The Eighth Day
The Eighth Day

Author: Richard Newbold Adams

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-02-04

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0292736436

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Can human social evolution be described in terms common to other sciences, most specifically, as an energy process? The Eighth Day reflects a conviction that the human trajectory, for all its uniqueness and indeterminism, will never be satisfactorily understood until it is framed in dynamics that are common to all of nature. The problem in doing this, however, lies in ourselves. The major social theories have failed to treat human social evolution as a component of broader natural processes. The Eighth Day argues that the energy process provides a basis for explaining, comparing, and measuring complex social evolution. Using traditional ecological energy flow studies as background, society is conceived as a self-organization of energy. This perspective enables Adams to analyze society in term of the natural selection of self-organizing energy forms and the trigger processes basic to it. Domestication, civilization, socioeconomic development, and the regulation of contemporary industrial nation-states serve to illustrate the approach. A principal aim is to explore the limitation that energy process imposes on human social evolution as well as to clarify the alternatives that it allows. Richly informed by contemporary anthropological historicism, sociobiology, and Marxism, The Eighth Day avoids simple reductionism and denies facile ideological categorization. Adams builds on work in nonequilibrium thermodynamics and theoretical biology and brings three decades of his own work to an analysis of human society that demands an extreme materialism in which human thought and action find a central place.

Textbook of Work Physiology
Textbook of Work Physiology

Author: Per-Olof Åstrand

Publisher: Human Kinetics

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 664

ISBN-13: 9780736001403

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This updated and revised fourth edition of the respected Textbook of Work Physiology combines classical issues in exercise and work physiology with the latest scientific findings. The result is an outstanding professional reference that will be indispensable to advanced students, physiologists, clinicians, physical educators--any professional pursuing study of the body as a working machine. Written by world-renowned exercise physiologists and sports medicine specialists, the new edition retains the important historical background and exercise physiology research conducted by the authors over the past 40 years. In addition, it brings you up-to-date on the growth in the field since the previous edition, presenting today's most current scientific research findings. Beyond the scientific details, the book also addresses the application of this information to the fields of exercise physiology and work physiology, making the resource more useful than ever. Textbook of Work Physiology, Fourth Edition includes these updated features: -More than 1,600 references -"Classical studies" and "additional reading" side boxes for those who wish to study a topic more closely -In-depth studies taken from the working world, recreational activities, and elite sport -More than 380 illustrations, tables, and photos -Comprehensive appendix, including glossary, list of symbols, conversion tables, and definitions of terms and units

Eating and Being
Eating and Being

Author: Steven Shapin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2024-11-20

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 0226832228

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What we eat, who we are, and the relationship between the two. Eating and Being is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case. For a great span of the past—from antiquity through about the middle of the eighteenth century—one of the most pervasive branches of medicine was known as dietetics, prescribing not only what people should eat but also how they should order many aspects of their lives, including sleep, exercise, and emotional management. Dietetics did not distinguish between the medical and the moral, nor did it acknowledge the difference between what was good for you and what was good. Dietetics counseled moderation in all things, where moderation was counted as a virtue as well as the way to health. But during the nineteenth century, nutrition science began to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the vocabulary of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories, and the medical and the moral went their separate ways. Steven Shapin shows how much depended upon that shift, and he also explores the extent to which the sensibilities of dietetics have been lost. Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and invites us to reflect on what it means to feel about food as we now do. Shapin shows how the change from dietetics to nutrition science fundamentally altered how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds.

Meditation
Meditation

Author: Deane H. Shapiro (Jr.)

Publisher: AldineTransaction

Published:

Total Pages: 756

ISBN-13: 9781412849951

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Many claim that meditation is effective in the treatment of many ailments associated with stress and high blood pressure, and in the management of pain. While there are many popular books on meditation, few embrace the science as well as the art of meditation. In this volume, Shapiro and Walsh fill this need by assembling a complete collection of scholarly articles--Meditation: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives. From an academic rather than a popular vantage, the volume takes the claims and counterclaims about meditation to a deeper analytical level by including studies from clinical psychology and psychiatry, neuroscience, psychophysiology, and biochemistry. Each selection is a contribution to the field, either as a classic of research, or by being methodologically elegant, heuristically interesting, or creative. Original articles cover such topics as the effects of meditation in the treatment of stress, hypertension, and addictions; the comparison of meditation with other self-regulation strategies; the adverse effects of meditation; and meditation-induced altered states of consciousness. Concluding with a major bibliography of related works, Meditation offers the reader a valuable overview of the state and possible future directions of meditation research. Today, in the popular media and elsewhere, debate continues: Is meditation an effective technique for spiritual and physical healing, or is it quackery? Meditation: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives weighs in on this debate by presenting what continues to be the most complete collection of scholarly articles ever amassed on the subject of meditation.

Class Politics in the Information Age
Class Politics in the Information Age

Author: Donald Clark Hodges

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780252025839

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"Class Politics in the Information Age uncovers the origins, development, aims, means, and moral and political hypocrisy of the new class of professionals. In line with a broad consensus that expertise has replaced capital as the decisive asset in the informational economy, Hodges asserts that professionals have replaced capitalists as the premier exploiting class. The dictatorship of the proletariat predicted by Marx is, the United States, a dictatorship of experts."--BOOK JACKET.

Meditation
Meditation

Author: Jr. Shapiro

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-12

Total Pages: 1013

ISBN-13: 1351506137

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Many claim that meditation is effective in the treatment of many ailments associated with stress and high blood pressure, and in the management of pain. While there are many popular books on meditation, few embrace the science as well as the art of meditation. In this volume, Shapiro and Walsh fill this need by assembling a complete collection of scholarly articles--Meditation: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives. From an academic rather than a popular vantage, the volume takes the claims and counterclaims about meditation to a deeper analytical level by including studies from clinical psychology and psychiatry, neuroscience, psychophysiology, and biochemistry. Each selection is a contribution to the field, either as a classic of research, or by being methodologically elegant, heuristically interesting, or creative. Original articles cover such topics as the effects of meditation in the treatment of stress, hypertension, and addictions; the comparison of meditation with other self-regulation strategies; the adverse effects of meditation; and meditation-induced altered states of consciousness. Concluding with a major bibliography of related works, Meditation offers the reader a valuable overview of the state and possible future directions of meditation research. Today, in the popular media and elsewhere, debate continues: Is meditation an effective technique for spiritual and physical healing, or is it quackery? Meditation: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives weighs in on this debate by presenting what continues to be the most complete collection of scholarly articles ever amassed on the subject of meditation.