Download or read book Dispelling The Darkness Voyage In The Malay Archipelago And The Discovery Of Evolution By Wallace And Darwin written by John Van Wyhe and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2013-05-10 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.”T H Huxley (1887)Darwin is one of the most famous scientists in history. But he was not alone. Comparatively forgotten, Wallace independently discovered evolution by natural selection in Southeast Asia. This book is based on the most thorough research ever conducted on Wallace's voyage. Closely connected, but worlds apart, Darwin and Wallace's stories hold many surprises. Did Darwin really keep his theory a secret for twenty years? Did he plagiarise Wallace? Were their theories really the same? How did Wallace hit on the solution, and on which island? This book reveals for the first time the true story of Darwin, Wallace and the discovery that would change our understanding of life on Earth forever.

Download or read book Charles Darwin In Cambridge The Most Joyful Years written by John Van Wyhe and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Darwin's years as a student at the University of Cambridge were some of the most important and formative of his life. Thereafter he always felt a particular affection for Cambridge. For a time he even considered a Cambridge professorship as a career and sent three of his sons there to be educated. Unfortunately the remaining traces of what Darwin actually did and experienced in Cambridge have long remained undiscovered. Consequently his day-to-day life there has remained unknown and misunderstood. This book is based on new research, including newly discovered manuscripts and Darwin publications, and gathers together recollections of those who knew Darwin as a student. This book therefore reveals Darwin's time in Cambridge in unprecedented detail.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Biology written by and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 2138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Biology, Four Volume Set is the definitive go-to reference in the field of evolutionary biology. It provides a fully comprehensive review of the field in an easy to search structure. Under the collective leadership of fifteen distinguished section editors, it is comprised of articles written by leading experts in the field, providing a full review of the current status of each topic. The articles are up-to-date and fully illustrated with in-text references that allow readers to easily access primary literature. While all entries are authoritative and valuable to those with advanced understanding of evolutionary biology, they are also intended to be accessible to both advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Broad topics include the history of evolutionary biology, population genetics, quantitative genetics; speciation, life history evolution, evolution of sex and mating systems, evolutionary biogeography, evolutionary developmental biology, molecular and genome evolution, coevolution, phylogenetic methods, microbial evolution, diversification of plants and fungi, diversification of animals, and applied evolution. Presents fully comprehensive content, allowing easy access to fundamental information and links to primary research Contains concise articles by leading experts in the field that ensures current coverage of each topic Provides ancillary learning tools like tables, illustrations, and multimedia features to assist with the comprehension process

Download or read book Alfred Russel Wallace written by John van Wyhe and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together the letters of the great Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) during his famous travels of 1854-62 in the Malay Archipelago (now Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia). it was these travels which led him to come independently to the same conclusion as Charles Darwin: that evolution occurs through natural selection. Beautifully written, the letters are filled with lavish descriptions of the remote regions he explored, the peoples, and fascinating details of the many new species of mammals, birds, and insects he discovered during his time there. John van Wyhe and Kees Rookmaaker present new transcriptions of each of the letters, including recently discovered letters that shed light on the voyage and on questions such as Wallace's reluctance to publish on evolution, and why he famously chose to write to Darwin rather than to send his work to a journal directly. A revised account of Wallace's itinerary based on new research by the editors forms part of an introduction that sets the context of the voyage, and the volume includes full notes to all letters. Together the letters form a remarkable and vivid document of one of the most important journeys of the 19th century by a great Victorian naturalist.

Download or read book An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion written by Charles H. Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) was one of the most famous scientists in the world at the time of his death at the age of ninety, today he is known to many as a kind of “almost-Darwin,” a secondary figure relegated to the footnotes of Darwin’s prodigious insights. But this diminution could hardly be less justified. Research into the life of this brilliant naturalist and social critic continues to produce new insights into his significance to history and his role in helping to shape modern thought. Wallace declared his eight years of exploration in southeast Asia to be “the central and controlling incident” of his life. As 2019 marks one hundred and fifty years since the publication of The Malay Archipelago, Wallace’s canonical work chronicling his epic voyage, this collaborative book gathers an interdisciplinary array of writers to celebrate Wallace’s remarkable life and diverse scholarly accomplishments. Wallace left school at the age of fourteen and was largely self-taught, a voracious curiosity and appetite for learning sustaining him throughout his long life. After years as a surveyor and builder, in 1848 he left Britain to become a professional natural history collector in the Amazon, where he spent four years. Then, in 1854, he departed for the Malay Archipelago. It was on this voyage that he constructed a theory of natural selection similar to the one Charles Darwin was developing, and the two copublished papers on the subject in 1858, some sixteen months before the release of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. But as the contributors to the Companion show, this much-discussed parallel evolution in thought was only one epoch in an extraordinary intellectual life. When Wallace returned to Britain in 1862, he commenced a career of writing on a huge range of subjects extending from evolutionary studies and biogeography to spiritualism and socialism. An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion provides something of a necessary reexamination of the full breadth of Wallace’s thought—an attempt to describe not only the history and present state of our understanding of his work, but also its implications for the future.

Download or read book Naturalists Explorers and Field Scientists in South East Asia and Australasia written by Indraneil Das and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-25 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ​"Alfred Russel Wallace- His Predecessors and Successors. Naturalists, Explorers and Field Scientists in South-east Asia and Australasia. An International Conference" will be the premier forum for the presentation of new advances and research results in the fields of studies on Alfred Russel Wallace and other natural historians, past and present, as well as contemporary research on South-east Asian and Australasian biological diversity. The conference will bring together leading researchers including biologists, ecologists, zoologists, botanists, geologists, anthropologists, social scientists and others from around the world. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: history of biology, biodiversity, anthropology, geology, conservation, ecosystem management, environmental impact assessments, environmental law, environmental policies, landscape management and habitat restoration and management.

Download or read book Historicizing Humans written by Efram Sera-Shriar and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-05-23 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an Afterword by Theodore Koditschek A number of important developments and discoveries across the British Empire's imperial landscape during the nineteenth century invited new questions about human ancestry. The rise of secularism and scientific naturalism; new evidence, such as skeletal and archaeological remains; and European encounters with different people all over the world challenged the existing harmony between science and religion and threatened traditional biblical ideas about special creation and the timeline of human history. Advances in print culture and voyages of exploration also provided researchers with a wealth of material that contributed to their investigations into humanity’s past. Historicizing Humans takes a critical approach to nineteenth-century human history, as the contributors consider how these histories were shaped by the colonial world, and for various scientific, religious, and sociopolitical purposes. This volume highlights the underlying questions and shared assumptions that emerged as various human developmental theories competed for dominance throughout the British Empire.

Download or read book Travel Writing in Dutch and German 1790 1930 written by Alison E. Martin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on how travel writing contributed to cultural and intellectual exchange in and between the Dutch- and German-speaking regions from the 1790s to the twentieth-century interwar period. Drawing on a hitherto largely overlooked body of travelers whose work ranges across what is now Germany and Austria, the Netherlands and Dutch-speaking Belgium, the Dutch East Indies and Suriname, the contributors highlight the interrelations between the regional and the global and the role alterity plays in both spheres. They therefore offer a transnational and transcultural perspective on the ways in which the foreign was mediated to audiences back home. By combining a narrative perspective on travel writing with a socio-historically contextualized approach, essays emphasize the importance of textuality in travel literature as well as the self-positioning of such accounts in their individual historical and political environments. The first sustained analysis to focus specifically on these neighboring cultural and linguistic areas, this collection demonstrates how topographies of knowledge were forged across these regions by an astonishingly diverse range of travelling individuals from professional scholars and writers to art dealers, soldiers, (female) explorers, and scientific collectors. The contributors address cultural, aesthetic, political, and gendered aspects of travel writing, drawing productively on other disciplines and areas of scholarly research that encompass German Studies, Low Countries Studies, comparative literature, aesthetics, the history of science, literary geography, and the history of publishing.

Download or read book Rewriting Nature written by Paul Enríquez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History will mark the twenty-first century as the dawn of the age of precise genetic manipulation. Breakthroughs in genome editing are poised to enable humankind to fundamentally transform life on Earth. Those familiar with genome editing understand its potential to revolutionize civilization in ways that surpass the impact of the discovery of electricity and the development of gunpowder, the atomic bomb, or the Internet. Significant questions regarding how society should promote or hinder genome editing loom large in the horizon. And it is up to humans to decide the fate of this powerful technology. Rewriting Nature is a compelling, thought-provoking interdisciplinary exploration of the law, science, and policy of genome editing. The book guides readers through complex legal, scientific, ethical, political, economic, and social issues concerning this emerging technology, and challenges the conventional false dichotomy often associated with science and law, which contributes to a growing divide between both fields.

Download or read book Darwin Mythology written by Kostas Kampourakis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-30 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible collection debunks pervasive myths about Darwin's life and work, deepening our understanding of the history of science.

Download or read book Alfred Russel Wallace written by Patrick Armstrong and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometimes referred to as the “Father of Biogeography,” Alfred Russel Wallace has come to be known as the co-originator of the theory of evolution through natural selection, and he also wrote extensively on zoology, botany, anthropology, politics, astronomy, and psychology. Although notorious in his day for his unpopular and eccentric beliefs, he is still recognized as one of the leading figures in nineteenth-century British science. In this book, Patrick Armstrong illuminates the many facets of Wallace’s long life, which extended from 1823 until the eve of World War I. He shows Wallace to be, in many ways, a more interesting character than his colleague and friend, evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin. Taking a psychological approach, this compact yet comprehensive biography gives insight into a man who was frequently plagued with misfortune; legal problems, inability to obtain full-time employment, and relationship troubles all vexed him. Armstrong unlocks the life of a restless traveler who, although raised with “a very ordinary” education, would go on to become one of the most influential, extraordinary scientists of his time.

Download or read book Great Men Great Thoughts and The Environment written by William James and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2023-11-18 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Great Men, Great Thoughts, and The Environment" by William James. Published by DigiCat. DigiCat publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each DigiCat edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Download or read book Ingenious written by Peter Gluckman and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The trouble with innovation is that it can seldom be undone. We invent technologies to modify our environments in immediately beneficial ways, but the long-term consequences can be costly. From obesity to antibiotic resistance, we pay for our successes. Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson explore what happens when our creations lead nature to bite back.

Download or read book Visual Celebration of Borneo s Wildlife written by Fanny Lai and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Borneo wildlife pictorial offers nature lovers, visitors to Borneo and armchair explorers an unparalleled introduction to this mysterious treasure island. Illustrated with more than 350 images, taken by Bjorn Olesen and other wildlife photographers, A Visual Celebration of Borneo's Wildlife is a photographic tribute to the most spectacular wildlife species on the second-largest tropical island on Earth. It displays nature's beauty, revealing many private moments of the astonishing biodiversity of Borneo, where nature runs riot. Based on the latest research, it is filled with captivating little-known facts about the wildlife that modern-day travelers may come across when visiting this enchanting island. It also describes the top 16 wildlife locations in Borneo, with a comprehensive list of recommended reading, websites and blogs provided. Also included is a foreword by HRH Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands, President of Fauna & Flora International. **All of the authors' royalties will be donated to Fauna & Flora International for nature conservation work in Southeast Asia.**

Download or read book Transports of Delight written by Peter Hancock and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This inspiring book shows how the spiritual side of life, with its thoughts, feelings, and aspirations, is intimately bound up with our material technologies. From the wonder of Gothic Cathedrals, to the quiet majesty of lighter than air flight, to the ultimate in luxury of the north Atlantic steamers, Peter Hancock explores how these sequential heights of technology have enabled our dreams of being transported to new and uncharted realms to become reality. Sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, technology has always been there to make material the visions of our imagination. This book shows how this has essentially been true for all technologies from Stonehenge to space station.But technology is far from perfect. Indeed, the author argues here that some of the most public and tragic of its failures still remain instructive, emblematic, and even inspiring. He reports on examples such as a Cathedral of the Earth (Beauvais), a Cathedral of the Seas (Titanic), and a Cathedral of the Air (Hindenburg) and tells their stories from the viewpoint of material transcendence. By interweaving their stories he reveals how technologies can succeed in elevating human beings and, in taking them to whole new realms of being, he explores and explains why these experiences are ‘Transports of Delight.’

Download or read book Psychic Investigators written by Efram Sera-Shriar and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychic Investigators examines British anthropology’s engagement with the modern spiritualist movement during the late Victorian era. Efram Sera-Shriar argues that debates over the existence of ghosts and psychical powers were at the center of anthropological discussions on human beliefs. He focuses on the importance of establishing credible witnesses of spirit and psychic phenomena in the writings of anthropologists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Edward Burnett Tylor, Andrew Lang, and Edward Clodd. The book draws on major themes, such as the historical relationship between science and religion, the history of scientific observation, and the emergence of the subfield of anthropology of religion in the second half of the nineteenth century. For secularists such as Tylor and Clodd, spiritualism posed a major obstacle in establishing the legitimacy of the theory of animism: a core theoretical principle of anthropology founded in the belief of “primitive cultures” that spirits animated the world, and that this belief represented the foundation of all religious paradigms. What becomes clear through this nuanced examination of Victorian anthropology is that arguments involving spirits or psychic forces usually revolved around issues of evidence, or lack of it, rather than faith or beliefs or disbeliefs.

Download or read book There Are No Such Things As Theories written by Steven French and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There Are No Such Things as Theories considers the fundamental question: what is a scientific theory? It presents a range of options - from theories are sets of propositions, to theories are families of models, abstract artefacts, or fictions - and highlights the various problems they all face. In so doing it draws multiple comparisons between theories and artworks: on the one hand, theories are like certain kinds of paintings with regard to their representational capacity; on the other, they are like musical works in that they can be multiply presented. An alternative answer to the question is then offered, drawing on the metaphysics of musical works: there are no such things as theories. Nevertheless, we can still talk about them, since that talk is made true by the various practices that scientists engage in. The implications of this form of eliminativism for the realism debate is then discussed and it is concluded that this may offer a more flexible framework in which we can understand both the history and the philosophy of science in general.