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Camp Chase and the Evolution of Union Prison Policy
Roger Pickenpaugh
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Discusses an important yet often misunderstood topic in American History

Camp Chase was a major Union POW camp and also served at various times as a Union military training facility and as quarters for Union soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Confederacy and released on parole or exchanged. As such, this careful, thorough, and objective examination of the history and administration of the camp will be of true significance in the literature on the Civil War.
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Can Microbial Communities Regenerate?
Uniting Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Andrew Inkpen and Ford Doolittle
University of Chicago Press, 2022
By investigating a simple question, a philosopher of science and a molecular biologist offer an accessible understanding of microbial communities and a motivating theory for future research in community ecology.
 
Microorganisms, such as bacteria, are important determinants of health at the individual, ecosystem, and global levels. And yet many aspects of modern life, from the overuse of antibiotics to chemical spills and climate change, can have devastating, lasting impacts on the communities formed by microorganisms. Drawing on the latest scientific research and real-life examples such as attempts to reengineer these communities through microbial transplantation, the construction of synthetic communities of microorganisms, and the use of probiotics, this book explores how and why communities of microorganisms respond to disturbance, and what might lead to failure. It also unpacks related and interwoven philosophical questions: What is an organism? Can a community evolve by natural selection? How can we make sense of function and purpose in the natural world? How should we think about regeneration as a phenomenon that occurs at multiple biological scales? Provocative and nuanced, this primer offers an accessible conceptual and theoretical understanding of regeneration and evolution at the community level that will be essential across disciplines including philosophy of biology, conservation biology, microbiomics, medicine, evolutionary biology, and ecology.
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Canadian Military Intelligence
Operations and Evolution from the October Crisis to the War in Afghanistan
Georgetown University Press

The most comprehensive history of Canadian military intelligence and its influence on key military operations

Canadian intelligence has become increasingly central to the operations of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). Canadian Military Intelligence: Operations and Evolution from the October Crisis to the War in Afghanistan is the first comprehensive history that examines the impact of tactical, operational, and strategic intelligence on the Canadian military.

Drawing upon a wide range of original documents and interviews with participants in specific operations, author David A. Charters provides an inside perspective on the development of military intelligence since the Second World War. He shows how intelligence influenced key military operations, from domestic internal security to peacekeeping efforts to high-intensity air campaigns—including the October Crisis of 1970, the Oka Crisis, the Gulf War, peacekeeping and enforcement operations in the Balkans, and the war in Afghanistan. He describes how decades of experience, innovation, and increasingly close cooperation with its Five Eyes and NATO allies allowed Canada’s military intelligence to punch above its weight. Its tactical effectiveness and ability to overcome challenges reshaped the outlook of military commanders, and intelligence emerged from the margins to become a central feature of military and defense operations.

Canadian Military Intelligence offers lessons from the past and critical implications for future intelligence support with the creation of the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command. This book will be essential to both intelligence history and military history readers and collections.

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Cardiology
The Evolution of the Science and the Art
Bing, Richard J.
Rutgers University Press, 1999
Contributors to this volume examine the history of cardiology, stressing the source of ideas that have guided cardiology to the present. The lives of the scientists and physicians are emphasized, as are their successes and failures, their struggles and disappointments. Chapters cover. - Cardiac Catheterization - Echocardiography and the Doppler method - Cardiopulmonary Bypass - Congenital Heart Disease - Transplantation of the Heart - Artherosclerosis - Coronary Artery Disease - Coronary Artery Surgery - Isotopes in Cardiology - Myocardial Failure - Valvular Surgery - Hypertension and Hypertensive Heart Disease - Molecular Biology and Genetics of Cardiovascular Diseases - Electrophysiology - History of Cardiology at the Bedside Contributors to this volume include: Dr. Donald Baim, Dr. John Baldwin, Dr. Arnold M. Katz, Dr. Berndt Luderitz, and Dr. Alexander Nadas.
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The Case of the Female Orgasm
Bias in the Science of Evolution
Elisabeth A. Lloyd
Harvard University Press, 2006

Why women evolved to have orgasms--when most of their primate relatives don't--is a persistent mystery among evolutionary biologists. In pursuing this mystery, Elisabeth Lloyd arrives at another: How could anything as inadequate as the evolutionary explanations of the female orgasm have passed muster as science? A judicious and revealing look at all twenty evolutionary accounts of the trait of human female orgasm, Lloyd's book is at the same time a case study of how certain biases steer science astray.

Over the past fifteen years, the effect of sexist or male-centered approaches to science has been hotly debated. Drawing especially on data from nonhuman primates and human sexology over eighty years, Lloyd shows what damage such bias does in the study of female orgasm. She also exposes a second pernicious form of bias that permeates the literature on female orgasms: a bias toward adaptationism. Here Lloyd's critique comes alive, demonstrating how most of the evolutionary accounts either are in conflict with, or lack, certain types of evidence necessary to make their cases--how they simply assume that female orgasm must exist because it helped females in the past reproduce. As she weighs the evidence, Lloyd takes on nearly everyone who has written on the subject: evolutionists, animal behaviorists, and feminists alike. Her clearly and cogently written book is at once a convincing case study of bias in science and a sweeping summary and analysis of what is known about the evolution of the intriguing trait of female orgasm.

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Cattle in the Backlands
Mato Grosso and the Evolution of Ranching in the Brazilian Tropics
By Robert W. Wilcox
University of Texas Press, 2017

Henry A. Wallace Award, The Agricultural History Society, 2018

Brazil has the second-largest cattle herd in the world and is a major exporter of beef. While ranching in the Amazon—and its destructive environmental consequences—receives attention from both the media and scholars, the states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul actually host the most cattle. A significant beef producer in Brazil beginning in the late nineteenth century, the region served as a laboratory for raising cattle in the tropics, where temperate zone ranching practices do not work. Mato Grosso ranchers and cowboys transformed ranching’s relationship with the environment, including the introduction of an exotic cattle breed—the Zebu—that now dominates Latin American tropical ranching.

Cattle in the Backlands presents a comprehensive history of ranching in Mato Grosso. Using extensive primary sources, Robert W. Wilcox explores three key aspects: the economic transformation of a remote frontier region through modern technical inputs; the resulting social changes, especially in labor structures and land tenure; and environmental factors, including the long-term impact of ranching on ecosystems, which, he contends, was not as detrimental as might be assumed. Wilcox demonstrates that ranching practices in Mato Grosso set the parameters for tropical beef production in Brazil and throughout Latin America. As the region was incorporated into national and international economic structures, its ranching industry experienced the entry of foreign investment, the introduction of capitalized processing facilities, and nascent discussions of ecological impacts—developments that later affected many sectors of the Brazilian economy.

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Causes of Evolution
A Paleontological Perspective
Edited by Robert M. Ross and Warren D. Allmon
University of Chicago Press, 1990
By studying evolution across geological time, paleontologists gain a perspective that sometimes complements and sometimes conflicts with views based solely on studies of extant species. The contributors to Causes of Evolution consider whether factors exerting major influences on evolution are biotic or abiotic, intrinsic or extrinsic.

Causes of Evolution presents a broad sampling of paleontological research programs encompassing vertebrates, invertebrates, and vascular plants; empirical work and theoretical models; organisms ranging in age from Cambrian to Recent; and temporal scales from ecological time to hundreds of millions of years. The diverse array of research styles and opinions presented will acquaint scientists in related fields with the strengths and weaknesses of paleontology as an approach to evolutionary studies and will give evolutionary biologists of every stripe new bases for evaluating the scope and bias of their own work.
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Cave Life
Evolution and Ecology
David C. Culver
Harvard University Press, 1982

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The Cell
A Visual Tour of the Building Block of Life
Jack Challoner
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The cell is the basic building block of life. In its 3.5 billion years on the planet, it has proven to be a powerhouse, spreading life first throughout the seas, then across land, developing the rich and complex diversity of life that populates the planet today.  
           
With The Cell: A Visual Tour of the Building Block of Life, Jack Challoner treats readers to a visually stunning tour of these remarkable molecular machines. Most of the living things we’re familiar with—the plants in our gardens, the animals we eat—are composed of billions or trillions of cells. Most multicellular organisms consist of many different types of cells, each highly specialized to play a particular role—from building bones or producing the pigment in flower petals to fighting disease or sensing environmental cues. But the great majority of living things on our planet exist as single cell. These cellular singletons are every bit as successful and diverse as multicellular organisms, and our very existence relies on them.

The book is an authoritative yet accessible account of what goes on inside every living cell—from building proteins and producing energy to making identical copies of themselves—and the importance of these chemical reactions both on the familiar everyday scale and on the global scale. Along the way, Challoner sheds light on many of the most intriguing questions guiding current scientific research: What special properties make stem cells so promising in the treatment of injury and disease? How and when did single-celled organisms first come together to form multicellular ones? And how might scientists soon be prepared to build on the basic principles of cell biology to build similar living cells from scratch.
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Chance in Evolution
Edited by Grant Ramsey and Charles H. Pence
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Humans, however much we would care to think otherwise, do not represent the fated pinnacle of ape evolution. The diversity of life, from single-celled organisms to multicellular animals and plants, is the result of a long, complex, and highly chancy history. But how profoundly has chance shaped life on earth? And what, precisely, do we mean by chance? Bringing together biologists, philosophers of science, and historians of science, Chance in Evolution is the first book to untangle the far-reaching effects of chance, contingency, and randomness on the evolution of life.

The book begins by placing chance in historical context, starting with the ancients and moving through Darwin and his contemporaries, documenting how the understanding of chance changed as Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection developed into the modern synthesis, and how the acceptance of chance in Darwinian theory affected theological resistance to it. Subsequent chapters detail the role of chance in contemporary evolutionary theory—in particular, in connection with the concepts of genetic drift, mutation, and parallel evolution—as well as recent empirical work in the experimental evolution of microbes and in paleobiology. By engaging in collaboration across biology, history, philosophy, and theology, this book offers a comprehensive and synthetic overview both of the history of chance in evolution and of our current best understanding of the impact of chance on life on earth.
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Changing Hands
Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body
Peter J. Capuano
University of Michigan Press, 2015
In Changing Hands, Peter J. Capuano sifts through Victorian literature and culture for changes in the way the human body is imagined in the face of urgent questions about creation, labor, gender, class, and racial categorization, using “hands” (the “distinguishing mark of . . . humanity”) as the primary point of reference. Capuano complicates his study by situating the historical argument in the context of questions about the disappearance of hands during the twentieth century into the haze of figurative meaning. Out of this curious aporia, Capuano exposes a powerful, “embodied handedness” as the historical basis for many of the uncritically metaphoric, metonymic, and/or ideogrammatic approaches to the study of the human body in recent critical discourse.

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Chasing the Red Queen
The Evolutionary Race Between Agricultural Pests and Poisons
Andy Dyer
Island Press, 2015
In the race to feed the world’s seven billion people, we are at a standstill. Over the past century, we have developed increasingly potent and sophisticated pesticides, yet in 2014, the average percentage of U.S. crops lost to agricultural pests was no less than in 1944. To use a metaphor the field of evolutionary biology borrowed from Alice in Wonderland, farmers must run ever faster to stay in the same place—i.e., produce the same yields.

With Chasing the Red Queen, Andy Dyer offers the first book to apply the Red Queen Hypothesis to agriculture. He illustrates that when selection pressure increases, species evolve in response, creating a never-ending, perpetually-escalating competition between predator (us) and prey (bugs and weeds). The result is farmers are caught in a vicious cycle of chemical dependence, stuck using increasingly dangerous and expensive toxics to beat back progressively resistant pests.

To break the cycle, we must learn the science behind it. Dyer examines one of the world’s most pressing problems as a biological case study. He presents key concepts, from Darwin’s principles of natural selection to genetic variation and adaptive phenotypes. Understanding the fundamentals of ecology and biology is the first step to “playing the Red Queen,” and escaping her unwinnable race. The book’s novel frame will help students, researchers, and policy-makers alike apply that knowledge to the critical task of achieving food security.
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Chimpanzee and Red Colobus
The Ecology of Predator and Prey
Craig B. Stanford
Harvard University Press, 1998

Our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, are familiar enough--bright and ornery and promiscuous. But they also kill and eat their kin, in this case the red colobus monkey, which may say something about primate--even hominid--evolution. This book, the first long-term field study of a predator-prey relationship involving two wild primates, documents a six-year investigation into how the risk of predation molds primate society. Taking us to Gombe National Park in Tanzania, a place made famous by Jane Goodall's studies, the book offers a close look at how predation by wild chimpanzees--observable in the park as nowhere else--has influenced the behavior, ecology, and demography of a population of red colobus monkeys.

As he explores the effects of chimpanzees' hunting, Craig Stanford also asks why these creatures prey on the red colobus. Because chimpanzees are often used as models of how early humans may have lived, Stanford's findings offer insight into the possible role of early hominids as predators, a little understood aspect of human evolution.

The first book-length study in a newly emerging genre of primate field study, Chimpanzee and Red Colobus expands our understanding of not just these two primate societies, but also the evolutionary ecology of predators and prey in general.

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Chimpanzees and Human Evolution
Martin N. Muller
Harvard University Press, 2017

Knowledge of chimpanzees in the wild has expanded dramatically in recent years. This comprehensive volume, edited by Martin Muller, Richard Wrangham, and David Pilbeam, brings together scientists who are leading a revolution to discover and explain what is unique about humans, by studying their closest living relatives. Their observations and conclusions have the potential to transform our understanding of human evolution.

Chimpanzees offer scientists an unmatched view of what distinguishes humanity from its apelike ancestors. Based on evidence from the hominin fossil record and extensive morphological, developmental, and genetic data, Chimpanzees and Human Evolution makes the case that the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans was chimpanzee-like. It most likely lived in African rainforests around eight million years ago, eating fruit and walking on its knuckles. Readers will learn why chimpanzees are a better model for the last common ancestor than bonobos, gorillas, or orangutans. A thorough chapter-by-chapter analysis reveals which key traits we share with chimpanzees and which appear to be distinctive to Homo sapiens, and shows how understanding chimpanzees helps us account for the evolution of human uniqueness. Traits surveyed include social behaviors and structures, mating systems, diet, hunting practices, tool use, culture, cognition, and communication.

Edited by three of primatology’s most renowned experts, with contributions from 32 scholars drawing on decades of field research, Chimpanzees and Human Evolution provides readers with detailed up-to-date information on what we can infer about our chimpanzee-like ancestors and points the way forward for the next generation of discoveries.

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Christianity in Evolution
An Exploration
Jack Mahoney
Georgetown University Press, 2011

Evolution has provided a new understanding of reality, with revolutionary consequences for Christianity. In an evolutionary perspective the incarnation involved God entering the evolving human species to help it imitate the trinitarian altruism in whose image it was created and counter its tendency to self-absorption. Primarily, however, the evolutionary achievement of Jesus was to confront and overcome death in an act of cosmic significance, ushering humanity into the culminating stage of its evolutionary destiny, the full sharing of God’s inner life. Previously such doctrines as original sin, the fall, sacrifice, and atonement stemmed from viewing death as the penalty for sin and are shown not only to have serious difficulties in themselves, but also to emerge from a Jewish culture preoccupied with sin and sacrifice that could not otherwise account for death. The death of Jesus on the cross is now seen as saving humanity, not from sin, but from individual extinction and meaninglessness. Death is now seen as a normal process that affect all living things and the religious doctrines connected with explaining it in humans are no longer required or justified. Similar evolutionary implications are explored affecting other subjects of Christian belief, including the Church, the Eucharist, priesthood, and moral behavior.

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City Games
The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports
Steven A. Riess
University of Illinois Press, 1989
Comprehensive and thoughtful, City Games looks at the complex interrelationship and interdependency between sport and the city. Steven A. Riess shows how demographic growth, evolving special arrangements, social reform, the formulation of class and ethnic subcultures, the expansion of urban government, and the rise of political machines and crime syndicates all interacted to influence the development of sports in the United States.
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Clay
The History and Evolution of Humankind’s Relationship with Earth’s Most Primal Element
Suzanne Staubach
University Press of New England, 2013
More than a third of the houses in the world are made of clay. Clay vessels were instrumental in the invention of cooking, wine and beer making, and international trade. Our toilets are made of clay. The first spark plugs were thrown on the potter’s wheel. Clay has played a vital role in the health and beauty fields. Indeed, this humble material was key to many advances in civilization, including the development of agriculture and the invention of baking, architecture, religion, and even the space program. In Clay, Suzanne Staubach takes a lively look at the startling history of the mud beneath our feet. Told with verve and erudition, this story will ensure you won’t see the world around you in quite the same way after reading the book.
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Coevolution of Animals and Plants
Symposium V, First International Congress of Systematic and Evolutionary Biology, 1973
Edited by Lawrence E. Gilbert and Peter H. Raven
University of Texas Press, 1975

It has long been recognized that plants and animals profoundly affect one another’s characteristics during the course of evolution. However, the importance of coevolution as a dynamic process involving such diverse factors as chemical communication, population structure and dynamics, energetics, and the evolution, structure, and functioning of ecosystems has been widely recognized for a comparatively short time. Coevolution represents a point of view about the structure of nature that only began to be fully explored in the late twentieth century. The papers presented here herald its emergence as an important and promising field of biological research.

Coevolution of Animals and Plants is the first book to focus on the dynamic aspects of animal-plant coevolution. It covers, as broadly as possible, all the ways in which plants interact with animals. Thus, it includes discussions of leaf-feeding animals and their impact on plant evolution as well as of predator-prey relationships involving the seeds of angiosperms. Several papers deal with the most familiar aspect of mutualistic plant-animal interactions—pollination relationships. The interactions of orchids and bees, ants and plants, and butterflies and plants are discussed. One article provides a fascinating example of more indirect relationships centered around the role of carotenoids, which are produced by plants but play a fundamental part in the visual systems of both plants and animals.

Coevolution of Animals and Plants provides a general conceptual framework for studies on animal-plant interaction. The papers are written from a theoretical, rather than a speculative, standpoint, stressing patterns that can be applied in a broader sense to relationships within ecosystems.

Contributors to the volume include Paul Feeny, Miriam Rothschild, Christopher Smith, Brian Hocking, Lawrence Gilbert, Calaway Dodson, Herbert Baker, Bernd Heinrich, Doyle McKey, and Gordon Frankie.

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Coevolution of Life on Hosts
Integrating Ecology and History
Dale H. Clayton, Sarah E. Bush, and Kevin P. Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2015
For most, the mere mention of lice forces an immediate hand to the head and recollection of childhood experiences with nits, medicated shampoos, and traumatic haircuts. But for a certain breed of biologist, lice make for fascinating scientific fodder, especially enlightening in the study of coevolution. In this book, three leading experts on host-parasite relationships demonstrate how the stunning coevolution that occurs between such species in microevolutionary, or ecological, time generates clear footprints in macroevolutionary, or historical, time. By integrating these scales, Coevolution of Life on Hosts offers a comprehensive understanding of the influence of coevolution on the diversity of all life.

Following an introduction to coevolutionary concepts, the authors combine experimental and comparative host-parasite approaches for testing coevolutionary hypotheses to explore the influence of ecological interactions and coadaptation on patterns of diversification and codiversification among interacting species. Ectoparasites—a diverse assemblage of organisms that ranges from herbivorous insects on plants, to monogenean flatworms on fish, and feather lice on birds—are powerful models for the study of coevolution because they are easy to observe, mark, and count. As lice on birds and mammals are permanent parasites that spend their entire lifecycles on the bodies of their hosts, they are ideally suited to generating a synthetic overview of coevolution—and, thereby, offer an exciting framework for integrating the concepts of coadaptation and codiversification.
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The Coevolutionary Process
John N. Thompson
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Traditional ecological approaches to species evolution have frequently studied too few species, relatively small areas, and relatively short time spans. In The Coevolutionary Process, John N. Thompson advances a new conceptual approach to the evolution of species interactions—the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution. Thompson demonstrates how an integrated study of life histories, genetics, and the geographic structure of populations yields a broader understanding of coevolution, or the development of reciprocal adaptations and specializations in interdependent species.

Using examples of species interactions from an enormous range of taxa, Thompson examines how and when extreme specialization evolves in interdependent species and how geographic differences in specialization, adaptation, and the outcomes of interactions shape coevolution. Through the geographic mosaic theory, Thompson bridges the gap between the study of specialization and coevolution in local communities and the study of broader patterns seen in comparisons of the phylogenies of interacting species.
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Cognitive Ecology II
Edited by Reuven Dukas and John M. Ratcliffe
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Merging evolutionary ecology and cognitive science, cognitive ecology investigates how animal interactions with natural habitats shape cognitive systems, and how constraints on nervous systems limit or bias animal behavior. Research in cognitive ecology has expanded rapidly in the past decade, and this second volume builds on the foundations laid out in the first, published in 1998.

Cognitive Ecology II integrates numerous scientific disciplines to analyze the ecology and evolution of animal cognition. The contributors cover the mechanisms, ecology, and evolution of learning and memory, including detailed analyses of bee neurobiology, bird song, and spatial learning. They also explore decision making, with mechanistic analyses of reproductive behavior in voles, escape hatching by frog embryos, and predation in the auditory domain of bats and eared insects. Finally, they consider social cognition, focusing on alarm calls and the factors determining social learning strategies of corvids, fish, and mammals.

With cognitive ecology ascending to its rightful place in behavioral and evolutionary research, this volume captures the promise that has been realized in the past decade and looks forward to new research prospects.

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Cognitive Ecology
The Evolutionary Ecology of Information Processing and Decision Making
Edited by Reuven Dukas
University of Chicago Press, 1998
How does the environment shape the ways an animal processes information and makes decisions? How do constraints imposed on nervous systems affect an animal's activities? To help answer these questions, Cognitive Ecology integrates evolutionary ecology and cognitive science, demonstrating how studies of perception, memory, and learning can deepen our understanding of animal behavior and ecology.

Individual chapters consider such issues as the evolution of learning and its influence on behavior; the effects of cognitive mechanisms on the evolution of signaling behavior; how neurobiological and evolutionary processes have shaped navigational activities; functional and mechanical explanations for altered behaviors in response to changing environments; how foragers make decisions and how these decisions are influenced by the risks of predation; and how cognitive mechanisms affect partner choice.

Cognitive Ecology will encourage biologists to consider how animal cognition affects behavior, and will also interest comparative psychologists and cognitive scientists.
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Cognitive Gadgets
The Cultural Evolution of Thinking
Cecilia Heyes
Harvard University Press, 2018

“This is an important book and likely the most thoughtful of the year in the social sciences… Highly recommended, it is likely to prove one of the most thought-provoking books of the year.”—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts. Unlike other living animal species, we are born with complicated mechanisms for reasoning about causation, reading the minds of others, copying behaviors, and using language.

Cecilia Heyes agrees that adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us.

As Cognitive Gadgets makes clear, from birth our malleable human minds can learn through culture not only what to think but how to think it.

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Columnar Cacti and Their Mutualists
Evolution, Ecology, and Conservation
Edited by Theodore H. Fleming and Alfonso Valiente-Banuet
University of Arizona Press, 2002
Although cacti such as the saguaro and organ pipe have come to define the Sonoran Desert for many people, they represent some 170 species of columnar cacti found in many parts of the Americas. These giant plants are so dominant in some ecosystems that many species of animals rely on them for food and shelter. They are pollinated by bats in central Mexico and Venezuela, by birds and bees in northern Mexico and Peru.

This book summarizes our knowledge about the ecology, evolution, and conservation of columnar cacti and their vertebrate mutualists to show that the very survival of these cacti depends on animals who pollinate them and disperse their seeds. Contributors from the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia explore aspects of geology and evolution that have forged this relationship, review findings in anatomy and physiology, and discuss recent research in population and community ecology as well as conservation issues. Ranging from the Sonoran Desert to the northern Andes, these studies reflect progress in understanding how abiotic and biotic factors interact to influence the evolution, distribution, and abundance of cacti and mutualists alike.

In addition, this book examines the ways in which humans, through the process of domestication, have modified these plants for economic benefit. The contributors also review phylogenetic relationships between cacti and nectar-feeding bats in an effort to understand how bat-plant interactions have influenced the evolution of diversity and ecological specialization of both. Because of the number of migratory pollinators feeding on columnar cacti, the authors make conservation recommendations aimed at preserving fully functional ecosystems in arid portions of the New World tropics and subtropics.

Columnar Cacti and Their Mutualists provided a benchmark for both conservation efforts and future research.
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Comeuppance
Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction
William Flesch
Harvard University Press, 2009

With Comeuppance, William Flesch delivers the freshest, most generous thinking about the novel since Walter Benjamin wrote on the storyteller and Wayne C. Booth on the rhetoric of fiction. In clear and engaging prose, Flesch integrates evolutionary psychology into literary studies, creating a new theory of fiction in which form and content flawlessly intermesh.

Fiction, Flesch contends, gives us our most powerful way of making sense of the social world. Comeuppance begins with an exploration of the appeal of gossip and ends with an account of how we can think about characters and care about them as much as about persons we know to be real. We praise a storyteller who contrives a happy or at least an appropriate ending, and fault the writer who refuses us one. Flesch uses Darwinian theory to show how fiction satisfies our desire to see the good vindicated and the wicked get their comeuppance. He conveys the danger and excitement of reading fiction with nimble intelligence and provides wide reference to stories both familiar and little known.

Flesch has given us a book that is sure to claim a central place in the discussion of literature and the humanities.

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Communication and Imperial Control in China
Evolution of the Palace Memorial System, 1693–1735
Silas H. L. Wu
Harvard University Press, 1970

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The Comparative Reception of Darwinism
Edited by Thomas F. Glick
University of Chicago Press, 1988
The reaction to Darwin's Origin of Species varied in many countries according to the roles played by national scientific institutions and traditions and the attitudes of religious and political groups. The contributors to this volume, including M. J. S. Hodge, David Hull, and Roberto Moreno, gathered in 1972 at an international conference on the comparative reception of Darwinism. Their essays look at early pro- and anti-Darwinism arguments, and three additional comparative essays and appendices add a larger perspective. For this paperback edition, Thomas F. Glick has added a new preface commenting on recent research.
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Concealing Coloration in Animals
Judy Diamond and Alan B. Bond
Harvard University Press, 2013

The biological functions of coloration in animals are sometimes surprising. Color can attract mates, intimidate enemies, and distract predators. But color patterns can also conceal animals from detection. Concealing coloration is unusual because it is an adaptation not only to the visual features of the environment but also to the perceptual and cognitive capabilities of other organisms. Judy Diamond and Alan Bond bring to light the many factors at work in the evolution of concealing coloration.

Animals that resemble twigs, tree bark, stones, and seaweed may appear to be perfect imitations, but no concealment strategy is without flaws. Amid the clutter of the natural world, predators search for minute, telltale clues that will reveal the identity of their prey. Predators have remarkable abilities to learn to discriminate the fake from the real. But prey have their own range of defensive tactics, evolving multiple appearances or the ability to change color at will. Drawing on modern experimental evidence of the functional significance of animal color strategies, Diamond and Bond offer striking illustrations of how the evolution of features in one organism can be driven by the psychology of others.

Concealing Coloration in Animals takes readers on a scientific adventure that explores creatures inside mats of floating seaweed, mice and lizards on desert rocks and sand, and rare parrots in the rainforest of New Zealand. Color photographs extensively document the mind-boggling array of deceptive strategies animals use to blend in, mislead, or vanish from view.

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Corn
Its Origin, Evolution and Improvement
Paul C. Mangelsdorf
Harvard University Press, 1974

Corn is among the most familiar of grains; it is also one of the most mysterious. In this handsomely illustrated new book, Paul Mangelsdorf, perhaps the world's foremost expert on the corn plant, summarizes the work of a lifetime devoted to unraveling the enigma of corn.

This unique grain--it has no close counterpart elsewhere in the plant kingdom--exists only in association with man, and it survives only as a result of his intervention. Thus, the story of corn is in many ways a story about people. Combining the skills of scientist and storyteller, Professor Mangelsdorf in his search for the origin of corn takes the reader to archaeological digs in once-inhabited caves in Mexico and the United States Southwest, to the discovery of fossil pollen in drill cores taken deep below Mexico City, and to experimental fields where the great diversity of corn is revealed and where the plant is hybridized with its relatives teosinte and Tripsacum.

Drawing upon the evidence from botany, genetics, cytology, archaeology, and history, the author seeks to evaluate various hypotheses on the origin of corn. He concludes that the ancestor of cultivated corn was a wild form of pod corn; that corn may have been domesticated more than once in both Mexico and South America from different geographical races of wild corn; and that hybridizations between corn and its various relatives have resulted in explosive evolution leading to a diversity of varieties and forms unmatched in any other crop plant.

This is a book about corn, but it is a book for biologists, agronomists, anthropologists, and historians, and for the interested layman who would like to know something about the grain which, "transformed, as three fourths of it is, into meat, milk, eggs, and other animal products, is our basic food plant, as it was of the people who preceded us in this hemisphere."

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The Creationists
From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, Expanded Edition
Ronald L. Numbers
Harvard University Press, 2006

In light of the embattled status of evolutionary theory, particularly as "intelligent design" makes headway against Darwinism in the schools and in the courts, this now classic account of the roots of creationism assumes new relevance. Expanded and updated to account for the appeal of intelligent design and the global spread of creationism, The Creationists offers a thorough, clear, and balanced overview of the arguments and figures at the heart of the debate.

Praised by both creationists and evolutionists for its comprehensiveness, the book meticulously traces the dramatic shift among Christian fundamentalists from acceptance of the earth's antiquity to the insistence of present-day scientific creationists that most fossils date back to Noah's flood and its aftermath. Focusing especially on the rise of this "flood geology," Ronald L. Numbers chronicles the remarkable resurgence of antievolutionism since the 1960s, as well as the creationist movement's tangled religious roots in the theologies of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Adventists, among others. His book offers valuable insight into the origins of various "creation science" think tanks and the people behind them. It also goes a long way toward explaining how creationism, until recently viewed as a "peculiarly American" phenomenon, has quietly but dynamically spread internationally--and found its expression outside Christianity in Judaism and Islam.

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front cover of Culture and the Course of Human Evolution
Culture and the Course of Human Evolution
Gary Tomlinson
University of Chicago Press, 2018
The rapid evolutionary development of modern Homo sapiens over the past 200,000 years is a topic of fevered interest in numerous disciplines. How did humans, while undergoing few physical changes from their first arrival, so quickly develop the capacities to transform their world? Gary Tomlinson’s Culture and the Course of Human Evolution is aimed at both scientists and humanists, and it makes the case that neither side alone can answer the most important questions about our origins.
 
Tomlinson offers a new model for understanding this period in our emergence, one based on analysis of advancing human cultures in an evolution that was simultaneously cultural and biological—a biocultural evolution. He places front and center the emergence of culture and the human capacities to create it, in a fashion that expands the conceptual framework of recent evolutionary theory. His wide-ranging vision encompasses arguments on the development of music, modern technology, and metaphysics. At the heart of these developments, he shows, are transformations in our species’ particular knack for signmaking. With its innovative synthesis of humanistic and scientific ideas, this book will be an essential text.
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front cover of Culture and the Evolutionary Process
Culture and the Evolutionary Process
Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson
University of Chicago Press, 1985
How do biological, psychological, sociological, and cultural factors combine to change societies over the long run? Boyd and Richerson explore how genetic and cultural factors interact, under the influence of evolutionary forces, to produce the diversity we see in human cultures. Using methods developed by population biologists, they propose a theory of cultural evolution that is an original and fair-minded alternative to the sociobiology debate.
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