Author: Derek D. Turner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108727822
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 75
Get Book Here
Book Description
The practice of paleontology has an aesthetic as well as an epistemic dimension. Paleontology has distinctively aesthetic aims, such as cultivating sense of place and developing a better aesthetic appreciation of fossils. Scientific cognitivists in environmental aesthetics argue that scientific knowledge deepens and enhances our appreciation of nature. Drawing on that tradition, this Element argues that knowledge of something's history makes a difference to how we engage with it aesthetically. This means that investigation of the deep past can contribute to aesthetic aims. Aesthetic engagement with fossils and landscapes is also crucial to explaining paleontology's epistemic successes.
Author: Derek Turner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139497782
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the wake of the paleobiological revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, paleontologists continue to investigate far-reaching questions about how evolution works. Many of those questions have a philosophical dimension. How is macroevolution related to evolutionary changes within populations? Is evolutionary history contingent? How much can we know about the causes of evolutionary trends? How do paleontologists read the patterns in the fossil record to learn about the underlying evolutionary processes? Derek Turner explores these and other questions, introducing the reader to exciting recent work in the philosophy of paleontology and to theoretical issues including punctuated equilibria and species selection. He also critically examines some of the major accomplishments and arguments of paleontologists of the last 40 years.
Author: Samuel Schindler
Publisher:
ISBN: 1108422268
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263
Get Book Here
Book Description
In-depth discussion of the value of scientific theories, bringing together and advancing current important debates in realism.
Author: Robert Elliot
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134833385
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Get Book Here
Book Description
Faking Nature explores the arguments surrounding the concept of ecological restoration. This is a crucial process in the modern world and is central to companies' environmental policy; whether areas restored after ecological destruction are less valuable than before the damage took place. Elliot discusses the pros and cons of the argument and examines the role of humans in the natural world. This volume is a timely and provocative analysis of the simultaneous destruction and restoration of the natural world and the ethics related to those processes, in an era of accelerated environmental damage and repair.
Author: Jeffrey S. Levinton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521005500
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 644
Get Book Here
Book Description
An expanded and updated second edition comprehensively looks at macroevolution, integrating evolutionary processes at all levels to explain animal diversity.
Author: Tim Burt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108625878
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 415
Get Book Here
Book Description
Notwithstanding the importance of modern technology, fieldwork remains vital, not least through helping to inspire and educate the next generation. Fieldwork has the ingredients of intellectual curiosity, passion, rigour and engagement with the outdoor world - to name just a few. You may be simply noting what you see around you, making detailed records, or carrying out an experiment; all of this and much more amounts to fieldwork. Being curious, you think about the world around you, and through patient observation develop and test ideas. Forty contributors capture the excitement and importance of fieldwork through a wide variety of examples, from urban graffiti to the Great Barrier Reef. Outdoor learning is for life: people have the greatest respect and care for their world when they have first-hand experience of it. The Editors are donating all royalties due to them to the environmental charity, The Field Studies Council, to support student fieldwork at the Council's field centres.
Author: Caitlin Donahue Wylie
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262365960
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Get Book Here
Book Description
An investigation of the work and workers in fossil preparation labs reveals the often unacknowledged creativity and problem-solving on which scientists rely. Those awe-inspiring dinosaur skeletons on display in museums do not spring fully assembled from the earth. Technicians known as preparators have painstakingly removed the fossils from rock, repaired broken bones, and reconstructed missing pieces to create them. These specimens are foundational evidence for paleontologists, and yet the work and workers in fossil preparation labs go largely unacknowledged in publications and specimen records. In this book, Caitlin Wylie investigates the skilled labor of fossil preparators and argues for a new model of science that includes all research work and workers. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, Wylie shows that the everyday work of fossil preparation requires creativity, problem-solving, and craft. She finds that preparators privilege their own skills over technology and that scientists prefer to rely on these trusted technicians rather than new technologies. Wylie examines how fossil preparators decide what fossils, and therefore dinosaurs, look like; how labor relations between interdependent yet hierarchically unequal collaborators influence scientific practice; how some museums display preparators at work behind glass, as if they were another exhibit; and how these workers learn their skills without formal training or scientific credentials. The work of preparing specimens is a crucial component of scientific research, although it leaves few written traces. Wylie argues that the paleontology research community's social structure demonstrates how other sciences might incorporate non-scientists into research work, empowering and educating both scientists and nonscientists.
Author: Henrik Hogh-Olesen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190927933
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Aesthetic Animal answers the ultimate questions of why we adorn ourselves, embellish our things and surroundings, and produce art, music, song dance, and fiction. Humans are aesthetic animals that spend vast amounts of time and resources on seemingly useless aesthetic activities. However, nature would not allow a species to waste precious time and effort on activities completely unrelated to survival, reproduction, and the well-being of that species. Consequently, the aesthetic impulse must have some important biological functions. A number of observations indicate that the aesthetic impulse is an inherent part of human nature, and therefore a primary impulse in its own right with several important functions: The aesthetic impulse may guide us toward what is biologically good for us, and help us choose the right fitness enhancing items in our surroundings. It is a valid individual fitness indicator as well as a unifying social group marker, and aesthetically skilled individuals get more mating possibilities, higher status and more collaborative offers. The book is written in a lively and entertaining tone, with beautiful color illustrations. It covers a wide field of aesthetic behaviors from cave art, graffiti, tattoos, and piercings over fashion, design, music, song, and dance. It presents an original and comprehensive synthesis of the empirical field, synthesizing data from archeology, cave art, anthropology, biology, ethology, behavioral- and evolutionary psychology and neuro-aesthetics. It is a must-read for people interested in biology, psychology, anthropology, architecture, design, fashion, body culture, art, and the evolution of aesthetics.
Author: Thomas Pradeu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108575021
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book Here
Book Description
Immunology is central to contemporary biology and medicine, but it also provides novel philosophical insights. Its most significant contribution to philosophy concerns the understanding of biological individuality: what a biological individual is, what makes it unique, how its boundaries are established and what ensures its identity through time. Immunology also offers answers to some of the most interesting philosophical questions. What is the definition of life? How are bodily systems delineated? How do the mind and the body interact? In this Element, Thomas Pradeu considers the ways in which immunology can shed light on these and other important philosophical issues. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Author: Richard A. Richards
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108575188
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 137
Get Book Here
Book Description
Biological accounts of art typically start with evolutionary, psychological or neurobiological theories. These approaches might be able to explain many of the similarities we see in art behaviors within and across human populations, but they don't obviously explain the differences we also see. Nor do they give us guidance on how we should engage with art, or the conceptual basis for art. A more comprehensive framework, based also on the ecology of art and how art behaviors get expressed in engineered niches, can help us better understand the full range of art behaviors, their normativity and conceptual basis.
