Author: Carol Kaesuk Yoon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393338711
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Examines the history of taxonomy, describing the quest of scientists to name and classify living things from Carl Linnaeus to early twenty-first-century scientists who rely more on microscopic evidence than their senses, which has encouraged an indifference to nature that is responsible for the extinction of many species.
Author: Carol Kaesuk Yoon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393061970
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology: the surprising, untold story about the poetic and deeply human (cognitive) capacity to name the natural world.
Author: Carol Kaesuk Yoon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393072762
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology: the surprising, untold story about the poetic and deeply human (cognitive) capacity to name the natural world. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus set out to order and name the entire living world and ended up founding a science: the field of scientific classification, or taxonomy. Yet, in spite of Linnaeus’s pioneering work and the genius of those who followed him, from Darwin to E. O. Wilson, taxonomy went from being revered as one of the most significant of intellectual pursuits to being largely ignored. Today, taxonomy is viewed by many as an outdated field, one nearly irrelevant to the rest of science and of even less interest to the rest of the world. Now, as Carol Kaesuk Yoon, biologist and longtime science writer for the New York Times, reminds us in Naming Nature, taxonomy is critically important, because it turns out to be much more than mere science. It is also the latest incarnation of a long-unrecognized human practice that has gone on across the globe, in every culture, in every language since before time: the deeply human act of ordering and naming the living world. In Naming Nature, Yoon takes us on a guided tour of science’s brilliant, if sometimes misguided, attempts to order and name the overwhelming diversity of earth’s living things. We follow a trail of scattered clues that reveals taxonomy’s real origins in humanity’s distant past. Yoon’s journey brings us from New Guinea tribesmen who call a giant bird a mammal to the trials and tribulations of patients with a curious form of brain damage that causes them to be unable to distinguish among living things. Finally, Yoon shows us how the reclaiming of taxonomy—a renewed interest in learning the kinds and names of things around us—will rekindle humanity’s dwindling connection with wild nature. Naming Nature has much to tell us, not only about how scientists create a science but also about how the progress of science can alter the expression of our own human nature.
Author: Michael Ohl
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537036
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
From Tyrannosaurus rex to Heteropoda davidbowie: scientific naming as a joyful and creative act. Tyrannosaurus rex. Homo sapiens. Heteropoda davidbowie. Behind each act of scientific naming is a story. In this entertaining and illuminating book, Michael Ohl considers scientific naming as a joyful and creative act. There are about 1.8 million discovered and named plant and animal species, and millions more still to be discovered. Naming is the necessary next step after discovery; it is through the naming of species that we perceive and understand nature. Ohl explains the process, with examples, anecdotes, and a wildly varied cast of characters. He describes the rules for scientific naming; the vernacular isn't adequate. These rules—in standard binomial nomenclature, the generic name followed by specific name—go back to Linnaeus; but they are open to idiosyncrasy and individual expression. A lizard is designated Barbaturex morrisoni (in honor of the Doors' Jim Morrison, the Lizard King); a member of the horsefly family Scaptia beyonceae. Ohl, a specialist in “winged things that sting,” confesses that among the many wasp species he has named is Ampulex dementor, after the dementors in the Harry Potter novels. Scientific names have also been deployed by scientists to insult other scientists, to make political statements, and as expressions of romantic love: “I shall name this beetle after my beloved wife.” The Art of Naming takes us on a surprising and fascinating journey, in the footsteps of the discoverers of species and the authors of names, into the nooks and crannies and drawers and cabinets of museums, and through the natural world of named and not-yet-named species.
Author: Melanie Dewberry
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
ISBN: 1401950027
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Who are you, really? This is the central question. The question you might have been asking yourself all these years. Who are you without your title, your gender, your talent, your weight, your income, or your personality? If you strip away all of your niceties, all those embellishments that you’ve added to your persona to be accepted, what is left? If you wriggle out of all the identities that others have foisted on you, if you release all the ways you smooth out your rough edges so you can belong and feel safe, who are you? What is your core identity? The Power of Naming: A Journey toward Your Soul’s Indigenous Nature is a beautiful guide to answering your soul’s yearning to be known, to live on purpose, and to be authentic. To hear and elicit your name, you will need to be honest with yourself and admit that deep down inside you have always had at least an inkling of your essence, but you’ve played a game of hide-and-seek with your soul. Through The Power of Naming, peaceful warriors are born, false identities and labels are cast off, and a deeper understanding of the true soul is unearthed. As you work through the chapters of this book, learning to apply the teachings imbued with the author’s rich Native American and African American background, you will rediscover who you are and experience a new sense of freedom, love, and alignment with your highest self.
Author: Victor S. Navasky
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1480436216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 802
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Book Description
Winner of the National Book Award: The definitive history of Joe McCarthy, the Hollywood blacklist, and HUAC explores the events behind the hit film Trumbo. Drawing on interviews with over one hundred and fifty people who were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee—including Elia Kazan, Ring Lardner Jr., and Arthur Miller—award-winning author Victor S. Navasky reveals how and why the blacklists were so effective and delves into the tragic and far-reaching consequences of Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts. A compassionate, insightful, and even-handed examination of one of our country’s darkest hours, Naming Names is at once a morality play and a fascinating window onto a searing moment in American cultural and political history.
Author: Glauco Sanga
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571818232
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
Numerous scholars, in particular anthropologists, historians, economists, linguists, and biologists, have, over the last few years, studied forms of knowledge and use of nature, and of the ways nature can be protected and conserved. Some of the most prominent scholars have come together in this volume to reflect on what has been achieved so far, to compare the work carried out in the past, to discuss the problems that have emerged from different research projects, and to map out the way forward.
Author: Loren Graham
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674032934
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
The intellectual drama will attract readers who are interested in mystical religion and the foundations of mathematics. The personal drama will attract readers who are interested in a human tragedy with characters who met their fates with exceptional courage--Freeman Dyson.
Author: David Lukas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780983489122
Category : Creative writing
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Author: Saul A. Kripke
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674598461
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics or in philosophy of language, this is it. Ever since the publication of its original version, Naming and Necessity has had great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of reference, in particular of naming, and of identity. From a critique of the dominant tendency to assimilate names to descriptions and more generally to treat their reference as a function of their Fregean sense, surprisingly deep and widespread consequences may be drawn. The largely discredited distinction between accidental and essential properties, both of individual things (including people) and of kinds of things, is revived. So is a consequent view of science as what seeks out the essences of natural kinds. Traditional objections to such views are dealt with by sharpening distinctions between epistemic and metaphysical necessity; in particular by the startling admission of necessary a posteriori truths. From these, in particular from identity statements using rigid designators whether of things or of kinds, further remarkable consequences are drawn for the natures of things, of people, and of kinds; strong objections follow, for example to identity versions of materialism as a theory of the mind. This seminal work, to which today's thriving essentialist metaphysics largely owes its impetus, is here published with a substantial new Preface by the author.
