front cover of Symbiogenesis
Symbiogenesis
A New Principle of Evolution
Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyansky
Harvard University Press, 2010

More than eighty years ago, before we knew much about the structure of cells, Russian botanist Boris Kozo-Polyansky brilliantly outlined the concept of symbiogenesis, the symbiotic origin of cells with nuclei. It was a half-century later, only when experimental approaches that Kozo-Polyansky lacked were applied to his hypotheses, that scientists began to accept his view that symbiogenesis could be united with Darwin's concept of natural selection to explain the evolution of life. After decades of neglect, ridicule, and intellectual abuse, Kozo-Polyansky's ideas are now endorsed by virtually all biologists.

Kozo-Polyansky's seminal work is presented here for the first time in an outstanding annotated translation, updated with commentaries, references, and modern micrographs of symbiotic phenomena.

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Symbols in Clay
Seeking Artists’ Identities in Hopi Yellow Ware Bowls
Steven A. LeBlanc and Lucia R. Henderson
Harvard University Press, 2009

In late prehistory, the ancestors of the present-day Hopi in Arizona created a unique and spectacular painted pottery tradition referred to as Hopi Yellow Ware. This ceramic tradition, which includes Sikyatki Polychrome pottery, inspired Hopi potter Nampeyo’s revival pottery at the turn of the twentieth century.

How did such a unique and unprecedented painting style develop? The authors compiled a corpus of almost 2,000 images of Hopi Yellow Ware bowls from the Peabody Museum’s collection and other museums. Focusing their work on the exterior, glyphlike painted designs of these bowls, they found that the “glyphs” could be placed into sets and apparently acted as a kind of ­signature.

The authors argue that part-time specialists were engaged in making this pottery and that relatively few households manufactured Hopi Yellow Ware during the more than 300 years of its production.Extending the Peabody’s influential Awatovi project of the 1930s, Symbols in Clay calls into question deep-seated assumptions about pottery production and specialization in the precontact American Southwest.

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Symmorphosis
On Form and Function in Shaping Life
Ewald R. Weibel M.D.
Harvard University Press, 2000

This book addresses a simple question: Are animals designed economically? The pronghorn can run at speeds of up to 60 kilometers an hour and can maintain this speed for nearly a full hour. Clearly, the form of this elegant animal is beautifully matched to the function it needs to perform.

This is symmorphosis. The theory of symmorphosis predicts that the size of the parts in a system must be matched to the overall functional demand. Moreover, it predicts that animals must provide their complex systems with a functional capacity that can cope with the highest expected functional demands, possibly including some safety margin to prevent the system from failing when it is overloaded. In Symmorphosis, Ewald Weibel tests these predictions by working out the quantitative relations between form and function.

Physiologists will value this book because Weibel shows them that morphological information can be as quantitative as physiological data. Anatomists will value the book for its demonstration that advanced integrative physiology crucially depends on adequate but rigorously quantitative and testable information on structural design. Finally, anyone interested in the origins of the diverse forms of animals will be fascinated by Weibel's demonstrations that show how animals as different as shrews, pronghorns, dogs, goats--even humans--all develop from essentially the same blueprint by variation of design. This is a hidden beauty of the animal kingdom, which can be uncovered by a rigorous investigation of the quantitative relations of form and function.

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Symphonic Aspirations
German Music and Politics, 1900–1945
Karen Painter
Harvard University Press, 2008

Can music be political? Germans have long claimed the symphony as a pillar of their modern national culture. By 1900, the critical discourse on music, particularly symphonies, rose to such prominence as to command front-page news. With the embrace of the Great War, the humiliation of defeat, and the ensuing economic turmoil, music evolved from the most abstract to the most political of the arts. Even Goebbels saw the symphony as a tool of propaganda. More than composers or musicians, critics were responsible for this politicization of music, aspiring to change how music was heard and understood. Once hailed as a source of individual heroism, the symphony came to serve a communal vision.

Karen Painter examines the politicization of musical listening in Germany and Austria, showing how nationalism, anti-Semitism, liberalism, and socialism profoundly affected the experience of serious music. Her analysis draws on a vast collection of writings on the symphony, particularly those of Mahler and Bruckner, to offer compelling evidence that music can and did serve ideological ends. She traces changes in critical discourse that reflected but also contributed to the historical conditions of the fin de siècle, World War I, and the Nazi regime.

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The Symptom of Beauty
Francett Pacteau
Harvard University Press
For a woman in the Western world, there's no escaping beauty. She has it or she doesn't. If she doesn't, she may hope to gain it. If she already has it, she will certainly lose it. But what is "it"? Not a singular thing, Francette Pacteau tells us, but a generic term for an unspecifiable number of disparate experiences. What these experiences are, what they mean, how they manifest themselves as a notion of beauty is the subject of Pacteau's book, an intriguing psychoanalytic study of beauty that looks into the eye of the beholder and into the mind conjuring behind it. Her book is an ambitious attempt to describe the mise-en-scène of beauty within a particular field of representations; that of the beauty of a woman.
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The Synagogue at Sardis
Andrew R. Seager
Harvard University Press

The Synagogue at Sardis, discovered by the Harvard-Cornell expedition in 1962, is the largest synagogue known in the ancient world. Its great size, its location within a bath-gymnasium complex, its elaborate and expensive interior decorations, and the high status of many of the donors caused significant revision of previous assumptions about Judaism in the Roman Empire.

This long-awaited volume discusses in detail the history of the building, its decoration, and the place of the Jewish community in the larger society. Copiously illustrated with plans and photos, the book also includes catalogs of the decorative elements, coins, and other objects associated with this monumental religious space.

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Syntax and Speech
William E. Cooper and Jeanne Paccia-Cooper
Harvard University Press, 1980

Syntax and Speech is the first extensive examination of the relation between sentence structure and the organization of speech. Combining the methods of cognitive psychology, linguistics, and acoustics, the Coopers show that a surprising amount of syntactic information is conveyed by the subtle ways a speaker times the delivery of a sentence.

Syntax and Speech provides abundant experimental evidence that the syntactic boundaries of surface phrase structure have strong effects on the timing of the speech signal.

The Coopers develop a detailed theory of structural representation to account for the location of pauses and elongated speech sounds. This work bears importantly both upon psychological theories of speech production and linguistic theories of sentence structure. Moreover, their methods of examining speech provide an admirable model of how complex human behavior can be successfully analyzed. The results, which can be applied to language pathology and communications engineering and have clear parallels in other expressive behaviors such as American Sign Language, music, and animal communication, provide the starting point for many new lines of research in cognitive science.

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Syphilis and Other Venereal Diseases
William J. Brown
Harvard University Press, 1970

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Syria
Development and Monetary Policy
Edmund Y. Asfour
Harvard University Press

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The Syrian Social Nationalist Party
An Ideological Analysis
Labib Zuwiyya Yamak
Harvard University Press

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Systematics and the Origin of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist
With a New Introduction by the Author
Ernst Mayr
Harvard University Press, 1999

Ernst Mayr is perhaps the most distinguished biologist of the twentieth century, and Systematics and the Origin of Species may be one of his greatest and most influential books. This classic study, first published in 1942, helped to revolutionize evolutionary biology by offering a new approach to taxonomic principles and correlating the ideas and findings of modern systematics with those of other life science disciplines. This book is one of the foundational documents of the “Evolutionary Synthesis.” It is the book in which Mayr pioneered his new concept of species based chiefly on such biological factors as interbreeding and reproductive isolation, taking into account ecology, geography, and life history.

In his new Introduction for this edition, Mayr reflects on the place of this enduring work in the subsequent history of his field.

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Sāmaveda Samhitā of the Kauthuma School
With Padapāṭha and the commentaries of Madhava, Bharatasvāmin and Sayaṇa
B. R. Sharma
Harvard University Press, 2000
The Samaveda contains the earliest tradition of music from India. It presents largely Rigvedic textual material in a form arranged for singing in the solemn Srauta ritual. Since the first editions by Theodor Benfey (1848) and Satyavrata Samasrami (1874–1899), there has been no complete, accented edition that also included all its important commentaries. The present edition is based on manuscripts collected from all over India and Europe. B. R. Sharma, Dean of Samaveda Studies, presents the accented text, its Padapatha, and the commentaries of Madhava, Bharata-Svamin, and Sayana in three volumes totaling 2,500 pages. These contain the Purvarcika and Uttaracika portions of the text, and a third volume the indexes and a detailed introduction to the whole work. Vols. 2 and 3 to appear soon.
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Sāmaveda Samhitā of the Kauthuma School
With Padapāṭha and the commentaries of Madhava, Bharatasvāmin and Sayaṇa
B. R. Sharma
Harvard University Press

The Sāmaveda contains the earliest tradition of music from India, which is largely Rigvedic textual material in a form arranged for singing in the solemn Srauta ritual. Since the first editions by Theodor Benfey (1848) and Satyavrata Samasrami (1874–1899), there has been no complete, accented edition that has also included all of its important commentaries.

In this work, B. R. Sharma presents an accented edition that is based on manuscripts collected from all over India and Europe. Its Padapāṭha and the commentaries of Madhava, Bharatasvāmin, and Sayana comprise three volumes totaling 2,500 pages.

These volumes contain the Purvarcika and Uttarārcika portions of the text. The third volume, complete with the indexes and a detailed introduction to the whole work, will be published soon.

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Śṛṅgāraprakāśa of Bhoja
Venkatarama Raghavan
Harvard University Press, 1998

This edition is based on new manuscripts of this important treatise on classical Sanskrit poetics. It was composed by the famous eleventh-century King Bhoja of Malwa (West India), a patron of traditional learning.

The text has never received a complete critical edition. It is important not only because of the theoretical treatment of the erotic sentiment (śṛṅgāra) in classical Sanskrit texts. It is also a mine of quotations from extant and also from lost Sanskrit and Prakrit poetical texts.

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Śṛṅgāraprakāśa of Bhoja
Venkatarama Raghavan
Harvard University Press

This edition is based on new manuscripts of this important treatise on classical Sanskrit poetics. It was composed by the famous eleventh-century King Bhoja of Malwa (West India), a patron of traditional learning.

The text has never received a complete critical edition. It is important not only because of the theoretical treatment of the erotic sentiment (śṛṅgāra) in classical Sanskrit texts. It is also a mine of quotations from extant and also from lost Sanskrit and Prakrit poetical texts.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Śṛṅgāraprakāśa of Bhoja
Venkatarama Raghavan
Harvard University Press
This edition is based on new manuscripts of this important treatise on classical Sanskrit poetics by the famous eleventh-century King Bhoja of Malwa. The text is important because of the theoretical treatment of the erotic sentiment (śṛṅgāra) in classical Sanskrit texts, and also as a mine of quotations from Sanskrit and Prakrit poetical texts.
[more]


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