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Author: Spencer Wells
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812971914
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Ten thousand years ago, our species made a radical shift in its way of life: We became farmers rather than hunter-gatherers. Although this decision propelled us into the modern world, renowned geneticist and anthropologist Spencer Wells demonstrates that such a dramatic change in lifestyle had a downside that we’re only now beginning to recognize. Growing grain crops ultimately made humans more sedentary and unhealthy and made the planet more crowded. The expanding population and the need to apportion limited resources created hierarchies and inequalities. Freedom of movement was replaced by a pressure to work that is the forebear of the anxiety millions feel today. Spencer Wells offers a hopeful prescription for altering a life to which we were always ill-suited. Pandora’s Seed is an eye-opening book for anyone fascinated by the past and concerned about the future.
Author: Spencer Wells
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812971914
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Get Book Here
Book Description
Ten thousand years ago, our species made a radical shift in its way of life: We became farmers rather than hunter-gatherers. Although this decision propelled us into the modern world, renowned geneticist and anthropologist Spencer Wells demonstrates that such a dramatic change in lifestyle had a downside that we’re only now beginning to recognize. Growing grain crops ultimately made humans more sedentary and unhealthy and made the planet more crowded. The expanding population and the need to apportion limited resources created hierarchies and inequalities. Freedom of movement was replaced by a pressure to work that is the forebear of the anxiety millions feel today. Spencer Wells offers a hopeful prescription for altering a life to which we were always ill-suited. Pandora’s Seed is an eye-opening book for anyone fascinated by the past and concerned about the future.
Author: Spencer Wells
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679603743
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Get Book Here
Book Description
Ten thousand years ago, our species made a radical shift in its way of life: We became farmers rather than hunter-gatherers. Although this decision propelled us into the modern world, renowned geneticist and anthropologist Spencer Wells demonstrates that such a dramatic change in lifestyle had a downside that we’re only now beginning to recognize. Growing grain crops ultimately made humans more sedentary and unhealthy and made the planet more crowded. The expanding population and the need to apportion limited resources created hierarchies and inequalities. Freedom of movement was replaced by a pressure to work that is the forebear of the anxiety millions feel today. Spencer Wells offers a hopeful prescription for altering a life to which we were always ill-suited. Pandora’s Seed is an eye-opening book for anyone fascinated by the past and concerned about the future.
Author: Caius Rommens
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781986600835
Category : Crops
Languages : en
Pages : 84
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Book Description
-THIS BOOK HAS SERVED ITS FUNCTION AND IS RETIRED-GMO potatoes are quietly entering the market place with innocuous names such as Innate, White, and Hibernate. They are suggested to have maintained all the original traits of normal potatoes and to have gained three new traits: enhanced disease resistance, enhanced uniformity, and enhanced healthiness. However, the reality is different. As a crop, the potatoes contain genetically unstable traits, two of which appear to have been lost already (or are in the process of being lost), suffer a significant yield drag and reduction in size profile, conceal bruises and potentially spread diseases, may be grown and stored in ways that maximize disease and pest pressures, and were developed through an act of biopiracy. As a processed food, they lost the sensory attributes that make normal potato foods so attractive, and they are also likely to contain new toxins. If it were up to me, the creator of these potatoes, I would call them Pandora's Potatoes. They are the worst GMOs ever commercialized.
Author: Spencer Wells
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1426202113
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
Travel backward through time from today's scattered billions to the handful of early humans who lived in Africa 60,000 years ago and are ancestors to us all. In Deep Ancestry, scientist and National Geographic explorer Spencer Wells shows how tiny genetic changes add up over time into a fascinating story. Using scores of real-life examples, helpful analogies, and detailed diagrams and illustrations, he explains exactly how each and every individual's DNA contributes another piece to the jigsaw puzzle of human history. The book takes readers inside the Genographic Project—the landmark study now assembling the world's largest collection of DNA samples and employing the latest in testing technology and computer analysis to examine hundreds of thousand of genetic profiles from all over the globe—and invites us all to take part.
Author: Spencer Wells
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176019
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Around 60,000 years ago, a man, genetically identical to us, lived in Africa. Every person alive today is descended from him. How did this real-life Adam wind up as the father of us all? What happened to the descendants of other men who lived at the same time? And why, if modern humans share a single prehistoric ancestor, do we come in so many sizes, shapes, and races? Examining the hidden secrets of human evolution in our genetic code, the author reveals how developments in the revolutionary science of population genetics have made it possible to create a family tree for the whole of humanity. Replete with marvelous anecdotes and remarkable information, from the truth about the real Adam and Eve to the way differing racial types emerged, this book is an enthralling, epic tour through the history and development of early humankind.
Author: Alan McHughen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, UK
ISBN: 0191587923
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
The first book to look at all the issues involved in GM (genetically modified food) technology in a clear and dispassionate way. Alan McHughen surveys the technology that makes GM food possible, assesses the risk of health and environmental dangers and the regulatory and labelling processes in force to protect the consumer. Question and answer boxes and case histories, and the author's easy writing style make this an essential purchase for all those interested in the debate. - ;Are you concerned about fish genes in tomatoes? Worried that brazil nut genes in soybeans can result in potentially lethal allergic reactions? That rapeseed plants bred to be resistant to herbicides could become uncontrollable superweeds? You are not alone. The issue of genetically modified foods has fast become one of the most debated of recent years, with scientists and companies seeking to develop the technology on one side, and consumer groups and environmentalists on the other. However, in spite of the great heat generated by the debate, there is very little real information on the subject, either about the technologies in use or about the regulatory processes established to approve the processes and the products. This book sets out to explain, in clear and direct language, the technologies underlying so-called genetically modified food, and compares them with other "natural" methods of plant breeding and production. The author then looks at the safeguards in place from regulators around the world and asks whether these are sufficient. The question of labelling, held by some to be an obvious way out for concerned consumers, is examined, and the honesty and usefulness of some of these labels addressed. The book then looks at issues of real concern, particularly environmental issues, and ways in which a consumer can seek to avoid GMOs if they so choose. In each chapter, key topics are addressed through question and answer boxes. Real case histories illustrate the development and regulation of GMOs, and by the end of the book the reader will be able to make an informed choice about whether to support or challenge this technology, the products of which are increasingly pervasive. -
Author: Scott Chaskey
Publisher: Rodale Books
ISBN: 1609615042
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Scott Chaskey—working farmer, poet, and spiritual father of the community farming movement—considers "the web of biodiversity and resilience at the heart of our cultural inheritance" by masterfully weaving history, politics, botany, literature, mythology, and memoir into a beautiful and instructive book. It's hard to think of a subject more fundamental to the sustenance of the human race than seeds. Having coevolved with the Earth's plants, insects, and animals, seeds are entwined with the core myths of ancient cultures and the development of human consciousness. Their story remains vitally important today, as the corporations that manufacture GMOs threaten our food security and the future of seed-cultivated agriculture. The stakes, for those concerned with preserving biodiversity and ecological integrity, are high. Balancing a wide view of politics and history, Chaskey alights from life on the farm he has cultivated for 25 years to conjure Gregor Mendel's breeding experiments that yielded our modern understanding of genetics; he also introduces us to several "bioneers," such as the geobotanist Nikolay Vavilov and agriculturalist Cary Fowler, who are preserving global biodiversity through seeds. Integrating scholarship with accessible storytelling, Seedtime is a celebration as well as a call to action urging us to renew our role as citizens of nature, in ecologist Aldo Leopold's phrase, not as conquerors of it.
Author: Charles Raymond Snow
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 1698709609
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 137
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Book Description
Contemporary psychology believes that there exists an entity, called the mind, whose task is to deliberately control the body. This entity is said to inhabit a dimension that's separate from the physical reality that's occupied by the brain. Were this to be true, then it might be possible for the mind to survive the death of its owner and be imported into another biological or mechanical body, or be elevated into some metaphysical plane. Topographic psychology dispenses with the concept of the mind. Instead, it asserts that the brain is a biological machine that uses an internal world model to transform sensation into movement. This idea renders superfluous the concept of mindedness, and enables human and animal behavior to be calibrated against evolution. A world model largely consists of topographic maps. Among these are a map of the proprietary territory of the brain’s owner and a map of the owner’s bones and muscles. Although the territory exists in the outside world, while the organs exist in the internal world of the body, to the brain, both maps represent pieces of the same reality. Inhabiting the model’s central axis is a neural artifact called the self object, which serves within the owner’s thinking as a proxy for the owner. A transition from sensing to moving is called a decision. Decisions that are made in the brain are facilitated by neural artifacts, which are derived from sensory input, that reside within the world model. There are two fundamental kinds of artifacts, objects and connections, from which larger neural structures are assembled. These include effectors, which represent unitary actions by one party; transactions, which represent reciprocal actions between two parties; polygon stacks, which represent analogies, inferences, and stories; a special polygon stack that represents the owner’s autobiography; pyramids, which represent referents in the outside world; and a special pyramid that represents the self object. In order to promote its owner’s survival, a world model reacts to events in the external world by cycling the body between three physiological states. There are three such states, violence, sex, and work, each of which reconfigures the body so that it can optimally respond to a threat or opportunity.
Author: Marlene Zuk
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393081370
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
A whip-smart, brilliantly researched expos of pseudoscientific myths about the evolutionary past and how people should live today.
Author: Kevin R. Nelson
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
ISBN: 1662915772
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Our species has coexisted in the world in a healthy and balanced way for 97% of its existence. It was only after our ancestors emerged from life in nature as hunter-gatherers that this all began to change. By the beginning of civilization some 6,000 years ago, these changes rigidified and became destructive on a large scale. They have accumulated to such an extent that our species now faces extinction or a dismal future of ever-worsening ecocide. Meaninglessness and confusion have become rampant in our postmodern era. The human psyche has become utterly fragmented and rendered a stranger to reality, other people, and itself. As dispiriting as this all seems, the path forward has always been available to us if we can overcome the ignorance that prevents us from taking it. We must reject the values of civilization and return to the naturalistic perspective of our ancestors where our values, thinking, feeling, and actions are once again based on how nature and reality truly function. While this approach should be evident, we have until now been too terrified, bewildered, or arrogant to adopt it. To help us succeed, Reality Unedited provides a simple model of reality that serves as a foundation for establishing truth claims in the public sphere. Then we can finally take the actions necessary so our species, and all life on the planet, cannot only survive, but thrive.
