Download or read book Do Elephants Have Knees written by Charles R. Ault and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking whimsically makes serious science accessible. That’s a message that should be taken to heart by all readers who want to learn about evolution. Do Elephants Have Knees? invites readers into serious appreciation of Darwinian histories by deploying the playful thinking found in children’s books. Charles R. Ault Jr. weds children’s literature to recent research in paleontology and evolutionary biology. Inquiring into the origin of origins stories, Ault presents three portraits of Charles Darwin—curious child, twentysomething adventurer, and elderly worm scientist. Essays focusing on the origins of tetrapods, elephants, whales, and birds explain fundamental Darwinian concepts (natural selection, for example) with examples of fossil history and comparative anatomy. The imagery of the children’s story offers a way to remember and recreate scientific discoveries. By juxtaposing Darwin’s science with tales for children, Do Elephants Have Knees? underscores the importance of whimsical storytelling to the accomplishment of serious thinking. Charles Darwin mused about duck beaks and swimming bears as he imagined a pathway for the origin of baleen. A "bearduck" chimera may be a stretch, but the science linking not just cows but also whales to moose through shared ancestry has great merit. Teaching about shared ancestry may begin with attention to Bernard Wiseman’s Morris the Moose. Morris believes that cows and deer are fine examples of moose because they all have four legs and things on their heads. No whale antlers are known, but fossils of four-legged whales are. By calling attention to surprising and serendipitous echoes between children’s stories and challenging science, Ault demonstrates how playful thinking opens the doors to an understanding of evolutionary thought.
Download or read book Beyond Science Standards written by Charles R. Ault and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Science Standards captures a vision of science education both whimsical and serious. Ranging across examples from elementary to university level classrooms and grounded in philosophy and history, the stories address dimensions beyond the realm of bureaucratic standards. Its thesis brings into question the premise of scientific unity and its representation in school as notions of method, process, nature, and practice. Schools, no less than the sciences, profit from playful exploration—of musical instruments in fourth grade physical science, for example, and hotel lobby decorative rock in a college geology course. Aesthetic expression permeates geologic interpretation and evolutionary insight—in depicting dentition, for instance, in the history of the horse family and linking this history to changing landscapes. Participating in collecting local, high altitude weather data enhances trust in climate science, especially when the observations benefit the local farming community. Allied with historical examples of the conduct of science, Beyond Science Standards offers the reader inspiring stories of science teaching, varying from place to place, time to time, discipline to discipline, and purpose to purpose.
Download or read book Too Much of a Good Thing written by Lee Goldman and published by Little, Brown Spark. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dean of Columbia University's medical school explains why our bodies are out of sync with today's environment and how we can correct this to save our health. Over the past 200 years, human life-expectancy has approximately doubled. Yet we face soaring worldwide rates of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, mental illness, heart disease, and stroke. In his fascinating new book, Dr. Lee Goldman presents a radical explanation: The key protective traits that once ensured our species' survival are now the leading global causes of illness and death. Our capacity to store food, for example, lures us into overeating, and a clotting system designed to protect us from bleeding to death now directly contributes to heart attacks and strokes. A deeply compelling narrative that puts a new spin on evolutionary biology, Too Much of a Good Thing also provides a roadmap for getting back in sync with the modern world.
Download or read book The Spectator written by and published by . This book was released on 1876 with total page 838 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Works of Sir Thomas Browne written by Thomas Browne and published by . This book was released on 1852 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Works of Sir Thomas Browne Preface Dr Johnson s Life of Sir Thomas Browne Supplementary memoir by the editor Mrs Lyttleton s communication to Bishop Kennet Pseudodoxia epidemica books I IV written by Sir Thomas Browne and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Preface Dr Johnson s Life of Sir Thomas Browne Supplementary memoir by the editor Mrs Lyttleton s communication to Bishop Kennet Pseudodoxia epidemica books I IV written by Sir Thomas Browne and published by . This book was released on 1852 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How the Zebra Got Its Stripes written by Léo Grasset and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do giraffes have such long necks? Why are zebras striped? And why does the clitoris of the female hyena exactly resemble and in most respects function like the male's penis?Deploying the latest scientific research and his own extensive observations in Africa, Léo Grasset offers answers to these questions and many more in a book of post-Darwinian Just So stories. Complex natural phenomena are explained in simple and at times comic terms, as Grasset turns evolutionary biology to the burning questions of the animal kingdom, from why elephants prefer dictators and buffaloes democracies, to whether the lion really is king.The human is, of course, just another animal, and the author's exploration of two million years of human evolution shows how it not only informs our current habits and behavior, but reveals that we are hybrids of several different species.Prepare to be fascinated, shocked and delighted, as well as reliably advised — by the end, you will know to never hug the beautiful, cuddly honey badger, and what explains its almost psychotic nastiness.This is serious science at its entertaining best.
Download or read book Origins written by Charles Darwin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-24 with total page 29 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This special anniversary edition of Burkhardt's bestselling work, "Origins: Charles Darwin's Letters: A Selection 1825-1859," now includes previously unpublished letters.
Download or read book At the Water s Edge written by Carl Zimmer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1999-09-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everybody Out of the Pond At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is the story of how we got here, what we left behind, and what we brought with us. We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago. In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.
Download or read book Sophie s World written by Jostein Gaarder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Download or read book Biology Medicine and Surgery of Elephants written by Murray Fowler and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-01-09 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elephants are possibly the most well-known members of the animal kingdom. The enormous size, unusual anatomy, and longevity of elephants have fascinated humans for millenia. Biology, Medicine, and Surgery of Elephants serves as a comprehensive text on elephant medicine and surgery. Based on the expertise of 36 scientists and clinical veterinarians, this volume covers biology, husbandry, veterinary medicine and surgery of the elephant as known today. Written by the foremost experts in the field Comprehensively covers both Asian and African elephants Complete with taxonomy, behavioral, geographical and systemic information Well-illustrated and organized for easy reference
Download or read book Great Books of the Western World Darwin written by and published by . This book was released on 1952 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Great Books of the Western World Darwin written by Robert Maynard Hutchins and published by . This book was released on 1952 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For contents, see Title Catalog.
Download or read book The Logic of the Unconscious Mind written by M. K. Bradby and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD 49 DARWIN written by ROBERT MAYNARD HUTCHINS and published by . This book was released on 1952 with total page 684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Looking for Darwin written by Lloyd Spencer Davis and published by Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning zoologist travels in Charles Darwin's footsteps, and in search of the meaning of life. In one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, zoologist Lloyd Spencer Davis comes face to face with an enraged leopard seal. Towering ice cliffs, a ferocious creature of the deep, and the extreme Antarctic environment all turn Davis's world view on its head. 'What the hell am I doing here?' This question sets Davis on a quest for insight and meaning in a world that still pitches theories of evolution against belief in a Creator; the science of natural selection against a faith that asserts our world was crafted by Intelligent Design. With a self-deprecating grin packed along with his cabin baggage - even when his passport isn't - Davis decides to follow the travels of the eminent nineteenth-century naturalist, Charles Darwin: the man who did more to change our understanding of this planet than any other biologist. Looking for Darwin gives us a personal and intimate insight into Darwin and what drove the man. It is also an attempt to resolve that initially panicked — and then far-reaching — question, that first hit Davis on the big ice. With a wealth of research and vivid imagery — along with a disarming honesty —Lloyd Spencer Davis takes the reader on an unforgettable world tour.
