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Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571200030
Category : Death
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Book Description
Adam Phillips has been called the 'psychotherapist of the floating world' and 'the closest thing we have to a philosopher of happiness'. In this extraordinary book he takes a look, via Freud and Darwin, at endings - at mortality, extinction and death. Darwin and Freud took God out of the big picture, leaving nothing between mankind and nature. Their ideas were met with righteous indignation. But today, whether or not we read Darwin and Freud, we speak a version of their languages. Most of us think of childhood and sexuality as sources of suffering, and we picture ourselves as animals struggling competitively for survival. Yet, as Adam Phillips argues, we are not merely trapped in a world of continuous loss. Taking as his examples Darwin's life-long fascination in lowly earthworms, and Freud's life-long antipathy to grubbing biographers, he unexpectedly finds much to celebrate. For both of these writers are interested, above all, in how destruction conserves life. They take their inspiration from fossils or from half-remembered dreams, and show how life is about what can be done with these humble remnants from the past. Darwin and Freud render ageing, accident and death integral, not alien, to our sense of ourselves. They teach us the art of transience.
Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571200030
Category : Death
Languages : en
Pages : 148
Get Book Here
Book Description
Adam Phillips has been called the 'psychotherapist of the floating world' and 'the closest thing we have to a philosopher of happiness'. In this extraordinary book he takes a look, via Freud and Darwin, at endings - at mortality, extinction and death. Darwin and Freud took God out of the big picture, leaving nothing between mankind and nature. Their ideas were met with righteous indignation. But today, whether or not we read Darwin and Freud, we speak a version of their languages. Most of us think of childhood and sexuality as sources of suffering, and we picture ourselves as animals struggling competitively for survival. Yet, as Adam Phillips argues, we are not merely trapped in a world of continuous loss. Taking as his examples Darwin's life-long fascination in lowly earthworms, and Freud's life-long antipathy to grubbing biographers, he unexpectedly finds much to celebrate. For both of these writers are interested, above all, in how destruction conserves life. They take their inspiration from fossils or from half-remembered dreams, and show how life is about what can be done with these humble remnants from the past. Darwin and Freud render ageing, accident and death integral, not alien, to our sense of ourselves. They teach us the art of transience.
Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786748613
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
Adam Phillips has been called "the psychotherapist of the floating world" and "the closest thing we have to a philosopher of happiness." His style is epigrammatic; his intelligence, electric. His new book, Darwin's Worms, uses the biographical details of Darwin's and Freud's lives to examine endings-suffering, mortality, extinction, and death. Both Freud and Darwin were interested in how destruction conserves life. They took their inspiration from fossils or from half-remembered dreams. Each told a story that has altered our perception of our lives. For Darwin, Phillips explains, "the story to tell was how species can drift towards extinction; for Freud, the story was how the individual tended to, and tended towards his own death." In each case, it is a death story that uniquely illuminates the life story.
Author: Deborah Heiligman
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company (BYR)
ISBN: 1429934956
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, his revolutionary tract on evolution and the fundamental ideas involved, in 1859. Nearly 150 years later, the theory of evolution continues to create tension between the scientific and religious communities. Challenges about teaching the theory of evolution in schools occur annually all over the country. This same debate raged within Darwin himself, and played an important part in his marriage: his wife, Emma, was quite religious, and her faith gave Charles a lot to think about as he worked on a theory that continues to spark intense debates. Deborah Heiligman's new biography of Charles Darwin is a thought-provoking account of the man behind evolutionary theory: how his personal life affected his work and vice versa. The end result is an engaging exploration of history, science, and religion for young readers. Charles and Emma is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature.
Author: J. Satchell
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400959656
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 492
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Book Description
'Darwin cleared: official' This 1982 Times (7 January) head line of a first leader, reporting the astonishing case brought in Arkansas against compulsory teaching of a biblical account of creation, hopefully set at rest doubts about Darwin in the minds of a public confused by media presentations of such unfamiliar concepts as punctuated equilibria, cladism and phenetics. Mud sticks, but Darwin's perturbed ghost may have found some consolation in the concurrent celebrations at Grange-over-Sands, a modest township in Cumbria, UK, of the centenary of the publication of his less controversial book The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. In the form of a symposium on earthworm ecology, this attracted some 150 participants, predominantly adrenalin-charged research workers in the full heat of peer-group interaction. This book comprises a selection of the more ecologically oriented papers contributed to the symposium, brutally edited in the interests of brevity and thematic continuity. The book opens with an appraisal of Darwin's earthworm work in its historical and philosophical context and relates his views on 'vegetable mould' to current concepts of humus formation. Thereafter, quotations from Darwin made out of piety have been rigorously excluded. Subsequent sections each comprise a review chapter and two or three 'case studies' presenting new data on a related topic.
Author: Martin Brasier
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191613908
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
Darwin made a powerful argument for evolution in the Origin of Species, based on all the evidence available to him. But a few things puzzled him. One was how inheritance works - he did not know about genes. This book concerns another of Darwin's Dilemmas, and the efforts of modern palaeontologists to solve it. What puzzled Darwin is that the most very ancient rocks, before the Cambrian, seemed to be barren, when he would expect them to be teeming with life. Darwin speculated that this was probably because the fossils had not been found yet. Decades of work by modern palaeontologists have indeed brought us amazing fossils from far beyond the Cambrian, from the depths of the Precambrian, so life was certainly around. Yet the fossils are enigmatic, and something does seem to happen around the Cambrian to speed up evolution drastically and produce many of the early forms of animals we know today. In this book, Martin Brasier, a leading palaeontologist working on early life, takes us into the deep, dark ages of the Precambrian to explore Darwin's Lost World. Decoding the evidence in these ancient rocks, piecing together the puzzle of what happened over 540 million years ago to drive what is known as the Cambrian Explosion, is very difficult. The world was vastly different then from the one we know now, and we are in terrain with few familiar landmarks. Brasier is a master storyteller, and combines the account of what we now know of the strange creatures of these ancient times with engaging and amusing anecdotes from his expeditions to Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Barbuda, and other places, giving a vivid impression of the people, places, and challenges involved in such work. He ends by presenting his own take on the Cambrian Explosion, based on the picture emerging from this very active field of research. A vital clue involves worms - burrowing worms are one of the key signs of the start of the Cambrian. This is fitting: Darwin was inordinately fond of worms.
Author: Amy Stewart
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1565124685
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
In The Earth Moved, Amy Stewart takes us on a journey through the underground world and introduces us to one of its most amazing denizens. The earthworm may be small, spineless, and blind, but its impact on the ecosystem is profound. It ploughs the soil, fights plant diseases, cleans up pollution, and turns ordinary dirt into fertile land. Who knew? In her witty, offbeat style, Stewart shows that much depends on the actions of the lowly worm. Charles Darwin devoted his last years to the meticulous study of these creatures, praising their remarkable abilities. With the august scientist as her inspiration, Stewart investigates the worm's subterranean realm, talks to oligochaetologists—the unsung heroes of earthworm science—who have devoted their lives to unearthing the complex life beneath our feet, and observes the thousands of worms in her own garden. From the legendary giant Australian worm that stretches to ten feet in length to the modest nightcrawler that wormed its way into the heart of Darwin's last book to the energetic red wigglers in Stewart's compost bin, The Earth Moved gives worms their due and exposes their hidden and extraordinary universe. This book is for all of us who appreciate Mother Nature's creatures, no matter how humble.
Author: C.S.K. Mishra
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527564185
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 137
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Book Description
This book is a concise and well-illustrated treatment of the conventional knowledge and modern utilities of earthworms. The first two chapters deal with earthworm morphology, food relationship, behavior, functional role, interaction with soil biota, and the influence of environmental factors. Earthworms found in the tropics and sub-tropics are also discussed in this section. The third chapter provides a good account of utilizing species of worms to produce high value manure through vermitechnology and its application in agriculture. The nutritional and medicinal values of earthworms are illustrated in the fourth chapter, while the fifth c provides information on how earthworms are used successfully as indicators of ecological perturbations, soil quality and for remediation of contaminated soils. The book will immensely benefit students, faculty and researchers in biological, agricultural and environmental sciences. It is also a source of information for anyone interested in knowing more about earthworms.
Author: Jeremy Taylor
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022605988X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
We think of medical science and doctors as focused on treating conditions—whether it’s a cough or an aching back. But the sicknesses and complaints that cause us to seek medical attention actually have deeper origins than the superficial germs and behaviors we regularly fault. In fact, as Jeremy Taylor shows in Body by Darwin, we can trace the roots of many medical conditions through our evolutionary history, revealing what has made us susceptible to certain illnesses and ailments over time and how we can use that knowledge to help us treat or prevent problems in the future. In Body by Darwin, Taylor examines the evolutionary origins of some of our most common and serious health issues. To begin, he looks at the hygiene hypothesis, which argues that our obsession with anti-bacterial cleanliness, particularly at a young age, may be making us more vulnerable to autoimmune and allergic diseases. He also discusses diseases of the eye, the medical consequences of bipedalism as they relate to all those aches and pains in our backs and knees, the rise of Alzheimer’s disease, and how cancers become so malignant that they kill us despite the toxic chemotherapy we throw at them. Taylor explains why it helps to think about heart disease in relation to the demands of an ever-growing, dense, muscular pump that requires increasing amounts of nutrients, and he discusses how walking upright and giving birth to ever larger babies led to a problematic compromise in the design of the female spine and pelvis. Throughout, he not only explores the impact of evolution on human form and function, but he integrates science with stories from actual patients and doctors, closely examining the implications for our health. As Taylor shows, evolutionary medicine allows us think about the human body and its adaptations in a completely new and productive way. By exploring how our body’s performance is shaped by its past, Body by Darwin draws powerful connections between our ancient human history and the future of potential medical advances that can harness this knowledge.
Author: Charles Darwin
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393969672
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
Gathers selections from nine of Darwin's most important books, including writings about coral reefs, the Galapagos Islands, evolution, emotions, and flowers.
Author: Jonathan Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521856906
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 23
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Book Description
A highly illustrated account of Darwin's visual representations of his theories, and their influence on Victorian literature, art and culture, first published in 2006.
