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Author: Simon Ings
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 362
ISBN-13: 9780393067194
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIngs' work delves into both the evolution of sight and the evolution of the human understanding of sight. The book presents the natural science, while also addressing the history, philosophy, and mythology of how and why people see the way they do. Illustrations throughout.
Author: Simon Ings
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWe spend about one-tenth of our waking hours completely blind. Only one percent of what we see is in focus at any one time. We exist in a world we see that's always about half a second behind the real one. In fact you don't need eyes to see - blind volunteers have been taught to see through their chests. Wasps can't see, but map their surroundings instead. If we are stared at, our heartbeat rises and our galvanic skin response alters. How many generations did it take for the first fish to acquire eyes? Answer is 400,000. Why do humans have whites to their eyes when other species don't? Could it be that thinking arose as an evolutionary response to seeing? Without eyes, would minds exist at all? Be prepared to have your eyes opened! Using a spellbinding mix of scientific research, mathematics, philosophy, history, neuroscience, anecdote and language theory, in The Eye, Simon Ings unravels brilliantly the never-ending puzzle of how and why we see in the way that we do. From looking at the work of a huge range of theorists and scientists, to myths and personal experiences, and with the help of a beguiling mix of illustrated visual conundrums and enigmas, Ings triumphs with a compelling dissection of the age-old mysteries of the eye that's both seriously interesting and interestingly fun. He tells the eye's whole story for the very first time, fusing eye and sight into a single story - this is popular science of the highest order.
Author: Nicholas J. Wade
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2000-01-31
Total Pages: 492
ISBN-13: 9780262731294
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis illustrated survey covers what Nicholas Wade calls the "observational era of vision," beginning with the Greek philosophers and ending with Wheatstone's description of the stereoscope in the late 1830s.
Author: Michael Tomasello
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2018-04-09
Total Pages: 193
ISBN-13: 0674986830
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Tomasello maintains that our prehuman ancestors, like today's great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello's "shared intentionality hypothesis" captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together and coordinate thoughts. A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.
Author: Richard Fortey
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2011-03-23
Total Pages: 566
ISBN-13: 0307761185
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBy one of Britain's most gifted scientists: a magnificently daring and compulsively readable account of life on Earth (from the "big bang" to the advent of man), based entirely on the most original of all sources--the evidence of fossils. With excitement and driving intelligence, Richard Fortey guides us from the barren globe spinning in space, through the very earliest signs of life in the sulphurous hot springs and volcanic vents of the young planet, the appearance of cells, the slow creation of an atmosphere and the evolution of myriad forms of plants and animals that could then be sustained, including the magnificent era of the dinosaurs, and on to the last moment before the debut of Homo sapiens. Ranging across multiple scientific disciplines, explicating in wonderfully clear and refreshing prose their findings and arguments--about the origins of life, the causes of species extinctions and the first appearance of man--Fortey weaves this history out of the most delicate traceries left in rock, stone and earth. He also explains how, on each aspect of nature and life, scientists have reached the understanding we have today, who made the key discoveries, who their opponents were and why certain ideas won. Brimful of wit, fascinating personal experience and high scholarship, this book may well be our best introduction yet to the complex history of life on Earth. A Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection With 32 pages of photographs
Author: Diane Ackerman
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2011-12-07
Total Pages: 354
ISBN-13: 0307763315
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDiane Ackerman's lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth. “Delightful . . . gives the reader the richest possible feeling of the worlds the senses take in.” —The New York Times
Author: American Museum of Natural History
Publisher:
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781454912149
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHighlights 40 masterworks of illustrated scientific art from the Rare Book Collection of the American Museum of Natural History.
Author: Francis Mark Mondimore
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 1996-10-30
Total Pages: 365
ISBN-13: 0801853494
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAnd he focuses on the process by which individuals come to identify themselves as homosexual, the sensitivity of children to their own sexual identities, and the psychological effects of the stigmatization of homosexuality on adolescents.
Author: Rob DeSalle
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-07-07
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781643134420
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA star curator at the American Museum of Natural History widens the palette and shows how the physical, natural, and cultural context of color are inextricably tied to what we see right before our eyes. Is color a phenomenon of science or a thing of art? Over the years, color has dazzled, enhanced, and clarified the world we see, embraced through the experimental palettes of painting, the advent of the color photograph, Technicolor pictures, color printing, on and on, a vivid and vibrant celebrated continuum. These turns to represent reality in “living color” echo our evolutionary reliance on and indeed privileging of color as a complex and vital form of consumption, classification, and creation. It’s everywhere we look, yet do we really know much of anything about it? Finding color in stars and light, examining the system of classification that determines survival through natural selection, studying the arrival of color in our universe and as a fulcrum for philosophy, DeSalle’s brilliant A Natural History of Color establishes that an understanding of color on many different levels is at the heart of learning about nature, neurobiology, individualism, even a philosophy of existence. Color and a fine tuned understanding of it is vital to understanding ourselves and our consciousness.
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 2021-08-31
Total Pages: 664
ISBN-13: 9780241393345
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