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Author: Robert F. Shedinger
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532658338
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Is Darwinian evolution really the most successful scientific theory ever proposed—or even the best idea anyone has ever had, as Daniel Dennett once put it? The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms provides a comprehensive critical reading of the literature of evolutionary biology from Darwin to Dobzhansky to Dawkins, revealing this popular account of evolution to be a grand narrative of Darwinian triumph that greatly overstates the empirical validity of modern evolutionary theory. The mechanisms driving the evolutionary process truly remain a mystery more than one hundred fifty years after Origin of Species, a fact that can free religion scholars to think in more creative ways about the positive contributions religious reflection might make to our understanding of life’s origin and diversity. The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms calls for an embrace of mystery, understood not as an abdication of the scientific quest for truth but as a courageous and humble acknowledgment of the limits of human reason and an openness to a fundamentally religious orientation toward life.
Author: Robert F. Shedinger
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532658338
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Is Darwinian evolution really the most successful scientific theory ever proposed—or even the best idea anyone has ever had, as Daniel Dennett once put it? The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms provides a comprehensive critical reading of the literature of evolutionary biology from Darwin to Dobzhansky to Dawkins, revealing this popular account of evolution to be a grand narrative of Darwinian triumph that greatly overstates the empirical validity of modern evolutionary theory. The mechanisms driving the evolutionary process truly remain a mystery more than one hundred fifty years after Origin of Species, a fact that can free religion scholars to think in more creative ways about the positive contributions religious reflection might make to our understanding of life’s origin and diversity. The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms calls for an embrace of mystery, understood not as an abdication of the scientific quest for truth but as a courageous and humble acknowledgment of the limits of human reason and an openness to a fundamentally religious orientation toward life.
Author: Brian K. Hall
Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Publishers
ISBN: 1449663907
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 779
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Book Description
Thoroughly updated and reorganized, Strickberger's Evolution, Fourth Edition, presents biology students with a basic introduction to prevailing knowledge and ideas about evolution, discussing how, why, and where the world and its organisms changed throughout history. Keeping consistent with Strickberger's engaging writing style, the authors carefully unfold a broad range of philosophical and historical topics that frame the theories of today including cosmological and geological evolution and its impact on life, the origins of life on earth, the development of molecular pathways from genetic systems to organismic morphology and function, the evolutionary history of organisms from microbes to animals, and the numerous molecular and populational concepts that explain the earth's dynamic evolution. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images or content found in the physical edition.
Author: Lucyle T Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science Michael Ruse
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674042980
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
With the recent Sokal hoax--the publication of a prominent physicist's pseudo-article in a leading journal of cultural studies--the status of science moved sharply from debate to dispute. Is science objective, a disinterested reflection of reality, as Karl Popper and his followers believed? Or is it subjective, a social construction, as Thomas Kuhn and his students maintained? Into the fray comes "Mystery of Mysteries," an enlightening inquiry into the nature of science, using evolutionary theory as a case study. Michael Ruse begins with such colorful luminaries as Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) and Julian Huxley (brother of novelist Aldous and grandson of T. H. Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog" ) and ends with the work of the English game theorist Geoffrey Parker--a microevolutionist who made his mark studying the mating strategies of dung flies--and the American paleontologist Jack Sepkoski, whose computer-generated models reconstruct mass extinctions and other macro events in life's history. Along the way Ruse considers two great popularizers of evolution, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, as well as two leaders in the field of evolutionary studies, Richard Lewontin and Edward O. Wilson, paying close attention to these figures' cultural commitments: Gould's transplanted Germanic idealism, Dawkins's male-dominated Oxbridge circle, Lewontin's Jewish background, and Wilson's southern childhood. Ruse explicates the role of metaphor and metavalues in evolutionary thought and draws significant conclusions about the cultural impregnation of science. Identifying strengths and weaknesses on both sides of the "science wars," he demonstrates that a resolution of the objective and subjective debate is nonetheless possible.
Author: Stephen C. Meyer
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062071491
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 605
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Book Description
When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought that he had explained every clue, but one. Though his theory could explain many facts, Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. During this event, the “Cambrian explosion,” many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock. In Darwin’s Doubt, Stephen C. Meyer tells the story of the mystery surrounding this explosion of animal life—a mystery that has intensified, not only because the expected ancestors of these animals have not been found, but because scientists have learned more about what it takes to construct an animal. During the last half century, biologists have come to appreciate the central importance of biological information—stored in DNA and elsewhere in cells—to building animal forms. Expanding on the compelling case he presented in his last book, Signature in the Cell, Meyer argues that the origin of this information, as well as other mysterious features of the Cambrian event, are best explained by intelligent design, rather than purely undirected evolutionary processes.
Author: Martin A. Nowak
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674075536
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
According to the reigning competition-driven model of evolution, selfish behaviors that maximize an organism’s reproductive potential offer a fitness advantage over self-sacrificing behaviors—rendering unselfish behavior for the sake of others a mystery that requires extra explanation. Evolution, Games, and God addresses this conundrum by exploring how cooperation, working alongside mutation and natural selection, plays a critical role in populations from microbes to human societies. Inheriting a tendency to cooperate, argue the contributors to this book, may be as beneficial as the self-preserving instincts usually thought to be decisive in evolutionary dynamics. Assembling experts in mathematical biology, history of science, psychology, philosophy, and theology, Martin Nowak and Sarah Coakley take an interdisciplinary approach to the terms “cooperation” and “altruism.” Using game theory, the authors elucidate mechanisms by which cooperation—a form of working together in which one individual benefits at the cost of another—arises through natural selection. They then examine altruism—cooperation which includes the sometimes conscious choice to act sacrificially for the collective good—as a key concept in scientific attempts to explain the origins of morality. Discoveries in cooperation go beyond the spread of genes in a population to include the spread of cultural transformations such as languages, ethics, and religious systems of meaning. The authors resist the presumption that theology and evolutionary theory are inevitably at odds. Rather, in rationally presenting a number of theological interpretations of the phenomena of cooperation and altruism, they find evolutionary explanation and theology to be strongly compatible.
Author: Johnjoe McFadden
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393323108
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Marrying physics and biology, McFadden theorizes that evolution may not be random but directed, and that quantum mechanics endows living organisms with the ability to initiate specific actions, including new mutations. Illustrations.
Author: Pierre M. Durand
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022674793X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
The question of why an individual would actively kill itself has long been an evolutionary mystery. Pierre M. Durand’s ambitious book answers this question through close inspection of life and death in the earliest cellular life. As Durand shows us, cell death is a fascinating lens through which to examine the interconnectedness, in evolutionary terms, of life and death. It is a truism to note that one does not exist without the other, but just how does this play out in evolutionary history? These two processes have been studied from philosophical, theoretical, experimental, and genomic angles, but no one has yet integrated the information from these various disciplines. In this work, Durand synthesizes cellular studies of life and death looking at the origin of life and the evolutionary significance of programmed cellular death. The exciting and unexpected outcome of Durand’s analysis is the realization that life and death exhibit features of coevolution. The evolution of more complex cellular life depended on the coadaptation between traits that promote life and those that promote death. In an ironic twist, it becomes clear that, in many circumstances, programmed cell death is essential for sustaining life.
Author: David A. Baum
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069117587X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 886
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Book Description
The essential one-volume reference to evolution The Princeton Guide to Evolution is a comprehensive, concise, and authoritative reference to the major subjects and key concepts in evolutionary biology, from genes to mass extinctions. Edited by a distinguished team of evolutionary biologists, with contributions from leading researchers, the guide contains some 100 clear, accurate, and up-to-date articles on the most important topics in seven major areas: phylogenetics and the history of life; selection and adaptation; evolutionary processes; genes, genomes, and phenotypes; speciation and macroevolution; evolution of behavior, society, and humans; and evolution and modern society. Complete with more than 100 illustrations (including eight pages in color), glossaries of key terms, suggestions for further reading on each topic, and an index, this is an essential volume for undergraduate and graduate students, scientists in related fields, and anyone else with a serious interest in evolution. Explains key topics in some 100 concise and authoritative articles written by a team of leading evolutionary biologists Contains more than 100 illustrations, including eight pages in color Each article includes an outline, glossary, bibliography, and cross-references Covers phylogenetics and the history of life; selection and adaptation; evolutionary processes; genes, genomes, and phenotypes; speciation and macroevolution; evolution of behavior, society, and humans; and evolution and modern society
Author: J. P. Moreland
Publisher: Crossway
ISBN: 1433585162
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 775
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Book Description
Winner of the ECPA Book of the Year Award for Bible Reference Works Many prominent Christians insist that the church must yield to contemporary evolutionary theory and therefore modify traditional biblical ideas about the creation of life. They argue that God used—albeit in an undetectable way—evolutionary mechanisms to produce all forms of life. Featuring two dozen highly credentialed scientists, philosophers, and theologians from Europe and North America, this volume contests this proposal, documenting evidential, logical, and theological problems with theistic evolution—making it the most comprehensive critique of theistic evolution yet produced. Explains why theistic evolution is not congruent with a biblical worldview Features nineteen essays written by well-known experts in their fields Designed to be used as a textbook for courses on religion and evolution Accessible for those without expertise in the subject
Author: Walter Friedman
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498276083
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Book Description
In this book, Walter Friedman exposes internal contradictions that nullify the theory of evolution. He also reveals the ways Charles Darwin falsified observation data to promote his pseudoscientific discovery. In a variety of ways, Friedman aims to undercut the logical assumptions of evolutionary theory. First, he applies elementary probability theory to show that a random mutation cannot spread to an entire population, which means that the evolution of species is a myth. Friedman further contends that the centerpiece of Darwin's theory--the hypothesis of natural selection--is also a statistical impossibility, as simple arithmetic reveals. Third, he turns to genetics data to demonstrate that the idea of the evolution of species leads to ridiculous conclusions. Next, Friedman employs anthropological findings of so-called human ancestors to argue the reverse of what anthropologists believe to be true-- that evolution never took place. Fifth, Friedman appeals to the laws of physics to explain why it is impossible, in principle, for inorganic matter to transform into organic matter with a DNA-like structure. Darwin's racist view of people of African descent and its legal implications for the teaching of the evolutionary theory in public schools are also investigated. The last section of the book provides extensive criticism of the books written by prominent evolutionists, including Darwin. Friedman points out that a vast majority of false scientific theories stumbled and fell not because they were replaced by new, more sophisticated theories, but simply because of an abundance of conflicting statements and disagreement with the experimental data. For the same reasons, he finally asserts, the theory of evolution is destined for oblivion.
