A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Nearly all residents of England and its colonies between 1860 and 1914 were active theatergoers, and many participated in the amateur theatricals that defined late Victorian life. The Victorian theater was not an abstract figuration of the world as a stage, but a media system enmeshed in mass lived experience that fulfilled in actuality the concept of a theatergoing nation. Everyone’s Theater turns to local history, the words of everyday Victorians found in their diaries and production records, to recover this lost chapter of theater history in which amateur drama domesticates the stage. Professional actors and playwrights struggled to make their productions compatible with ideas and techniques that could be safely reproduced in the home—and in amateur performances from Canada to India. This became the first true English national theater: a society whose myriad classes found common ground in theatrical display. Everyone’s Theater provides new ways to extend Victorian literature into the dimension of voice, sound, and embodiment, and to appreciate the pleasures of Victorian theatricality.
At the heart of the stories in Everything Flirts are some of life’s trickiest questions: Why is it so hard to make the first move on a date? How do we find the person we will love? If you finally find a person to love, how do you convince them to love you back?
With a mixture of humor and reverence, Sharon Wahl hijacks classic works of philosophy and turns their focus to love. The philosopher Wittgenstein helps us consider the limits of language: Does there exist an argument, a logical deduction, that will cause another person to love us? The philosopher Zeno’s laws of motion stipulate that we can only ever cross half of any distance. This principle is applied to a first date, where making a first move becomes more and more impossible because the movie this couple goes to see is a depressing mood-killer. A woman afraid of love applies Bentham’s utilitarian principles to find her perfect match, testing every man she meets until she finds one who aces every one of her tests. Nonetheless, she wonders: Is he right for her? Is she ready to fall in love forever? The sublime and the ridiculous come together to playfully examine why love just might be a topic too hard for philosophers to explain.
"The best survey of the limits of free markets that we have. . . . A much needed plea for pragmatism: Take from free markets what is good and do not hesitate to recognize what is bad."—Jeff Madrick, Los Angeles Times
"It ought to be compulsory reading for all politicians—fortunately for them and us, it is an elegant read."—The Economist
"Demonstrating an impressive mastery of a vast range of material, Mr. Kuttner lays out the case for the market's insufficiency in field after field: employment, medicine, banking, securities, telecommunications, electric power."—Nicholas Lemann, New York Times Book Review
"A powerful empirical broadside. One by one, he lays on cases where governments have outdone markets, or at least performed well."—Michael Hirsh, Newsweek
"To understand the economic policy debates that will take place in the next few years, you can't do better than to read this book."—Suzanne Garment, Washington Post Book World
Innovative poets such as Vsevolod Nekrasov, Lev Rubinstein, and Dmitry Prigov are among the most prominent literary figures of Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, yet they are virtually unknown outside Russia. The same is true of the numerous active Russian performance art groups, especially the pioneering Collective Actions group led by the brilliantly inventive Andrei Monastyrsky. Everything Has Already Been Written strives to make Moscow Conceptualism more accessible, to break the language barrier and to foster understanding among an international readership by thoroughly discussing a broad range of specific works and theories. Janecek’s study is the first comprehensive analysis of Moscow Conceptualist poetry and theory, vital for an understanding of Russian culture in the post‑Conceptualist era.
In Everything I Never Wanted to Know, Christine Hume confronts the stigma and vulnerability of women’s bodies in the US. She explores bodily autonomy and sexual assault alongside the National Sex Offender Registry in order to invoke not solutions but a willingness to complicate our ideas of justice and defend every human’s right to be treated like a member of the community. Feminist autobiography threads into historical narrative and cultural criticism about the Victorian-era Frozen Charlotte doll; the Nylon Riots of the 1940s; the movie Halloween; Larry Nassar, who practiced in Hume’s home state of Michigan; and other material. In these reflections on sexuality, gender, criminality, and violence, Hume asks readers to reconsider what we have collectively normalized and how we are each complicit, writing through the darkness of what we don’t want to see, what we’d rather not believe, and what some of us have long tried to forget.
How institutional and interpersonal policing have been central to worldmaking
Policing is constitutive of colonial modernity: normalizing, internalizing, and legalizing anti-Black violence as the ongoing condition for white life and freedom. The result, Tia Trafford argues here, is a situation where we cannot practically experience or even imagine worlds free from policing. From the plantation to the prison, global apartheid, and pandemic control, this book examines why and how policing has become the most ingrained, commonsense—and insidious—way of managing our world.
In late summer 1953, as he returned to Mexico City after a seven-month expedition through the jungles of Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, William Burroughs began a notebook of final reflections on his four years in Latin America. His first novel, Junkie, had just been published and he would soon be back in New York to meet Allen Ginsberg and together complete the manuscripts of what became The Yage Letters and Queer. Yet this notebook, the sole survivor from that period, reveals Burroughs not as a writer on the verge of success, but as a man staring down personal catastrophe and visions of looming cultural disaster.
Losses that will not let go of him haunt Burroughs throughout the notebook: “Bits of it keep floating back to me like memories of a daytime nightmare.” However, out of these dark reflections we see emerge vivid fragments of Burroughs’ fiction and, even more tellingly, unique, primary evidence for the remarkable ways in which his early manuscripts evolved. Assembled in facsimile and transcribed by Geoffrey D. Smith, John M. Bennett, and Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, the notebook forces us to change the way we see both Burroughs and his writing at a turning point in his literary biography.
After a decade of miscarriages, Brooke Jensen is finally pregnant—with quadruplets. When she goes into labor after twenty-three weeks, Brooke and her husband rush to the hospital in the small town of Hanover, Wisconsin. For the 203 days that follow, they’re plunged into the terrifying and mysterious netherworld of the neonatal intensive care unit.
As the babies grow and struggle, fall turns to stark upper-Midwest winter. Brooke bonds with Dash, a senior nurse whose son, Landon, had been a patient in the NICU years earlier and is now straining his parents’ abilities to care for him. Both families bend and edge closer to breaking, and the questions mount: What does love look like? What does it mean to save a life?
A fiercely honest portrait of American parenthood, the American healthcare system, and Rust Belt communities, Everything We Could Do lays bare the ways that families are formed and remade in times of crisis.
A fascinating analysis of anonymous publication centuries before the digital age
Everywhere and Nowhere considers the ubiquity of anonymity and mediation in the publication and circulation of eighteenth-century British literature—before the Romantic creation of the “author”—and what this means for literary criticism. Anonymous authorship was typical of the time, yet literary scholars and historians have been generally unable to account for it as anything more than a footnote or curiosity.
Mark Vareschi shows the entangled relationship between mediation and anonymity, revealing the nonhuman agency of the printed text. Drawing richly on quantitative analysis and robust archival work, Vareschi brings together philosophy, literary theory, and media theory in a trenchant analysis, uncovering a history of textual engagement and interpretation that does not hinge on the known authorial subject.
In discussing anonymous poetry, drama, and the novel along with anonymously published writers such as Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, and Walter Scott, he unveils a theory of mediation that renews broader questions about agency and intention. Vareschi argues that textual intentionality is a property of nonhuman, material media rather than human subjects alone, allowing the anonymous literature of the eighteenth century to speak to contemporary questions of meaning in the philosophy of language. Vareschi closes by exploring dubious claims about the death of anonymity and the reexplosion of anonymity with the coming of the digital. Ultimately, Everywhere and Nowhere reveals the long history of print anonymity so central to the risks and benefits of the digital culture.
Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker engages Ostriker’s poetry from throughout her career, including her first volume Songs, her award-winning collection The Imaginary Lover, and her more recent work in the collections No Heaven, the volcano sequence, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, and Waiting for the Light. Like her literary criticism and essays, Ostriker’s poetry explores themes of feminism, Jewish life, family, and social justice.
With insightful essays—some newly written for this collection—poets and literary critics including Toi Derricotte, Daisy Fried, Cynthia Hogue, Tony Hoagland, and Eleanor Wilner illuminate and open new pathways for critical engagement with Alicia Ostriker’s lifetime of poetic work.
In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, John M. Riddle showed, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, that women from ancient Egyptian times to the fifteenth century had relied on an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives to regulate fertility. In Eve’s Herbs, Riddle explores a new question: If women once had access to effective means of birth control, why was this knowledge lost to them in modern times?
Beginning with the testimony of a young woman brought before the Inquisition in France in 1320, Riddle asks what women knew about regulating fertility with herbs and shows how the new intellectual, religious, and legal climate of the early modern period tended to cast suspicion on women who employed “secret knowledge” to terminate or prevent pregnancy. Knowledge of the menstrual-regulating qualities of rue, pennyroyal, and other herbs was widespread through succeeding centuries among herbalists, apothecaries, doctors, and laywomen themselves, even as theologians and legal scholars began advancing the idea that the fetus was fully human from the moment of conception.
Drawing on previously unavailable material, Riddle reaches a startling conclusion: while it did not persist in a form that was available to most women, ancient knowledge about herbs was not lost in modern times but survived in coded form. Persecuted as “witchcraft” in centuries past and prosecuted as a crime in our own time, the control of fertility by “Eve’s herbs” has been practiced by Western women since ancient times.
Modern Rome is a city rife with contradictions. Once the seat of ancient glory, it is now often the object of national contempt. It plays a significant part on the world stage, but the concerns of its residents are often deeply parochial. And while they live in the seat of a world religion, Romans can be vehemently anticlerical. These tensions between the past and the present, the global and the local, make Rome fertile ground to study urban social life, the construction of the past, the role of religion in daily life, and how a capital city relates to the rest of the nation.
Michael Herzfeld focuses on Rome’s historic Monti district and the wrenching dislocation caused by rapid economical, political, and social change. Evicted from Eternity tells the story of the gentrification of Monti—once the architecturally stunning home of a community of artisans and shopkeepers now displaced by an invasion of rapacious real estate speculators, corrupt officials, dithering politicians, deceptive clerics, and shady thugs. As Herzfeld picks apart the messy story of Monti’s transformation, he ranges widely over many aspects of life there and in the rest of the city, richly depicting the uniquely local landscape of globalization in Rome.
Becker has for seventy years been mulling over the problem of evidence. He argues that social scientists don’t take questions about the usefulness of their data as evidence for their ideas seriously enough. For example, researchers have long used the occupation of a person’s father as evidence of the family’s social class, but studies have shown this to be a flawed measure—for one thing, a lot of people answer that question too vaguely to make the reasoning plausible. The book is filled with examples like this, and Becker uses them to expose a series of errors, suggesting ways to avoid them, or even to turn them into research topics in their own right. He argues strongly that because no data-gathering method produces totally reliable information, a big part of the research job consists of getting rid of error. Readers will find Becker’s newest guidebook a valuable tool, useful for social scientists of every variety.
Coedited by Twining, one of the world's outstanding evidence scholars, and Iain Hampsher-Monk, a leading political theorist, the volume considers intriguing questions from Assyriology, theater iconography, musicology, criminology, the history of ideas, and colonial history as it reveals how particular concepts, lines of questioning, and techniques of reasoning and analysis developed in one context can be fruitfully applied in others. Did cuneiform languages really die out in the second or third century B.C.? Was Schubert responsible for any of the guitar arrangements for some of his lieder? In these cases and others, the authors' work demonstrates that, regardless of the field or the problem, all such projects involve drawing inferences from evidence, and that the logic of this kind of inquiry is always governed by the same principles.
According to polling data, most Americans doubt that evolution is a real phenomenon. And it’s no wonder that so many are skeptical: many of today’s biology courses and textbooks dwell on the mechanisms of evolution—natural selection, genetic drift, and gene flow—but say little about the evidence that evolution happens at all. How do we know that species change? Has there really been enough time for evolution to operate?
With The Evidence for Evolution, Alan R. Rogers provides an elegant, straightforward text that details the evidence for evolution. Rogers covers different levels of evolution, from within-species changes, which are much less challenging to see and believe, to much larger ones, say, from fish to amphibian, or from land mammal to whale. For each case, he supplies numerous lines of evidence to illustrate the changes, including fossils, DNA, and radioactive isotopes. His comprehensive treatment stresses recent advances in knowledge but also recounts the give and take between skeptical scientists who first asked “how can we be sure” and then marshaled scientific evidence to attain certainty. The Evidence for Evolution is a valuable addition to the literature on evolution and will be essential to introductory courses in the life sciences.
A new perspective on editorial activity in the Hebrew Bible for research and teaching
Evidence of Editing lays out the case for substantial and frequent editorial activity within the Hebrew Bible. The authors show how editors omitted, expanded, rewrote, and compiled both smaller and larger phrases and passages to address religious and political change. The book refines the exegetical method of literary and redaction criticism, and its results have important consequences for the future use of the Hebrew Bible in historical and theological studies.
Features:
- Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic examples of editorial activity
- Clear explanations of the distinctions between textual, literary, and redaction criticism
- Fifteen chapters attesting to continual editorial activity in the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings
From a leper colony in India to an American research station on the Antarctic Peninsula, from the back rooms of the White House to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, Evidence of My Existence tells a unique and riveting story of seventeen years spent racing from one photo assignment to the next. It is also a story of photojournalism and theconsequences of obsessive wanderlust.
When the book opens, Jim Lo Scalzo is a blur to his wife, her remarkable tolerance wearing thin. She is heading to the hospital with her second miscarriage, and Jim is heading to Baghdad to cover the American invasion of Iraq. He hates himself for this—for not giving her a child, for deserting her when she soobviously needs him, for being consumed by his job—but how to stop moving? Sure, there have been some tough trips. He’s been spit on by Mennonites in Missouri, by heroin addicts in Pakistan, and by the KKK in South Carolina. He’s contracted hepatitis on the Navajo Nation, endured two bouts of amoebic dysentery in India and Burma and four cases of giardia in Nepal, Peru, Afghanistan, and Cuba. He’s been shot with rubber bullets in Seattle, knocked to the ground by a water cannon in Quebec, and sprayed with more teargas than he cares to recall. But photojournalism is his career, and travel is his compulsivecraving.
We follow Lo Scalzo through the maze of airports and crowds and countries as he chases the career he has always wanted, struggles with his family problems, and reveals the pleasures of a life singularly focused. For him, as for so many photojournalists, it is always about the going.
As Gary Lawson shows, legal claims are inherently objects of proof, and whether or not the law acknowledges the point openly, proof of legal claims is just a special case of the more general norms governing proof of any claim. As a result, similar principles of evidentiary admissibility, standards of proof, and burdens of proof operate, and must operate, in the background of claims about the law. This book brings these evidentiary principles for proving law out of the shadows so that they can be analyzed, clarified, and discussed. Viewing legal problems through this lens of proof illuminates debates about everything from constitutional interpretation to the role of stipulations in litigation. Rather than prescribe resolutions to any of those debates, Evidence of the Law instead provides a set of tools that can be used to make those debates more fruitful, whatever one’s substantive views may be. As lawyers, judges, and legal subjects confront uncertainty about what the law is, they can, should, and must, Lawson argues, be guided by the same kinds of abstract considerations, structures, and doctrines long used to make determinations about questions of fact.
Synthesizing insights from law, philosophy and logic, probability, semiotics, artificial intelligence, psychology, and history, Schum provides a detailed examination of the various properties and uses of evidence and the evaluative skills evidence requires. Along with the evidential subtleties of probabilistic reasoning, Schum also explores the processes by which evidence is generated or discovered and looks at the intellectual and practical underpinnings of probabilistic reasoning. It is a useful resourse for students, researchers, and practitioners of every discipline concerned with evidence and its inferential use.
2006 — Runner-up, Arab American National Museum Book Awards
The "evil" Arab has become a stock character in American popular films, playing the villain opposite American "good guys" who fight for "the American way." It's not surprising that this stereotype has entered American popular culture, given the real-world conflicts between the United States and Middle Eastern countries, particularly since the oil embargo of the 1970s and continuing through the Iranian hostage crisis, the first and second Gulf Wars, and the ongoing struggle against al-Qaeda. But when one compares the "evil" Arab of popular culture to real Arab people, the stereotype falls apart. In this thought-provoking book, Tim Jon Semmerling further dismantles the "evil" Arab stereotype by showing how American cultural fears, which stem from challenges to our national ideologies and myths, have driven us to create the "evil" Arab Other.
Semmerling bases his argument on close readings of six films (The Exorcist, Rollover, Black Sunday, Three Kings, Rules of Engagement, and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut), as well as CNN's 9/11 documentary America Remembers. Looking at their narrative structures and visual tropes, he analyzes how the films portray Arabs as threatening to subvert American "truths" and mythic tales—and how the insecurity this engenders causes Americans to project evil character and intentions on Arab peoples, landscapes, and cultures. Semmerling also demonstrates how the "evil" Arab narrative has even crept into the documentary coverage of 9/11. Overall, Semmerling's probing analysis of America's Orientalist fears exposes how the "evil" Arab of American popular film is actually an illusion that reveals more about Americans than Arabs.
Evil by Design documents the search for the origins of the iconic “femme fatale.” Depicted as a dangerous, depraved, and deadly woman, this image was found frequently in Salon paintings from 1885 to 1910.
Elizabeth K. Menon’s study is the first to use popular sources to make the critical link between the femme fatale and the rise of feminism. In addition to the Salon paintings, Menon sifts through a variety of popular sources, including French illustrated journals, literature, posters, and decorative arts. Over 120 images depict women with serpents, evil flowers, and even miniature men having their hearts cooked. She argues that the evolution of the femme fatale, with both literary and visual links to the biblical Eve figure, came as a response to increasing feminism and the desire by men to halt its spread.
An Ojibwa woman has been found dead on the outskirts of the Minnesota Red Earth Reservation. The coroner ruled the death a suicide, but after an ex-lover comes back into her life saying foul play was involved, Renee LaRoche wants to prove otherwise. As the events begin to unfold, Renee conducts a presumably normal welfare check on a young Ojibwa boy in foster care. After she learns the boy has suffered abuse, Renee finds herself amid an investigation into the foster care system and the deep trauma it has inflicted on the Ojibwa people. As Renee uncovers horrible truths, she must work through her own childhood issues to help shine a light on the dark web she has stumbled into.
The evil eye—the power to inflict illness, damage to property, or even death simply by gazing at or praising someone—is among the most pervasive and powerful folk beliefs in the Indo-European and Semitic world. It is also one of the oldest, judging from its appearance in the Bible and in Sumerian texts five thousand years old. Remnants of the superstition persist today when we drink toasts, tip waiters, and bless sneezers. To avert the evil eye, Muslim women wear veils, baseball players avoid mentioning a no-hitter in progress, and traditional Jews say their business or health is "not bad" (rather than "good").
Though by no means universal, the evil eye continues to be a major factor in the behavior of millions of people living in the Mediterranean and Arab countries, as well as among immigrants to the Americas. This widespread superstition has attracted the attention of many scholars, and the twenty-one essays gathered in this book represent research from diverse perspectives: anthropology, classics, folklore studies, ophthalmology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, sociology, and religious studies. Some essays are fascinating reports of beliefs about the evil eye, from India and Iran to Scotland and Slovak-American communities; others analyze the origin, function, and cultural significance of this folk belief from ancient times to the present day. Editor Alan Dundes concludes the volume by proffering a comprehensive theoretical explanation of the evil eye.
Anyone who has ever knocked on wood to ward off misfortune will enjoy this generous sampling of evil eye scholarship, and may never see the world through the same eyes again.
Presented with accounts of genocide and torture, we ask how people could bring themselves to commit such horrendous acts. A searching meditation on our all-too-human capacity for inhumanity, Evil Men confronts atrocity head-on—how it looks and feels, what motivates it, how it can be stopped.
Drawing on firsthand interviews with convicted war criminals from the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), James Dawes leads us into the frightening territory where soldiers perpetrated some of the worst crimes imaginable: murder, torture, rape, medical experimentation on living subjects. Transcending conventional reporting and commentary, Dawes’s narrative weaves together unforgettable segments from the interviews with consideration of the troubling issues they raise. Telling the personal story of his journey to Japan, Dawes also lays bare the cultural misunderstandings and ethical compromises that at times called the legitimacy of his entire project into question. For this book is not just about the things war criminals do. It is about what it is like, and what it means, to befriend them.
Do our stories of evil deeds make a difference? Can we depict atrocity without sensational curiosity? Anguished and unflinchingly honest, as eloquent as it is raw and painful, Evil Men asks hard questions about the most disturbing capabilities human beings possess, and acknowledges that these questions may have no comforting answers.
In 1924, fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks was abducted while walking home from school, killed by a chisel blow to his head, and later found stuffed in a culvert in a marshy wasteland at the Illinois-Indiana state line. Acid had been poured over his naked body. Evil Summer examines the shocking kidnapping and murder of Franks by two University of Chicago students, Nathan “Babe” Leopold and Richard “Dickie” Loeb, both from families of privilege.
In this new examination of the crime, author John Theodore takes readers into the minds of the two criminals as he focuses on three months in 1924. Theodore covers the killing, the confessions, the defense, and the sentencing surrounding the horrific murder, placing the killers’ actions and Clarence Darrow’s historic defense into the context of 1920s Chicago.
Theodore deftly investigates the psychological dimensions of the crime, revealing the murderers’ fantasies, relationships, sexuality, and motives. The author examines the killers’ past, outlining Loeb’s obsession with detective fiction and crime and his editorial on random killing—written at age nine—and Leopold’s nightly master-slave fantasies and fascination with Nietzsche.
Evil Summer, which includes twenty-three illustrations, meticulously traces the murder from inception to confession, including such details as the special-delivery ransom letter sent to Jacob Franks and the discovery of Leopold’s horn-rimmed eyeglasses lying on a railroad embankment near Bobby’s dead body. Theodore re-creates such scenes as the convergence of hundreds of people in front of the Franks home, Bobby’s body lying in a small white casket in the library, and Loeb being voyeuristically drawn to the home while Bobby’s classmates carry the casket to the hearse.
Worldwide press coverage reflected the public fascination with the case in what was then called “the trial of the century.” The story became a media circus: Chicago’s six daily newspapers battled vigorously for readers, two Daily News cub reporters became part of the story, and the Chicago Tribune carried a voting ballot asking readers whether radio station WGN should broadcast the courtroom spectacle. The changing drama was delivered to Chicagoans every morning and evening, and the public feasted on every press run.
More than a crime story, Evil Summer illuminates the dark side of American life in the 1920s, including the excesses of privileged youth, the troubled childhoods, the random victimization, the anti-Semitism, and the sexuality.
In 1907, Pavel Muratov, a budding littérateur and art connoisseur from Moscow, set off for Italy with his wife, three friends, and a dozen books on the Italian Renaissance. This journey, the first of over a dozen he would make in a decade, inspired an obsession with the country’s art and culture that would produce, in the words of Clive James, “one of the most dazzling books of its type ever written.” First published in Russian between 1911 and 1924, Evocations of Italy(Obrazy Italii) chronicles Muratov’s encounters with the art, myth, and land of Italy. A classic of the Silver Age, it built on the tradition of Italian travelogues by Goethe, Stendhal, John Ruskin, and Henry James and defined the idea of Italy for generations of Russian artists and writers. Finally available in English, this three-volume collector's edition illuminates the personalities, conditions, and dreams that gave us the Italian Renaissance. At once intimate and authoritative, and here richly illustrated with photographs that echo Muratov’s shimmering juxtapositions of image and sensation, Evocations of Italy is as timely and compelling a guide today as it was a hundred years ago.
From the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 to the court ruling against the Dover Area School Board’s proposed intelligent design curriculum in 2005, few scientific topics have engendered as much controversy—or grabbed as many headlines—as evolution. And since the debate shows no signs of abating, there is perhaps no better time to step back and ask: What is evolution? Defined as the gradual process by which something changes into a different and usually more complex and efficient form, evolution explains the formation of the universe, the nature of viruses, and the emergence of humans. A first-rate summary of the actual science of evolution, this Scientific American reader is a timely collection that gives readers an opportunity to consider evolution’s impact in various settings.
Divided into four sections that consider the evolution of the universe, cells, dinosaurs, and humans, Evolution brings together more than thirty articles written by some of the world’s most respected evolutionary scientists. As tour guides through the genesis of the universe and complex cells, P. James E. Peebles examines the evidence in support of an expanding cosmos, while Christian de Duve discusses the birth of eukaryotes. In an article that anticipated his book Full House, Stephen Jay Gould argues that chance and contingency are as important as natural selection for evolutionary change. And Ian Tatersall makes two fascinating contributions, submitting his view that the schematic of human evolution looks less like a ladder and more like a bush.
With the latest on what’s being researched at every level of evolutionary studies, from prospects of life on other planets to the inner working of cells, Evolution offers general readers an opportunity to update their knowledge on this hot topic while giving students an introduction to the problems and methodologies of an entire field of inquiry.
Perhaps only someone with Roughgarden's unique academic standing could examine so well controversial issues such as the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, or the potential flaws in Darwin's theory of evolution. Certainly Roughgarden is uniquely suited to reference both the minutiae of scientific processes and the implication of Biblical verses. Whether the topic is mutation rates and lizards or the hidden meanings behind St. Paul's letters, Evolution and Christian Faith distils complex arguments into everyday understanding. Roughgarden has scoured the Bible and scanned the natural world, finding examples time and again, not of conflict, but of harmony.
The result is an accessible and intelligent context for seeing a Christian vision of the world that embraces science. In the ongoing debates over creationism and evolution, Evolution and Christian Faith will be seen as a work of major significance, written for contemporary readers who wonder how-or if-they can embrace scientific advances while maintaining their traditional values.
"I'm an evolutionary biologist and a Christian," states Stanford professor Joan Roughgarden at the outset of her groundbreaking new book, Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist. From that perspective, she offers an elegant, deeply satisfying reconciliation of the theory of evolution and the wisdom of the Bible.
Perhaps only someone with Roughgarden's unique academic standing could examine so well controversial issues such as the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, or the potential flaws in Darwin's theory of evolution. Certainly Roughgarden is uniquely suited to reference both the minutiae of scientific processes and the implication of Biblical verses. Whether the topic is mutation rates and lizards or the hidden meanings behind St. Paul's letters, Evolution and Christian Faith distils complex arguments into everyday understanding. Roughgarden has scoured the Bible and scanned the natural world, finding examples time and again, not of conflict, but of harmony.
The result is an accessible and intelligent context for a Christian vision of the world that embraces science. In the ongoing debates over creationism and evolution, Evolution and Christian Faith will be seen as a work of major significance, written for contemporary readers who wonder how-or if-they can embrace scientific advances while maintaining their traditional values.
Recent discoveries show that dramatic changes in climate and ocean circulation can occur very quickly, and that ecological communities respond just as rapidly. Abrupt changes in the composition of fossil assemblages, formerly dismissed as artifacts of a poor fossil record, now are seen as accurate records of swift changes in the composition of ocean communities.
The twenty-four contributors use current work in paleontology, geology, oceanography, anthropology, ecology, and evolution to paint this challenging portrait of rapid environmental and evolutionary change. Their conclusions argue for a revision of existing interpretations of the fossil record and the processes—including invading Eurasian peoples—that have produced it.
Marcelle K. BouDagher-Fadel collects and significantly adds to the information already published on the larger benthic foraminifera. New research in the Far East, the Middle East, South Africa, Tibet, and the Americas has provided fresh insights into the evolution and palaeographic significance of these vital reef-forming forms. With the aid of new and precise biostratigraphic dating, she presents revised phylogenies and ranges of the larger foraminifera. The book is illustrated throughout, with examples of different families and groups at the generic levels. Key species are discussed and their biostratigraphic ranges are depicted in comparative charts.
Few things come more naturally to us than sex—or so it would seem. Yet to a chimpanzee, the sexual practices and customs we take for granted would appear odd indeed. He or she might wonder why we bother with inconveniences like clothes, why we prefer to make love on a bed, and why we fuss so needlessly over privacy. Evolution and Human Sexual Behavior invites us into the thought-experiment of imagining human sex from the vantage point of our primate cousins, in order to underscore the role of evolution in shaping all that happens, biologically and behaviorally, when romantic passions are aroused.
Peter Gray and Justin Garcia provide an interdisciplinary synthesis that draws on the latest discoveries in evolutionary theory, genetics, neuroscience, comparative primate research, and cross-cultural sexuality studies. They are our guides through an exploration of the patterns and variations that exist in human sexuality, in chapters covering topics ranging from the evolution of sex differences and reproductive physiology to the origins of sexual play, monogamous unions, and the facts and fictions surrounding orgasm.
Intended for generally curious readers of all stripes, this up-to-date, one-volume survey of the evolutionary science of human sexual behavior explains why sexuality has remained a core fascination of human beings throughout time and across cultures.
This volume presents essays by some of the leading figures in the vanguard of theoretical linguistics within the framework of universal grammmar. One of the first books to adopt the "minimalist" framework to syntactic analysis, it includes a central essay by Noam Chomsky on the minimalist program and covers a range of topics in syntax and morphology.
Contributors: Luigi Burzio, Héctor Campos, Noam Chomsky, Joseph E. Emonds, Robert Freidin, James Harris, Ray Jackendoff, Paula Kempchinsky, Howard Lasnik, Claudia Parodi, Carlos Piera, A. Carlos Quicoli, Dominique Sportiche, Esther Torrego.
Natural selection is one of the factors responsible for changes in biological populations. Some traits or organisms are fitter than others, and natural selection occurs when there are changes in the distribution of traits in populations because of fitness differences. Many philosophers of biology insist that a trait’s fitness should be defined as an average of the fitnesses of individual members of the population that have the trait.
Marshall Abrams argues convincingly against this widespread approach. As he shows, it conflicts with the roles that fitness is supposed to play in evolutionary theory and with the ways that evolutionary biologists use fitness concepts in empirical research. The assumption that a causal kind of fitness is fundamentally a property of actual individuals has resulted in unnecessary philosophical puzzles and years of debate. Abrams came to see that the fitnesses of traits that are the basis of natural selection cannot be defined in terms of the fitnesses of actual members of populations, as philosophers of biology often claim. Rather, it is an overall population-environment system—not actual, particular organisms living in particular environmental conditions—that is the basis of trait fitnesses. Abrams argues that by distinguishing different classes of fitness concepts and the roles they play in the practice of evolutionary biology, we can see that evolutionary biologists’ diverse uses of fitness concepts make sense together and are consistent with the idea that fitness differences cause evolution.
Abrams’s insight has broad significance, for it provides a general framework for thinking about the metaphysics of biological evolution and its relations to empirical research. As such, it is a game-changing book for philosophers of biology, biologists who want deeper insight into the nature of evolution, and anyone interested in the applied philosophy of probability.
"This book is unquestionably mandatory reading not only for every living biologist but for generations of biologists to come."—Jack P. Hailman, Animal Behaviour, review of the first edition
"An important contribution to modern evolutionary thinking. It fortifies the place of Evolutionary Theory among the other well-established natural laws."—R.Gessink,TAXON
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.
In Evolution in a Toxic World, Monosson seeks to change that. She traces the development of life's defense systems—the mechanisms that transform, excrete, and stow away potentially harmful chemicals—from more than three billion years ago to today. Beginning with our earliest ancestors' response to ultraviolet radiation, Monosson explores the evolution of chemical defenses such as antioxidants, metal binding proteins, detoxification, and cell death.
As we alter the world's chemistry, these defenses often become overwhelmed faster than our bodies can adapt. But studying how our complex internal defense network currently operates, and how it came to be that way, may allow us to predict how it will react to novel and existing chemicals. This understanding could lead to not only better management and preventative measures, but possibly treatment of current diseases. Development of that knowledge starts with this pioneering book.
We aren't very strong, nor very fast, we have insufficient body hair to keep us warm and dry, and we will never eat bananas with our feet. But like our chimpanzee cousins, we, the naked apes, have evolved to flourish in our surroundings--a cultural environment largely of our own creation. For the human race, the critical evolution of the past million years has been the evolution of our minds.
Yet psychology, the very science that purports to understand us, has long been deeply ambivalent about Darwin's unsettling discoveries. In an accessible, level-headed overview, Henry Plotkin describes the new rapprochement called 'evolutionary psychology.' He examines how such a powerful theory as Darwinism could have been disregarded by much academic psychology and shows why the relationship between the two must be readdressed. The theory and data of evolutionary biology and animal behavior can illuminate many of our most basic mental processes and activities: language learning, perception, social understanding, and most controversially, culture and the sharing of knowledge and beliefs.
Ranging from the nature-nurture question, which has bedeviled philosophers and scientists for thousands of years, to recent debates about the mind's structure, Evolution in Mind vividly demonstrates how an evolutionary perspective helps us understand what we are, and how we got that way.
In Evolution Made to Order, Helen Anne Curry traces the history of America’s pursuit of tools that could intervene in evolution. An immersive journey through the scientific and social worlds of midcentury genetics and plant breeding and a compelling exploration of American cultures of innovation, Evolution Made to Order provides vital historical context for current worldwide ethical and policy debates over genetic engineering.
The author’s second objective is to use biology to explain why evolution cannot have taken place in the way that is most commonly assumed. Mejsnar builds his case around gene stability and on the sophisticated modern techniques for gene manipulation, the complexity of which make these modified genes inaccessible to nature. Development of life on Earth is a discontinuous, saltatory progression that results in stages following from preceding latent periods in which new forms suddenly appear and possess new types of genome. This, the author argues, is difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis of continuous biological evolution based on the natural selection of random variations.
Taking a new approach to a much-debated subject, Mejsnar distills complex information into a readable style. The result is a book that is sure to get readers talking.
Samir Chopra is an immigrant, a “voluntary exile,” who discovers he can tell the story of his life through cricket, a game that has long been an influence—really, an obsession—for him. In so doing, he reveals how his changing views on the sport mirror his journey of self-discovery. In The Evolution of a Cricket Fan, Chopra is thus able to reflect on his changing perceptions of self, and of the nations and cultures that have shaped his identity, politics, displacement, and fandom.
Chopra’s passion for the sport began as a child, when he rooted for Pakistan and against his native India. When he migrated, he became a fan of the Indian team that gave him a sense of home among the various cultures he encountered in North America and Australia. This “shapeshifting” exposes the rift between the Old and the New world, which Chopra acknowledges is “cricket’s greatest modern crisis.” But it also illuminates the identity dilemmas of post-colonial immigrants in the Indian diaspora.
Chopra’s thoughts about the sport and its global influence are not those of a player. He provides access to the inner world of the global cricket fan navigating the world that colonial empire wrought and that cricket continues to connect and animate. He observes that the Indian cricket team carries many burdens—not only must they win cricket matches, but their style of play must generate a pride that assuages generations of wounds inflicted by history. And Chopra must navigate where he stands in that history.
The Evolution of a Cricket Fan shows Chopra’s own wins and losses as his life takes new directions and his fandom changes allegiances.
This institutional history of the hospital traces the debates surrounding its creation (as the State Lunatic Asylum) in a time when mental illness was barely understood. Although the Fulton hospital was initially conceived as a treatment facility, it quickly transformed into a primarily custodial institution. It existed as a self-sufficient establishment until the mid-twentieth century, dependent on patient labor and even producing its own food. But for the most socially disadvantaged and for the severely delusional, life at Fulton was anything but therapeutic.
The book describes not only the lofty goals of professionals dedicated to treating the mentally ill but also an institution once clouded by overcrowding, financial mismanagement, political cronyism, and wrongful confinement. It considers segregation within the hospital, where the first black doctor was hired in 1960 and where racism nevertheless continued to flourish, and it describes how, even after the 1921 Eleemosynary Act, the patronage system continued to plague Fulton for two more decades.
The authors reveal changing attitudes toward new treatments in the mid-twentieth century as psychotherapy and drugs became common, and decisions at Fulton regarding patient care are described within the context of progress in Europe and the eastern United States. The book addresses the complexities facing the physician-superintendents who supervised both medical therapies and administrative matters, depicting ongoing tension between hospital finances and state support and showing the difficulties state institutions faced in a “low tax/low public service” environment.
As Fulton State Hospital enters the twenty-first century, clients have become active in the development of institutional policies—a far cry from the warehousing of patients a hundred years ago. In tracing these seismic shifts in mental health care, this book offers an eye-opening exploration of how one state has sought to care for its citizens.
"I was but a boy in my nineteenth year, and in for adventure when I started out from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, with all my worldly possessions, consisting of a few dollars in money, a change of clothes, and a gun, of course, to seek my fortune in this lazy man's paradise."
Noah Smithwick was an old man, blind and near his ninetieth year, when his daughter recorded these words. He had stayed on in "paradise"—Texas—from 1827 to 1861, when his opposition to secession took him to California. The Evolution of a State is his story of these "old Texas days."
A blacksmith and a tobacco smuggler, Noah Smithwick made weapons for the Battle of Concepción, and he fought in that battle. With Hensley's company, he chased the Mexican army south of the Rio Grande after the Battle of San Jacinto. Twice he served with the Texas Rangers. In quieter times, he was a postmaster and justice of the peace in little Webber's Prairie.
Eyewitness to so much Texas history, Smithwick recounts his life and adventures in a simple, straightforward style, with a wry sense of humor. His keen memory for detail—what the people wore, what they ate, how they worked and played— vividly evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of the frontier.
First published in part by the Dallas Morning News, Smithwick's recollections gained such popularity that they were published in book form, as The Evolution of a State, in 1900. This new edition of a Texas classic makes widely available for the first time in many years this "best of all books dealing with life in early Texas."
The recent explosion of publications on African prehistory has forced researchers in vertebrate evolution to sift through countless details of morphology, distribution and geological setting. Now, to simplify access to this information, Vincent Maglio and H.B.S. Cooke have prepared a single volume that summarizes our current knowledge about the origin and evolution of the Class Mammalia in Africa. Their book, consequently, is of great importance, and much of its material derives from ongoing research not available in any other published form.
In thirty chapters, fifteen mammalian orders are described in detail—their taxonomic groupings; the origins of their various subgroups; geographical distributions; major phyletic units; and specific evolutionary trends. Numerous illustrations accompany the text, and complete bibliographic references are given for each group. The modern mammalian fauna of Africa is summarized, with a description of the environments in which it is found. Man's impact on wildlife is also assessed. The major geological deposits of the African Cenozoic are reviewed, and the broader patterns of faunal evolution are synthesized in an attempt to cut across taxonomic boundaries and demonstrate the interdependence of faunal events on the continent as a whole.
With the collapse of the state socialist regimes in East-Central Europe, it was widely expected that collectivized agriculture would quickly be remade in the glowing image of China--a patchwork of small, privately run farms yielding rapid increases in output and incomes. However, the European experience has been quite different; while socialist collective farms have disappeared, collective forms of organization have persisted, and private farming has been slow to emerge. Meurs argues that an understanding of the causes of the slow emergence of private farming is essential to effective policy intervention in agriculture. This book contributes to such an understanding through analyzing variations in farm organization and rural market development and comparing agricultural restructuring in Hungary and Bulgaria.
The Evolution of Agrarian Institutions is unique in its combination of original survey data, published data on land use, and published historical data. It also tests two institutionalist explanations for the pace and direction of change in agricultural organization. This book will be of interest to economists, political scientists, sociologists, scholars working in the area of rural development in emerging countries, and anyone with an interest in transitional economics.
Mieke Meurs is Associate Professor of Economics, American University.
In this book, Stephen J. Pope argues that contemporary scientifically-based theories of the evolution of altruism provide important insights into one of the fundamental moral problems of Christian ethics, the natural basis of love and its ordering. He explores the contributions evolutionary theory makes to our understanding of the biological foundations of kin preference and reciprocal care, the limits of love, and the need for an ordering of love—issues relevant to any ethic that accords a central role to the deeply natural affections found in friendship, marriage, and the family. He proposes that understanding human nature in its broader evolutionary context brings to ethics a needed balance between the personal and biological dimensions of human nature.
In the context of Catholic ethics, Pope points out functional similarities between Thomas Aquinas's use of then-available scientific theories in his interpretation of the natural basis of primary relationships and Pope's own efforts to avoid the deficiencies that characterize contemporary Catholic interpretations of love based on personalism and existentialism. He concludes with a call for a multidimensional interpretation of love, one that incorporates scientifically-based theories about human nature together with an appreciation of the significance of motives, intentions, and freedom, for the ordering of human affections and moral responsibility. This book will be of interest to moral theologians, especially those concerned with the topics of love, justice, and natural law ethics.
The institutional development of American legislatures, beginning with the first colonial assembly of 1619, has been marked by continuity as well as change. Peverill Squire draws upon a wealth of primary sources to document this institutional history. Beginning with the ways in which colonial assemblies followed the precedents of British institutions, Squire traces the fundamental ways they evolved to become distinct. He next charts the formation of the first state legislatures and the Constitutional Congress, describes the creation of territorial and new state legislatures, and examines the institutionalization of state legislatures in the nineteenth century and their professionalization since 1900.
With his conclusion, Squire discusses the historical trajectory of American legislatures and suggests how they might further develop over the coming decades. While Squire's approach will appeal to historians, his focus on the evolution of rules, procedures, and standing committee systems, as well as member salaries, legislative sessions, staff, and facilities, will be valuable to political scientists and legislative scholars.
The aims of this study are twofold: compile, for the first time, all the archaeological, environmental, and geological data pertinent to the evolution of the aboriginal inhabitants of southwest Florida; and, using this basis, develop a specific, integrated, and dynamic model of cultural adaptation that will serve as a stimulus for hypotheses that go beyond simple culture-historical concerns for future archaeological research in this region.
Although several kinds of production units developed, households were the most persistent units of production in spite of massive social change and the reorientation of pottery production to the tourist market. Entrepreneurial workshops, government-sponsored workshops, and workshops attached to tourist hotels developed more recently but were short-lived, whereas pottery-making households extended deep into the nineteenth century. Through this continuity and change, intermittent crafting, multi-crafting, and potters' increased management of economic risk also factored into the development of the production organization in Ticul.
Illustrated with more than 100 images of production units, The Evolution of Ceramic Production Organization in a Maya Community is an important contribution to the understanding of ceramic production. Scholars with interests in craft specialization, craft production, and demography, as well as specialists in Mesoamerican archaeology, anthropology, history, and economy, will find this volume especially useful.
Cetaceans—whales, dolphins, and porpoises—represent an evolutionary peak with respect to their advanced cognitive capacities, flexible communication systems, and structured, multilevel societies. Indeed, the social lives of whales and dolphins have long fascinated scientists and the public alike. The Evolution of Cetacean Societies provides a comprehensive overview of the significant advancements made in studying cetacean behavior and ecology over the last twenty-five years, focusing on our growing understanding of these animals’ complex social lives.
Bringing together scientists from multiple disciplines, the volume summarizes key innovations and progress related to studying cetacean societies’ cultural and genetic basis, their complex social structures, their use of cooperation and patterns of social conflict, and their significant interactions with humans. Each chapter provides an in-depth account of the social lives of whales and dolphins, incorporating the latest cutting-edge research from genomics, communication, network analysis, and animal culture to explain how these animals form societies, maintain relationships, and share information. The final chapters focus on the existential threats facing these diverse and charismatic species, how human-cetacean interactions have shaped our perceptions, and what scientists can learn from their diverse social lives by championing researcher diversity in marine mammal science. The result is an essential and forward-looking book that both contextualizes the lessons of the past two decades and questions the challenges these enigmatic species might face in the future.
Published in 2000 by Chicago, Cetacean Societies: Field Studies of Dolphins and Whales, edited by Janet Mann, Richard C. Connor, Peter Tyack, and Hal Whitehead, inspired a generation of marine biologists. In this new volume, Darren P. Croft, Andrew D. Foote, Ellen C. Garland, and Stephanie L. King—all respected cetacean researchers—offer a worthy successor.
This book is an intellectual tour de force: a comprehensive Darwinian interpretation of human development. Looking at the entire range of human evolutionary history, Melvin Konner tells the compelling and complex story of how cross-cultural and universal characteristics of our growth from infancy to adolescence became rooted in genetically inherited characteristics of the human brain.
All study of our evolution starts with one simple truth: human beings take an extraordinarily long time to grow up. What does this extended period of dependency have to do with human brain growth and social interactions? And why is play a sign of cognitive complexity, and a spur for cultural evolution? As Konner explores these questions, and topics ranging from bipedal walking to incest taboos, he firmly lays the foundations of psychology in biology.
As his book eloquently explains, human learning and the greatest human intellectual accomplishments are rooted in our inherited capacity for attachments to each other. In our love of those we learn from, we find our way as individuals and as a species. Never before has this intersection of the biology and psychology of childhood been so brilliantly described.
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," wrote Dobzhansky. In this remarkable book, Melvin Konner shows that nothing in childhood makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Written by specialists in the field, the papers in this volume explore evolution of animals and plants on the deserts of North America, South America, and Australia. Together, the articles constitute a complete survey of the geological history of the deserts of three continents, the evolution of the animals and plants of those deserts, and their adaptations to the environments in which they live.
The first paper, by Otto T. Solbrig, discusses the flora of the South American temperate and semidesert regions, citing numerous genera and reasons that they are found in the different areas. John S. Beard uses the same approach in his discussion of the evolution of Australian desert plants and focuses on western Australian areas. Guillermo Sarmiento appraises the evolution of arid vegetation in tropical America, including the Lesser Antilles and the Coast Range of Venezuela and Colombia. A. R. Main surveys the adaptation of Australian vertebrates to desert conditions and gives examples of how various species of birds, reptiles, and amphibians adapt to their environment in order for the greatest number to survive. James A. MacMahon designates specific communities in the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan deserts and discusses the similarity of species of the North American desert mammal faunas found there, while Bobbi S. Low focuses on the evolution of amphibian life histories in the desert and compiles a lengthy table of amphibia comparing egg size, habitat, number of eggs per clutch, and so forth. Finally, W. Frank Blair treats adaptation of anurans to equivalent desert scrub of North and South America and cites various species of frogs and toads that are found in similar areas.
The volume also includes an introduction by the editor and an index. Evolution of Desert Biota is the result of a symposium held during the First International Congress of Systematic and Evolutionary Biology in Boulder, Colorado; in August 1973.
Beginning with a general introduction to fossil Lagerstätten, Evolution of Fossil Ecosystems goes on, chapter by chapter, to consider each fossil site, detailing its evolutionary position and significance; a brief history of the locality; its background sedimentology, stratigraphy, and paleoenvironment; its biota and paleoecology; and its commonalities with similar Lagerstätten. Considering deposits both marine and terrestrial, the book covers one fossil site from the Precambrian era, five sites from the Paleozoic era, five sites from the Mesozoic era, and three sites from the Cenozoic era.
Illustrated with hundreds of color photographs and drawings, Evolution of Fossil Ecosystems is a sophisticated yet accessible guide to these critical sites. Containing useful appendixes listing important museums, instructions on how to visit the fossil sites, and additional suggested reading, this book will attract students, academics, and professionals in paleontology, evolution, and the earth and life sciences, as well as dedicated amateurs interested in fossils and geology.
Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states.
The Evolution of Grammar has important implications for the development of language and for the study of cognitive processes in general.
Guided by neuroscience, animal behavior, evolution, philosophy, and psychology, Asma burrows deep into the human psyche to look right at the enigmatic but powerful engine that is our improvisational creativity—the source, he argues, of our remarkable imaginational capacity. How is it, he asks, that a story can evoke a whole world inside of us? How are we able to rehearse a skill, a speech, or even an entire scenario simply by thinking about it? How does creativity go beyond experience and help us make something completely new? And how does our moral imagination help us sculpt a better society? As he shows, we live in a world that is only partly happening in reality. Huge swaths of our cognitive experiences are made up by “what-ifs,” “almosts,” and “maybes,” an imagined terrain that churns out one of the most overlooked but necessary resources for our flourishing: possibilities. Considering everything from how imagination works in our physical bodies to the ways we make images, from the mechanics of language and our ability to tell stories to the creative composition of self-consciousness, Asma expands our personal and day-to-day forms of imagination into a grand scale: as one of the decisive evolutionary forces that has guided human development from the Paleolithic era to today. The result is an inspiring look at the rich relationships among improvisation, imagination, and culture, and a privileged glimpse into the unique nature of our evolved minds.
The century-long process by which a distinct pattern of Japanese labor relations evolved is traced through the often turbulent interactions of workers, managers, and, at times, government bureaucrats and politicians. The author argues that, although by the 1920s labor relations had reached a stage that foreshadowed postwar development, it was not until the 1940s and 1950s that something closely akin to the contemporary pattern emerged.
The central theme is that the ideas and actions of the workers, whether unionized or not, played a vital role in the shaping of the system. This is the only study in the West that demonstrates how Japanese workers sought to change and to some extent succeeded in changing the structure of factory life. Managerial innovations and the efforts of state bureaucrats to control social change are also examined.
The book is based on extensive archival research and interviewing in Japan, including the use of numerous labor-union publications and the holdings of the prewar elite’s principal organization for the study of social issues, the Kyochokai (“Association for Harmonious Cooperation”)—both collections having only recently been catalogued and opened to scholars. This is an intensive look at past developments that underlie labor relations in today’s Japanese industrial plants.
In The Evolution of Pragmatism in India, Scott R. Stroud delivers a comprehensive exploration of the influence of John Dewey’s pragmatism on Bhimrao Ambedkar, architect of the Republic of India’s constitution. Stroud traces Ambedkar’s development in Dewey’s Columbia University classes in 1913–1916 through his final years in 1950s India when he rewrote the story of Buddhism. Stroud examines pragmatism’s influence not only on the philosophical ideas underpinning Ambedkar’s fight against caste oppression but also how his persuasive techniques drew on pragmatism’s commitment to reconstruction and meliorism. At the same time, Stroud is careful to point out the ways that Ambedkar pushed back against Dewey’s paradigm and developed his own approach to challenges in India. The result is a nuanced study of one of the most important figures in Indian history.
In 1987, the University of Chicago Press published Primate Societies, the standard reference in the field of primate behavior for an entire generation of students and scientists. But in the twenty-five years since its publication, new theories and research techniques for studying the Primate order have been developed, debated, and tested, forcing scientists to revise their understanding of our closest living relatives.
Intended as a sequel to Primate Societies, The Evolution of Primate Societies compiles thirty-one chapters that review the current state of knowledge regarding the behavior of nonhuman primates. Chapters are written by the leading authorities in the field and organized around four major adaptive problems primates face as they strive to grow, maintain themselves, and reproduce in the wild. The inclusion of chapters on the behavior of humans at the end of each major section represents one particularly novel aspect of the book, and it will remind readers what we can learn about ourselves through research on nonhuman primates. The final section highlights some of the innovative and cutting-edge research designed to reveal the similarities and differences between nonhuman and human primate cognition. The Evolution of Primate Societies will be every bit the landmark publication its predecessor has been.
In an intellectually engaging narrative that mixes science and history, theories and personalities, Pat Shipman asks the question: Can we have legitimate scientific investigations of differences among humans without sounding racist?
Through the original controversy over evolutionary theory in Darwin's time; the corruption of evolutionary theory into eugenics; the conflict between laboratory research in genetics and fieldwork in physical anthropology and biology; and the continuing controversies over the heritability of intelligence, criminal behavior, and other traits, the book explains both prewar eugenics and postwar taboos on letting the insights of genetics and evolution into the study of humanity.
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