Download or read book Masterminding Nature written by Margaret E. Derry and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Canadian historian Margaret Derry examines the evolution of modern animal breeding from the invention of improved breeding methods in 18th-century England to the application of molecular genetics in the 1980s and 1990s.
Download or read book Masterminding Nature written by Margaret Derry and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-03-27 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Masterminding Nature, Margaret Derry examines the evolution of modern animal breeding from the invention of improved breeding methodologies in eighteenth-century England to the application of molecular genetics in the 1980s and 1990s. A clear and concise introduction to the science and practice of artificial selection, Derry’s book puts the history of breeding in its scientific, commercial, and social context. Masterminding Nature explains why animal breeders continued to use eighteenth-century techniques well into the twentieth century, why the chicken industry was the first to use genetics in its breeding programs, and why it was the dairy cattle industry that embraced quantitative genetics and artificial insemination in the 1970s, as well as answering many other questions. Following the story right up to the present, the book concludes with an insightful analysis of today’s complex relationships between biology, industry, and ethics.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History written by Jeannie Whayne and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-08 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agricultural history has enjoyed a rebirth in recent years, in part because the agricultural enterprise promotes economic and cultural connections in an era that has become ever more globally focused, but also because of agriculture's potential to lead to conflicts over precious resources. The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History reflects this rebirth and examines the wide-reaching implications of agricultural issues, featuring essays that touch on the green revolution, the development of the Atlantic slave plantation, the agricultural impact of the American Civil War, the rise of scientific and corporate agriculture, and modern exploitation of agricultural labor.
Download or read book The Eight Master Lessons of Nature written by Gary Ferguson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting manifesto for the millions of people who long to forge a more vital, meaningful connection to the natural world to live a better, more fulfilling life Looking around at the world today—a world of skyscrapers, super highways, melting ice caps, and rampant deforestation—it is easy to feel that humanity has actively severed its ties with nature. It’s no wonder that we are starving to rediscover a connection with the natural world. With new insights into the inner workings of nature's wonders, Gary Ferguson presents a fascinating exploration into how many of the most remarkable aspects of nature are hardwired into our very DNA. What emerges is a dazzling web of connections that holds powerful clues about how to better navigate our daily lives. Through cutting-edge data and research, drawing on science, psychology, history, and philosophy, The Eight Master Lessons of Nature will leave readers with a feeling of hope, excitement, and joy. It is a dazzling statement about the powers of physical, mental, and spiritual wellness that come from reclaiming our relationship with Mother Nature. Lessons about mystery, loss, the fine art of rising again, how animals make us smarter, and how the planet’s elders make us better at life are unforgettable and transformative.
Download or read book Reinventing the Wheel written by Bronwen Percival and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In little more than a century, industrial practices have altered every aspect of the cheesemaking process, from the bodies of the animals that provide the milk to the microbial strains that ferment it. Reinventing the Wheel explores what has been lost as raw-milk, single-farm cheeses have given way to the juggernaut of factory production. In the process, distinctiveness and healthy rural landscapes have been exchanged for higher yields and monoculture. However, Bronwen and Francis Percival find reason for optimism. Around the world—not just in France, but also in the United States, England, and Australia—enterprising cheesemakers are exploring the techniques of their great-grandparents. At the same time, using sophisticated molecular methods, scientists are upending conventional wisdom about the role of microbes in every part of the world. Their research reveals the resilience and complexity of the indigenous microbial communities that contribute to the flavor and safety of cheese. One experiment at a time, these dynamic scientists, cheesemakers, and dairy farmers are reinventing the wheel.
Download or read book Care of the Species written by John Hartigan Jr. and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the globe, an expanding circle of care is encompassing a growing number of species through efforts targeting biodiversity, profoundly revising the line between humans and nonhumans. Care of the Species examines infrastructures of care—labs and gardens in Spain and Mexico—where plant scientists grapple with the complexities of evolution and domestication. John Hartigan Jr. uses ethnography to access the expertise of botanists and others engaged with cultivating biodiversity, providing various entry points for understanding plants in the world around us. He begins by tracing the historical emergence of race through practices of care on nonhumans, showing how this history informs current thinking about conservation. With geneticists working on maize, Hartigan deploys Foucault’s concept of care of the self to analyze how domesticated species are augmented by an afterlife of data. In the botanical gardens of Spain, Care of the Species explores seed banks, herbariums, and living collections, depicting the range of ways people interact with botanical knowledge. This culminates in Hartigan’s effort to engage plants as ethnographic subjects through a series of imaginative “interview” techniques. Care of the Species contributes to debates about the concept of species through vivid ethnography, developing a cultural perspective on evolutionary dynamics while using ethnography to theorize species. In tackling the racial dimension of efforts to go “beyond the human,” this book reveals a far greater stratum of sameness than commonly assumed.
Download or read book Diet for a Large Planet written by Chris Otter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-06-05 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the unsustainable modern diet—heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar—that requires more land and resources than the planet is able to support. We are facing a world food crisis of unparalleled proportions. Our reliance on unsustainable dietary choices and agricultural systems is causing problems both for human health and the health of our planet. Solutions from lab-grown food to vegan diets to strictly local food consumption are often discussed, but a central question remains: how did we get to this point? In Diet for a Large Planet, Chris Otter goes back to the late eighteenth century in Britain, where the diet heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar was developing. As Britain underwent steady growth, urbanization, industrialization, and economic expansion, the nation altered its food choices, shifting away from locally produced plant-based nutrition. This new diet, rich in animal proteins and refined carbohydrates, made people taller and stronger, but it led to new types of health problems. Its production also relied on far greater acreage than Britain itself, forcing the nation to become more dependent on global resources. Otter shows how this issue expands beyond Britain, looking at the global effects of large agro-food systems that require more resources than our planet can sustain. This comprehensive history helps us understand how the British played a significant role in making red meat, white bread, and sugar the diet of choice—linked to wealth, luxury, and power—and shows how dietary choices connect to the pressing issues of climate change and food supply.
Download or read book Feminist Animal and Multispecies Studies Critical Perspectives on Food and Eating written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-04 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops critical feminist animal and multispecies studies across various societal and environmental contexts. The chapters discuss timely questions broadly related to food and eating, stemming from connections drawn between critical animal studies, feminist theory, and multispecies studies. The themes explored include trans-inclusive ecofeminism, decolonial perspectives to veganism, links between the critique of ableism and animal exploitation, alternatives to dominant Western masculinities invested in meat consumption, and the politics of sex and purity in factory farming. The book explores responses to interlinked forms of exploitation by focusing on sites such as sanctuaries, educational institutions, social media, and animal advocacy.
Download or read book Cat People Human Cat Interrelatedness in the Cat Fancy written by Emily Stone and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-31 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the social world of the cat fancy, or the leisure activity of breeding and exhibiting pedigree cats. Based on multispecies ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in the United Kingdom, it explores the process and performance of exhibiting cats at shows, the breeding practices and discourses integral to the creation of pedigree breeds, and the relations that these practices generate between human guardians, the pedigree cat population, and non-pedigree cats. Through observation with cat fanciers and their interactions with their cats, the author investigates the social dynamics and relationships that form within the fancy, considering the interconnections between biopower and eugenics in pedigree breeding, the practices of pet keeping and the complexities of more-than-human care, and the implications of involvement for the cats themselves. As such, Cat People: Human–Cat Interrelatedness in the Cat Fancy will appeal to scholars from across the social sciences and humanities interested in human–animal interactions, multispecies leisure, anthrozoology, and more-than-human care.
Download or read book Made to Order written by Margaret E. Derry and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animal breeding has been complicated by persisting factors across species, cultures, geography, and time. In Made to Order, Margaret E. Derry explains these factors and other breeding concerns in relation to both animals and society in North America and Europe over the past three centuries. Made to Order addresses how breeding methodology evolved, what characterized the aims of breeding, and the way structures were put in place to regulate the occupation. Illustrated by case studies on important farm animals and companion species, the book presents a synthetic overview of livestock breeding as a whole. It gives considerable emphasis to genetics and animal breeding in the post-1960 period, the relationship between environmental and improvement breeding, and regulation of breeding as seen through pedigrees. In doing so, Made to Order shows how studying the ancient human practice of animal breeding can illuminate the ways in which human thinking, theorizing, and evolving characterize our interactions with all-natural processes.
Download or read book Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization NICSO 2010 written by Carlos Cruz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-04-07 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many aspects of Nature, Biology or even from Society have become part of the techniques and algorithms used in computer science or they have been used to enhance or hybridize several techniques through the inclusion of advanced evolution, cooperation or biologically based additions. The previous NICSO workshops were held in Granada, Spain, 2006, Acireale, Italy, 2007, and in Tenerife, Spain, 2008. As in the previous editions, NICSO 2010, held in Granada, Spain, was conceived as a forum for the latest ideas and the state of the art research related to nature inspired cooperative strategies. The contributions collected in this book cover topics including nature-inspired techniques like Genetic Algorithms, Evolutionary Algorithms, Ant and Bee Colonies, Swarm Intelligence approaches, Neural Networks, several Cooperation Models, Structures and Strategies, Agents Models, Social Interactions, as well as new algorithms based on the behaviour of fireflies or bats.
Download or read book New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture written by Denise Phillips and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores problems in the history of science at the intersection of life sciences and agriculture, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Taking a comparative national perspective, the book examines agricultural practices in a broad sense, including the practices and disciplines devoted to land management, forestry, soil science, and the improvement and management of crops and livestock. The life sciences considered include genetics, microbiology, ecology, entomology, forestry, and deal with US, European, Russian, Japanese, Indonesian, Chinese contexts. The book shows that the investigation of the border zone of life sciences and agriculture raises many interesting questions about how science develops. In particular it challenges one to re-examine and take seriously the intimate connection between scientific development and the practical goals of managing and improving – perhaps even recreating – the living world to serve human ends. Without close attention to this zone it is not possible to understand the emergence of new disciplines and transformation of old disciplines, to evaluate the role and impact of such major figures of science as Humboldt and Mendel, or to appreciate how much of the history of modern biology has been driven by national ambitions and imperialist expansion in competition with rival nations.
Download or read book The Vortex written by Frank Uekötter and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2024-04-18 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental challenges are defining the twenty-first century. To fully understand ongoing debates about our current crises—climate change, loss of biological diversity, pollution, extinction, resource woes—means revisiting their origins, in all their complexity. With this ambitious, highly original contribution to the environmental history of global modernity, Frank Uekötter considers the many ways humans have had an impact on their physical environment throughout history. Ours is not a one-way trajectory to sudden collapse, he argues, but rather death by a thousand cuts. The many paths we’ve forged to arrive in our current predicament, from agriculture to industry to infrastructure, must be considered collectively if we are to stay afloat in what Uekötter describes as a vortex: a powerful metaphor for the flow of history, capturing the momentum and the many crosscurrents that swept people and environments along. His book invites us to look at environmental challenges from multiple perspectives, including all the twists and turns that have helped to create the mess we find ourselves in. Uekötter has written a world history for an age where things are falling apart: where we know what lies ahead and are equipped with the right tools—technological and otherwise—and plenty of experience to deal with environmental challenges, but somehow fail to get our affairs in order.
Download or read book Beauty or Statistics written by Bert Theunissen and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-02-24 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1970s, scientists claimed that farm animal breeding was finally evolving from an art into a science. In their view, the switch to scientific breeding was as inevitable as the ongoing process of agricultural modernization. However, the art-to-science scenario is too simplistic to do justice to the complex dynamic that characterized the transformation of the field. The livestock breeds that take centre stage in this book – dairy cattle, chickens, pigs, sheep, and horses – were products of the twentieth century. The methods used by breeders to improve their animals, however, were much older. Tracing the history of practical stockbreeding, the role of Mendelism in scientific breeding, and the emergence of quantitative genetics, Beauty or Statistics shows that the story of the scientific modernization of livestock breeding can be more fruitfully analysed from the perspective of changing cultures of breeding, taking practical, commercial, normative, and aesthetic considerations into account.
Download or read book Eight Master Lessons of Nature written by Gary Ferguson and published by Black Swan. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: _______________________ 'A classic' - Sir Tim Smit, Co-founder of the Eden Project 'I saw truth, I saw beauty, I saw a better future in these pages.' - John Lewis-Stempel For too long we have set ourselves apart from nature, seeing ourselves as superior, removed, independent. But in doing so we have lost sight of all that the natural world can teach us. In Eight Master Lessons of Nature, Gary Ferguson reveals the wisdom of the natural world. By keenly observing and admiring wildlife and their surroundings, he shows us why sympathy is our greatest asset and crucial to our survival, that feminine rule is default in the natural world, and how even from the ashes of destruction, life is still able to thrive. Written in rich and nourishing prose, Ferguson gently dismantles the walls we have erected between ourselves and nature, showings us the wonder of our surroundings in all their splendour. Drawing on stories from art and science, flora and fauna, philosophy and history, he carefully unravels the dazzling web of connections that binds us to earth and the rich supply of wisdom that is stored here. The result is a powerful and timely reminder of our place in this world, our interdependence, and how much nature is able to teach, heal and ultimately restore us.
Download or read book The Advance written by and published by . This book was released on 1885 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mastermind written by Jerry Moffatt and published by Vertebrate Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The brain is the most important muscle for climbing.' – Wolfgang Güllich Mastermind by climbing legend Jerry Moffatt is a guide to mental training for climbers. Drawing on his own personal experiences, as well as inspiring stories from the current elite of the sport including Alex Megos, Adam Ondra, Alex Honnold and Barbara Zangerl, Jerry invites climbers and other sportspeople to explore and maximise their mental potential. Broken down into easy-to-read sections, including Mind Control, Self Image and Visualisation, Mastermind will help you utilise the power of your mind to make the most of your existing strength, technique and ability so that you can perform under pressure – not just in climbing, but in all sport.
