But is it? In this provocative, groundbreaking book, renowned anthropologist (and mother) Sarah Blaffer Hrdy shares a radical new vision of motherhood and its crucial role in human evolution.Hrdy strips away stereotypes and gender-biased myths to demonstrate that traditional views of maternal behavior are essentially wishful thinking codified as objective observation. As Hrdy argues, far from being "selfless," successful primate mothers have always combined nurturing with ambition, mother love with sexual love, ambivalence with devotion. In fact all mothers, in the struggle to guarantee both their own survival and that of their offspring, deal nimbly with competing demands and conflicting strategies.In her nuanced, stunningly original interpretation of the relationships between mothers and fathers, mothers and babies, and mothers and their social groups, Hrdy offers not only a revolutionary new meaning to motherhood but an important new understanding of human evolution. Written with grace and clarity, suffused with the wisdom of a long and distinguished career, Mother Nature is a profound contribution to our understanding of who we are as a species--and why we have become this way.

    

    One of Pennock's major innovations is to turn from biological evolution to the less-charged subject of linguistic evolution, which has strong theoretical parallels with biological evolution both in content and in the sort of evidence scientists use to draw conclusions about origins Several chapters deal with the work of Phillip Johnson, a highly influential leader of the new creationists. Pennock explains how science uses naturalism and discusses the relationship between factual and moral issues in the creationism-evolution controversy. The book also includes a discussion of Darwin's own shift from creationist to evolutionist and an extended argument for keeping private religious beliefs separate from public scientific knowledge.

    Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from.Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes place within it, are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny. These include capacities for sharing attention with other persons; for understanding that others have intentions of their own; and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. In his discussions of language, symbolic representation, and cognitive development, Tomasello describes with authority and ingenuity the "ratchet effect" of these capacities working over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops. He also proposes a novel hypothesis, based on processes of social cognition and cultural evolution, about what makes the cognitive representations of humans different from those of other primates.Lucid, erudite, and passionate, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition will be essential reading for developmental psychology, animal behavior, and cultural psychology.

    Nature hailed it as a book of grand and daunting sweep.... A splendid and rewarding tour de force. And New Scientist wrote that it captured the essence of modern biology, calling it an extremely significant book which, as a bonus, is very readable. Now, in The Origins of Life, Maynard Smith and Szathmary have completely rewritten Transitions to bring their ideas to a wider audience of general readers. Here is a brilliant, state-of-the-art account of how life evolved on earth, focusing primarily on six major transitions--dramatic breakthroughs in the way that information was passed between generations. The authors offer illuminating explorations of the origin of life itself, the arrival of the first cells with nuclei, the first reproduction by sexual means, the appearance of multicellular plants and animals, the emergence of cooperation and of animal societies, and the birth of language. The Origins of Life represents the thinking of two leading scientists on questions that engage us all--how life began and how it gradually evolved from tiny invisible cells into whales and trees and human beings.

    We learn about how human arrogance—demonstrated by our disregard for the small and microscopic species that constitute the Earth's engine and our reckless use of powerful herbicides or genetically engineered crops—is threatening the health of our children and the safety of our food supply. But it's not too late to change our course.From Naked Ape to Superspecies shows us that we are at a turning point—we can either push ahead on our path to destruction or we can reshape our place in nature and prosper. A new introductory chapter provides an overview of how the world has changed since the first edition was published. The final chapter of the book has been revised, and new examples and analyses have been added to the existing chapters throughout the book.Published in partnership with the David Suzuki Foundation.

    200 full-color illustrations.

    The first edition, considered the leading text in the field, is required reading for all marine biologists concerned with marine mammals. Revisions include updates of citations, expansion of nearly every chapter and full color photographs. This title continues the tradition by fully expanding and updating nearly all chapters.

    He shows how plants and animals (including humans) have evolved together as components of a worldwide learning machine. He describes the network of life on Earth as one that is, in fact, a complex adaptive system, a global brain in which each of us plays a sometimes conscious, sometimes unknowing role. and he reveals that the World Wide Web is just the latest step in the development of this brain. These are theories as important as they are radical. Informed by twenty years of interdisciplinary research, Bloom takes us on a spellbinding journey back to the big bang to let us see how its fires forged primordial sociality. As he brings us back via surprising routes, we see how our earliest bacterial ancestors built multitrillion-member research and development teams a full 3.5 billion years ago. We watch him unravel the previously unrecognized strands of interconnectedness woven by crowds of trilobites, hunting packs of dinosaurs, feathered flying lizards gathered in flocks, troops of baboons making communal decisions, and adventurous tribes of protohumans spreading across continents but still linked by primitive forms of information networking. We soon find ourselves reconsidering our place in the world. Along the way, Bloom offers us exhilarating insights into the strange tricks of body and mind that have organized a variety of life forms: spiny lobsters, which, during the Paleozoic age, participated in communal marching rituals; and bees, which, during the age of dinosaurs, conducted collective brainwork. This fascinating tour continues on to the sometimes brutal subculture wars that have spurred the growth of human civilization since the Stone Age. Bloom shows us how culture shapes our infant brains, immersing us in a matrix of truth and mass delusion that we think of as reality.Global Brain is more than just a brilliantly original contribution to the ongoing debate on the inner workings of evolution. It is a grand vision, says the eminent evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, a work that transforms our very view of who we are and why.

    thru-hickers who happen to be publishing pros, too.

    This new edition has been fully updated and greatly expanded throughout toincorporate a decade of new research findings. It maintains the depth and scientific rigour of the first edition, and includes a new chapter on human sexuality, written from a comparative perspective. It contains 2600 references, almost 400 figures and photographs, and 73 tables.

    The mechanisms by which a fertilized egg develops into an adult can now be grasped in a way that was unimaginable a few decades ago. The Art of Genes is the first account of these exciting new findings, and of their broader significance in how we view ourselves. Through a highly original synthesis of sciece and art, Enrico Coen vividly describes this revolution in our understanding of how plants and animals develop. Drawing on a wide range of material--from flowers growing petals instead of sex organs, and flies that develop an extra pair of wings, to works of art by Leonardo and Magritte--he explains in lively accessible prose the meaning of genes. Coen draws parallels between the way genes respond to the developing pattern of an organism and the way an artist responds to a painting being created on canvas, a memorable analogy that shows how the organism develops through an interactive dialogue in which there is no separation between plan and execution. There have been many attempts to resolve the paradox of how organisms make themselves. Lucid, authoritative, and entertaining, The Art of Genes offers fresh and exciting insights into the nature of evolution, development, and human creativity.

    

    For each of life's milestones - sexual intercourse, conception, pregnancy, birth, puberty, love, marriage, parenting, menopause and death - they describe the biology behind our actions and consider how pressures imposed by various historical and contemporary cultures have further influenced our behaviour. By looking back at the past they attempt to make sense of the present, to see how and why these cultural modifications arose, how they have contributed to the richness of human sexual behaviour, and what our biological and cultural inheritance can teach us about safeguarding the continuation of our species.

    Brimming with brilliant watercolor artwork, this book explores the fascinating evolution of the earth's biggest animals.

    Christopher Boehm, an anthropologist whose fieldwork has focused on the political arrangements of human and nonhuman primate groups, postulates that egalitarianism is in effect a hierarchy in which the weak combine forces to dominate the strong.The political flexibility of our species is formidable: we can be quite egalitarian, we can be quite despotic. Hierarchy in the Forest traces the roots of these contradictory traits in chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and early human societies. Boehm looks at the loose group structures of hunter-gatherers, then at tribal segmentation, and finally at present-day governments to see how these conflicting tendencies are reflected.Hierarchy in the Forest claims new territory for biological anthropology and evolutionary biology by extending the domain of these sciences into a crucial aspect of human political and social behavior. This book will be a key document in the study of the evolutionary basis of genuine altruism.

    The second edition incorporates newly acquired evolutionary insight from genome projects involving bacteria, plants, and animals, as well as analytical tools that have been developed and perfected in the last decade, and hasbeen brought up to date in line with the many advances in genomics, protein engineering, computational biology, and bioinformatics.The authors explain evolutionary phenomena at the molecular level in a way that can be understood without much prerequisite knowledge of molecular biology, evolution, or mathematics. Both mathematical and intuitive explanations are provided, and examples that support and clarify the many theoreticalarguments and methodological discussions are included.

    Until recently, however, the theory has had little impact on medical research or practice. Evolutionary Medicine shows how this is beginning to change.Collecting work from leaders in the field, this volume describes an array of new and innovative approaches to human health that are based on an appreciation of our long evolutionary history. For example, it shows how evolution helps to explain the complex relationship between our immune systems and the virulence and transmission of human viruses. It also shows how comparisons between how we live today and how our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived thousands of years ago illuminate a variety of contemporary ills, including obesity, lower-back pain, and insomnia.Evolutionary Medicine covers issues at every stage of life, from infancy (colic, jaundice, SIDS, parent-infant sleep struggles, ear infections, breast-feeding, asthma) to adulthood (sexually transmitted diseases, depression, overeating, addictions, child abuse, cardiovascular disease, breast and ovarian cancer) to old age (osteoporosis, geriatric sleep problems). Written for a wide range of students and researchers in medicine, anthropology, and psychology, it is an invaluable guide to this rapidly developing field.

    Barbara Smuts used long-term friendships between males and females, documented over a two-year period, to show how social interactions between members of friendly pairs differed from those of other troop mates, Her findings, now enhanced by 15 years of field studies, suggest that the evolution of male reproductive strategies in baboons can only be understood by considering the relationship between sex and friendship: female baboons prefer to mate with males who have previously engaged in friendly interaction with them and their offspring. Smuts suggests that female choice may promote male investment in other species, and she explores the relevance of her findings for the evolution of male-female relationships in humans.

    Then a eukaryot cell. Then a multicellular organism. That's for the first chapter, and from the cell's viewpoint." "Christine Brooke-Rose blends her well-developed narratorless technique with a drastic extension of a very ancient convention, that of lending words to creatures that have none, indeed have no consciousness, to move steadily through evolution to the earliest human species, ending some 3,000 years before agriculture and some 8,000 years before the earliest writing appeared.The novel begins thus: "Zing! discharging through the glowsalties the pungent ammonia earthfarts in slithery clay and all the rest to make simple sweeties and sharpies and other stuffs. Dust out of vast crashes and currents now calmer as the crust thickens and all cools a bit.Over many many forevers.Waiting. Absorbing. Growing. Churning. Splitting.Over and over."

    Yet the teaching of evolution to schoolchildren is still contentious.In Science and Creationism, The National Academy of Sciences states unequivocally that creationism has no place in any science curriculum at any level.Briefly and clearly, this booklet explores the nature of science, reviews the evidence for the origin of the universe and earth, and explains the current scientific understanding of biological evolution. This edition includes new insights from astronomy and molecular biology.Attractive in presentation and authoritative in content, Science and Creationism will be useful to anyone concerned about America's scientific literacy: education policymakers, school boards and administrators, curriculum designers, librarians, teachers, parents, and students.

    This comprehensive book brings together a diverse number of traditional