Download or read book The Genesis of Animal Play written by Gordon M. Burghardt and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A scientist examines the origins and evolutionary significance of play in humans and animals.
Download or read book The Genesis of Animal Play written by G.M. Burghardt and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Animal Play Behavior written by Robert Fagen and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1981 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative analysis - the first comprehensive, single-author treatment of the subject in this century - Robert Fagen breaks new ground by adopting an evolutionary approach to behavioral development. Basing his research on the natural history of play in animals, as well as on recent advances in theoretical biology, he resolves an essential biological paradox: mammals, including humans, and birds, of every age and species, spend time and energy - even risk physical injury - performing the seemingly inconsequential activities referred to colloquially as play. Features of this unique book include a detailed review of the natural history of play in mammalian and avian species (supplemented by an extensive bibliography); sociobiological analysis of the shifting balance between selfishness and cooperation in animal social play; and discussion of the biological mechanisms underlying beneficial and hamrful effects of play behavior. Robert Fagen uses previously unexploited theory to investigate the phenomenon of play and to generate several novel or unusual insights and questions. His clear, literate style, enhanced by notes, appendices, and numerous lively illustrations, serves to communicate, entertain, and educate professionals and academics as well as general readers who are fascinated with the natural history, psychology, and behavior of animals.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Play written by Peter K. Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Play takes up much of the time budget of young children, and many animals, but its importance in development remains contested. This comprehensive collection brings together multidisciplinary and developmental perspectives on the forms and functions of play in animals, children in different societies, and through the lifespan. The Cambridge Handbook of Play covers the evolution of play in animals, especially mammals; the development of play from infancy through childhood and into adulthood; historical and anthropological perspectives on play; theories and methodologies; the role of play in children's learning; play in special groups such as children with impairments, or suffering political violence; and the practical applications of playwork and play therapy. Written by an international team of scholars from diverse disciplines such as psychology, education, neuroscience, sociology, evolutionary biology and anthropology, this essential reference presents the current state of the field in play research.
Download or read book Animal Play written by Marc Bekoff and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-06-04 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animal Play, first published in 1998, is an interdisciplinary study of play in animals and humans.
Download or read book Play Playfulness Creativity and Innovation written by Paul Patrick Gordon Bateson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the role of playfulness in animal and human development, highlighting its links to creativity and, in turn, to innovation.
Download or read book How Animals Play written by Rebecca Stefoff and published by Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior. It was widely thought that animal play, mostly in mammals, was part of Darwinian natural selection and somehow fit into survival of the fittest. However, animal researchers believe that animals play out of pure joy, rather than aiding in their survival. This jovial book about animal play, tells the secrets of, and the science behind, clever baboons that know which cars to break into for snacks, mighty elephants that grieve, tricky octopuses that squirt water, and beetles that read messages through their feet. This book includes explanative text by award-winning author Rebecca Stefoff and an extensive bibliography. Key scientific terms and phrases are explained and includes procedures for scientific observation.
Download or read book Being Animal written by Anna Peterson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most people, animals are the most significant aspects of the nonhuman world. They symbolize nature in our imaginations, in popular media and culture, and in campaigns to preserve wilderness, yet scholars habitually treat animals and the environment as mutually exclusive objects of concern. Conducting the first examination of animals' place in popular and scholarly thinking about nature, Anna L. Peterson builds a nature ethic that conceives of nonhuman animals as active subjects who are simultaneously parts of both nature and human society. Peterson explores the tensions between humans and animals, nature and culture, animals and nature, and domesticity and wildness. She uses our intimate connections with companion animals to examine nature more broadly. Companion animals are liminal creatures straddling the boundary between human society and wilderness, revealing much about the mutually constitutive relationships binding humans and nature together. Through her paradigm-shifting reflections, Peterson disrupts the artificial boundaries between two seemingly distinct categories, underscoring their fluid and continuous character.
Download or read book Play Sport and Spirit written by Kelly, Patrick, SJ and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Play, Sport, and Spirit Patrick Kelly, SJ Play, Sport, and Spirit retrieves a much needed ‘play ethic’ from Catholic cultural and theological sources and brings this into dialogue with evolutionary theory, contemporary philosophy and psychology to illuminate the human and spiritual meaning of sport and work. After a discussion of the marginalization of the play element in contemporary sport in the U.S., the author uses the work of cultural historian Johan Huizinga to understand the meaning of play and how it is related to culture, ritual, festival, and spirituality. Basic to this "play ethic" is an acceptance of play as a part of human life. For Aquinas, play is enjoyable and done for its own sake. However, the enjoyment we experience in play is directed to the "good of the player" in that it brings pleasure and relaxation. Using the work of scholars Gordon Burghardt (evolutionary psychology), Randolph Feezell (philosophy), and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (psychology) the book demonstrates that when sport is enjoyable and engaged in for its own sake (i.e., as play), it leads to human flourishing and openness to transcendence. In this way, the book provides a contemporary account of how play can be autotelic and yet benefit the human person, as Aquinas had claimed. The in-depth consideration of play in this book also illuminates our understanding of the human and spiritual meaning of work and vocation.
Download or read book The Exultant Ark written by Jonathan Peter Balcombe and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nature documentaries often depict animal life as a grim struggle for survival, but this visually stunning book opens our eyes to a different, more scientifically up-to-date way of looking at the animal kingdom. In more than one hundred thirty striking images, The Exultant Ark celebrates the full range of animal experience with dramatic portraits of animal pleasure ranging from the charismatic and familiar to the obscure and bizarre. These photographs, windows onto the inner lives of pleasure seekers, show two polar bears engaged in a bout of wrestling, hoary marmots taking time for a friendly chase, Japanese macaques enjoying a soak in a hot spring, a young bull elk sticking out his tongue to catch snowflakes, and many other rewarding moments. Biologist and best-selling author Jonathan Balcombe is our guide, interpreting the images within the scientific context of what is known about animal behavior. In the end, old attitudes fall away as we gain a heightened sense of animal individuality and of the pleasures that make life worth living for all sentient beings.
Download or read book Animal Tool Behavior written by Robert W. Shumaker and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When published in 1980, Benjamin B. Beck’s Animal Tool Behavior was the first volume to catalog and analyze the complete literature on tool use and manufacture in non-human animals. Beck showed that animals—from insects to primates—employed different types of tools to solve numerous problems. His work inspired and energized legions of researchers to study the use of tools by a wide variety of species. In this revised and updated edition of the landmark publication, Robert W. Shumaker and Kristina R. Walkup join Beck to reveal the current state of knowledge regarding animal tool behavior. Through a comprehensive synthesis of the studies produced through 2010, the authors provide an updated and exact definition of tool use, identify new modes of use that have emerged in the literature, examine all forms of tool manufacture, and address common myths about non-human tool use. Specific examples involving invertebrates, birds, fish, and mammals describe the differing levels of sophistication of tool use exhibited by animals.
Download or read book The Redemption of the Animals written by Douglas Sloan and published by SteinerBooks. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As human beings, what is our true relationship to the animals on earth? What is our responsibility to our fellow creatures? Douglas Sloan explores these and other questions in this important book on the human-animal connection. His explorations are based on personal experience and wide-ranging research into the work of Rudolf Steiner and others, including scientist students of the inner life of animals and committed defenders of animal wellbeing. Rudolf Steiner describes how from the beginning of creation humans and animals have been united in deep kinship. A loss of the sense of this human–animal connection has resulted in an immense animal suffering the world over. Especially in their suffering, the animals now pose for the modern human being many pressing and perplexing questions. Are the animals conscious? Do they have feelings like ours? Do they experience pain? Do the animals have a spiritual reality and experience? Do the animals have souls and selves? Do the animals have capacities for cognitive intelligence, emotional empathy, language, and memory? Is there a crucial difference between the human and the animal, a basic difference in kind, or only a difference in degree? Do animals have rights? Are we justified in using the animals as we wish—eating them, hunting them, experimenting on them? Rudolf Steiner presents a vision of the ultimate redemption of the animals from their suffering. What is the nature of this redemption? What is our responsibility in making it happen? In exploring these and related questions with the help of Rudolf Steiner’s work and that of others on the issue, we can begin to see the importance in our time of our relating to the animals in a completely new way—a relationship that understands and respects the animals’ inner spiritual being, and one that requires a deep grasp of our own spiritual being in relation to theirs. In this book, Douglas Sloan seeks to help us toward this new relationship with the animals, both in concept and in everyday action.
Download or read book Brian Sutton Smith Playful Scholar written by Michael M. Patte and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-05-15 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book honors the legacy of Dr. Brian Sutton-Smith, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Sutton-Smith was considered the premier play scholar of his generation, with numerous publications in the fields of developmental psychology, folklore, anthropology, sociology of sport, education, and philosophy. We present an eclectic array of essays written in honor of the centennial of his birth, ranging from the scholarly to the overtly playful. There are essays distilling his work to their key ideas and some that offer a robust and respectful critique. There are personal anecdotes honoring his memory, and original works of fiction celebrating his legacy. The book is a publication in the TASP biannual Play and Culture Studies series and includes photographs of Brian Sutton-Smith, as well as heartfelt appreciation from scores of colleagues.
Download or read book Ritual Play and Belief in Evolution and Early Human Societies written by Colin Renfrew and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents unique new insights into the development of human ritual and society through our heritage of play and performance.
Download or read book Living with Tiny Aliens written by Adam Pryor and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Astrobiology is changing how we understand meaningful human existence. Living with Tiny Aliens seeks to imagine how an individuals’ meaningful existence persists when we are planetary creatures situated in deep time—not only on a blue planet burgeoning with life, but in a cosmos pregnant with living-possibilities. In doing so, it works to articulate an astrobiological humanities. Working with a series of specific examples drawn from the study of extraterrestrial life, doctrinal reflection on the imago Dei, and reflections on the Anthropocene, Pryor reframes how human beings meaningfully dwell in the world and belong to it. To take seriously the geological significance of human agency is to understand the Earth as not only a living planet but an artful one. Consequently, Pryor reframes the imago Dei, rendering it a planetary system that opens up new possibilities for the flourishing of all creation by fostering technobiogeochemical cycles not subject to runaway, positive feedback. Such an account ensures the imago Dei is not something any one of us possesses, but that it is a symbol for what we live into together as a species in intra-action with the wider habitable environment.
Download or read book The Creative Lives of Animals written by Carol Gigliotti and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Creative Lives of Animals offers readers intimate glimpses of how animals from elephants to alligators to ants apply the creative process in their lives, requiring a redefinition of creativity that includes animals as essential contributors to biodiversity"--
Download or read book Evolution and the Emergent Self written by Raymond L. Neubauer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-06 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolution and the Emergent Self is an eloquent and evocative new synthesis that explores how the human species emerged from the cosmic dust. Lucidly presenting ideas about the rise of complexity in our genetic, neuronal, ecological, and ultimately cosmological settings, the author takes readers on a provocative tour of modern science's quest to understand our place in nature and in our universe. Readers fascinated with "Big History" and drawn to examine big ideas will be challenged and enthralled by Raymond L. Neubauer's ambitious narrative. How did humans emerge from the cosmos and the pre-biotic Earth, and what mechanisms of biological, chemical, and physical sciences drove this increasingly complex process? Neubauer presents a view of nature that describes the rising complexity of life in terms of increasing information content, first in genes and then in brains. The evolution of the nervous system expanded the capacity of organisms to store information, making learning possible. In key chapters, the author portrays four species with high brain:body ratios—chimpanzees, elephants, ravens, and dolphins—showing how each species shares with humans the capacity for complex communication, elaborate social relationships, flexible behavior, tool use, and powers of abstraction. A large brain can have a hierarchical arrangement of circuits that facilitates higher levels of abstraction. Neubauer describes this constellation of qualities as an emergent self, arguing that self-awareness is nascent in several species besides humans and that potential human characteristics are embedded in the evolutionary process and have emerged repeatedly in a variety of lineages on our planet. He ultimately demonstrates that human culture is not a unique offshoot of a language-specialized primate, but an analogue of fundamental mechanisms that organisms have used since the beginning of life on Earth to gather and process information in order to buffer themselves from fluctuations in the environment. Neubauer also views these developments in a cosmic setting, detailing open thermodynamic systems that grow more complex as the energy flowing through them increases. Similar processes of increasing complexity can be found in the "self-organizing" structures of both living and nonliving forms. Recent evidence from astronomy indicates that planet formation may be nearly as frequent as star formation. Since life makes use of the elements commonly seeded into space by burning and expiring stars, it is reasonable to speculate that the evolution of life and intelligence that happened on our planet may be found across the universe.
