Download or read book The Selfish Ape written by Nicholas P. Money and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weaving together stories of science and sociology, The Selfish Ape offers a refreshing response to common fantasies about the ascent of humanity. Rather than imagining modern humans as a species with godlike powers, or Homo deus, Nicholas P. Money recasts us as Homo narcissus—paragons of self-absorption. This exhilarating story offers an immense sweep of modern biology, leading readers from earth’s unexceptional location in the cosmos to the story of our microbial origins and the innerworkings of the human body. It explores human genetics, reproduction, brain function, and aging, creating an enlightened view of man as a brilliantly inventive, yet self-destructive animal. The Selfish Ape is a book about human biology, the intertwined characteristics of our greatness and failure, and the way that we have plundered the biosphere. Written in a highly accessible style, it is a perfect read for those interested in science, human history, sociology, and the environment.
Download or read book The Kindness of Strangers written by Michael E. McCullough and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A fine achievement."--Peter Singer, author of The Life You Can Save and The Most Good You Can Do A sweeping psychological history of human goodness -- from the foundations of evolution to the modern political and social challenges humanity is now facing. How did humans, a species of self-centered apes, come to care about others? Since Darwin, scientists have tried to answer this question using evolutionary theory. In The Kindness of Strangers, psychologist Michael E. McCullough shows why they have failed and offers a new explanation instead. From the moment nomadic humans first settled down until the aftermath of the Second World War, our species has confronted repeated crises that we could only survive by changing our behavior. As McCullough argues, these choices weren't enabled by an evolved moral sense, but with moral invention -- driven not by evolution's dictates but by reason. Today's challenges -- climate change, mass migration, nationalism -- are some of humanity's greatest yet. In revealing how past crises shaped the foundations of human concern, The Kindness of Strangers offers clues for how we can adapt our moral thinking to survive these challenges as well.
Download or read book The Ape that Understood the Universe written by Steve Stewart-Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ape that Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our altruistic tendencies, and our culture? The book tackles these issues by drawing on two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory. The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass on our genes. At some point, however, we also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which we're but a tiny, fleeting fragment. Featuring a new foreword by Michael Shermer.
Download or read book The Last Great Ape written by Ofir Drori and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of an adventurer-turned-warrior fighting poachers and traffickers to protect animals from extinction. Staging heart-pounding, espionage-style raids, Ofir Drori and his organization, The Last Great Ape (LAGA), have put countless poachers and traffickers of endangered species behind bars, and they have fought back against a Kafkaesque culture of corruption. Before Ofir arrived in Cameroon, no one had ever even tried. The Last Great Ape follows a young Ofir on fantastical adventures as he crosses remote African lands by camel, on a horse, and in dug-out canoes, while living with exotic tribes and struggling against nature at its rawest: charging elephants and hyenas, flash floods, and the need to eat river algae and snails to stay alive. The story moves from places of extreme beauty to those of the darkest horror: the war zones of Sierra Leone and Liberia. Ofir begins to work as a photojournalist in order to expose his shocking encounter with war victims and child soldiers. His experiences forge in him a resolution to become an activist and to fight for justice. The search for a cause eventually leads him to Cameroon. When Ofir discovers that no one is fighting to disprove Jane Goodall's dark prophesy that apes in the wild will be extinct in twenty years, he decides that he is the man to step in; because he knows he can make a difference, he sees it as his responsibility. And LAGA is born. The Last Great Ape is a story of the fight against extinction and the tragedy of endangered worlds, not just of animals but of people struggling to hold onto their culture. This book reveals the intense beauty and strife that exist side by side in Africa, and Ofir makes the case that activism and dedication to a cause are still relevant in a cynical modern world. This dangerous and dramatic story is one of courage and hope and, most importantly, a search for meaning.
Download or read book Demonic Males written by Richard W. Wrangham and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1996 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whatever their virtues, men are more violent than women. Why do men kill, rape, and wage war, and what can be done about it? Drawing on the latest discoveries about human evolution and about our closest living relatives, the great apes, "Demonic Males" offers some startling new answers to these questions.
Download or read book Good Natured written by Frans B. M. DE WAAL and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To observe a dog's guilty look. to witness a gorilla's self-sacrifice for a wounded mate, to watch an elephant herd's communal effort on behalf of a stranded calf--to catch animals in certain acts is to wonder what moves them. Might there he a code of ethics in the animal kingdom? Must an animal be human to he humane? In this provocative book, a renowned scientist takes on those who have declared ethics uniquely human Making a compelling case for a morality grounded in biology, he shows how ethical behavior is as much a matter of evolution as any other trait, in humans and animals alike. World famous for his brilliant descriptions of Machiavellian power plays among chimpanzees-the nastier side of animal life--Frans de Waal here contends that animals have a nice side as well. Making his case through vivid anecdotes drawn from his work with apes and monkeys and holstered by the intriguing, voluminous data from his and others' ongoing research, de Waal shows us that many of the building blocks of morality are natural: they can he observed in other animals. Through his eyes, we see how not just primates but all kinds of animals, from marine mammals to dogs, respond to social rules, help each other, share food, resolve conflict to mutual satisfaction, even develop a crude sense of justice and fairness. Natural selection may be harsh, but it has produced highly successful species that survive through cooperation and mutual assistance. De Waal identifies this paradox as the key to an evolutionary account of morality, and demonstrates that human morality could never have developed without the foundation of fellow feeling our species shares with other animals. As his work makes clear, a morality grounded in biology leads to an entirely different conception of what it means to he human--and humane.
Download or read book Man the Hunted written by Donna Hart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Man the Hunted argues that primates, including the earliest members of the human family, have evolved as the prey of any number of predators, including wild cats and dogs, hyenas, snakes, crocodiles, and even birds. The authors' studies of predators on monkeys and apes are supplemented here with the observations of naturalists in the field and revealing interpretations of the fossil record. Eyewitness accounts of the 'man the hunted' drama being played out even now give vivid evidence of its prehistoric significance. This provocative view of human evolution suggests that countless adaptations that have allowed our species to survive (from larger brains to speech), stem from a considerably more vulnerable position on the food chain than we might like to imagine. The myth of early humans as fearless hunters dominating the earth obscures our origins as just one of many species that had to be cautious, depend on other group members, communicate danger, and come to terms with being merely one cog in the complex cycle of life.
Download or read book The Selfish Gene written by Richard Dawkins and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1989 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science need not be dull and bogged down by jargon, as Richard Dawkins proves in this entertaining look at evolution. The themes he takes up are the concepts of altruistic and selfish behaviour; the genetical definition of selfish interest; the evolution of aggressive behaviour; kinshiptheory; sex ratio theory; reciprocal altruism; deceit; and the natural selection of sex differences. 'Should be read, can be read by almost anyone. It describes with great skill a new face of the theory of evolution.' W.D. Hamilton, Science
Download or read book Ape and Essence written by Aldous Huxley and published by Ivan R. Dee. This book was released on 1992-08-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first appeared in 1932, it presented in terms of purest fantasy a society bent on self-destruction. Few of its outraged critics anticipated the onset of another world war with its Holocaust and atomic ruin. In 1948, seeing that the probable shape of his anti-utopia had been altered inevitably by the facts of history, Huxley wrote Ape and Essence. In this savage novel, using the form of a film scenario, he transports us to the year 2108. The setting is Los Angeles where a "rediscovery expedition" from New Zealand is trying to make sense of what is left. From chief botanist Alfred Poole we learn, to our dismay, about the twenty-second-century way of life. "It was inevitable that Mr. Huxley should have written this book: one could almost have seen it since Hiroshima is the necessary sequel to Brave New World."—Alfred Kazin. "The book has a certain awesome impressiveness; its sheer intractable bitterness cannot but affect the reader."—Time.
Download or read book The Kindness of Strangers written by curious directive and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's 7:03pm on the front line of the NHS ambulance service. Sylvia is on her last shift. Lisa is on her first shift. The two women patrol the city streets, encountering the full spectrum of human experience. An immersive journey into the world of the paramedic, where the audience sit in the back of a moving ambulance and witness all that comes with a twelve-hour night shift. The Kindness of Strangers is a pan-city promenade piece taking you into the curious day-to-day life of the paramedic.
Download or read book Rescued written by Eliot Schrefer and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From two-time National Book Award finalist Eliot Schrefer comes an unbelievable story of survival. Raja has been raised in captivity. Not behind the bars of a zoo, but within the confines of an American home. He was stolen when he was young to be someone's pet. Now he's grown up . . . and is about to be sent away again, to a place from which there will be no return. John grew up with Raja. The orangutan was his friend, his brother -- never his pet. But when John's parents split up and he moved across the country, he left Raja behind. Now Raja is suffering.There's one last chance to save Raja -- a chance that will force John to confront his fractured family and the captivity he's imposed on himself all of these years.Eliot Schrefer's last two novels, Endangered and Threatened, were both finalists for the National Book Award. With Rescued, he brings his remarkable storytelling to the American landscape, giving us a boy who must redefine his own humanity and an orangutan who will need his help in order to return home.
Download or read book Abundant Earth written by Eileen Crist and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Abundant Earth, Eileen Crist not only documents the rising tide of biodiversity loss, but also lays out the drivers of this wholesale destruction and how we can push past them. Looking beyond the familiar litany of causes—a large and growing human population, rising livestock numbers, expanding economies and international trade, and spreading infrastructures and incursions upon wildlands—she asks the key question: if we know human expansionism is to blame for this ecological crisis, why are we not taking the needed steps to halt our expansionism? Crist argues that to do so would require a two-pronged approach. Scaling down calls upon us to lower the global human population while working within a human-rights framework, to deindustrialize food production, and to localize economies and contract global trade. Pulling back calls upon us to free, restore, reconnect, and rewild vast terrestrial and marine ecosystems. However, the pervasive worldview of human supremacy—the conviction that humans are superior to all other life-forms and entitled to use these life-forms and their habitats—normalizes and promotes humanity’s ongoing expansion, undermining our ability to enact these linked strategies and preempt the mounting suffering and dislocation of both humans and nonhumans. Abundant Earth urges us to confront the reality that humanity will not advance by entrenching its domination over the biosphere. On the contrary, we will stagnate in the identity of nature-colonizer and decline into conflict as we vie for natural resources. Instead, we must chart another course, choosing to live in fellowship within the vibrant ecologies of our wild and domestic cohorts, and enfolding human inhabitation within the rich expanse of a biodiverse, living planet.
Download or read book Through a Glass Brightly written by David P. Barash and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Human beings are important, especially to themselves! But as science advances, it has become increasingly clear that we are less special and more natural than many people have long believed. This book shows how, as we finally look at ourselves honestly and accurately, we can identify ourselves as wonderfully natural, inseparable from the universe and other living things"--
Download or read book The Awakened Ape written by Jevan Pradas and published by . This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is life's most intense pleasure? Did you know that it is free, safe and feels way better than sex? Or that the key to pristine health is not only to eat like a caveman, but to live like one?In The Awakened Ape Jevan Pradas uses evolutionary psychology to hack the human mind and body to answer the question: "How can we enjoy life to the fullest?" The results, while unexpected, are completely backed by science.Perpetually bored, anxious, fatigued and overweight, modern society has failed to deliver the happiness it promised. The remedy, Jevan argues, is in a unique synthesis of a Paleolithic lifestyle and Buddhist meditation.A sprawling journey, featuring Jevan's adventures with naked Amazonian tribes and retreats with enlightened monks to learn the secrets of optimal well-being, The Awakened Ape will teach you how to achieve deep states of bliss. All while shaping your body into the fit and healthy animal millions of years of evolution programmed you to be.
Download or read book Nico written by Paul Borovsky and published by Knopf Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 1993 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even though he has always been very selfish, Nico the ape is helped by his tropical forest neighbors when his house collapses from the weight of all the food he had been hoarding.
Download or read book The Naked Ape written by Desmond Morris and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Appius and Virginia written by G.E. Trevelyan and published by Eye & Lightning Books. This book was released on 2020-11-16 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A REDISCOVERED WORK BY ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING NOVELISTS OF THE 1930S 'One of the most important novelists of our day' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (1938) Virginia Hutton embarks upon an experiment. She will take an ape and raise it as a human child. She purchases an infant orangutan and names him Appius. She clothes him, feeds him, and puts him to bed in a cot every night. As Appius grows older, she teaches him to dress himself, to speak, to read, to stand and walk up straight, to eat his meals at the dining table with a knife and fork. She teaches him how to be human. The young orangutan is not always a willing student. His relationship with Virginia becomes fraught and flits between that of mother and child, teacher and student, scientist and experiment. But as Appius gains knowledge he moves ever closer to the one discovery Virginia does not want him to make: that of his true origins. Appius and Virginia explores the ongoing conflict between nature and nurture. It is also a chilling and unforgettable portrait of loneliness. G.E. Trevelyan wrote eight groundbreaking novels between 1932 and 1941 but her writing career was tragically cut short when her flat was hit by a German bomb during the Blitz. She died shortly afterwards and her books have subsequently been largely forgotten. This publication, the first reissue of any of her books since her death, seeks to restore the author to her rightful place in British literature.
