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Author: Simon Conway Morris
Publisher: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Paleontologist Simon Conway Morris provides a guided tour of the world's richest treasure trove of fossils--a fantastically rich deposit of bizarre and bewildering Cambrain fossils, located in Western Canada. 4 plates. 90 linecuts.
Author: Simon Conway Morris
Publisher: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Paleontologist Simon Conway Morris provides a guided tour of the world's richest treasure trove of fossils--a fantastically rich deposit of bizarre and bewildering Cambrain fossils, located in Western Canada. 4 plates. 90 linecuts.
Author: Stephen Jay Gould
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245209
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
"[An] extraordinary book. . . . Mr. Gould is an exceptional combination of scientist and science writer. . . . He is thus exceptionally well placed to tell these stories, and he tells them with fervor and intelligence."—James Gleick, New York Times Book Review High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It hold the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived—a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.
Author: Simon Conway Morris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139440802
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
The assassin's bullet misses, the Archduke's carriage moves forward, and a catastrophic war is avoided. So too with the history of life. Re-run the tape of life, as Stephen J. Gould claimed, and the outcome must be entirely different: an alien world, without humans and maybe not even intelligence. The history of life is littered with accidents: any twist or turn may lead to a completely different world. Now this view is being challenged. Simon Conway Morris explores the evidence demonstrating life's almost eerie ability to navigate to a single solution, repeatedly. Eyes, brains, tools, even culture: all are very much on the cards. So if these are all evolutionary inevitabilities, where are our counterparts across the galaxy? The tape of life can only run on a suitable planet, and it seems that such Earth-like planets may be much rarer than hoped. Inevitable humans, yes, but in a lonely Universe.
Author: Peter J. Kastor
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030012824X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
In 1803 the United States purchased Louisiana from France. This seemingly simple acquisition brought with it an enormous new territory as well as the country’s first large population of nonnaturalized Americans—Native Americans, African Americans, and Francophone residents. What would become of those people dominated national affairs in the years that followed. This book chronicles that contentious period from 1803 to 1821, years during which people proposed numerous visions of the future for Louisiana and the United States. The Louisiana Purchase proved to be the crucible of American nationhood, Peter Kastor argues. The incorporation of Louisiana was among the most important tasks for a generation of federal policymakers. It also transformed the way people defined what it meant to be an American.
Author: Jean Rabe
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780765347275
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
They were the Finest Creations - mystically forged creatures of perfection sent by the creators to aid the Fallen (mankind) during their mortal existence. Though they resemble ordinary horses they are highly intelligent, capable of communicating telepathically and completely moral. They are assigned to bond with individuals of great potential and then protect them from harm while guiding them along a path of virtue. This is as it has been for years unto creation ... but when a young Finest is separated from its mentor before it has been invested with its assignment, the result of an ambush by evil forces bent on corrupting men, the young equine accepts the charge of two orphans to its care not realizing that man's potential may rest in their future.... And that the path forward is already being diverted by an evil mastermind whose manipulation of court politics and affairs of state might instigate a new dark age upon the light of civilization.
Author: Mikhail A. Fedonkin
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801886799
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
An essential resource for paleontologists, biologists, geologists, and teachers, The Rise of Animals is the best single reference on one of earth's most significant events.
Author: Simon Conway Morris
Publisher: Templeton Foundation Press
ISBN: 1599474654
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 525
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Book Description
How did human beings acquire imaginations that can conjure up untrue possibilities? How did the Universe become self-aware? In The Runes of Evolution, Simon Conway Morris revitalizes the study of evolution from the perspective of convergence, providing us with compelling new evidence to support the mounting scientific view that the history of life is far more predictable than once thought. A leading evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge, Conway Morris came into international prominence for his work on the Cambrian explosion (especially fossils of the Burgess Shale) and evolutionary convergence, which is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches. In The Runes of Evolution, he illustrates how the ubiquity of convergence hints at an underlying framework whereby many outcomes, not least brains and intelligence, are virtually guaranteed on any Earth-like planet. Conway Morris also emphasizes how much of the complexity of advanced biological systems is inherent in microbial forms. By casting a wider net, The Runes of Evolution explores many neglected evolutionary questions. Some are remarkably general. Why, for example, are convergences such as parasitism, carnivory, and nitrogen fixation in plants concentrated in particular taxonomic hot spots? Why do certain groups have a particular propensity to evolve toward particular states? Some questions lead to unexpected evolutionary insights: If bees sleep (as they do), do they dream? Why is that insect copulating with an orchid? Why have sponges evolved a system of fiber optics? What do mantis shrimps and submarines have in common? If dinosaurs had not gone extinct what would have happened next? Will a saber-toothed cat ever re-evolve? Cona Morris observes: “Even amongst the mammals, let alone the entire tree of life, humans represent one minute twig of a vast (and largely fossilized) arborescence. Every living species is a linear descendant of an immense string of now-vanished ancestors, but evolution itself is the very reverse of linear. Rather it is endlessly exploratory, probing the vast spaces of biological hyperspace. Indeed this book is a celebration of how our world is (and was) populated by a riot of forms, a coruscating tapestry of life.” The Runes of Evolution is the most definitive synthesis of evolutionary convergence to be published to date.
Author: Robert Fyall
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830871411
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
For Robert Fyall, the mystery of God's ways and the appalling evil and suffering in the world are at the heart of Job's significant contribution to the canon of Scripture. This New Studies in Biblical Theology volume offers a holistic reading of Job, with particular reference to its depiction of creation and evil, and finds significant clues to its meaning in the striking imagery it uses.
Author: Robert Wright
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375727817
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 529
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Book Description
In his bestselling The Moral Animal, Robert Wright applied the principles of evolutionary biology to the study of the human mind. Now Wright attempts something even more ambitious: explaining the direction of evolution and human history–and discerning where history will lead us next. In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright asserts that, ever since the primordial ooze, life has followed a basic pattern. Organisms and human societies alike have grown more complex by mastering the challenges of internal cooperation. Wright's narrative ranges from fossilized bacteria to vampire bats, from stone-age villages to the World Trade Organization, uncovering such surprises as the benefits of barbarian hordes and the useful stability of feudalism. Here is history endowed with moral significance–a way of looking at our biological and cultural evolution that suggests, refreshingly, that human morality has improved over time, and that our instinct to discover meaning may itself serve a higher purpose. Insightful, witty, profound, Nonzero offers breathtaking implications for what we believe and how we adapt to technology's ongoing transformation of the world.
Author: Stephen Jay Gould
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674061624
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 431
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Book Description
Gould’s final essay collection is based on his remarkable series for Natural History magazine—exactly 300 consecutive essays, with never a month missed, published from 1974 to 2001. Both an intellectually thrilling journey into the nature of scientific discovery and the most personal book he ever published.
