Accidental Creatures

Author : Anne Harris
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0312865384
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Accidental Creatures written by Anne Harris and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1998-05-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bio-technology corporation creates a new species--intelligent, four-armed, humanoid "tetras" who can live in the vats in which the company grows biopolymers--and soon the victims become the aggressors in this new SF thriller by the author of "The Nature of Smoke".

Author : Henry Gee
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022604498X
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Accidental Species written by Henry Gee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With a delightfully irascible sense of humor, Henry Gee reflects on our origin . . . an excellent primer on how—and how not—to think about human evolution.” —Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary imagination, and new fossil discoveries are often hailed in headlines as revealing the elusive transitional step, the moment when we stopped being “animal” and started being “human.” In The Accidental Species, Henry Gee, longtime paleontology editor at Nature, takes aim at this misleading notion, arguing that it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how evolution works and, when applied to the evolution of our own species, supports mistaken ideas about our own place in the universe. Gee presents a robust and stark challenge to our tendency to see ourselves as the acme of creation. Far from being a quirk of religious fundamentalism, human exceptionalism, Gee argues, is an error that also infects scientific thought. Touring the many features of human beings that have recurrently been used to distinguish us from the rest of the animal world, Gee shows that our evolutionary outcome is one possibility among many, one that owes more to chance than to an organized progression to supremacy. He starts with bipedality, which he shows could have arisen entirely by accident, as a by-product of sexual selection, then moves on to technology, large brain size, intelligence, language, and, finally, sentience. He reveals each of these attributes to be alive and well throughout the animal world—they are not, indeed, unique to our species. The Accidental Species combines Gee’s expertise and experience with healthy skepticism and humor to create a book that aims to overturn popular thinking on human evolution. The key is not what’s missing—but how we’re linked.

Author : Wallace Arthur
Publisher : Hill and Wang
ISBN 13 : 1466801794
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Creatures of Accident written by Wallace Arthur and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2007-09-04 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important aspect of evolution, from a philosophical viewpoint, is the rise of complex, advanced creatures from simple, primitive ones. This "vertical" dimension of evolution has been downplayed in both the specialist and popular literature on evolution, in large part because it was in the past associated with unsavory political views. The avoidance of evolution's vertical dimension has, however, left evolutionary biology open to the perception, from outside, that it deals merely with the diversification of rather similar creatures, all at the same level of "advancedness" from a common ancestor—for example, the classic case studies of finches with different beaks or moths of different colors. The latest incarnation of creationism, dubbed intelligent design (or ID), has taken advantage of this situation. It portrays an evolutionary process that is constantly guided—especially in its upward direction—by the hand of an unseen Creator, who is able to ensure that it ends up producing humans. Creatures of Accident attacks the antiscience ID worldview, mainly by building a persuasive picture of how "unaided" evolution produces advanced creatures from simple ones by an essentially accidental process. Having built this picture, in the final chapter the book reflects on its religious implications.

Author : Peter S. Alagona
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520397886
Total Pages : 293 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Accidental Ecosystem written by Peter S. Alagona and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Smithsonian Magazine's Favorite Books of 2022 With wildlife thriving in cities, we have the opportunity to create vibrant urban ecosystems that serve both people and animals. The Accidental Ecosystem tells the story of how cities across the United States went from having little wildlife to filling, dramatically and unexpectedly, with wild creatures. Today, many of these cities have more large and charismatic wild animals living in them than at any time in at least the past 150 years. Why have so many cities--the most artificial and human-dominated of all Earth's ecosystems--grown rich with wildlife, even as wildlife has declined in most of the rest of the world? And what does this paradox mean for people, wildlife, and nature on our increasingly urban planet? The Accidental Ecosystem is the first book to explain this phenomenon from a deep historical perspective, and its focus includes a broad range of species and cities. Cities covered include New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Austin, Miami, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Digging into the natural history of cities and unpacking our conception of what it means to be wild, this book provides fascinating context for why animals are thriving more in cities than outside of them. Author Peter S. Alagona argues that the proliferation of animals in cities is largely the unintended result of human decisions that were made for reasons having little to do with the wild creatures themselves. Considering what it means to live in diverse, multispecies communities and exploring how human and nonhuman members of communities might thrive together, Alagona goes beyond the tension between those who embrace the surge in urban wildlife and those who think of animals as invasive or as public safety hazards. The Accidental Ecosystem calls on readers to reimagine interspecies coexistence in shared habitats, as well as policies that are based on just, humane, and sustainable approaches.

Author : Amanda Foody
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1534477578
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Accidental Apprentice written by Amanda Foody and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleven-year-old Barclay Thorne yearns for the quiet life of a mushroom farmer, but after unwittingly bonding with a beast in the forbidden Woods, he must seek Lore Keepers to break the bond and return home.

Author : Lynne Heasley
Publisher : MSU Press
ISBN 13 : 1628954493
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes written by Lynne Heasley and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2022 NAUTILUS SILVER WINNER FOR LYRIC PROSE—In The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes, Lynne Heasley illuminates an underwater world that, despite a ferocious industrial history, remains wondrous and worthy of care. From its first scene in a benighted Great Lakes river, where lake sturgeon thrash and spawn, this powerful book takes readers on journeys through the Great Lakes, alongside fish and fishers, scuba divers and scientists, toxic pollutants and threatened communities, oil pipelines and invasive species, Indigenous peoples and federal agencies. With dazzling illustrations from Glenn Wolff, the book helps us know the Great Lakes in new ways and grapple with the legacies and alternative futures that come from their abundance of natural wealth. Suffused with curiosity, empathy, and wit, The Accidental Reef will not fail to astonish and inspire.

Author : Eric Basso
Publisher : Leaping Dog Press/Asylum
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Accidental Monsters written by Eric Basso and published by Leaping Dog Press/Asylum. This book was released on 1998 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Completed in six months, on the eve of the poet's twenty-ninth birthday, ACCIDENTAL MONSTERS was Eric Basso's first collection of poems. The author of the critically acclaimed GOLEM TRIPTYCH carries us through a world where landscapes and interiors merge. This is a poetry of convergences, set in the time-warp which traps that disquieting moment between the dream and the awakening: beyond the last step/ where a soft part of the/ floor had turned to dust/ red pupils glowed like/ round cinders in/ the dark (Rudimentary Gods). Eric Basso was born in Baltimore in 1947. He is the author of twenty-one plays, and his poems have been published in the Chicago Review, Central Park, Asylum, and numerous other publications.

Author : Saint Thomas (Aquinas)
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 468 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Of God and His Creatures written by Saint Thomas (Aquinas) and published by . This book was released on 1905 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Lawrence Susskind
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 0787966592
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Transboundary Environmental Negotiation written by Lawrence Susskind and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2002-10-08 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transboundary Environmental Negotiation is an important collection of articles generated by faculty and graduate students at MIT, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. The contributors emphasize the ways in which global environmental treaty-making can be improved. They highlight new environmental problems that pose difficult global negotiation challenges and suggest new strategies for involving a range of nongovernmental actors in ways that can overcome the obstacles to transboundary environmentalism.

Author : Wallace Arthur
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0809037017
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Creatures of Accident written by Wallace Arthur and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-09-04 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important aspect of evolution, from a philosophical viewpoint, is the rise of complex, advanced creatures from simple, primitive ones. This "vertical" dimension of evolution has been downplayed, in large part because it was in the past associated with unsavory political views. This avoidance has, however, left evolutionary biology open to the perception that it deals merely with the diversification of similar creatures, all at the same level of "advancedness," from a common ancestor--for example, the classic case studies of finches with different beaks. The latest incarnation of creationism, dubbed Intelligent Design (or ID), has taken advantage of this. It portrays an evolutionary process that is guided--especially in its upward direction--by the hand of an unseen Creator, to ensure that it ends up producing humans. This book builds a persuasive picture of how "unaided" evolution produces advanced creatures from simple ones by an essentially accidental process.--From publisher description.