Accidental Creatures

Accidental Creatures

Author: Anne Harris

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 1998-05-15

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0312865384

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A bio-technology corporation creates a new species--intelligent, four-armed, humanoid "tetras" who can live in the vats in which the company grows biopolymers--and soon the victims become the aggressors in this new SF thriller by the author of "The Nature of Smoke".


The Accidental Species

The Accidental Species

Author: Henry Gee

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 022604498X

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“With a delightfully irascible sense of humor, Henry Gee reflects on our origin . . . an excellent primer on how—and how not—to think about human evolution.” —Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary imagination, and new fossil discoveries are often hailed in headlines as revealing the elusive transitional step, the moment when we stopped being “animal” and started being “human.” In The Accidental Species, Henry Gee, longtime paleontology editor at Nature, takes aim at this misleading notion, arguing that it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how evolution works and, when applied to the evolution of our own species, supports mistaken ideas about our own place in the universe. Gee presents a robust and stark challenge to our tendency to see ourselves as the acme of creation. Far from being a quirk of religious fundamentalism, human exceptionalism, Gee argues, is an error that also infects scientific thought. Touring the many features of human beings that have recurrently been used to distinguish us from the rest of the animal world, Gee shows that our evolutionary outcome is one possibility among many, one that owes more to chance than to an organized progression to supremacy. He starts with bipedality, which he shows could have arisen entirely by accident, as a by-product of sexual selection, then moves on to technology, large brain size, intelligence, language, and, finally, sentience. He reveals each of these attributes to be alive and well throughout the animal world—they are not, indeed, unique to our species. The Accidental Species combines Gee’s expertise and experience with healthy skepticism and humor to create a book that aims to overturn popular thinking on human evolution. The key is not what’s missing—but how we’re linked.


The Accidental Apprentice

The Accidental Apprentice

Author: Amanda Foody

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 153447756X

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Eleven-year-old Barclay Thorne yearns for the quiet life of a mushroom farmer, but after unwittingly bonding with a beast in the forbidden Woods, he must seek Lore Keepers to break the bond and return home.


The Accidental Ecosystem

The Accidental Ecosystem

Author: Peter S. Alagona

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2022-04-19

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0520386329

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One of Smithsonian Magazine's Favorite Books of 2022 With wildlife thriving in cities, we have the opportunity to create vibrant urban ecosystems that serve both people and animals. The Accidental Ecosystem tells the story of how cities across the United States went from having little wildlife to filling, dramatically and unexpectedly, with wild creatures. Today, many of these cities have more large and charismatic wild animals living in them than at any time in at least the past 150 years. Why have so many cities—the most artificial and human-dominated of all Earth’s ecosystems—grown rich with wildlife, even as wildlife has declined in most of the rest of the world? And what does this paradox mean for people, wildlife, and nature on our increasingly urban planet? The Accidental Ecosystem is the first book to explain this phenomenon from a deep historical perspective, and its focus includes a broad range of species and cities. Cities covered include New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Austin, Miami, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Digging into the natural history of cities and unpacking our conception of what it means to be wild, this book provides fascinating context for why animals are thriving more in cities than outside of them. Author Peter S. Alagona argues that the proliferation of animals in cities is largely the unintended result of human decisions that were made for reasons having little to do with the wild creatures themselves. Considering what it means to live in diverse, multispecies communities and exploring how human and nonhuman members of communities might thrive together, Alagona goes beyond the tension between those who embrace the surge in urban wildlife and those who think of animals as invasive or as public safety hazards. The Accidental Ecosystem calls on readers to reimagine interspecies coexistence in shared habitats, as well as policies that are based on just, humane, and sustainable approaches.


Creatures of Accident

Creatures of Accident

Author: Wallace Arthur

Publisher: Hill and Wang

Published: 2007-09-04

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1466801794

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The most important aspect of evolution, from a philosophical viewpoint, is the rise of complex, advanced creatures from simple, primitive ones. This "vertical" dimension of evolution has been downplayed in both the specialist and popular literature on evolution, in large part because it was in the past associated with unsavory political views. The avoidance of evolution's vertical dimension has, however, left evolutionary biology open to the perception, from outside, that it deals merely with the diversification of rather similar creatures, all at the same level of "advancedness" from a common ancestor—for example, the classic case studies of finches with different beaks or moths of different colors. The latest incarnation of creationism, dubbed intelligent design (or ID), has taken advantage of this situation. It portrays an evolutionary process that is constantly guided—especially in its upward direction—by the hand of an unseen Creator, who is able to ensure that it ends up producing humans. Creatures of Accident attacks the antiscience ID worldview, mainly by building a persuasive picture of how "unaided" evolution produces advanced creatures from simple ones by an essentially accidental process. Having built this picture, in the final chapter the book reflects on its religious implications.


Accidental Monsters

Accidental Monsters

Author: Eric Basso

Publisher: Leaping Dog Press/Asylum

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13:

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Poetry. Completed in six months, on the eve of the poet's twenty-ninth birthday, ACCIDENTAL MONSTERS was Eric Basso's first collection of poems. The author of the critically acclaimed GOLEM TRIPTYCH carries us through a world where landscapes and interiors merge. This is a poetry of convergences, set in the time-warp which traps that disquieting moment between the dream and the awakening: beyond the last step/ where a soft part of the/ floor had turned to dust/ red pupils glowed like/ round cinders in/ the dark (Rudimentary Gods). Eric Basso was born in Baltimore in 1947. He is the author of twenty-one plays, and his poems have been published in the Chicago Review, Central Park, Asylum, and numerous other publications.


Actuality

Actuality

Author: C. W. Adams

Publisher: CW Adams

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 141962119X

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This collection of essays delivers realistic and logical answers to our probing questions of life with refreshing scientific grounding. Actuality uncovers the essential elements for understanding our true nature and reason for existence. Common occurrences, everyday observations and scientific data give the reader clear and logical answers. Once establishing these clear answers, Actuality goes deeper, offering the reader a clear pathway towards transcendental realization.


Saint Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God

Saint Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God

Author: Joseph Owens

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1980-01-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780873954013

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This book puts before the reader a succinct and philosophically valid interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas' arguments for the existence of God by a modern, historically grounded interpreter of his thought. Father Joseph Owens is well known for the exacting care with which he prepares his articles and the solid scholarly apparatus with which he supports them. His knowledge of Greek, Latin, Aristotelian, as well as the Thomistic corpus is profound, and he is conversant with the various interpretative traditions within Aristotelianism and Thomism in ancient, medieval, and modern times in their appropriate languages. This volume will challenge the reader, yet it includes everything to help comprehend the position of St. Thomas Aquinas on this central issue.


Alien Love

Alien Love

Author: Kevin Abell

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2011-10-25

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1463439326

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ALIEN (al-yun) adj. 1 Of another country; foreign 2 Hence, of foreign character; not similar; incongruous; also, owing allegiance to a foreign country. LOVE (luv) noun, verb. 1 ? Do you 'love' chocolate? Why does The Love Shoppe sell lingerie? If your son was a thief, or a drug dealer, would you report him to the authorities? Whatever love was intended to be, it has become the sentiment which embraces immorality, overlooks the injustices committed by those closest to us, as well as that which intertwines itself with human sexuality. For many of us, if we were to see love as it is, we would scarcely recognize it. In its purest form, authentic love has the appearance of something foreign. Love has been lost in our culture, if we ever even had it in the first place. Finding the way of love begins by coming to meet The One whose nation is not of this world.


God or No God

God or No God

Author: Haya Muhammad Eid

Publisher: Haya Muhammad Eid

Published: 2018-01-10

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13:

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It was narrated that a Bedouin was traveling on his camel when his camel suddenly dropped dead. He descended from the camel’s back and started circling it while meditatively saying: Why don’t you get up? Why don’t you come back to life? Here are your limbs! They are perfectly complete and your body is sound! What is the matter with you? What used to keep you going? What worked in you to make you alive? What caused you to die? What stopped you now from moving? Then he left his camel in amazement, wondering what had happened to it. There are traces of past and present creations everywhere — are they meaningless or living signs of a Creator God?