Author: Suzan Mazur
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1556439245
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 378
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Book Description
A new theory of evolution begins to emerge in the pages of The Altenberg 16: An Expos of the Evolution Industry. Written by Suzan Mazur--a print and television journalist whose reports have appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Archaeology, Omni, and many other publications--the book is a front row seat to the thinking of the great evolutionary science minds of our time about the need to reformulate the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. We hear from world renowned scientists such as Richard Lewontin, Lynn Margulis, Niles Eldredge, Richard Dawkins, the "evo-devo" revolutionaries, NASA astrobiologists, and others. The book grew out of a story Mazur broke online in March 2008--titled "Altenberg The Woodstock of Evolution?"--about the now famous meeting at Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria in July 2008, where 16 scientists discussed expanding evolutionary thinking beyond outdated hypotheses. (MIT will publish the proceedings in April 2010.) Science magazine noted that Mazur's reporting "reverberated throughout the evolutionary biology community." Mazur says she was punished for getting out in front of the story and banned from the symposium but realized the story was bigger than Altenberg (which covered events beginning 500 million years ago) and spoke to scientists who were not invited, including those investigating pre-biotic evolution. She came to the conclusion that evolutionary science suffers because many in the scientific establishment refuse to acknowledge that the old science has served its purpose and there is disagreement about what the new evolution paradigm is. She thinks the dam is now breaking because the public (who funds science) has become a party to the discourse via the Internet and seeks answers to fundamental questions about evolution that scientists so far can't definitively answer.
Author: Robert J Marks II
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
ISBN: 9814508721
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 584
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Book Description
In the spring of 2011, a diverse group of scientists gathered at Cornell University to discuss their research into the nature and origin of biological information. This symposium brought together experts in information theory, computer science, numerical simulation, thermodynamics, evolutionary theory, whole organism biology, developmental biology, molecular biology, genetics, physics, biophysics, mathematics, and linguistics. This volume presents new research by those invited to speak at the conference. The contributors to this volume use their wide-ranging expertise in the area of biological information to bring fresh insights into the many explanatory difficulties associated with biological information. These authors raise major challenges to the conventional scientific wisdom, which attempts to explain all biological information exclusively in terms of the standard mutation/selection paradigm. Several clear themes emerged from these research papers: 1) Information is indispensable to our understanding of what life is; 2) Biological information is more than the material structures that embody it; 3) Conventional chemical and evolutionary mechanisms seem insufficient to fully explain the labyrinth of information that is life. By exploring new perspectives on biological information, this volume seeks to expand, encourage, and enrich research into the nature and origin of biological information.
Author: James Alan Shapiro
Publisher: Pearson Education
ISBN: 0132780933
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
This book proposes an important new paradigm for understanding biological evolution. Shapiro demonstrates why traditional views of evolution are inadequate to explain the latest evidence, and presents an alternative. His information- and systems-based approach integrates advances in symbiogenesis, epigenetics, and saltationism, and points toward an emerging synthesis of physical, information, and biological sciences.
Author: Karin Altenberg
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 0143120662
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
A dazzling debut novel of love and loss, faith and atonement, on an untamed nineteenth-century Scottish island. Exquisitely written and profoundly moving, Island of Wings is a richly imagined novel about two people struggling to keep their love, and their family, alive in a place of extreme hardship and unearthly beauty. Everything lies ahead for Lizzie and Neil McKenzie when they arrive at the St. Kilda islands in July of 1830. Neil is to become the minister to the small community of islanders, and Lizzie-bright, beautiful, and devoted-is pregnant with their first child. As the two adjust to life at the edge of civilization, where the natives live in squalor and babies perish mysteriously, their marriage-and their sanity-are soon threatened.
Author: Peter Altenberg
Publisher: Ariadne Press (CA)
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 140
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Book Description
This collection of thirty-eight impressionist episodes describes a white man's friendship with a group of Ashanti tribespeople from the Gold Coast of Africa (the former British colony known today as Ghana), who in 1896 were put on display as living objects in a popular ethnographic exhibit in the Vienna Zoological Garden, then still located in Vienna's famous amusement park called Prater. The exhibit caused a veritable "Ashanti fever" as the show attracted five to six thousand visitors per day. Altenberg, barely disguised as Ashantee's autobiographical character Sir Peter, shows a genuine curiosity about the cultural Other and paints a critical picture of his Austrian contemporaries' prejudices, revealed as they were experienced by the Africans. In "Ashantee", beautiful, sensual, childlike, and wholesome African "paradise people" provide inspiration for the tormented civilised soul of the fin-de-siècle European. Eccentric coffeehouse writer Altenberg is famous for his unique telegram style. Critic Karl Kraus claimed, "One sentence by Peter Altenberg is equal to an entire Viennese novel". "Ashantee" introduces the reader to a little-known facet of vibrant Vienna around 1900. Combining cross-cultural sympathy with colonial stereotyping, the book has gained new popularity as current debates about the challenges of cultural coexistence in the global society have renewed interest in the literature about encounters between people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In this edition, Peter Altenberg's literary text is illustrated with reprints of original drawings and photographs of Altenberg and the Ashanti in Vienna.
Author: Robert F. Shedinger
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532658354
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
Is Darwinian evolution really the most successful scientific theory ever proposed--or even the best idea anyone has ever had, as Daniel Dennett once put it? The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms provides a comprehensive critical reading of the literature of evolutionary biology from Darwin to Dobzhansky to Dawkins, revealing this popular account of evolution to be a grand narrative of Darwinian triumph that greatly overstates the empirical validity of modern evolutionary theory. The mechanisms driving the evolutionary process truly remain a mystery more than one hundred fifty years after Origin of Species, a fact that can free religion scholars to think in more creative ways about the positive contributions religious reflection might make to our understanding of life's origin and diversity. The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms calls for an embrace of mystery, understood not as an abdication of the scientific quest for truth but as a courageous and humble acknowledgment of the limits of human reason and an openness to a fundamentally religious orientation toward life.
Author: Frank Ryan
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007545274
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
The extraordinary role of viruses in evolution and how this is revolutionising biology and medicine.
Author: United States Board on Geographic Names
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Names, Geographical
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
Author: John C Lennox
Publisher: Lion Books
ISBN: 0745981410
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
"In this accessible and engaging introduction, [John Lennox] guides us through the great debates about science and faith, and offers incisive assessments of the issues." Alister McGrath, Professor of Science and Religion, University of Oxford Is the rigorous pursuit of scientific knowledge really compatible with a sincere faith in God? Building on the arguments put forward in God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, Prof John Lennox examines afresh the plausibility of a Christian theistic worldview in the light of some of the latest developments in scientific understanding. Prof Lennox focuses on the areas of evolutionary theory, the origins of life and the universe, and the concepts of mind and consciousness to provide a detailed and compelling introduction to the science and religion debate. He also offers his own reasoning as to why he continues to be convinced by a Christian approach to explaining these phenomena. Robust in its reasoning, but respectful in tone, this book is vital reading for anyone exploring the relationship between science and God.
Author: Günter P. Wagner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691180679
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 494
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Book Description
A major synthesis of homology, written by a top researcher in the field Homology—a similar trait shared by different species and derived from common ancestry, such as a seal's fin and a bird’s wing—is one of the most fundamental yet challenging concepts in evolutionary biology. This groundbreaking book provides the first mechanistically based theory of what homology is and how it arises in evolution. Günter Wagner, one of the preeminent researchers in the field, argues that homology, or character identity, can be explained through the historical continuity of character identity networks—that is, the gene regulatory networks that enable differential gene expression. He shows how character identity is independent of the form and function of the character itself because the same network can activate different effector genes and thus control the development of different shapes, sizes, and qualities of the character. Demonstrating how this theoretical model can provide a foundation for understanding the evolutionary origin of novel characters, Wagner applies it to the origin and evolution of specific systems, such as cell types; skin, hair, and feathers; limbs and digits; and flowers. The first major synthesis of homology to be published in decades, Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation reveals how a mechanistically based theory can serve as a unifying concept for any branch of science concerned with the structure and development of organisms, and how it can help explain major transitions in evolution and broad patterns of biological diversity.
