The Simian Tongue

Author : Gregory Radick
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226702243
Total Pages : 593 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Simian Tongue written by Gregory Radick and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yet for most of the next century, the simian tongue and the means for its study existed at the scientific periphery.

Author : Gregory Radick
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226835944
Total Pages : 593 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Simian Tongue written by Gregory Radick and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-01-23 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1890s the theory of evolution gained an unexpected ally: the Edison phonograph. An amateur scientist used the new machine—one of the technological wonders of the age—to record monkey calls, play them back to the monkeys, and watch their reactions. From these soon-famous experiments he judged that he had discovered “the simian tongue,” made up of words he was beginning to translate, and containing the rudiments from which human language evolved. Yet for most of the next century, the simian tongue and the means for its study existed at the scientific periphery. Both returned to great acclaim only in the early 1980s, after a team of ethologists announced that experimental playback showed certain African monkeys to have rudimentarily meaningful calls. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources and interviews with key scientists, Gregory Radick here reconstructs the remarkable trajectory of a technique invented and reinvented to listen in on primate communication. Richly documented and powerfully argued, The Simian Tongue charts the scientific controversies over the evolution of language from Darwin’s day to our own, resurrecting the forgotten debts of psychology, anthropology, and other behavioral sciences to the Victorian debate about the animal roots of human language.

Author : Joanna Bourke
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1619021676
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book What It Means to be Human written by Joanna Bourke and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2013-07-23 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1872, a woman known only as "An Earnest Englishwoman" published a letter titled "Are Women Animals?" in which she protested against the fact that women were not treated as fully human. In fact, their status was worse than that of animals: regulations prohibiting cruelty against dogs, horses, and cattle were significantly more punitive than laws against cruelty to women. The Earnest Englishwoman's heartfelt cry was for women to "become–animal" in order to gain the status that they were denied on the grounds that they were not part of "mankind." In this fascinating account, Joanna Bourke addresses the profound question of what it means to be "human" rather than "animal." How are people excluded from political personhood? How does one become entitled to rights? The distinction between the two concepts is a blurred line, permanently under construction. If the Earnest Englishwoman had been capable of looking 100 years into the future, she might have wondered about the human status of chimeras, or the ethics of stem cell research. Political disclosures and scientific advances have been re–locating the human–animal border at an alarming speed. In this meticulously researched, illuminating book, Bourke explores the legacy of more than two centuries, and looks forward into what the future might hold for humans, women, and animals.

Author : Roy Harris
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 9781855064386
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Origin Of Language written by Roy Harris and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public debate about language in the English-speaking world during the nineteenth century turned on the issue of how language began. The notion that language was a divine gift to humanity, not shared by lower creatures, was supported by the Biblical accounts of Adam naming the animals and of the Tower of Babel. It was still accepted by leading religious authorities. But this notion was seriously brought into question by the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution. Those who rejected Darwinism ridiculed all attempts to conjure up language out of primitive calls, grunts, and ejaculations. No animals, it was pointed out, had yet achieved communication remotely resembling the use of words. On the other side were those who held that it was possible to account for the birth of language rationally as a function of the development of human communicational needs in society.

Author : Christine Ferguson
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351923323
Total Pages : 166 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle written by Christine Ferguson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Focusing on a variety of literary and non-literary texts, the book maps out the dialogue between the Victorian life and social sciences most involved in the study of language and the literary genre frequently indicted for causing linguistic corruption and debasement - popular fiction. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian biological, philological, and anthropological accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists such as Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Bram Stoker used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste. In its alignment of scientific, cultural, and popular discourses of human language, Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle stands as a corrective to assessments of best-selling fiction's intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic simplicity.

Author : William Thomas Stead
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 680 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Review of Reviews written by William Thomas Stead and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191061840
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Foot in the River written by Felipe Fernández-Armesto and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-10-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are a weird species. Like other species, we have a culture. But by comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable: human cultures self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place. And the way we live — our manners, morals, habits, experiences, relationships, technology, values — seems to be changing at an ever accelerating pace. The effects can be dislocating, baffling, sometimes terrifying. Why is this? In A Foot in the River, best-selling historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto sifts through the evidence and offers some radical answers to these very big questions about the human species and its history — and speculates on what these answers might mean for our future. Combining insights from a huge range of disciplines, including history, biology, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, sociology, ethology, zoology, primatology, psychology, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, and even business studies, he argues that culture is exempt from evolution. Ultimately, no environmental conditions, no genetic legacy, no predictable patterns, no scientific laws determine our behaviour. We can consequently make and remake our world in the freedom of unconstrained imaginations. A revolutionary book which challenges scientistic assumptions about culture and how and why cultural change happens, A Foot in the River comes to conclusions which readers may well find by turns both daunting and also potentially hugely liberating.

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 782 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The New Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Lisa Gitelman
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262572286
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book New Media, 1740-1915 written by Lisa Gitelman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cultural history of media that were "new media" in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Author : James L. Newman
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1442219572
Total Pages : 221 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Encountering Gorillas written by James L. Newman and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2013-07-05 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gorillas, the largest of the apes inhabiting our planet, have been a source of fear, awe, and inspiration to humans. In this book, James L. Newman brings a lifetime of study of Africa to his compelling story of the rich and varied interaction between gorillas and humans since earliest contact. He illuminates the complex relationship over time through the interlinked themes of discovery, exploitation, understanding, and continuing survival. Tragically, the number of free-living gorillas—facing habitat loss, disease, and poaching—has declined dramatically over the course of the past century, and the future of the few that remain is highly uncertain. At the same time, those in zoos and sanctuaries now lead much more secure lives than they did earlier. Newman follows this transition, highlighting the roles played by key individuals, both humans and gorillas. Among the former have been adventurers, opportunists, writers, and scientists. The latter include real gorillas, such as Gargantua and Koko, and fictional ones, notably King Kong and Mighty Joe Young. This thoughtful and engaging book helps us understand how our image of gorillas has been both distorted and clarified through culture and science for centuries and how we now control the destiny of these magnificent great apes.