Darwin's "Historical Sketch"

Darwin's Author: Curtis N. Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN: 019088293X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
Curtis Johnson examines Charles Darwin's "Historical Sketch," creating profiles of the great thinkers writing before and during Darwin's lifetime.

Darwin's "Historical Sketch"

Darwin's Author: Curtis N. Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN: 019088293X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 473

Get Book Here

Book Description
Curtis Johnson examines Charles Darwin's "Historical Sketch," creating profiles of the great thinkers writing before and during Darwin's lifetime.

Darwin's Dice

Darwin's Dice PDF Author: Curtis N. Johnson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019936141X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
"Discusses the chance and randomness as motifs in the writing of Charles Darwin" --publisher

Retrieving Darwin's Revolutionary Idea

Retrieving Darwin's Revolutionary Idea PDF Author: Samuel Grove
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793632502
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Darwin's discovery of evolution is as celebrated as Galileo's laws of motion or Newton's discovery of gravity. But this was only half the story. Not content to prove that evolution had happened, Darwin sought to convey its full humbling implications. Thus he formulated the theory of natural selection. Contrary to popular belief, this theory ran exactly counter to scientific reason and was consequently rejected by the scientific community of the time. This wasn’t the only reason Darwin’s critics recoiled. His theory robbed the ruling orders of any easy recourse to consolatory tales of nature’s harmony and design. The fate of his ideas, for the time being at least, would be left to the heretics he inspired in other domains. Darwin's radical thought anticipated Nietzsche's Godless philosophy, Marx's class-based economics and Freud's psychological theories of the unconscious. It would take a further 80 years for Darwinism to become accepted as mainstream science, but it came at the expense of its counter-scientific core. For the remainder of the twentieth century a popularized Darwinism would become the touchstone for backlash movements in philosophy, economics and psychology—disciplines he once so radicalized. This is the story of how the most revolutionary idea of the nineteenth century became the most reactionary idea of the twentieth.

Nature's Prophet

Nature's Prophet PDF Author: Michael A. Flannery
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817319859
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
An astute study of Alfred Russel Wallace’s path to natural theology. A spiritualist, libertarian socialist, women’s rights advocate, and critic of Victorian social convention, Alfred Russel Wallace was in every sense a rebel who challenged the emergent scientific certainties of Victorian England by arguing for a natural world imbued with purpose and spiritual significance. Nature’s Prophet:Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology is a critical reassessment of Wallace’s path to natural theology and counters the dismissive narrative that Wallace’s theistic and sociopolitical positions are not to be taken seriously in the history and philosophy of science. Author Michael A. Flannery provides a cogent and lucid account of a crucial—and often underappreciated—element of Wallace’s evolutionary worldview. As co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, of the theory of natural selection, Wallace willingly took a backseat to the well-bred, better known scientist. Whereas Darwin held fast to his first published scientific explanations for the development of life on earth, Wallace continued to modify his thinking, refining his argument toward a more controversial metaphysical view which placed him within the highly charged intersection of biology and religion. Despite considerable research into the naturalist’s life and work, Wallace’s own evolution from natural selection to natural theology has been largely unexplored; yet, as Flannery persuasively shows, it is readily demonstrated in his writings from 1843 until his death in 1913. Nature’s Prophet provides a detailed investigation of Wallace’s ideas, showing how, although he independently discovered the mechanism of natural selection, he at the same time came to hold a very different view of evolution from Darwin. Ultimately, Flannery shows, Wallace’s reconsideration of the argument for design yields a more nuanced version of creative and purposeful theistic evolution and represents one of the most innovative contributions of its kind in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, profoundly influencing a later generation of scientists and intellectuals.

Darwin's Nemesis

Darwin's Nemesis PDF Author: William A. Dembski
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830828362
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Eighteen essays review and celebrate the life and thought of Phillip Johnson, the Cal Berkeley legal scholar who became a leading figure in the intelligentdesign movement.

The Physics of Possibility

The Physics of Possibility PDF Author: Michael Tondre
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813941466
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
The Physics of Possibility traces the sensational birth of mathematical physics in Victorian literature, science, and statistics. As scientists took up new breakthroughs in quantification, they showed how all sorts of phenomena—the condition of stars, atoms, molecules, and nerves—could be represented as a set of probabilities through time. Michael Tondre demonstrates how these techniques transformed the British novel. Fictions of development by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and others joined the vogue for alternative possibilities. Their novels not only reflected received pieties of maturation but plotted a wider number of deviations from the norms of reproductive adulthood. By accentuating overlooked elements of form, Tondre reveals the novel’s changing identification with possible worlds through the decades when physics became a science of all things. In contrast to the observation that statistics served to invent normal populations, Tondre brings influential modes of historical thinking to the foreground. His readings reveal an acute fascination with alternative temporalities throughout the period, as novelists depicted the categories of object, action, and setting in new probabilistic forms. Privileging fiction’s agency in reimagining historical realities, never simply sanctioning them, Tondre revises our understanding of the novel and its ties to the ascendant Victorian sciences.

Darwin's Pangenesis and Its Rediscovery Part A

Darwin's Pangenesis and Its Rediscovery Part A PDF Author:
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128155507
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
Darwin's Pangenesis and Its Rediscovery Part A highlights the findings of Darwin's Pangenesis, an expanded cell theory and unified theory of heredity and variation that strengthened his theory of evolution and explained many phenomena of life. Now, new advances and the discovery of circulating cell-free DNA, mobile RNAs, prions and extracellular vesicles are providing new breakthroughs, thus increasing evidence on the inheritance of acquired characters, graft hybridization, and many other phenomena that Pangenesis suggests. Sections of note in this volume include the rationale, criticisms, influence and recent molecular evidence of Darwin's Pangenesis, as well as its relation to the inheritance of acquired characters, which is often included under the blanket term "transgenerational epigenetic inheritance." - Presents a comprehensive approach to Darwin's Pangenesis, which is so little understood that few have recognized its far-reaching importance, but seems today surprisingly modern - Links Darwin's hypothetical gemmules with circulating cell-free DNA, mobile RNAs, prions and extracellular vesicles, shedding new light on an old theory - Includes section on Darwin's Pangenesis in relation to the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters, a central debate in the history of genetics

Darwin's Demise

Darwin's Demise PDF Author: Nicholas Comninellis
Publisher: New Leaf Publishing Group
ISBN: 1614581118
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
For people confused by the contradictory messages they hear from secular science and church teaching, evolution can be intimidating. The truth is that Darwin's ideas are based upon faulty science, and that creationists have solid evidence to support their claims. Finally, a brilliant defense of Genesis and the Bible's teaching about origins is waiting for those who are soon to understand how Darwinism is fraudulent faith masquerading as science. Authors Joe White and Nicholas Comninellis have a passion for truth, and for sharing it with students and their parents. In Darwin's Demise,they succeed in showing why real science is burning down the House of Darwin.

God Does Not Play Dice

God Does Not Play Dice PDF Author: David A. Shiang
Publisher: eBookIt.com
ISBN: 0980237343
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 117

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Book Description
In this revolutionary and provocative work, David A. Shiang claims to offer final answers to many of humankind's most enduring mysteries. He argues that Einstein was right in rejecting the randomness of quantum theory, and he shows that Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time) and Brian Greene (The Fabric of the Cosmos) are mistaken in saying that evidence shows nature to be probabilistic. He takes on Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), contending that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is neither scientific nor correct. He also maintains that worry and regret can be overcome, following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot and other pioneers of the mind. Odds are high that the logical and elegant solutions Shiang presents to our deepest riddles will cause you to rethink your most fundamental beliefs. "Very provocative, erudite, and solidly based on intelligent and logical thinking! Congratulations on making an excellent contribution to understanding the role of a higher intelligence in organizing the affairs of the universe!" - Pat McGovern, IDG Founder and Chairman, Co-founder of The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT "His lucidity and logic are breathtakingly devastating. He is not afraid to defend the mind of God, either.... I cannot overstate the importance of Shiang's work and its deep influence." - Len Klikunas, Cultural Anthropologist

Descended from Darwin

Descended from Darwin PDF Author: Joe Cain
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0871692791
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This vol. has its origins in a conference, held October 22-23, 2004, at the Amer. Philosophical Society (APS) Library, Phila. The main focus was on evolutionary studies in America before, during, and after the famous “synthesis” period of the 1930s and 1940s. The synthesis period has been the focus of substantial new research and important new thinking. This vol. brings together 15 specialists to explore these developments and to press further. Questions shaping these essays focus on the following broad themes: Continuity and breaks across generations; Emerging narratives for the period; New research opportunities at the APS; New ideas from the research front; Placing evolutionists in the broader context of biology; and Future directions. Also includes a thoughtful intro. by Michael Ruse.