Download or read book In Search of Nature written by Edward O. Wilson and published by Island Press. This book was released on 1997-09-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " Perhaps more than any other scientist of our century, Edward O. Wilson has scrutinized animals in their natural settings, tweezing out the dynamics of their social organization, their relationship with their environments, and their behavior, not only for what it tells us about the animals themselves, but for what it can tell us about human nature and our own behavior. He has brought the fascinating and sometimes surprising results of these studies to general readers through a remarkable collection of books, including The Diversity of Life, The Ants, On Human Nature, and Sociobiology. The grace and precision with which he writes of seemingly complex topics has earned him two Pulitzer prizes, and the admiration of scientists and general readers around the world. In Search of Nature presents for the first time a collection of the seminal short writings of Edward O. Wilson, addressing in brief and eminently readable form the themes that have actively engaged this remarkable intellect throughout his career. ""The central theme of the essays is that wild nature and human nature are closely interwoven. I argue that the only way to make complete sense of either is by examining both closely and together as products of evolution.... Human behavior is seen not just as the product of recorded history, ten thousand years recent, but of deep history, the combined genetic and cultural changes that created humanity over hundreds of thousands of years. We need this longer view, I believe, not only to understand our species, but more firmly to secure its future. The book is composed of three sections. ""Animal Nature, Human Nature"" ranges from serpents to sharks to sociality in ants. It asks how and why the universal aversion to snakes might have evolved in humans and primates, marvels at the diversity of the world's 350 species of shark and how their adaptive success has affected our conception of the world, and admonishes us to ""be careful of little lives""-to see in the construction of insect social systems ""another grand experiment in evolution for our delectation. ""The Patterns of Nature"" probes at the foundation of sociobiology, asking what is the underlying genetic basis of social behavior, and what that means for the future of the human species. Beginning with altruism and aggression, the two poles of behavior, these essays describe how science, like art, adds new information to the accumulated wisdom, establishing new patterns of explanation and inquiry. In ""The Bird of Paradise: The Hunter and the Poet,"" the analytic and synthetic impulses-exemplified in the sciences and the humanities-are called upon to give full definition to the human prospect. ""Nature's Abundance"" celebrates biodiversity, explaining its fundamental importance to the continued existence of humanity. From ""The Little Things That Run the World""-invertebrate species that make life possible for everyone and everything else-to the emergent belief of many scientists in the human species' possible innate affinity for other living things, known as biophilia, Wilson sets forth clear and compelling reasons why humans should concern themselves with species loss. ""Is Humanity Suicidal?"" compares the environmentalist's view with that of the exemptionalist, who holds that since humankind is transcendent in intelligence and spirit, our species must have been released from the iron laws of ecology that bind all other species. Not without optimism, Wilson concludes that we are smart enough and have time enough to avoid an environmental catastrophe of civilization-threatening dimensions-if we are willing both to redirect our science and technology and to reconsider our self-image as a species. In Search of Nature is a lively and accessible introduction to the writings of one of the most brilliant scientists of the 20th century. Imaginatively illustrated by noted artist Laura Southworth, it is a book all readers will treasure."
Download or read book In Search of Human Nature written by Mary E. Clark and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-18 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human Nature offers a wide-ranging and holistic view of human nature from all perspectives: scientific, historical, and sociological. Mary Clark takes the most recent data from a dozen or more fields, and works it together with clarifying anecdotes and thought-provoking images to challenge conventional Western beliefs with hopeful new insights. Balancing the theories of cutting-edge neuroscience with the insights of primitive mythologies, Mary Clark provides down-to-earth suggestions for peacefully resolving global problems. Human Nature builds up a coherent, and above all positive, picture of who we really are.
Download or read book William Bartram the Search for Nature s Design written by William Bartram and published by Wormsloe Foundation Nature Boo. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work presents new material in the form of art, letters, and unpublished manuscripts. These documents expand our knowledge of Bartram as an explorer, naturalist, artist, writer, and citizen of the early Republic.
Download or read book Hidden in Nature written by Agnese Baruzzi and published by Union Square Kids. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This large format book helps children test their ability to observe and count. The wonderful full-page illustrations by Agnese Baruzzi which are so rich in detail, depict different natural environments and incredible mazes. The children have to search for the animals hidden in the pages and list them on the adjoining page. How many animals will they be able to identify on each page? The children can check the answers at the end of the book. Entertaining and informative at the same time, this great book will provide children with many hours of fun and interest.
Download or read book Why care for Nature written by Dirk Willem Postma and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-10-31 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a rigorous, yet accessible introduction into the current philosophical discourses underpinning practices of environmental education. It provides a comprehensive theoretical framework, relating philosophical key issues and educational concerns in an intrinsic manner, against the background of current practices and policies. While the issues discussed are complex and abstract, the book is readable for a general audience.
Download or read book Remarkable Creatures written by Sean B. Carroll and published by HMH. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: A biologist’s “thoroughly enjoyable” account of the expeditions that unearthed the history of life on our planet (Publishers Weekly). Not so long ago, most of our world was an unexplored wilderness. Our sense of its age was vague and vastly off the mark, and much of the knowledge of our own species’ history was a set of fantastic myths and fairy tales. But scientists were about to embark on an amazing new era of understanding. From the New York Times–bestselling author of The Big Picture, this book leads us on a rousing voyage that recounts the most important discoveries in two centuries of natural history: from Darwin’s trip around the world to Charles Walcott’s discovery of pre-Cambrian life in the Grand Canyon; from Louis and Mary Leakey’s investigation of our deepest past in East Africa to the trailblazers in modern laboratories who have located a time clock in our DNA. Filled with the same sense of adventure that spurred on these extraordinary men and women, Remarkable Creatures is a “stirring introduction to the wonder of evolutionary biology” (Kirkus Reviews). “Charming and enlightening.” —San Francisco Chronicle “As fast-paced as a detective story.” —Nature
Download or read book The Control of Nature written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.
Download or read book Explore the Wild written by Beverly Duncan and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines seven different environments that exist in the U.S., exploring the characteristics of each place and the plants and animals that live there.
Download or read book Information Consciousness Reality written by James B. Glattfelder and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-10 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book chronicles the rise of a new scientific paradigm offering novel insights into the age-old enigmas of existence. Over 300 years ago, the human mind discovered the machine code of reality: mathematics. By utilizing abstract thought systems, humans began to decode the workings of the cosmos. From this understanding, the current scientific paradigm emerged, ultimately discovering the gift of technology. Today, however, our island of knowledge is surrounded by ever longer shores of ignorance. Science appears to have hit a dead end when confronted with the nature of reality and consciousness. In this fascinating and accessible volume, James Glattfelder explores a radical paradigm shift uncovering the ontology of reality. It is found to be information-theoretic and participatory, yielding a computational and programmable universe.
Download or read book Reading the Book of Nature written by Jonathan R. Topham and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-10-12 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When Darwin returned to Britain from the Beagle voyage in 1836, the most talked-about scientific books were the Bridgewater Treatises. This series of eight books was funded by a bequest of the last Earl of Bridgewater, and they were authored by leading men of science, appointed by the President of the Royal Society, and intended to explore "the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation." Securing public attention beyond all expectations, the series gave Darwin's generation a range of approaches to one of the great questions of the age: how to incorporate the newly emerging disciplinary sciences into Britain's overwhelmingly Christian culture. Drawing on a wealth of archival and published sources, including many unexplored by historians, Jonathan R. Topham examines how and to what extent the series contributed to a sense of congruence between Christianity and the sciences in the generation before the infamous Victorian "conflict between science and religion." He does so by drawing on the distinctive insights of book history, using close attention to the production, circulation, and use of the books to open up new perspectives not only on aspects of early Victorian science but also on the whole subject of science and religion. Its innovative focus on practices of authorship, publishing, and reading helps us to understand the everyday considerations and activities through which the religious culture of early Victorian science was fashioned. And in doing so, Reading the Book of Nature powerfully reimagines the world in which a young Charles Darwin learned how to think about the implications of his theory"--
Download or read book In Search of Nature written by Kenneth G. Henshall and published by Global Oriental. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Search of Nature by Kenneth G. Henshall provides a biography of Tayama Katai, leader of Japan's naturalist movement. This book discusses Katai's prose fiction and perceptions of nature, and also corrects widely held but erroneous assumptions about Japanese naturalism.
Download or read book Abstract Nature written by Nawratil and published by Search Press Limited. This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Better Angels of Our Nature written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.
Download or read book In Search of the Amazon written by Seth Garfield and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicling the dramatic history of the Brazilian Amazon during the Second World War, Seth Garfield provides fresh perspectives on contemporary environmental debates. His multifaceted analysis explains how the Amazon became the object of geopolitical rivalries, state planning, media coverage, popular fascination, and social conflict. In need of rubber, a vital war material, the United States spent millions of dollars to revive the Amazon's rubber trade. In the name of development and national security, Brazilian officials implemented public programs to engineer the hinterland's transformation. Migrants from Brazil's drought-stricken Northeast flocked to the Amazon in search of work. In defense of traditional ways of life, longtime Amazon residents sought to temper outside intervention. Garfield's environmental history offers an integrated analysis of the struggles among distinct social groups over resources and power in the Amazon, as well as the repercussions of those wartime conflicts in the decades to come.
Download or read book Nature Themed Word Search written by Alice M Cantrell and published by . This book was released on 2019-06-17 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of word search puzzles with only nature themes! Word searches are a super way to build vocabulary, spelling skills and pattern recognition! They are great cognitive exercises for both kids and adults. This large print 8.5" x 11" sized book contains 64 puzzles (some easy and some more challenging... good for about age 7 and up), followed by the solutions, plus 14 hand drawn coloring pages featuring some of the specimens listed in the puzzles. Puzzle topics include: Pond Life Raptors Mollusks Starry Sky Owls Weather Nocturnal Plant Parts And so many more! Makes a great birthday or Christmas gift for nature and outdoors loving boys or girls. Perfect for road trips, rainy days, waiting rooms or whenever!
Download or read book The Laws of Human Nature written by Robert Greene and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power comes the definitive new book on decoding the behavior of the people around you Robert Greene is a master guide for millions of readers, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding and mastery. Now he turns to the most important subject of all - understanding people's drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves. We are social animals. Our very lives depend on our relationships with people. Knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess, without which our other talents can only take us so far. Drawing from the ideas and examples of Pericles, Queen Elizabeth I, Martin Luther King Jr, and many others, Greene teaches us how to detach ourselves from our own emotions and master self-control, how to develop the empathy that leads to insight, how to look behind people's masks, and how to resist conformity to develop your singular sense of purpose. Whether at work, in relationships, or in shaping the world around you, The Laws of Human Nature offers brilliant tactics for success, self-improvement, and self-defense.
Download or read book Reason in Nature written by Matthew Boyle and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the dominant view of reductive naturalism, John McDowell argues that human life should be seen as transformed by reason so that human minds, while not supernatural, are sui generis. This collection assembles eleven critical essays that highlight the enduring significance and wide ramifications of McDowell’s unorthodox position.
