Download or read book Evolutionary Worlds Without End written by Henry C. Plotkin and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Evolutionary Worlds without end, Henry Plotkin considers whether there is any general theory in biology, including the social sciences, that is in any way equivalent to the general theories of physics. He starts by examining Ernest Rutherford's dictum as to what science is. In the later chapters he considers the possibility, within an historical framework, of a general theory being based upon selection processes. --

Download or read book World without End written by James H. Moorhead and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1999-10-22 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this compelling intellectual and social history, Moorhead argues that for mainline Protestants in the late 19th century, time became endless, human-directed and without urgency. . . . Moorhead offers some brilliant observations about the legacy of postmillennialism and the human need for a definitive eschaton." —Publishers Weekly In the 19th century American Protestants firmly believed that when progress had run its course, there would be a Second Coming of Christ, the world would come to a supernatural End, and the predictions in the Apocalypse would come to pass. During the years covered in James Moorhead's study, however, moderate and liberal mainstream Protestants transformed this postmillennialism into a hope that this world would be the scene for limitless spiritual improvement and temporal progress. The sense of an End vanished with the arrival of the new millennium.

Download or read book World Without End written by Thomas Keating and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these conversations with film maker and writer Lucette Verboven, Thomas Keating OCSO – bestselling author, Trappist monk and founder of the Centering Prayer movement – looks back on his long life and spiritual development. Following on from his previous books Invitation to Love, Open Mind, Open Heart and The Mystery of Christ, Father Keating now turns his attention to the themes of awakening, the nature of true happiness and the character and purpose of death. World Without End also contains an interview with Abbot Joseph Boyle OCSO, who presides over the monastery where Father Keating is resident, high in the Rocky Mountains in Snowmass, Colorado. Verboven's insightful questions probe into the depths of Father Keating's spirituality, discussing identity, transformation, silence, nature and the cosmos – themes universal and applicable to all those searching for a deeper and more meaningful life.

Download or read book Worlds Without End written by Chris Impey and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The science of finding habitable planets beyond our solar system and the prospects for establishing human civilization away from our ever-less-habitable planetary home. Planet Earth, it turns out, may not be the best of all possible worlds—and lately humanity has been carelessly depleting resources, decimating species, and degrading everything needed for life. Meanwhile, human ingenuity has opened up a vista of habitable worlds well beyond our wildest dreams of outposts on Mars. Worlds without End is an expertly guided tour of this thrilling frontier in astronomy: the search for planets with the potential to host life. With the approachable style that has made him a leading interpreter of astronomy and space science, Chris Impey conducts readers across the vast, fast-developing field of astrobiology, surveying the dizzying advances carrying us ever closer to the discovery of life beyond Earth—and the prospect of humans living on another planet. Since the first exoplanet, or planet beyond our solar system, was discovered in 1995, over 4,000 more have been pinpointed, including hundreds of Earth-like planets, many of them habitable, detected by the Kepler satellite. With a view spanning astronomy, planetary science, geology, chemistry, and biology, Impey provides a state-of-the-art account of what’s behind this accelerating progress, what’s next, and what it might mean for humanity’s future. The existential threats that we face here on Earth lend urgency to this search, raising the question: Could space be our salvation? From the definition of habitability to the changing shape of space exploration—as it expands beyond the interests of government to the pursuits of private industry—Worlds without End shows us the science, on horizons near and far, that may hold the answers.

Download or read book Anarchy Evolution written by Greg Graffin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Take one man who rejects authority and religion, and leads a punk band. Take another man who wonders whether vertebrates arose in rivers or in the ocean….Put them together, what do you get? Greg Graffin, and this uniquely fascinating book.” —Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel Anarchy Evolution is a provocative look at the collision between religion and science, by an author with unique authority: UCLA lecturer in Paleontology, and founding member of Bad Religion, Greg Graffin. Alongside science writer Steve Olson (whose Mapping Human History was a National Book Award finalist) Graffin delivers a powerful discussion sure to strike a chord with readers of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion or Christopher Hitchens God Is Not Great. Bad Religion die-hards, newer fans won over during the band’s 30th Anniversary Tour, and anyone interested in this increasingly important debate should check out this treatise on science from the god of punk rock.

Download or read book World Without End written by Joseph A. Bracken and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marjorie Suchocki's ground-breaking work "The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context (SUNY, 1988) serves as the backdrop for a series of essays by distinguished Christian philosophers and theologians on the usefulness of process thought for the articulation of a contemporary Christian Eschatology in the light of postmodernism and contemporary natural science.

Download or read book Exercised written by Daniel Lieberman and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book tells the story of how we never evolved to exercise - to do voluntary physical activity for the sake of health. Using his own research and experiences throughout the world, the author recounts how and why humans evolved to walk, run, dig, and do other necessary and rewarding physical activities while avoiding needless exertion. Drawing on insights from biology and anthropology, the author suggests how we can make exercise more enjoyable, rather that shaming and blaming people for avoiding it

Download or read book Worlds Without End written by John S. Lewis and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 1998 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everything you ever wanted to know about planets: past, present, and future.

Download or read book Synergistic Selection How Cooperation Has Shaped Evolution And The Rise Of Humankind written by Peter A Corning and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Nothing about the evolution of biological complexity makes sense except in the light of synergy.' Peter Corning's new book is being hailed as a major contribution to what is perhaps the greatest shift in our understanding of evolution since The Origin of Species. It's a tour de force that takes us on a synergy-guided tour of the history of life. As Corning puts it, 'life on Earth has been a synergistic phenomenon from the get go.' Corning also shows how synergy has been a key to human evolution, including the rise of complex modern societies. 'Cooperation may have been the vehicle, but synergy was the driver.' As we now face a tipping point and another major transition in evolution, Corning offers us a synergy-based road-map to the future. 'One of the great take-home lessons from the epic of evolution is that cooperation produces synergy, and synergy is the way forward. The arc of evolution bends toward synergy.'Related Link(s)

Download or read book Cultural Evolution and its Discontents written by Robert Watson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People worry that computers, robots, interstellar aliens, or Satan himself – brilliant, stealthy, ruthless creatures – may seize control of our world and destroy what’s uniquely valuable about the human race. Cultural Evolution and its Discontents shows that our cultural systems – especially those whose last names are "ism" – are already doing that, and doing it so adeptly that we seldom even notice. Like other parasites, they’ve blindly evolved to exploit us for their own survival. Creative arts and humanistic scholarship are our best tools for diagnosis and cure. The assemblages of ideas that have survived, like the assemblages of biological cells that have survived, are the ones good at protecting and reproducing themselves. They aren’t necessarily the ones that guide us toward our most admirable selves or our healthiest future. Relying so heavily on culture to protect our uniquely open minds from cognitive overload makes us vulnerable to hijacking by the systems that co-evolve with us. Recognizing the selfish Darwinian functions of these systems makes sense of many aspects of history, politics, economics, and popular culture. What drove the Protestant Reformation? Why have the Beatles, The Hunger Games, and paranoid science-fiction thrived, and how was hip-hop co-opted? What alliances helped neoliberalism out-compete Communism, and what alliances might enable environmentalism to overcome consumerism? Why are multiculturalism and university-trained elites provoking working-class nationalist backlash? In a digital age, how can we use numbers without having them use us instead? Anyone who has wondered how our species can be so brilliant and so stupid at the same time may find an answer here: human mentalities are so complex that we crave the simplifications provided by our cultures, but the cultures that thrive are the ones that blind us to any interests that don’t correspond to their own.

Download or read book Evolution Evolving written by Kevin N. Lala and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new account of the central role developmental processes play in evolution A new scientific view of evolution is emerging—one that challenges and expands our understanding of how evolution works. Recent research demonstrates that organisms differ greatly in how effective they are at evolving. Whether and how each organism adapts and diversifies depends critically on the mechanistic details of how that organism operates—its development, physiology, and behavior. That is because the evolutionary process itself has evolved over time, and continues to evolve. The scientific understanding of evolution is evolving too, with groundbreaking new ways of explaining evolutionary change. In this book, a group of leading biologists draw on the latest findings in evolutionary genetics and evo-devo, as well as novel insights from studies of epigenetics, symbiosis, and inheritance, to examine the central role that developmental processes play in evolution. Written in an accessible style, and illustrated with fascinating examples of natural history, the book presents recent scientific discoveries that expand evolutionary biology beyond the classical view of gene transmission guided by natural selection. Without undermining the central importance of natural selection and other Darwinian foundations, new developmental insights indicate that all organisms possess their own characteristic sets of evolutionary mechanisms. The authors argue that a consideration of developmental phenomena is needed for evolutionary biologists to generate better explanations for adaptation and biodiversity. This book provides a new vision of adaptive evolution.

Download or read book Thank God for Evolution written by Michael Dowd and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a philosophy that unifies evolution and religion, discussing evolution as a divine process, how to use insights derived from evolution to improve spiritual life, and how to work for systemic change within this framework.

Download or read book Worlds Without End written by Norman John Berrill and published by New York : Macmillan. This book was released on 1964 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Evolution written by Jonathan Bard and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolution is the single unifying principle of biology and core to everything in the life sciences. More than a century of work by scientists from across the biological spectrum has produced a detailed history of life across the phyla and explained the mechanisms by which new species form. This textbook covers both this history and the mechanisms of speciation; it also aims to provide students with the background needed to read the research literature on evolution. Students will therefore learn about cladistics, molecular phylogenies, the molecular-genetical basis of evolutionary change including the important role of protein networks, symbionts and holobionts, together with the core principles of developmental biology. The book also includes introductory appendices that provide background knowledge on, for example, the diversity of life today, fossils, the geology of Earth and the history of evolutionary thought. Key Features Summarizes the origins of life and the evolution of the eukaryotic cell and of Urbilateria, the last common ancestor of invertebrates and vertebrates. Reviews the history of life across the phyla based on the fossil record and computational phylogenetics. Explains evo-devo and the generation of anatomical novelties. Illustrates the roles of small populations, genetic drift, mutation and selection in speciation. Documents human evolution using the fossil record and evidence of dispersal across the world leading to the emergence of modern humans.

Download or read book Principles of Evolution written by Jonathan Bard and published by Garland Science. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Principles of Evolution covers all aspects of the subject. Following an introductory section that provides necessary background, it has chapters on the evidence for evolution that cover the fossil record, DNA-sequence homologies, and protein homologies (evo-devo). It also includes a full history of life from the first universal common ancestor, through the rise of the eukaryote and on to the major groups of phyla. This section is followed by one on the mechanism of evolution with chapters on variation, selection and speciation. The main part of the book ends with a chapter on human evolution and this is followed by appendices that expand on the making of fossils, the history of the subject and creationism. What marks this book as different from others on evolution is its systems-biology perspective. This new area focuses on the role of protein networks and on multi-level complexity, and is used in three contexts. First, most biological activity is driven by such networks and this has direct implications for understanding evo-devo and for seeing how variation is initiated, mainly during embryogenesis. Second, it provides the natural language for discussing phylogenetics. Third, evolutionary change involves events at levels ranging from the genome to the ecosystem and systems biology provides a context for integrating material of this complexity. The book assumes a basic grounding in biology but little mathematics as the difficult subject of evolutionary population genetics is mainly covered qualitatively, with major results being discussed and used rather than derived. Principles of Evolution will be an interesting and thought-provoking text for undergraduates and graduates across the biological sciences.

Download or read book The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms written by Robert F. Shedinger and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-06-28 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Darwinian evolution really the most successful scientific theory ever proposed—or even the best idea anyone has ever had, as Daniel Dennett once put it? The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms provides a comprehensive critical reading of the literature of evolutionary biology from Darwin to Dobzhansky to Dawkins, revealing this popular account of evolution to be a grand narrative of Darwinian triumph that greatly overstates the empirical validity of modern evolutionary theory. The mechanisms driving the evolutionary process truly remain a mystery more than one hundred fifty years after Origin of Species, a fact that can free religion scholars to think in more creative ways about the positive contributions religious reflection might make to our understanding of life’s origin and diversity. The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms calls for an embrace of mystery, understood not as an abdication of the scientific quest for truth but as a courageous and humble acknowledgment of the limits of human reason and an openness to a fundamentally religious orientation toward life.

Download or read book Darwin Mythology written by Kostas Kampourakis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-06 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many historical figures have their lives and works shrouded in myth, both in life and long after their deaths. Charles Darwin (1809–82) is no exception to this phenomenon and his hero-worship has become an accepted narrative. This concise, accessible and engaging collection unpacks this narrative to rehumanize Darwin's story and establish what it meant to be a 'genius' in the Victorian context. Leading Darwin scholars have come together to argue that, far from being a lonely genius in an ivory tower, Darwin had fortune, diligence and – crucially – community behind him. The aims of this essential work are twofold. First, to set the historical record straight, debunking the most pervasive myths and correcting falsehoods. Second, to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of science itself, relevant to historians, scientists and the public alike.