On the Nature of Human Plasticity PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download On the Nature of Human Plasticity PDF full book. Access full book title On the Nature of Human Plasticity by Richard M. Lerner. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Richard M. Lerner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521256518
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book questions the extent to which human beings are capable of changing their physical characteristics and behavioural patterns.
Author: Richard M. Lerner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521256518
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book questions the extent to which human beings are capable of changing their physical characteristics and behavioural patterns.
Author: Matt Ridley
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060006781
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 340
Get Book Here
Book Description
Following his highly praised and bestselling book Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Matt Ridley has written a brilliant and profound book about the roots of human behavior. Nature via Nurture explores the complex and endlessly intriguing question of what makes us who we are. In February 2001 it was announced that the human genome contains not 100,000 genes, as originally postulated, but only 30,000. This startling revision led some scientists to conclude that there are simply not enough human genes to account for all the different ways people behave: we must be made by nurture, not nature. Yet again biology was to be stretched on the Procrustean bed of the nature-nurture debate. Matt Ridley argues that the emerging truth is far more interesting than this myth. Nurture depends on genes, too, and genes need nurture. Genes not only predetermine the broad structure of the brain, they also absorb formative experiences, react to social cues, and even run memory. They are consequences as well as causes of the will. Published fifty years after the discovery of the double helix of DNA, Nature via Nurture chronicles a revolution in our understanding of genes. Ridley recounts the hundred years' war between the partisans of nature and nurture to explain how this paradoxical creature, the human being, can be simultaneously free-willed and motivated by instinct and culture. Nature via Nurture is an enthralling,up-to-the-minute account of how genes build brains to absorb experience.
Author: Patrick Bateson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521516297
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166
Get Book Here
Book Description
How do we understand and explain the apparent dichotomy between plasticity and robustness in the context of development? Can we identify these complex processes without resorting to 'either/or' solutions? Written by two leaders in the field, this is the first book to fully unravel the complexity of the subject, explaining that the epigenetic processes generating plasticity and robustness are in fact deeply intertwined. It identifies the different mechanisms that generate robustness and the various forms of plasticity, before considering the functional significance of the integrated mechanisms and how the component processes might have evolved. Finally, it highlights the ways in which epigenetic mechanisms could be instrumental in driving evolutionary change. Essential reading for biologists and psychologists interested in epigenetics and evolution, this book is also a valuable resource for biological anthropologists, sociobiologists, child psychologists and paediatricians.
Author: Steven E. Brauth
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262023269
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Get Book Here
Book Description
Plasticity of Development brings together innovative, current research on the nature/nurture issue, and presents new comparative approaches to epigenetic processes processes in which environmental signals act upon the genome. Plasticity of Development brings together innovative, current research by Jerome Kagan, Stephen Suomi, Sandra Scarr, Patricia Kuhl, Peter Mader, and Pasko Rakic on the nature/nurture issue, and presents new comparative approaches to epigenetic processes processes in which environmental signals act upon the genome--from the fields of child psychology, animal learning, brain development, and psycholinguistics. The studies address important issues concerning continuity of developmental processes, the nature of biological and environmental signals controlling epigenetic mechanisms, and the adaptive significance of developmental pathways. An introduction discusses theories of self-organizing systems including the important concept of canalization, which is taken up in chapters by Mader, Rakic, Kagan, and Suomi. Central to the study of development, canalization encompasses the idea that genetic information supports a self-organizing process that is guided by environmental input but that also provides a set of buffers against abnormal environmental and even genetic information. Kagan and Suomi describe continuity in developmental processes in humans and in Rhesus monkeys, revealing that in at least one important personality characteristic, response to challenge and stress, the behaviors and physiological correlates are strikingly similar. Scarr investigates the role of adoption and home environment on developmental continuity and shows that to a surprising extent children create the environmental niches they fill. Kuhl provides additional insight into the nature of the biological and environmental signals controlling epigenetic programs through her work on the development of speech perception in human children. The issue she raises of what is general and what is special in human speech perception and language development bears directly on the open versus closed teaming systems observed by Mader for oscine songbirds. In the most detailed account of the biological and environmental signals controlling epigenesis, Pasko Rakic describes the ontogenetic processes that produce the primate cerebral cortex.
Author: Mary Jane West-Eberhard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198028563
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 815
Get Book Here
Book Description
The first comprehensive synthesis on development and evolution: it applies to all aspects of development, at all levels of organization and in all organisms, taking advantage of modern findings on behavior, genetics, endocrinology, molecular biology, evolutionary theory and phylogenetics to show the connections between developmental mechanisms and evolutionary change. This book solves key problems that have impeded a definitive synthesis in the past. It uses new concepts and specific examples to show how to relate environmentally sensitive development to the genetic theory of adaptive evolution and to explain major patterns of change. In this book development includes not only embryology and the ontogeny of morphology, sometimes portrayed inadequately as governed by "regulatory genes," but also behavioral development and physiological adaptation, where plasticity is mediated by genetically complex mechanisms like hormones and learning. The book shows how the universal qualities of phenotypes--modular organization and plasticity--facilitate both integration and change. Here you will learn why it is wrong to describe organisms as genetically programmed; why environmental induction is likely to be more important in evolution than random mutation; and why it is crucial to consider both selection and developmental mechanism in explanations of adaptive evolution. This book satisfies the need for a truly general book on development, plasticity and evolution that applies to living organisms in all of their life stages and environments. Using an immense compendium of examples on many kinds of organisms, from viruses and bacteria to higher plants and animals, it shows how the phenotype is reorganized during evolution to produce novelties, and how alternative phenotypes occupy a pivotal role as a phase of evolution that fosters diversification and speeds change. The arguments of this book call for a new view of the major themes of evolutionary biology, as shown in chapters on gradualism, homology, environmental induction, speciation, radiation, macroevolution, punctuation, and the maintenance of sex. No other treatment of development and evolution since Darwin's offers such a comprehensive and critical discussion of the relevant issues. Developmental Plasticity and Evolution is designed for biologists interested in the development and evolution of behavior, life-history patterns, ecology, physiology, morphology and speciation. It will also appeal to evolutionary paleontologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and teachers of general biology.
Author: Bryan Kolb
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780805815207
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Get Book Here
Book Description
First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Author: Agustín Fuentes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315431513
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307
Get Book Here
Book Description
Recent empirical and philosophical research into the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, the origins of the mind/brain, and the development of human culture has sparked heated debates about what it means to be human and how knowledge about humans from the sciences and humanities should be understood. Conversations on Human Nature, featuring 20 interviews with leading scholars in biology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and theology, brings these debates to life for teachers, students, and general readers. The book-outlines the basic scientific, philosophical and theological issues involved in understanding human nature;-organizes material from the various disciplines under four broad headings: (1) evolution, brains and human nature; (2) biocultural human nature; (3) persons, minds and human nature, (4) religion, theology and human nature; -concludes with Fuentes and Visala's discussion of what researchers into human nature agree on, what they disagree on, and what we need to learn to resolve those differences.
Author: Timothy Paul Fortin
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031745310
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 387
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Maurizio Meloni
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135168938X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279
Get Book Here
Book Description
During the twentieth century, genes were considered the controlling force of life processes, and the transfer of DNA the definitive explanation for biological heredity. Such views shaped the politics of human heredity: in the eugenic era, controlling heredity meant intervening in the distribution of "good" and "bad" genes. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, this centrality of genes has been challenged by a number of "postgenomic" disciplines. The rise of epigenetics in particular signals a shift from notions of biological fixedness to ideas of plasticity and "impressionability" of biological material. This book investigates a long history of the beliefs about the plasticity of human biology, starting with ancient medicine, and analyses the biopolitical techniques required to govern such permeability. It looks at the emergence of the modern body of biomedicine as a necessary displacement or possibly reconfiguration of earlier plastic views. Finally, it analyses the returning of plasticity to contemporary postgenomic views and argues that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental management of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of potentialities. It is instead a plasticity that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community, with important implications for notions of risk, responsibility and intervention.
Author: Norman Doidge, M.D.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101147113
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 447
Get Book Here
Book Description
“Fascinating. Doidge’s book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.”—Oliver Sacks, MD, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat What is neuroplasticity? Is it possible to change your brain? Norman Doidge’s inspiring guide to the new brain science explains all of this and more An astonishing new science called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable, and proving that it is, in fact, possible to change your brain. Psychoanalyst, Norman Doidge, M.D., traveled the country to meet both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity, its healing powers, and the people whose lives they’ve transformed—people whose mental limitations, brain damage or brain trauma were seen as unalterable. We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, blind people who learn to see, learning disorders cured, IQs raised, aging brains rejuvenated, stroke patients learning to speak, children with cerebral palsy learning to move with more grace, depression and anxiety disorders successfully treated, and lifelong character traits changed. Using these marvelous stories to probe mysteries of the body, emotion, love, sex, culture, and education, Dr. Doidge has written an immensely moving, inspiring book that will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential.
