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Author: Leon Gray
Publisher: Capstone
Published: 2015-08
Total Pages: 18
ISBN-13: 1491469846
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Describes the different types of tools animals use to find food, build homes or defend themselves."--
Author: Robert W. Shumaker
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2011-05-02
Total Pages: 302
ISBN-13: 1421401282
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen published in 1980, Benjamin B. Beck’s Animal Tool Behavior was the first volume to catalog and analyze the complete literature on tool use and manufacture in non-human animals. Beck showed that animals—from insects to primates—employed different types of tools to solve numerous problems. His work inspired and energized legions of researchers to study the use of tools by a wide variety of species. In this revised and updated edition of the landmark publication, Robert W. Shumaker and Kristina R. Walkup join Beck to reveal the current state of knowledge regarding animal tool behavior. Through a comprehensive synthesis of the studies produced through 2010, the authors provide an updated and exact definition of tool use, identify new modes of use that have emerged in the literature, examine all forms of tool manufacture, and address common myths about non-human tool use. Specific examples involving invertebrates, birds, fish, and mammals describe the differing levels of sophistication of tool use exhibited by animals.
Author: Library of Congress
Publisher:
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 968
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Alan Wolfe
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2023-04-28
Total Pages: 263
ISBN-13: 0520915615
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAre we losing touch with our humanity? Yes, contends Alan Wolfe in this provocative critique of modern American intellectual life. From ecology, sociobiology, and artificial intelligence to post-modernism and the social sciences, Wolfe examines the antihumanism underlying many contemporary academic trends. Animal rights theorists and "ecological extremists" too often downplay human capacities. Computers are smarter than we are and will soon replace us as the laws of evolution continue to unfold. Even the humanities, held in sway by imported theories that are explicitly antihumanistic in intention, have little place for human beings. Against this backdrop, Wolfe calls for a return to a moral and humanistic social science, one in which the qualities that distinguish us as a species are given full play. Tracing the development of modern social theory, Wolfe explores the human-centered critical thinking of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars, now eclipsed by post-modern and scientistic theorizing. In the work of Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and Mead, human beings are placed on the center stage, shaping and interpreting the world around them. Sociology in particular emerged as a distinct science because the species it presumed to understand was distinct as well. Recent intellectual trends, in contrast, allow little room for the human difference. Sociobiology underlines the importance of genetics and mathematically governed evolutionary rules while downplaying the unique cognitive abilities of humans. Artificial intelligence heralds the potential superiority of computers to the human mind. Post-modern theorizing focuses on the interpretation of texts in self-referential modes, rejecting humanism in any form. And mainstream social science, using positivist paradigms of human behavior based on the natural sciences, develops narrow and arid models of social life. Wolfe eloquently makes a case for a new commitment to humanistic social science based on a realistic and creative engagement with modern society. A reconstituted social science, acknowledging our ability to interpret the world, will thrive on a recognition of human difference. Nurturing a precious humanism, social science can celebrate and further refine our unique capacity to create morality and meaning for ourselves. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993. Are we losing touch with our humanity? Yes, contends Alan Wolfe in this provocative critique of modern American intellectual life. From ecology, sociobiology, and artificial intelligence to post-modernism and the social sciences, Wolfe examines the antihu
Author: Ashley Shew
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2017-09-20
Total Pages: 151
ISBN-13: 149854312X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAnimal studies literature, and its public consumption have sparked interest in questions about humanity. Most scholars aim these studies to help us sort out how we should regard other creatures and how we should understand ourselves in light of their capacities. This book offers something a little different, investigating the conceptual limits of tool-use and technology through the lens of technological knowledge. Making sense of animal studies can be tricky because of long-held and culturally pervasive beliefs and messages about human triumph over nature (where animals are considered to be part of nature). Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge, considers animal tool use, techniques, and construction within the context of theories about what constitutes technology and what constitutes knowledge. With reference to an engaging variety of animal case studies, primarily from research on apes, dolphins, and crows, this book shows how concepts from philosophy of technology can be used to make better sense of the animal cases. These animal cases also help us to refine our philosophical concepts, creating more careful distinction and uniting different accounts of technological knowledge.
Author: John Napier
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-05-11
Total Pages: 195
ISBN-13: 1400845912
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIntended for all readers--including magicians, detectives, musicians, orthopedic surgeons, and anthropologists--this book offers a thorough account of that most intriguing and most human of appendages: the hand. In this illustrated work, John Napier explores a wide range of absorbing subjects such as fingerprints, handedness, gestures, fossil remains, and the making and using of tools.
Author: Richard G. Lipsey
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2005-11-03
Total Pages: 636
ISBN-13: 9780191558092
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book examines the long term economic growth that has raised the West's material living standards to levels undreamed of by counterparts in any previous time or place. The authors argue that this growth has been driven by technological revolutions that have periodically transformed the West's economic, social and political landscape over the last 10,000 years and allowed the West to become, until recently, the world's only dominant technological force. Unique in the diversity of the analytical techniques used, the book begins with a discussion of the causes and consequences of economic growth and technological change. The authors argue that long term economic growth is largely driven by pervasive technologies now known as General Purpose (GPTs). They establish an alternative to the standard growth models that use an aggregate production function and then introduce the concept of GPTs, complete with a study of how these technologies have transformed the West since the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Early modern science is given more importance than in most other treatments and the 19th century demographic revolution is studied with a combination of formal models of population dynamics and historical analysis. The authors argue that once sustained growth was established in the West, formal models can shed much light on its subsequent behaviour. They build non-conventional, dynamic, non-stationary equilibrium models of GPT-driven growth that incorporate a range of phenomena that their historical studies show to be important but which are excluded from other GPT models in the interests of analytical tractability. The book concludes with a study of the policy implications that follow from their unique approach.
Author: Chip Colwell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 022680142X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"To be human means to need things. Even more human is to need more and more of them. In this engaging, charming book, archaeologist, curator, and writer Chip Colwell takes us around the world, covering topics as wide-ranging as the dawn of tool making, the earliest cave paintings, the complexities of clothing, the Industrial Revolution, the torrent of gizmos invented to bring us closer and supposedly make our lives easier, and, finally, the mountains of unwanted stuff in dumps. Along the way, he raises questions such as: Why is a treasured keepsake sacred to one person but meaningless to another? What do we go through when we clean out the belongings of the dearly departed? And what is the point of storing things in museums? The book is organized around three historical phases: (1) the invention of tools; (2) the dawn of the belief that things mean something beyond their immediate use (around 50,000 years ago); and (3) the Industrial Revolution and the age of mass consumption. Colwell takes us on a tour across millions of years to explain how humans have arrived at this moment-a world that both requires things and is suffering because of them"--
Author: Rebecca Stefoff
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC
Published: 2013-08-01
Total Pages: 113
ISBN-13: 160870615X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBirds that are smarter than a fifth grader--smart enough to do math, that is. Chimps that use tools. These are just two examples of the amazing skills of the animals all around us. In this jovial book, award-winning author Rebecca Stefoff tells us not just that animals are intelligent, but explains how researchers have discovered how smart they are. Readers will learn the languages of chimps and the mental maps of birds as well as the disputes that have arisen over the years about the very idea of animal intelligence.
Author: Daniel Black
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-26
Total Pages: 284
ISBN-13: 0429757204
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book takes the interface – or rather to interface, a process rather than a discrete object or location – as a concept emblematic of our contemporary embodied relationship with technological artefacts. The fundamental question addressed by this book is: How can we understand what it means to perceive or act upon the world as a body–artefact assemblage? Black works to clarify the role of artefacts of all kinds in human perception and action, then considers the ways in which new digital technologies can expand and transform this capacity to change our mode of engagement with our environment. Throughout, the discussion is grounded in specific technologies – some already familiar and some still in development (e.g. new virtual reality and brain–machine interface technologies, natural user interfaces, etc.). In order to develop a detailed, generalizable theory of how we interface with technology, Black assembles an analytical toolkit from a number of different disciplines, including media theory, ethology, clinical psychology, cultural theory, philosophy, science and technology studies, cultural history, aesthetics and neuroscience.
