Download or read book How Evolution Explains Everything About Life written by New Scientist and published by Nicholas Brealey. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did we get here? It's the journey of a lifetime. All cultures have a creation story, but a little over 150 years ago Charles Darwin introduced a revolutionary new one. We, and all living things, exist because of the action of evolution on the first simple life form and its descendants. We now know that it has taken 3.8 billions of years of work by the forces of evolution to turn what was once a lump of barren rock into the rich diversity of into plants, animals and microbes that surround us. In the process, evolution has created all manner of useful adaptions, from biological computers (brains) to a system to capture energy from the sun (photosynthesis). But how does evolution actually work? In How Evolution Explains Everything, leading biologists and New Scientist take you on a journey of a lifetime, exploring the question of whether life is inevitable or a one-off fluke, and how it got kick-started. Does evolution have a purpose or direction? Are selfish genes really the driving force of evolution? And is evolution itself evolving?
Download or read book The Physics of Life written by Adrian Bejan and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Physics of Life explores the roots of the big question by examining the deepest urges and properties of living things, both animate and inanimate: how to live longer, with food, warmth, power, movement and free access to other people and surroundings. Bejan explores controversial and relevant issues such as sustainability, water and food supply, fuel, and economy, to critique the state in which the world understands positions of power and freedom. Breaking down concepts such as desire and power, sports health and culture, the state of economy, water and energy, politics and distribution, Bejan uses the language of physics to explain how each system works in order to clarify the meaning of evolution in its broadest scientific sense, moving the reader towards a better understanding of the world's systems and the natural evolution of cultural and political development. The Physics of Life argues that the evolution phenomenon is much broader and older than the evolutionary designs that constitute the biosphere, empowering readers with a new view of the globe and the future, revealing that the urge to have better ideas has the same physical effect as the urge to have better laws and better government. This is evolution explained loudly but also elegantly, forging a path that flows sustainability.
Download or read book Unified Reality Theory written by Steven Kaufman and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2015-12-04 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Unified Reality Theory demonstrates that the source of reality is a universal consciousness, and that we are in no way separable from that source, and so in no way truly separable from each other or any other aspect of reality. I recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding the nature of reality and their place in it.” —Deepak Chopra Unified Reality Theory describes how all reality evolves from an absolute existence. It also demonstrates that this absolute existence must have consciousness as an attribute that’s intrinsic to its being. Thus, Unified Reality Theory shows that consciousness, rather than being a product of the evolution of physical reality, is itself the source of what we experience as physical reality, and that physical reality is itself but one aspect of an evolving universal consciousness. Unified Reality Theory shows that, most fundamentally, this absolute consciousness-existence evolves into reality by means of a single process: self-relation. That is, consciousness-existence becomes reality by forming relationships with itself, analogous in a very limited way to what happens to a rubber band that’s twisted upon itself, i.e., it remains whole while differentiating into other forms. Thus, Unified Reality Theory demonstrates that reality is a state of existential self-relation. The idea that the universe consists of existence which has formed relationships with itself isn’t new; Taoists have understood this idea for at least a couple of thousand years. What’s new here is the presentation of this idea in the form of a detailed and defined structural model that correlates with the behavior of physical reality as described by science in general and physics in particular. Ultimately, Unified Reality Theory uses science and logic to make the case that God exists, as a pervasive and absolute consciousness that transcends the realities of space and time, and that we, as well as everything else, are that!
Download or read book A New History of Life written by Peter Ward and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of life on Earth is, in some form or another, known to us all--or so we think. A New History of Life offers a provocative new account, based on the latest scientific research, of how life on our planet evolved--the first major new synthesis for general readers in two decades. Charles Darwin's theories, first published more than 150 years ago, form the backbone of how we understand the history of the Earth. In reality, the currently accepted history of life on Earth is so flawed, so out of date, that it's past time we need a 'New History of Life.' In their latest book, Joe Kirschvink and Peter Ward will show that many of our most cherished beliefs about the evolution of life are wrong. Gathering and analyzing years of discoveries and research not yet widely known to the public, A New History of Life proposes a different origin of species than the one Darwin proposed, one which includes eight-foot-long centipedes, a frozen “snowball Earth”, and the seeds for life originating on Mars. Drawing on their years of experience in paleontology, biology, chemistry, and astrobiology, experts Ward and Kirschvink paint a picture of the origins life on Earth that are at once too fabulous to imagine and too familiar to dismiss--and looking forward, A New History of Life brilliantly assembles insights from some of the latest scientific research to understand how life on Earth can and might evolve far into the future.
Download or read book Existence and Evolution of Everything written by Sunil Kumar and published by Notion Press. This book was released on 2023-07-19 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever been speechless when someone asked you, “Who came first, the hen or the egg? How big is the Universe? Have you seen God?” Or, “Why do dogs bark in the night when the earthquake would just be going to strike?” Or, “If electrons are moving around the nucleus, like planets do in the universe?” and, so on... The list of such elusive questions may be numerous, but, if something is happening and observable to the human, then, it follows a law of science, BASED ON facts and figures, which, indirectly makes an intelligent and sound-minded person liable to answer these matters popularised as riddles in our society due to lack of knowledge or clarity. It has been noticed that, those who have raised such questions also failed to come up with a logical and convincing answer to such questions. In turn, to make others speechless, they try to imply similar questions. However, after reading this book, one may find himself in a position to find answers to all such questions or may acquire a concept to think and reach a level of understanding that he may derive the answer to further such evolving questions. Thus, the creation of every object found in this universe has followed a system and an attempt has been made to introduce the readers to such systems. That’s why what you think is not important but rather how you think is more important.
Download or read book The Evolution of Everything written by Matt Ridley and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Mr. Ridley’s best and most important work to date…there is something profoundly democratic and egalitarian—even anti-elitist—in this bottom-up approach: Everyone can have a role in bringing about change.” —Wall Street Journal The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimist and Genome returns with a fascinating argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world Human society evolves. Change in technology, language, morality, and society is incremental, inexorable, gradual, and spontaneous. It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next, and it largely happens by trial and error—a version of natural selection. Much of the human world is the result of human action but not of human design: it emerges from the interactions of millions, not from the plans of a few. Drawing on fascinating evidence from science, economics, history, politics, and philosophy, Matt Ridley demolishes conventional assumptions that the great events and trends of our day are dictated by those on high. On the contrary, our most important achievements develop from the bottom up. The Industrial Revolution, cell phones, the rise of Asia, and the Internet were never planned; they happened. Languages emerged and evolved by a form of natural selection, as did common law. Torture, racism, slavery, and pedophilia—all once widely regarded as acceptable—are now seen as immoral despite the decline of religion in recent decades. In this wide-ranging, erudite book, Ridley brilliantly makes the case for evolution, rather than design, as the force that has shaped much of our culture, our technology, our minds, and that even now is shaping our future.
Download or read book Chaos and Life written by Richard J. Bird and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2003-11-26 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why, in a scientific age, do people routinely turn to astrologers, mediums, cultists, and every kind of irrational practitioner rather than to science to meet their spiritual needs? The answer, according to Richard J. Bird, is that science, especially biology, has embraced a view of life that renders meaningless the coincidences, serendipities, and other seemingly significant occurrences that fill people's everyday existence. Evolutionary biology rests on the assumption that although events are fundamentally random, some are selected because they are better adapted than others to the surrounding world. This book proposes an alternative view of evolving complexity. Bird argues that randomness means not disorder but infinite order. Complexity arises not from many random events of natural selection (although these are not unimportant) but from the "playing out" of chaotic systems—which are best described mathematically. When we properly understand the complex interplay of chaos and life, Bird contends, we will see that many events that appear random are actually the outcome of order.
Download or read book Design in Nature written by Adrian Bejan and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book, Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a single principle of physics, the constructal law, accounts for the evolution of these and many other designs in our world. Everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. River basins, cardiovascular systems, and bolts of lightning are very efficient flow systems to move a current—of water, blood, or electricity. Likewise, the more complex architecture of animals evolve to cover greater distance per unit of useful energy, or increase their flow across the land. Such designs also appear in human organizations, like the hierarchical “flowcharts” or reporting structures in corporations and political bodies. All are governed by the same principle, known as the constructal law, and configure and reconfigure themselves over time to flow more efficiently. Written in an easy style that achieves clarity without sacrificing complexity, Design in Nature is a paradigm-shifting book that will fundamentally transform our understanding of the world around us.
Download or read book Wonderful Life The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History written by Stephen Jay Gould and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1990-09-17 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[An] extraordinary book. . . . Mr. Gould is an exceptional combination of scientist and science writer. . . . He is thus exceptionally well placed to tell these stories, and he tells them with fervor and intelligence."—James Gleick, New York Times Book Review High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It hold the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived—a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.
Download or read book Darwin s Dangerous Idea written by Daniel C. Dennett and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a book that is both groundbreaking and accessible, Daniel C. Dennett, whom Chet Raymo of The Boston Globe calls "one of the most provocative thinkers on the planet," focuses his unerringly logical mind on the theory of natural selection, showing how Darwin's great idea transforms and illuminates our traditional view of humanity's place in the universe. Dennett vividly describes the theory itself and then extends Darwin's vision with impeccable arguments to their often surprising conclusions, challenging the views of some of the most famous scientists of our day.
Download or read book Probable Impossibilities written by Alan Lightman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams tackles "big questions like the origin of the universe and the nature of consciousness ... in an entertaining and easily digestible way” (Wall Street Journal) with a collection of meditative essays on the possibilities—and impossibilities—of nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between. Can space be divided into smaller and smaller units, ad infinitum? Does space extend to larger and larger regions, on and on to infinity? Is consciousness reducible to the material brain and its neurons? What was the origin of life, and can biologists create life from scratch in the lab? Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, whom The Washington Post has called “the poet laureate of science writers,” explores these questions and more—from the anatomy of a smile to the capriciousness of memory to the specialness of life in the universe to what came before the Big Bang. Probable Impossibilities is a deeply engaged consideration of what we know of the universe, of life and the mind, and of things vastly larger and smaller than ourselves.
Download or read book Vital Dust written by Christian De Duve and published by . This book was released on 1995-01-03 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping portrait--covering four billion years--of the possible origins and evolution of life on earth, written by a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist on the cutting edge of research into these issues.
Download or read book Life Ascending written by Nick Lane and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2010 Royal Society Prize for science books Powerful new research methods are providing fresh and vivid insights into the makeup of life. Comparing gene sequences, examining the atomic structure of proteins and looking into the geochemistry of rocks have all helped to explain creation and evolution in more detail than ever before. Nick Lane uses the full extent of this new knowledge to describe the ten greatest inventions of life, based on their historical impact, role in living organisms today and relevance to current controversies. DNA, sex, sight and consciousnesses are just four examples. Lane also explains how these findings have come about, and the extent to which they can be relied upon. The result is a gripping and lucid account of the ingenuity of nature, and a book which is essential reading for anyone who has ever questioned the science behind the glories of everyday life.
Download or read book Nothing Created Everything written by Ray Comfort and published by WND Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Dawkins is arguably the modern poster boy for Charles Darwin. However, a key difference radically separates the two men. Darwin believed in the existence of God and calls God the "Creator" seven times in "The Origin of Species." Dawkins, in contrast, claims, "The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed...towards atheism." It seems Professor Dawkins thinks Charles Darwin didn't understand his own theory. Just months after the 2009 discovery of the supposed "missing link," author Ray Comfort turns the tables on evolutionists. In "Nothing Created Everything," he examins the evidence for evolution and shows it is lacking. He demonstrates that when it comes to explaining how life began, atheists and evolutionists offer faith not facts. Ironically, atheists insist nothing created everything, a scientific impossibility. In a conversational tone, Comfort speaks to both atheists and believers and urges this discussion be based on hard evidence. And when it is, he insists, people will realize evolution is a theory that can't be tested or measured and therefore can't be scientific.
Download or read book The Revolutionary Origins of Life and Death written by Pierre M. Durand and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-12-09 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of why an individual would actively kill itself has long been an evolutionary mystery. Pierre M. Durand’s ambitious book answers this question through close inspection of life and death in the earliest cellular life. As Durand shows us, cell death is a fascinating lens through which to examine the interconnectedness, in evolutionary terms, of life and death. It is a truism to note that one does not exist without the other, but just how does this play out in evolutionary history? These two processes have been studied from philosophical, theoretical, experimental, and genomic angles, but no one has yet integrated the information from these various disciplines. In this work, Durand synthesizes cellular studies of life and death looking at the origin of life and the evolutionary significance of programmed cellular death. The exciting and unexpected outcome of Durand’s analysis is the realization that life and death exhibit features of coevolution. The evolution of more complex cellular life depended on the coadaptation between traits that promote life and those that promote death. In an ironic twist, it becomes clear that, in many circumstances, programmed cell death is essential for sustaining life.
Download or read book The Universe and Its Evolution written by Solomon Joseph Silberstein and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Evolution of Morality written by Richard Joyce and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-08-24 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.
