Download or read book The Major Metaphors of Evolution written by Salvatore J. Agosta and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-29 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a unified evolutionary framework based on three sets of metaphors that will help to consolidate discussions on evolutionary transitions. Evolution is the unifying principle of life, making identifying ways to apply evolutionary principles to tackle existence-threatening crises such as climate change crucial. A more cohesive evolutionary framework will further the discussions in this regard and also accelerate the process itself. This book lays out a framework based on three dualistic classes of metaphors – time, space, and conflict resolution. Evolutionary transitions theory shows how metaphors can help us understand selective diversification, as Darwin described with his “tree of life”. Moreover, the recently proposed Stockholm paradigm demonstrates how metaphors can help shed light on the emergence of complex ecosystems that Darwin highlighted with his “tangled bank” metaphor. Taken together, these ideas offer proactive measures for coping with existential crises for humanity, such as climate change. The book will appeal to biologists, philosophers and historians alike.

Download or read book Evolutionary Processes and Metaphors written by Mae-Wan Ho and published by . This book was released on 1988-06-03 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolutionary Processes and Metaphors Edited by Mae-Wan Ho, Department of Biology, The Open University, UK Sidney W. Fox, Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution, University of Miami, USA The current evolutionary debate encompasses protobiotic chemistry at one extreme and human sociobiology at the other. Meanwhile, significant advances continue to be made in many scientific disciplines which have far-reaching implications on our view of nature. Although it is now generally felt that neo-Darwinism, at least in its orthodox form, is no longer an adequate theory of evolution, very few attempts have yet been made to articulate a coherent alternative out of the many voices of dissent. The purpose of the present volume is two-fold: to work towards a new evolutionary synthesis which takes full account of contemporary knowledge in all disciplines; and to examine explicitly the metaphorical basis of evolutionary theories old and new, as this has a powerful impact on our humanistic perspectives which underpin all social and political actions. We have brought together representatives of two groups of workers: those who ultimately believe in working within a transformed neo-Darwinism, and others who advocate a more radical reorientation away from the orthodoxy. Despite their fundamentally different affiliations, they are nonetheless able to communicate on questions of evolutionary concepts and mechanisms and their wider relevance to science and society. New insights are presented on major issues such as the physicochemical underpinnings of life processes, the meaning of natural selection, the nature of variation, heredity and morphogenesis, the integration of organism and environment, the active role of the organism in evolution and the evolution of human society. The new synthesis which is emerging is an integrated, multilevel and multidisciplinary approach to evolution which accords not only with the state of present-day knowledge, but with our deepest experience of nature.

Download or read book Aristotle s Ladder Darwin s Tree written by J. David. Archibald and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading paleontologist David Archibald explores the rich history of visual metaphors for biological order from ancient times to the present and their influence on human beingsÕ perception of their place in nature. Specifically, Archibald focuses on ladders and trees, and the first appearance of trees to represent seasonal life cycles. Their use in ancient Roman decorations and genealogies was then appropriated by the early Christian Church to represent biblical genealogies. The late eighteenth century saw the idea of a tree reappropriated to visualize relationships in the natural world, sometimes with a creationist view, but in some instances suggesting evolution. Charles DarwinÕs On the Origin of Species (1859) exorcised the exclusively creationist view of the Òtree of life.Ó His ideas sparked an explosion of trees, mostly by younger acolytes in Europe. Although DarwinÕs influence waned in the early twentieth century, by midcentury his ideas held sway once again in time for another and even greater explosion of tree building, generated by the development of new theories on how to assemble trees, the birth of powerful computing, and the emergence of molecular technology. Throughout his far-reaching study, and with the use of many figures, Archibald connects the evolution of Òtree of lifeÓ iconography to our changing perception of the world and ourselves, offering uncommon insight into how we went from standing on the top rung of the biological ladder to embodying just one tiny twig on the tree of life.

Download or read book The Stockholm Paradigm written by Daniel R. Brooks and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-07-19 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary crisis of emerging disease has been a century and a half in the making. Human, veterinary, and crop health practitioners convinced themselves that disease could be controlled by medicating the sick, vaccinating those at risk, and eradicating the parts of the biosphere responsible for disease transmission. Evolutionary biologists assured themselves that coevolution between pathogens and hosts provided a firewall against disease emergence in new hosts. Most climate scientists made no connection between climate changes and disease. None of these traditional perspectives anticipated the onslaught of emerging infectious diseases confronting humanity today. As this book reveals, a new understanding of the evolution of pathogen-host systems, called the Stockholm Paradigm, explains what is happening. The planet is a minefield of pathogens with preexisting capacities to infect susceptible but unexposed hosts, needing only the opportunity for contact. Climate change has always been the major catalyst for such new opportunities, because it disrupts local ecosystem structure and allows pathogens and hosts to move. Once pathogens expand to new hosts, novel variants may emerge, each with new infection capacities. Mathematical models and real-world examples uniformly support these ideas. Emerging disease is thus one of the greatest climate change–related threats confronting humanity. Even without deadly global catastrophes on the scale of the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, emerging diseases cost humanity more than a trillion dollars per year in treatment and lost productivity. But while time is short, the danger is great, and we are largely unprepared, the Stockholm Paradigm offers hope for managing the crisis. By using the DAMA (document, assess, monitor, act) protocol, we can “anticipate to mitigate” emerging disease, buying time and saving money while we search for more effective ways to cope with this challenge.

Download or read book Missing Link written by Jeffery Donaldson and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We look for missing links in the sciences and humanities, but the essential missing link - metaphor - is always in front of us. In Missing Link, Jeffery Donaldson unites literary criticism and evolutionary and cognitive science to show how metaphor has been with us since the beginning of time as a seed in the nature of things. With examples from centuries of poets, critics, philosophers, and scientists, he details how metaphor is a chemistry, an exchange of energies forming and dissolving, and an openness in the spaces between things. He considers the ways in which DNA learns how to liken things that have been, how mutation makes errors and then tries them on, and how evolution is hypothesis - nature's way of "thinking more." The mind is a matrix of relations: neural synapses cascade into ever-changing pathways and patterns. Metaphor is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It is the unbroken thread between matter and spirit. Whether offering analysis of a turn of phrase or chemical reaction, Missing Link presents a vision of literature that is also a vision of the cosmos, and vice versa. It enters the debate between evolution and religion, and challenges scientists, literary theorists, and religious advocates to rethink the relations between their disciplines.

Download or read book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory written by Stephen Jay Gould and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002-03-21 with total page 1460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world’s most revered and eloquent interpreter of evolutionary ideas offers here a work of explanatory force unprecedented in our time—a landmark publication, both for its historical sweep and for its scientific vision. With characteristic attention to detail, Stephen Jay Gould first describes the content and discusses the history and origins of the three core commitments of classical Darwinism: that natural selection works on organisms, not genes or species; that it is almost exclusively the mechanism of adaptive evolutionary change; and that these changes are incremental, not drastic. Next, he examines the three critiques that currently challenge this classic Darwinian edifice: that selection operates on multiple levels, from the gene to the group; that evolution proceeds by a variety of mechanisms, not just natural selection; and that causes operating at broader scales, including catastrophes, have figured prominently in the course of evolution. Then, in a stunning tour de force that will likely stimulate discussion and debate for decades, Gould proposes his own system for integrating these classical commitments and contemporary critiques into a new structure of evolutionary thought. In 2001 the Library of Congress named Stephen Jay Gould one of America’s eighty-three Living Legends—people who embody the “quintessentially American ideal of individual creativity, conviction, dedication, and exuberance.” Each of these qualities finds full expression in this peerless work, the likes of which the scientific world has not seen—and may not see again—for well over a century.

Download or read book Metaphor and the Historical Evolution of Conceptual Mapping written by R. Trim and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-03 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of the historical evolution of figurative language within the framework of cognitive linguistics. It examines how and why metaphors evolve through the ages; discusses the role of culture; patterns of metaphor evolution; how many people use particular expressions.

Download or read book On the Evolution of Media written by Carlos A. Scolari and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-23 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the lifecycle of media in the context of the media ecology, presenting a general theoretical framework and a series of methodological procedures to support the construction of an eco-evolutionary approach to media change. Focusing on a series of processes - emergence, competition, dominance, hybridization, adaptation, extinction - this book goes beyond a chronological approach to propose a reticulated and multi-layered conception of media evolution. If media evolution is a network, what are the relationships between "media species" like? What happens when a new media emerges into the media ecology? How do new media influence the old ones? Can media become extinct? How do media adapt when the social and economic context changes? How can media evolution be analysed? What kinds of quantitative and qualitative techniques can be applied in media evolution research? By presenting an innovative research approach and theoretical framework to media studies, this book will be of keen interest to scholars and graduate students of new media, media history and theory, philosophy of technology, mass communication, and organisational studies.

Download or read book Metaphor Networks written by R. Trim and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-09-19 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphor Networks focuses on the historical evolution of metaphor and proposes new theories on language change based on substantial empirical data. It explores how the metaphors of today are very often linked to images existing in the past and traces metaphor paths back to the Middle Ages and Antiquity. The findings reveal that regular patters of evolution emerge and the aims of the book are to find out what lies behind these patterns.

Download or read book Nietzsche Biology and Metaphor written by Gregory Moore and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-24 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor explores the German philosopher's response to the intellectual debates sparked by the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. By examining the abundance of biological metaphors in Nietzsche's writings, Gregory Moore questions his recent reputation as an eminently subversive and (post-) modern thinker, and shows how deeply Nietzsche was immersed in late nineteenth-century debates on evolution, degeneration and race. The first part of the book provides a detailed study and interpretation of Nietzsche's much disputed relationship to Darwinism. Uniquely, Moore also considers the importance of Nietzsche's evolutionary perspective for the development of his moral and aesthetic philosophy. The second part analyzes key themes of Nietzsche's cultural criticism - his attack on the Judaeo-Christian tradition, his diagnosis of the nihilistic crisis afflicting modernity and his anti-Wagnerian polemics - against the background of fin-de-siècle fears about the imminent biological collapse of Western civilization.

Download or read book Understanding Metaphors in the Life Sciences written by Andrew S. Reynolds and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering a range of metaphors from a diverse field of sciences, from cell and molecular biology to evolution, ecology, and biomedicine, Understanding Metaphors in the Life Sciences explores the positive and negative implications of the widespread use of metaphors in the biological and life sciences. From genetic codes, programs, and blueprints, to cell factories, survival of the fittest, the tree of life, selfish genes, and ecological niches, to genome editing with CRISPR's molecular scissors, metaphors are ubiquitous and vital components of the modern life sciences. But how exactly do metaphors help scientists to understand the objects they study? How can they mislead both scientists and laypeople alike? And what should we all understand about the implications of science's reliance on metaphorical speech and thought for objective knowledge and adequate public policy informed by science? This book will literally help you to better understand the metaphorical dimensions of science.

Download or read book Evolution for Everyone written by David Sloan Wilson and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2007-03-27 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With stories that entertain as much as they inform, renowned evolutionist David Sloan Wilson outlines the basic principles of evolution and shows how, when properly understood, they can illuminate the length and breadth of creation, from the origin of life to the nature of religion. What is the biological reason for gossip? For laughter? For the creation of art? Why do dogs have curly tails? What can microbes tell us about morality? These and many other questions are tackled by Wilson in this witty and groundbreaking new book. Now everyone can move beyond the sterile debates about creationism and intelligent design to share Darwin’s panoramic view of animal and human life, seamlessly connected to each other. Evolution, as Wilson explains, is not just about dinosaurs and human origins, but about why all species behave as they do—from beetles that devour their own young, to bees that function as a collective brain, to dogs that are smarter in some respects than our closest ape relatives. And basic evolutionary principles are also the foundation for humanity’s capacity for symbolic thought, culture, and morality. In example after example, Wilson sheds new light on Darwin’ s grand theory and how it can be applied to daily life. By turns thoughtful, provocative, and daringly funny, Evolution for Everyone addresses some of the deepest philosophical and social issues of this or any age. In helping us come to a deeper understanding of human beings and our place in the world, it might also help us to improve that world.

Download or read book Michael Osborn on Metaphor and Style written by Michael Osborn and published by Michigan State University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume features two dimensions of Michael Osborn’s work with rhetorical metaphor. The first focuses on his early efforts to develop a conception of metaphor to advance the understanding of rhetoric, while the second concerns more recent efforts to apply this enriched conception in the analysis and criticism of significant rhetorical practice. The older emphasis features four of Osborn’s more prominent published essays, revealing the personal context in which they were generated, their strengths and shortcomings, and how they may have inspired the work of others. His more recent unpublished work analyzes patterns of metaphor in the major speeches of Demosthenes, the evolution of metaphors of illness and cure in speeches across several millennia, the exploitation of the birth-death-rebirth metaphor in Riefenstahl’s masterpiece of Nazi propaganda Triumph of the Will, and the contrasting forms of spatial imagery in the speeches of Edmund Burke and Barack Obama and what these contrasts may portend.

Download or read book The Terrestrialization Process written by Marco Vecoli and published by Geological Society of London. This book was released on 2010 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The invasion of the land by plants (terrestrialization) was one of the most significant evolutionary events in the history of life on Earth, and correlates in time with periods of major palaeoenvironmental perturbations. The development of a vegetation cover on the previously barren land surfaces impacted on the global biogeochemical cycles and the geological processes of erosion and sediment transport. The terrestrialization of plants preceded the rise of major new groups of animals, such as insects and tetrapods, the latter numbering some 24 000 living species, including ourselves. Early land-plant evolution also correlates with the most spectacular decline of atmospheric CO2 concentration of Phanerozoic times and with the onset of a protracted period of glacial conditions on Earth. This book includes a selection of papers covering different aspects of the terrestrialization, from palaeobotany to vertebrate palaeontology and geochemistry, promoting a multidisciplinary approach to the understanding of the co-evolution of life and its environments during Early to Mid-Palaeozoic times.

Download or read book A Cognitive Semantics Approach to Darwin s Theory of Evolution written by Dr. Anna Drogosz and published by Æ Academic Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DARWIN’S THEORY OF EVOLUTION ranks among the most influential of modern scientific theories. Applying the methodology of COGNITIVE SEMANTICS , this study investigates how metaphors based on domains of JOURNEY, STRUGGLE, TREE and HUMAN AGENCY serve to conceptualize key concepts of Darwin’s theory — such as evolutionary change, natural selection, and relationships among organisms. At the outset the author identifies original metaphors in The Origin of Species, to turn to their realizations in modern discourse on evolution in later chapters. Thus, the study uncovers how metaphors contribute to structuring the theory by expressing it in a coherent and attractive way, and how they provide mental tools for reasoning. As the first comprehensive study of conceptual metaphors that underlie Darwin’s theory and affect the way we talk and think about evolution, it may be of interest not only to linguists and evolutionary biologists but also to anyone interested in the interconnection between thought and language.

Download or read book The Mythology of Evolution written by Chris Bateman and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2012-09-16 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book liberates evolution from misrepresentative scientific myths to find a more nuanced vision of life that shows how advantages persist, trust is beneficial, and the diversity of species emerges.

Download or read book Evolution Revolution written by Ervin Laszlo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1971 Evolution – Revolution is an interdisciplinary volume examining inquiry around the central topic of evolution and revolution. Containing contributions from a number of eminent academics of the time, the book addresses the meaning and application of evolution and revolution in the context, not of what things are, or even how they behave, but how they become. The broad interdisciplinary range of essays explores this concept through the idea of development and change and argues that both change, and development must be measured against concepts of flux and that which endures. The editors of the book suggest that these are the ‘invariants’ which contemporary thinkers are beginning to accept as the process-counterparts of Platonic ‘immutables’. Thus this volume examines the two ‘immutables’ of evolution and revolution. The book covers the concept through essays in science, philosophic concepts of rationalism and existentialism, art and religion.