Darwin's Paradox

Darwin's Paradox

Author: Nina Munteanu

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9781896944685

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"When an intelligent virus and an intelligent machine conspire to seize North America's largest city, then threaten to spread world chaos, the only person who can save humanity is the woman who started it all"--Cover.


The Paradox of Evolution

The Paradox of Evolution

Author: Stephen Rothman

Publisher: Prometheus Books

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1633880729

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"In [this book], psychologist Stephen Rothman exposes a major, through remarkably amost completely neglected problem with Darwin's theory of evolution. Its two essential elements, natural selection and reproduction, are in important respects contradictory. In considering their relationship, Rothman makes the revolutionary claim that the evolution of life's complex and diverse reproductive mechanisms is not the consequence of natural selection. In so doing, he exposes the deepest question possible about life's nature-- its reason for being. In meticulously detailed but accessible terms he lays out the crux of the paradox and offers an intriguing solution within a naturalistic framework. In an obstensibly purposeless universe, somehow purposeful life has evolved. For all living things there are two overarching purposes: survival and the creation of new life. Natural selection is about the survival of existing life but has no interest in life's future, whether it persists or perishes. By contrast, reproduction is only about the future of life and has no interest in existing life except as a means to an end. Where do these purposes come from? As Rothamn demonstrates, at every level life is wired to react to danger. Counterintuitively, without danger life would neithr have come into being nor evolved. In the same way, death drives the creation of new life and has propelled the evolution of the mechanisms of reproduction. Written with great clarity and informed by deep learning, this elegant, thoughtful work tackles some of the most challening questions raised by the theory of evolution."--Page [4] Cover.


Paradoxes In Immunology

Paradoxes In Immunology

Author: Geoffrey W. Hoffman

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2019-08-15

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 100069397X

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First published in 1986: Paradoxes play a key role in the advancement of science. They are associated with excitement, and with the knowledge that we must be looking at something the wrong way. This book discusses in detail Paradoxes in Immunology.


Investigating Seafloors and Oceans

Investigating Seafloors and Oceans

Author: Antony Joseph

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2016-12-08

Total Pages: 614

ISBN-13: 0128093633

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Investigating Seafloors and Oceans: From Mud Volcanoes to Giant Squid offers a bottom-to-top tour of the world's oceans, exposing the secrets hidden therein from a variety of scientific perspectives. Opening with a discussion of the earth's formation, hot spots, ridges, plate tectonics, submarine trenches, and cold seeps, the text goes on to address such topics as the role of oceans in the origin of life, tidal bore, thermal effects, ecosystem services, marine creatures, and nutraceutical and pharmaceutical resources. This unique reference provides insight into a wide array of questions that researchers continue to ask about the vast study of oceans and the seafloor. It is a one-of-a-kind examination of oceans that offers important perspectives for researchers, practitioners, and academics in all marine-related fields. - Includes chapters addressing various scientific disciplines, offering the opportunity for readers to gain insights on diverse topics in the study of oceans - Provides scientific discussion on thermo-tolerant microbial life in sub-seafloor hot sediments and vent fields, as well as the origin of life debates and the puzzles revolving around how life originated - Includes detailed information on the origin of dreaded episodes, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, internal waves and tidal bores - Contains information on the contribution of the oceans in terms of providing useful nutraceutical and pharmaceutical products


The New Science of Radical Innovation

The New Science of Radical Innovation

Author: Sunnie Giles

Publisher: BenBella Books

Published: 2018-04-10

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1946885231

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Discover a groundbreaking, science-based approach to leadership that catalyzes radical innovation for dramatic—and permanent—results. Today's business environment is undergoing a revolutionary transformation, defined by extraordinary levels of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity). But most traditional companies are still built for the old-world economy when the new mandate from VUCA requires a fresh leadership approach. Dr. Sunnie Giles is a new generation expert on radical innovation who takes the mystery out of what radical innovation is and transforms organizations into ones fit to deliver radical innovation. Her in-depth research reveals that applying concepts from neuroscience, complex systems approach, and quantum mechanics can help leaders catalyze radical innovation rapidly. Giles's breakthrough leadership development program, called Quantum Leadership, is the key to survival in the today's VUCA market, with huge consequences for organizations' bottom lines. The New Science of Radical Innovation provides profound insights and actionable tools to help you accelerate the speed of execution, balance between team cohesion and self-organization, and tap into the power of collective wisdom. Inside, discover how to develop the six leadership competencies you need to catalyze radical innovation in your organization: • Self Management • Providing Safety • Creating Differentiation • Strengthening Connection • Facilitating Learning • Stimulating Radical Innovation This book will help you redefine how value is created in your industry.


Darwin the Writer

Darwin the Writer

Author: George Levine

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2011-06-30

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0191619345

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Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, arguably the most important book written in English in the nineteenth century, transformed the way we looked at the world. It is usually assumed that this is because the idea of evolution was so staggeringly powerful. Prize-winning author George Levine suggests that much of its influence was due, in fact, to its artistry; to the way it was written. Alive with metaphor, vivid descriptions, twists, hesitations, personal exclamations, and humour, the prose is imbued with the sorts of tensions, ambivalences, and feelings characteristic of great literature. Although it is certainly a work of "science," the Origin is equally a work of "literature," at home in the company of celebrated Victorian novels such as Middlemarch and Bleak House, books that give us a unique yet recognisable sense of what the world is really like, while not being literally 'true'. Darwin's enormous cultural success, Levine contends, depended as much on the construction of his argument and the nature of his language, as it did on the power of his ideas and his evidence. By challenging the dominant reading of his work, this impassioned and energetic book gives us a Darwin who is comic rather than tragic, ebullient rather than austere, and who takes delight in the wild and fluid entanglement of things.


Demons in Eden

Demons in Eden

Author: Jonathan Silvertown

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-11-15

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 0226757773

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At the heart of evolution lies a bewildering paradox. Natural selection favors above all the individual that leaves the most offspring—a superorganism of sorts that Jonathan Silvertown here calls the "Darwinian demon." But if such a demon existed, this highly successful organism would populate the entire world with its own kind, beating out other species and eventually extinguishing biodiversity as we know it. Why then, if evolution favors this demon, is the world filled with so many different life forms? What keeps this Darwinian demon in check? If humankind is now the greatest threat to biodiversity on the planet, have we become the Darwinian demon? Demons in Eden considers these questions using the latest scientific discoveries from the plant world. Readers join Silvertown as he explores the astonishing diversity of plant life in regions as spectacular as the verdant climes of Japan, the lush grounds of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, the shallow wetlands and teeming freshwaters of Florida, the tropical rainforests of southeast Mexico, and the Canary Islands archipelago, whose evolutionary novelties—and exotic plant life—have earned it the sobriquet "the Galapagos of botany." Along the way, Silvertown looks closely at the evolution of plant diversity in these locales and explains why such variety persists in light of ecological patterns and evolutionary processes. In novel and useful ways, he also investigates the current state of plant diversity on the planet to show the ever-challenging threats posed by invasive species and humans. Bringing the secret life of plants into more colorful and vivid focus than ever before, Demons in Eden is an empathic and impassioned exploration of modern plant ecology that unlocks evolutionary mysteries of the natural world.


Darwin's Love of Life

Darwin's Love of Life

Author: Karen L. Harel

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-10-25

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 0231557264

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Biophilia—the love of life—encompasses the drive to survive, a sense of kinship with all life-forms, and an instinct for beauty. In this unconventional book, Kay Harel uses biophilia as a lens to explore Charles Darwin’s life and thought in deeply original ways. In a set of interrelated essays, she considers how the love of life enabled him to see otherwise unseen evolutionary truths. Harel traces the influence of biophilia on Darwin’s views of dogs, facts, thought, emotion, and beauty, informed by little-known material from his private notebooks. She argues that much of what Darwin described, envisioned, and felt was biophilia in action. Closing the book is a profile of Darwin’s marriage to Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin, a woman gifted in music and medicine who shared her husband’s love of life. Harel’s meditative, playful, and lyrical musings draw on the tools of varied disciplines—aesthetics, astronomy, biology, evolutionary theory, history of science, philosophy, psychiatry, and more—while remaining unbounded by any particular one. Taking unexpected paths to recast a figure we thought we knew, this book offers readers a different Darwin: a man full of love, joy, awe, humility, curiosity, and a zest for living.