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Author: Christa Kuljian Publisher: ISBN: 9781431424252 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Scientists, and their research, are often shaped by the prevailing social and political context at the time. Kuljian explores this trend in South Africa and provides fresh insight on the search for human origins - in the fields of palaeoanthropology and genetics - over the past century. The book follows the colonial practice in Europe, the US and South Africa of collecting human skeletons and cataloguing them into racial types, in the hope that they would provide clues to human evolution. Kuljian sheds light on how, during apartheid, the concept of racial classification mirrored the way in which many scientists thought about race and human evolution.
Author: Christa Kuljian Publisher: ISBN: 9781431424252 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Scientists, and their research, are often shaped by the prevailing social and political context at the time. Kuljian explores this trend in South Africa and provides fresh insight on the search for human origins - in the fields of palaeoanthropology and genetics - over the past century. The book follows the colonial practice in Europe, the US and South Africa of collecting human skeletons and cataloguing them into racial types, in the hope that they would provide clues to human evolution. Kuljian sheds light on how, during apartheid, the concept of racial classification mirrored the way in which many scientists thought about race and human evolution.
Author: Daniel Jappah Publisher: Lulu.com ISBN: 1430324902 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 428
Book Description
The theory of evolution has changed so much- claiming that humans are closely related genetically to chimps, mice, donkeys, and even fish - that the theory is now a blurred mess masquerading as a scientific fact. It's a theory built on countless speculations, scientific fraud, and multiple conflicting theories. Garnering the evidence from biology, chemistry, genetics, geology, history, paleontology, and physics, evolution is exposed as a racist philosophy and a false science that provided the "scientific" justification for the Holocaust and other genocides, including the plot to silently exterminate American minorities through abortion and birth control. The evidence for evolution is examined in the light of genuine science. You may not like what you read, but you can't argue with the facts.
Author: Martin Brasier Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191613908 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 357
Book Description
Darwin made a powerful argument for evolution in the Origin of Species, based on all the evidence available to him. But a few things puzzled him. One was how inheritance works - he did not know about genes. This book concerns another of Darwin's Dilemmas, and the efforts of modern palaeontologists to solve it. What puzzled Darwin is that the most very ancient rocks, before the Cambrian, seemed to be barren, when he would expect them to be teeming with life. Darwin speculated that this was probably because the fossils had not been found yet. Decades of work by modern palaeontologists have indeed brought us amazing fossils from far beyond the Cambrian, from the depths of the Precambrian, so life was certainly around. Yet the fossils are enigmatic, and something does seem to happen around the Cambrian to speed up evolution drastically and produce many of the early forms of animals we know today. In this book, Martin Brasier, a leading palaeontologist working on early life, takes us into the deep, dark ages of the Precambrian to explore Darwin's Lost World. Decoding the evidence in these ancient rocks, piecing together the puzzle of what happened over 540 million years ago to drive what is known as the Cambrian Explosion, is very difficult. The world was vastly different then from the one we know now, and we are in terrain with few familiar landmarks. Brasier is a master storyteller, and combines the account of what we now know of the strange creatures of these ancient times with engaging and amusing anecdotes from his expeditions to Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Barbuda, and other places, giving a vivid impression of the people, places, and challenges involved in such work. He ends by presenting his own take on the Cambrian Explosion, based on the picture emerging from this very active field of research. A vital clue involves worms - burrowing worms are one of the key signs of the start of the Cambrian. This is fitting: Darwin was inordinately fond of worms.
Author: Francisco J. Ayala Publisher: National Academies Press ISBN: 0309102316 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 251
Book Description
With the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin established evolution by common descent as the dominant scientific explanation for nature's diversity. This was to be his gift to science and society; at last, we had an explanation for how life came to be on Earth. Scientists agree that the evolutionary origin of animals and plants is a scientific conclusion beyond reasonable doubt. They place it beside such established concepts as the roundness of the earth, its revolution around the sun, and the molecular composition of matter. That evolution has occurred, in other words, is a fact. Yet as we approach the bicentennial celebration of Darwin's birth, the world finds itself divided over the truth of evolutionary theory. Consistently endorsed as "good science" by experts and overwhelmingly accepted as fact by the scientific community, it is not always accepted by the public, and our schools continue to be battlegrounds for this conflict. From the Tennessee trial of a biology teacher who dared to teach Darwin's theory to his students in 1925 to Tammy Kitzmiller's 2005 battle to keep intelligent design out of the Dover district schools in Pennsylvania, it's clear that we need to cut through the propaganda to quell the cacophony of raging debate. With the publication of Darwin's Gift, a voice at once fresh and familiar brings a rational, measured perspective to the science of evolution. An acclaimed evolutionary biologist with a background in theology, Francisco Ayala offers clear explanations of the science, reviews the history that led us to ratify Darwin's theories, and ultimately provides a clear path for a confused and conflicted public.
Author: Adrian Lister Publisher: Smithsonian Institution ISBN: 158834617X Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
Reveals how Darwin's study of fossils shaped his scientific thinking and led to his development of the theory of evolution. Darwin's Fossils is an accessible account of Darwin's pioneering work on fossils, his adventures in South America, and his relationship with the scientific establishment. While Darwin's research on Galápagos finches is celebrated, his work on fossils is less well known. Yet he was the first to collect the remains of giant extinct South American mammals; he worked out how coral reefs and atolls formed; he excavated and explained marine fossils high in the Andes; and he discovered a fossil forest that now bears his name. All of this research was fundamental in leading Darwin to develop his revolutionary theory of evolution. This richly illustrated book brings Darwin's fossils, many of which survive in museums and institutions around the world, together for the first time. Including new photography of many of the fossils--which in recent years have enjoyed a surge of scientific interest--as well as superb line drawings produced in the nineteenth century and newly commissioned artists' reconstructions of the extinct animals as they are understood today, Darwin's Fossils reveals how Darwin's discoveries played a crucial role in the development of his groundbreaking ideas.
Author: Samuel Grove Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1793632502 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 301
Book Description
Darwin's discovery of evolution is as celebrated as Galileo's laws of motion or Newton's discovery of gravity. But this was only half the story. Not content to prove that evolution had happened, Darwin sought to convey its full humbling implications. Thus he formulated the theory of natural selection. Contrary to popular belief, this theory ran exactly counter to scientific reason and was consequently rejected by the scientific community of the time. This wasn’t the only reason Darwin’s critics recoiled. His theory robbed the ruling orders of any easy recourse to consolatory tales of nature’s harmony and design. The fate of his ideas, for the time being at least, would be left to the heretics he inspired in other domains. Darwin's radical thought anticipated Nietzsche's Godless philosophy, Marx's class-based economics and Freud's psychological theories of the unconscious. It would take a further 80 years for Darwinism to become accepted as mainstream science, but it came at the expense of its counter-scientific core. For the remainder of the twentieth century a popularized Darwinism would become the touchstone for backlash movements in philosophy, economics and psychology—disciplines he once so radicalized. This is the story of how the most revolutionary idea of the nineteenth century became the most reactionary idea of the twentieth.
Author: Kostas Kampourakis Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1009375709 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 327
Book Description
This accessible collection debunks pervasive myths about Darwin's life and work, deepening our understanding of the history of science.
Author: Philip Kitcher Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 9780199724994 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
Charles Darwin has been at the center of white-hot public debate for more than a century. In Living With Darwin, Philip Kitcher stokes the flames swirling around Darwin's theory, sifting through the scientific evidence for evolution, Creation Science, and Intelligent Design, and revealing why evolution has been the object of such vehement attack. Kitcher first provides valuable perspective on the present controversy, describing the many puzzles that blocked evolution's acceptance in the early years, and explaining how scientific research eventually found the answers to these conundrums. Interestingly, Kitcher shows that many of these early questions have been resurrected in recent years by proponents of Intelligent Design. In fact, Darwin himself considered the issue of intelligent design, and amassed a mountain of evidence that effectively refuted the idea. Kitcher argues that the problem with Intelligent Design isn't that it's "not science," as many critics say, but that it's "dead science," raising questions long resolved by scientists. But Kitcher points out that it is also important to recognize the cost of Darwin's success--the price of "life with Darwin." Darwinism has a profound effect on our understanding of our place in the universe, on our religious beliefs and aspirations. It is in truth the focal point of a larger clash between religious faith and modern science. Unless we can resolve this larger issue, the war over evolution will go on.
Author: Steven Johnson Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141033401 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 247
Book Description
In this book, one of our most innovative, popular thinkers, Steven Johnson, takes on one of life's key questions: where do good ideas come from?
Author: John Hartley Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1849666040 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
Cultural Science introduces a new way of thinking about culture. Adopting an evolutionary and systems approach, the authors argue that culture is the population-wide source of newness and innovation; it faces the future, not the past. Its chief characteristic is the formation of groups or 'demes' (organised and productive subpopulation; 'demos'). Demes are the means for creating, distributing and growing knowledge. However, such groups are competitive and knowledge-systems are adversarial. Starting from a rereading of Darwinian evolutionary theory, the book utilises multidisciplinary resources: Raymond Williams's 'culture is ordinary' approach; evolutionary science (e.g. Mark Pagel and Herbert Gintis); semiotics (Yuri Lotman); and economic theory (from Schumpeter to McCloskey). Successive chapters argue that: -Culture and knowledge need to be understood from an externalist ('linked brains') perspective, rather than through the lens of individual behaviour; -Demes are created by culture, especially storytelling, which in turn constitutes both politics and economics; -The clash of systems - including demes - is productive of newness, meaningfulness and successful reproduction of culture; -Contemporary urban culture and citizenship can best be explained by investigating how culture is used, and how newness and innovation emerge from unstable and contested boundaries between different meaning systems; -The evolution of culture is a process of technologically enabled 'demic concentration' of knowledge, across overlapping meaning-systems or semiospheres; a process where the number of demes accessible to any individual has increased at an accelerating rate, resulting in new problems of scale and coordination for cultural science to address. The book argues for interdisciplinary 'consilience', linking evolutionary and complexity theory in the natural sciences, economics and anthropology in the social sciences, and cultural, communication and media studies in the humanities and creative arts. It describes what is needed for a new 'modern synthesis' for the cultural sciences. It combines analytical and historical methods, to provide a framework for a general reconceptualisation of the theory of culture – one that is focused not on its political or customary aspects but rather its evolutionary significance as a generator of newness and innovation.
Author: Christa Kuljian
Author: Christa Kuljian
Author: Daniel Jappah
Author: Martin Brasier
Author: Francisco J. Ayala
Author: Adrian Lister
Author: Samuel Grove
Author: Kostas Kampourakis
Author: Philip Kitcher
Author: Steven Johnson
Author: John Hartley