The Darwin Awards II

The Darwin Awards II PDF Author: Wendy Northcutt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101218967
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
The hilarious New York Times bestselling phenomenon and the perfect funny gift! The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection brings together a fresh collection of the hapless, the heedless, and the just plain foolhardy among us. Salute the owner of an equipment training school who demonstrates the dangers of driving a forklift by failing to survive the filming of his own safety video. Gawk at the couple who go to sleep on a sloping roof. Witness the shepherd who leaves his rifle unsecured—only to be accidentally shot by one of his own flock. With over one hundred Darwin Award Winners, Honorable Mentions, and debunked Urban Legends, plus science and safety tips for avoiding the scythe of natural selection, The Darwin Awards II proves once again how uncommon common sense can be.

The Darwin Awards II

The Darwin Awards II PDF Author: Wendy Northcutt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101218967
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
The hilarious New York Times bestselling phenomenon and the perfect funny gift! The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection brings together a fresh collection of the hapless, the heedless, and the just plain foolhardy among us. Salute the owner of an equipment training school who demonstrates the dangers of driving a forklift by failing to survive the filming of his own safety video. Gawk at the couple who go to sleep on a sloping roof. Witness the shepherd who leaves his rifle unsecured—only to be accidentally shot by one of his own flock. With over one hundred Darwin Award Winners, Honorable Mentions, and debunked Urban Legends, plus science and safety tips for avoiding the scythe of natural selection, The Darwin Awards II proves once again how uncommon common sense can be.

The Darwin Awards Next Evolution

The Darwin Awards Next Evolution PDF Author: Wendy Northcutt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780525950851
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Features examples of people whose lack of common sense resulted in their demise, in a tribute to how the evolutionary process is improved when individuals of questionable intelligence accidentally remove themselves from the gene pool.

The Darwin Awards

The Darwin Awards PDF Author: Wendy Northcutt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780752844510
Category : Accident victims
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
One of the best known and most frequently visited web sites is the Darwin Awards web site. Practically everyone who is on the net has received a Darwin story in their e-mail at one time or another. It is one of those legendary sites which has become part of the fabric of being on-line. Started in 1993 by biologist Wendy Northcutt she set out to collect together and authenticate stories of individuals around the world who, through their stupidity, have removed themselves from the gene pool, (i.e. killed themselves). These are the people for whom warnings such as 'coffee is hot' and 'this superman cape does not enable the wearer to fly' were made. This is black humour elevated to its purest commercial form. There are rules here too. The candidate must: exhibit astounding misapplication of judgement; remove himself/herself from the gene pool; be capable of sound judgement; be self selecting (i.e. it was their fault) and the event must be verifiable.

 PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 0761354867
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description


Darwin Awards VI

Darwin Awards VI PDF Author: Wendy Northcutt
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
ISBN: 0143203584
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
(The countdown has begun . . . ) What distinguishes humans from baser animals is our higher intelligence. This is because most humans know to think twice before headbutting a coconut or biting down on a live wire. Intelligent individuals generally know not to use a mattress pad as a floatation device, or to kitesurf in a hurricane. Darwin Award winners, however, lack this basic common sense. Named for the father of evolution, the Darwin Awards honour those who help natural selection by taking a swan dive into the shallow end of the gene pool. From attaching a five-horsepower engine to a barstool, to hammering a metal hook into an explosive device, to using a Taser to treat a snake bite, The Darwin Awards: Countdown to Extinction show that the countdown (to human extinction) is well underway – and we won't exit this mortal coil without one last laugh. Illustrated and featuring all-new tales of the marvellously macabre, The Darwin Awards: Countdown to Extinction chronicles humans who step onto the lowest rung on the evolutionary ladder and prove that intelligence is not as common among humans as we'd like to think.

One Long Argument

One Long Argument PDF Author: Ernst Mayr
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674639065
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
The great evolutionist Mayr elucidates the subtleties of Darwin’s thought and that of his contemporaries and intellectual heirs—A. R. Wallace, T. H. Huxley, August Weisman, Asa Gray. Mayr has achieved a remarkable distillation of Darwin’s scientific thought and his legacy to twentieth-century biology.

Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution

Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution PDF Author: Jordi Bayarri Dolz
Publisher: Graphic Universe TM
ISBN: 1728488176
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
Audisee® eBooks with Audio combine professional narration and sentence highlighting for an engaging read aloud experience! Charles Darwin's scientific work transformed the way people think about life on Earth. From his childhood in England to his pivotal ocean voyages, he took every opportunity to study the natural world. And he helped shape a new understanding of how life forms change over time. This graphic biography highlights Darwin's youthful push to become a naturalist—against the wishes of his stern father. It also shares a look at his field research, collaborations, and scientific breakthroughs.

The Evolution of Beauty

The Evolution of Beauty PDF Author: Richard O. Prum
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385537220
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
A FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, SMITHSONIAN, AND WALL STREET JOURNAL A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences—what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful"—create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world. In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum—reviving Darwin's own views—thinks not. Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus Pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. In thirty years of fieldwork, Prum has seen numerous display traits that seem disconnected from, if not outright contrary to, selection for individual survival. To explain this, he dusts off Darwin's long-neglected theory of sexual selection in which the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons—for the mere pleasure of it—is an independent engine of evolutionary change. Mate choice can drive ornamental traits from the constraints of adaptive evolution, allowing them to grow ever more elaborate. It also sets the stakes for sexual conflict, in which the sexual autonomy of the female evolves in response to male sexual control. Most crucially, this framework provides important insights into the evolution of human sexuality, particularly the ways in which female preferences have changed male bodies, and even maleness itself, through evolutionary time. The Evolution of Beauty presents a unique scientific vision for how nature's splendor contributes to a more complete understanding of evolution and of ourselves.

Darwin's Rival: Alfred Russel Wallace and the Search for Evolution

Darwin's Rival: Alfred Russel Wallace and the Search for Evolution PDF Author: Christiane Dorion
Publisher: Candlewick Studio
ISBN: 1536209325
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 65

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Book Description
A beautifully illustrated volume follows a lesser-known Victorian naturalist and explorer on his global journeys — and reveals how he developed his own theory of evolution. Everyone knows Charles Darwin, the famous naturalist who proposed a theory of evolution. But not everyone knows the story of Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s friend and rival who simultaneously discovered the process of natural selection. This sumptuously illustrated book tells Wallace’s story, from his humble beginnings to his adventures in the Amazon rain forest and Malay Archipelago, and demonstrates the great contribution he made to one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time.

The Tangled Tree

The Tangled Tree PDF Author: David Quammen
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1476776636
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
In this New York Times bestseller and longlist nominee for the National Book Award, “our greatest living chronicler of the natural world” (The New York Times), David Quammen explains how recent discoveries in molecular biology affect our understanding of evolution and life’s history. In the mid-1970s, scientists began using DNA sequences to reexamine the history of all life. Perhaps the most startling discovery to come out of this new field—the study of life’s diversity and relatedness at the molecular level—is horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or the movement of genes across species lines. It turns out that HGT has been widespread and important; we now know that roughly eight percent of the human genome arrived sideways by viral infection—a type of HGT. In The Tangled Tree, “the grandest tale in biology….David Quammen presents the science—and the scientists involved—with patience, candor, and flair” (Nature). We learn about the major players, such as Carl Woese, the most important little-known biologist of the twentieth century; Lynn Margulis, the notorious maverick whose wild ideas about “mosaic” creatures proved to be true; and Tsutomu Wantanabe, who discovered that the scourge of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a direct result of horizontal gene transfer, bringing the deep study of genome histories to bear on a global crisis in public health. “David Quammen proves to be an immensely well-informed guide to a complex story” (The Wall Street Journal). In The Tangled Tree, he explains how molecular studies of evolution have brought startling recognitions about the tangled tree of life—including where we humans fit upon it. Thanks to new technologies, we now have the ability to alter even our genetic composition—through sideways insertions, as nature has long been doing. “The Tangled Tree is a source of wonder….Quammen has written a deep and daring intellectual adventure” (The Boston Globe).