and monkeys. Though her thesis is provocative, and she’s not above thoughtful speculation, King’s argument is strongly rooted in close observation and analysis. She traces an evolutionary path that connects us to other primates, who, like us, display empathy, make meanings through interaction, create social rules, and display imagination—the basic building blocks of the religious imagination. With fresh insights, she responds to recent suggestions that chimpanzees are spiritual—or even religious—beings, and that our ancient humanlike cousins carefully disposed of their dead well before the time of Neandertals. “Her interpretations result in a provocative hypothesis about the evolution of spirituality.” —The Dallas Morning News
Author: Alan Turner
Author: Alan Turner
Author: Jonathan Silvertown
Author: Daniel J. Fairbanks
Author: Robert M. Price
Author: Harry Harrison
Author: Jordi Agust
Author: Jordan Fisher Smith
Author: Jonathan Silvertown
Author: Mauricio Antón
Author: Barbara J. King