Download or read book The Simian Tongue written by Gregory Radick and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-01-23 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1890s the theory of evolution gained an unexpected ally: the Edison phonograph. An amateur scientist used the new machine—one of the technological wonders of the age—to record monkey calls, play them back to the monkeys, and watch their reactions. From these soon-famous experiments he judged that he had discovered “the simian tongue,” made up of words he was beginning to translate, and containing the rudiments from which human language evolved. Yet for most of the next century, the simian tongue and the means for its study existed at the scientific periphery. Both returned to great acclaim only in the early 1980s, after a team of ethologists announced that experimental playback showed certain African monkeys to have rudimentarily meaningful calls. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources and interviews with key scientists, Gregory Radick here reconstructs the remarkable trajectory of a technique invented and reinvented to listen in on primate communication. Richly documented and powerfully argued, The Simian Tongue charts the scientific controversies over the evolution of language from Darwin’s day to our own, resurrecting the forgotten debts of psychology, anthropology, and other behavioral sciences to the Victorian debate about the animal roots of human language.
Download or read book The Simian Tongue written by Gregory Radick and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yet for most of the next century, the simian tongue and the means for its study existed at the scientific periphery.
Download or read book What It Means to be Human written by Joanna Bourke and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2013-07-23 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1872, a woman known only as "An Earnest Englishwoman" published a letter titled "Are Women Animals?" in which she protested against the fact that women were not treated as fully human. In fact, their status was worse than that of animals: regulations prohibiting cruelty against dogs, horses, and cattle were significantly more punitive than laws against cruelty to women. The Earnest Englishwoman's heartfelt cry was for women to "become–animal" in order to gain the status that they were denied on the grounds that they were not part of "mankind." In this fascinating account, Joanna Bourke addresses the profound question of what it means to be "human" rather than "animal." How are people excluded from political personhood? How does one become entitled to rights? The distinction between the two concepts is a blurred line, permanently under construction. If the Earnest Englishwoman had been capable of looking 100 years into the future, she might have wondered about the human status of chimeras, or the ethics of stem cell research. Political disclosures and scientific advances have been re–locating the human–animal border at an alarming speed. In this meticulously researched, illuminating book, Bourke explores the legacy of more than two centuries, and looks forward into what the future might hold for humans, women, and animals.
Download or read book Origin Of Language written by Roy Harris and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public debate about language in the English-speaking world during the nineteenth century turned on the issue of how language began. The notion that language was a divine gift to humanity, not shared by lower creatures, was supported by the Biblical accounts of Adam naming the animals and of the Tower of Babel. It was still accepted by leading religious authorities. But this notion was seriously brought into question by the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution. Those who rejected Darwinism ridiculed all attempts to conjure up language out of primitive calls, grunts, and ejaculations. No animals, it was pointed out, had yet achieved communication remotely resembling the use of words. On the other side were those who held that it was possible to account for the birth of language rationally as a function of the development of human communicational needs in society.
Download or read book Language Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin de Si cle written by Christine Ferguson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Focusing on a variety of literary and non-literary texts, the book maps out the dialogue between the Victorian life and social sciences most involved in the study of language and the literary genre frequently indicted for causing linguistic corruption and debasement - popular fiction. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian biological, philological, and anthropological accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists such as Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Bram Stoker used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste. In its alignment of scientific, cultural, and popular discourses of human language, Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle stands as a corrective to assessments of best-selling fiction's intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic simplicity.
Download or read book The Review of Reviews written by William Thomas Stead and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Foot in the River written by Felipe Fernández-Armesto and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-10-09 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are a weird species. Like other species, we have a culture. But by comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable: human cultures self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place. And the way we live — our manners, morals, habits, experiences, relationships, technology, values — seems to be changing at an ever accelerating pace. The effects can be dislocating, baffling, sometimes terrifying. Why is this? In A Foot in the River, best-selling historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto sifts through the evidence and offers some radical answers to these very big questions about the human species and its history — and speculates on what these answers might mean for our future. Combining insights from a huge range of disciplines, including history, biology, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, sociology, ethology, zoology, primatology, psychology, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, and even business studies, he argues that culture is exempt from evolution. Ultimately, no environmental conditions, no genetic legacy, no predictable patterns, no scientific laws determine our behaviour. We can consequently make and remake our world in the freedom of unconstrained imaginations. A revolutionary book which challenges scientistic assumptions about culture and how and why cultural change happens, A Foot in the River comes to conclusions which readers may well find by turns both daunting and also potentially hugely liberating.
Download or read book The New Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book New Media 1740 1915 written by Lisa Gitelman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cultural history of media that were "new media" in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
Download or read book Encountering Gorillas written by James L. Newman and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2013-07-05 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gorillas, the largest of the apes inhabiting our planet, have been a source of fear, awe, and inspiration to humans. In this book, James L. Newman brings a lifetime of study of Africa to his compelling story of the rich and varied interaction between gorillas and humans since earliest contact. He illuminates the complex relationship over time through the interlinked themes of discovery, exploitation, understanding, and continuing survival. Tragically, the number of free-living gorillas—facing habitat loss, disease, and poaching—has declined dramatically over the course of the past century, and the future of the few that remain is highly uncertain. At the same time, those in zoos and sanctuaries now lead much more secure lives than they did earlier. Newman follows this transition, highlighting the roles played by key individuals, both humans and gorillas. Among the former have been adventurers, opportunists, writers, and scientists. The latter include real gorillas, such as Gargantua and Koko, and fictional ones, notably King Kong and Mighty Joe Young. This thoughtful and engaging book helps us understand how our image of gorillas has been both distorted and clarified through culture and science for centuries and how we now control the destiny of these magnificent great apes.
Download or read book Popular Exhibitions Science and Showmanship 1840 1910 written by Joe Kember and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian culture was characterized by a proliferation of shows and exhibitions. These were encouraged by the development of new sciences and technologies, together with changes in transportation, education and leisure patterns. The essays in this collection look at exhibitions and their influence in terms of location, technology and ideology.
Download or read book Littell s Living Age written by and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Littell s Living Age written by Eliakim Littell and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 846 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Psychoanalysis of Technoscience written by Hub Zwart and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2019 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a psychoanalysis of technoscience. Basic concepts and methods developed by Freud, Jung, Bachelard and Lacan are applied to case histories (palaeoanthropology, classical conditioning, virology). Rather than by disinterested curiosity, technoscience is driven by desire, resistance and the will to control. Moreover, psychoanalysis focusses on primal scenes (Dubois' quest for the missing link, Pavlov's discovery of the conditioned reflex) and opts for triangulation: comparing technoscience to "different scenes" provided by novels, so that Dubois's work is compared to missing link novels by Verne and London and Pavlov's experiments with Skinner's Walden Two, while virology is studied through the lens of viral fiction.
Download or read book Native Tongues written by Sean P. Harvey and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the morally entangled territory of language and race in 18th- and 19th-century America, Sean Harvey shows that whites’ theories of an “Indian mind” inexorably shaped by Indian languages played a crucial role in the subjugation of Native peoples and informed the U.S. government’s efforts to extinguish Native languages for years to come.
Download or read book The Great Apes written by Chris Herzfeld and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreword / by Jane Goodall -- The uncanniness of similitude : wild men, simians, and hybrid beings -- Skeletons, skins, and skulls : apes in the age of colonial expansion and natural history collections -- Apes as guinea pigs : primates and experimental research -- Great apes in the eyes of scientists : what does it mean to be an ape? -- Apes that think they are human : astronaut apes, painting apes, talking apes -- Conquering the field : pioneers, the quest for origins, and primates -- Socialities, culture, and traditions among primates : when the boundary between humans and apes blurs -- Women and apes : sex, gender, and primatology -- Becoming-human, being-ape
Download or read book The Mirror and the Mind written by Katja Guenther and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-11-26 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the classic mirror test served as a portal for scientists to explore questions of self-awareness Since the late eighteenth century, scientists have placed subjects—humans, infants, animals, and robots—in front of mirrors in order to look for signs of self-recognition. Mirrors served as the possible means for answering the question: What makes us human? In The Mirror and the Mind, Katja Guenther traces the history of the mirror self-recognition test, exploring how researchers from a range of disciplines—psychoanalysis, psychiatry, developmental and animal psychology, cybernetics, anthropology, and neuroscience—came to read the peculiar behaviors elicited by mirrors. Investigating the ways mirrors could lead to both identification and misidentification, Guenther looks at how such experiments ultimately failed to determine human specificity. The mirror test was thrust into the limelight when Charles Darwin challenged the idea that language sets humans apart. Thereafter the mirror, previously a recurrent if marginal scientific tool, became dominant in attempts to demarcate humans from other animals. But because researchers could not rely on language to determine what their nonspeaking subjects were experiencing, they had to come up with significant innovations, including notation strategies, testing protocols, and the linking of scientific theories across disciplines. From the robotic tortoises of Grey Walter and the mark test of Beulah Amsterdam and Gordon Gallup, to anorexia research and mirror neurons, the mirror test offers a window into the emergence of such fields as biology, psychology, psychiatry, animal studies, cognitive science, and neuroscience. The Mirror and the Mind offers an intriguing history of experiments in self-awareness and the advancements of the human sciences across more than a century.
