A unique visual guide to human evolution that brings you face to face with our ancient ancestors.Illustrated throughout with amazingly realistic model reconstructions by world-renowned Dutch paleoartists Kennis and Kennis.Draws on cutting-edge research and the latest theories to explain the science, explore our relationship to other primates, and chart our journey out of Africa to colonize and settle the world.

    It pays homage not only to the physical splendor of the horse--its grace, beauty, strength, and adaptability--but also to its remarkable diversity. Equestrian specialist Tamsin Pickeral traces the evolution of many different horse breeds from the dawn of written history to the present day. Separate chapters are devoted to-- The Ancient World-- the nomadic horse peoples of the Eurasian steppes, the Gotland Pony, used by the Goths as chariot horses, the Camargue, an ancient working breed that was taken into Spain by the Romans, and many more From the East-- Mongolian stocks, the influence of Ghengis Khan, the introduction of polo, the spread of the Arabian horse breed, and more The War Horse-- the rise of the heavy cavalry horse, Charles Martel and the influence of the Crusades on horse breeding, the Spanish and Portuguese originators of horse-riding cowboys, the horse in the Napoleonic wars, and more The New World-- the horse's arrival in South America, brought in by the Spanish, and the subsequent development of American breeds Racing Hunting and Sports Horses-- Racing thoroughbreds, Irish hunters, Holsteins, Australian breeds, and more Harness Horses, Carriage Driving, and Trotting-- the development of horses mainly used today for show and skill work, and German Oldenburg carriage horses, now widely used in riding competitions Agriculture and Industry-- The transformation of war horses into widely varied breeds that were developed for working the land, working in mines, serving as police horses, and moreMagnificent color photos by distinguished equine photographer Astrid Harrisson are complemented with reproductions of equine artworks from around the world--a total of 400 beautiful illustrations.

    Genes group together in cells, cells group together in organisms, and organisms group together in societies. Even different species form mutualistic partnerships. Throughout the history of life, previously independent units have formed groups that, in time, have come to resemble individuals in their own right. Evolutionary biologists term such events "the major transitions." The process common to them all is social evolution. Each transition occurs only if natural selection favors one unit joining with another in a new kind of group. This book presents a fresh synthesis of the principles of social evolution that underlie the major transitions, explaining how the basic theory underpinning social evolution - inclusive fitness theory - is central to understanding each event. The book defines the key stages in a major transition, then highlights the shared principles operating at each stage across the transitions as a whole. It addresses in new ways the question of how, once they have arisen, organisms and societies become more individualistic.

    From an engineer's perspective, how do such specialized adaptations among living thin

    After five years of rigorous scientific research, Danny Vendramini has developed a theory of human origins that is stunning in its simplicity, yet breathtaking in its scope and importance.Them and Us begins with a radical reassessment of Neanderthal behavioral ecology. He cites new archaeological and genetic evidence to show they weren't docile omnivores, but savage, cannibalistic carnivores - top flight predators of the stone age.Neanderthal Predation (NP) theory reveals that Neanderthals were 'apex' predators - who resided at the top of the food chain, and everything else - including humans - was their prey.NP theory is one of those groundbreaking ideas that revolutionizes scientific thinking. It represents a quantum leap in our understanding of human origins.A leading authority on Eurasian Neanderthals, Professor John Shea from Stony Brook University in New York, said, “Vendramini presents a truly unique and innovative picture of the role of Neanderthal predation in human evolution. He pulls together countless different threads of scientific evidence to re-cast Neanderthals as ‘apex predators’, proverbial ‘wolves with knives’ who were effective rivals with our ancestors.. It has been a long time since I read a book about human evolution that I enjoyed so much.”Professor Tony McMichael, from The Australian National University, said Vendramini’s Neanderthal predation theory “offers innovative insight into the many things about 'us' that we might otherwise take for granted.”Harvard Archaeologist and Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of New England, Professor Iain Davidson, another advocate of Vendramini’s revolutionary theory adds: “Sometimes it takes an outsider to cut through the most intractable problems in science. That is what Vendramini's approach offers the reader in his daring claims about the interactions between humans and their most famous evolutionary relatives, the Neanderthals.” A major point of Vendramini's 2009 theory - that Eurasian Neanderthals abducted, raped and interbred with early humans in the Middle East was confirmed in 2010 by the publication of the 'Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome' which showed that Neanderthals had interbred with early humans from the Middle East at precisely the time that Vendramini theorized.

    

    The first book to address the scope and methods of this new cross-disciplinary area of research for archaeologistsOffers a completely up-to-date overview of the latest research in this innovative subjectGuides students who wish to become biomolecular archaeologists through the complexities of both the scientific methods and archaeological goals.Provides an essential component to undergraduate and graduate archaeological research

    It identifies the different mechanisms that generate robustness and the various forms of plasticity, before considering the functional significance of the integrated mechanisms and how the component processes might have evolved. Finally, it highlights the ways in which epigenetic mechanisms could be instrumental in driving evolutionary change. Essential reading for biologists and psychologists interested in epigenetics and evolution, this book is also a valuable resource for biological anthropologists, sociobiologists, child psychologists and paediatricians.

    This change ranges from dramatic macroscopic innovations such as the evolution of wings or eyes, to a myriad of molecular changes that form the basis of macroscopic innovations. We are familiar with many examples of innovations (qualitatively new phenotypes that can provide a critical benefit) but have no systematic understanding of the principles that allow organisms to innovate. This book proposes several such principles as the basis of a theory of innovation, integrating recent knowledge about complex molecular phenotypes with more traditional Darwinian thinking. Central to the book are genotype networks: vast sets of connected genotypes that exist in metabolism and regulatory circuitry, as well as in protein and RNA molecules. The theory can successfully unify innovations that occur at different levels of organization. It captures known features of biological innovation, including the fact that many innovations occur multiple times independently, and that they combine existing parts of a system to new purposes. It also argues that environmental change is important to create biological systems that are both complex and robust, and shows how such robustness can facilitate innovation. Beyond that, the theory can reconcile neutralism and selectionism, as well as explain the role of phenotypic plasticity, gene duplication, recombination, and cryptic variation in innovation. Finally, its principles can be applied to technological innovation, and thus open to human engineering endeavours the powerful principles that have allowed life's spectacular success.

    MacNeill examines the surprising - and sometimes unsettling - answers to this most basic of human questions. The remarkable new field of evolutionary psychology takes a scientific approach to the evolution of human nature. Analyzing human behavior in relation to food, clothing, shelter, health care, and sex, Evolutionary Psychology proves an immensely stimulating exploration of human endeavor.

    Darnell describes how scientists unraveled fundamental questions about the biochemical and genetic importance of RNA-how mRNAs are generated and used to produce proteins, how noncoding and catalytic RNAs mediate key cellular processes, and how RNA molecules likely initiated life on Earth. With a scope extending from the early 20th century to the present day, and with the clarity expected from an accomplished textbook author, he conveys the intellectual context in which these questions first arose and explains how the key experiments were structured and answers obtained. The book is geared towards scientists from the graduate level on up, and will particularly appeal to active investigators in RNA biology, educators of molecular biology and biochemistry, and science historians.

    In the social sciences, heuristics have been believed to be generally inferior to complex methods for inference, or even irrational. Although this may be true in "small worlds" where everything is known for certain, we show that in the actual world in which we live, full of uncertainties and surprises, heuristics are indispensable and often more accurate than complex methods. Contrary to a deeply entrenched belief, complex problems do not necessitate complex computations. Less can be more. Simple heuristics exploit the information structure of the environment, and thus embody ecological rather than logical rationality. Simon (1999) applauded this new program as a "revolution in cognitive science, striking a great blow for sanity in the approach to human rationality."By providing a fresh look at how the mind works as well as the nature of rationality, the simple heuristics program has stimulated a large body of research, led to fascinating applications in diverse fields from law to medicine to business to sports, and instigated controversial debates in psychology, philosophy, and economics. In a single volume, the present reader compiles key articles that have been published in journals across many disciplines. These articles present theory, real-world applications, and a sample of the large number of existing experimental studies that provide evidence for people's adaptive use of heuristics.

    The island's limited resources affected the size and life histories of its animals, resulting in a local dwarfism. For example, sauropods found on the island measured only six meters long, while their cousins elsewhere grew up to five times larger. Here, David B. Weishampel and Coralia-Maria Jianu present unique evolutionary interpretations of this phenomenon.The authors bring together the latest information on the fauna, flora, geology, and paleogeography of the region, casting these ancient reptiles in their phylogenetic, paleoecological, and evolutionary contexts. What the authors find is that Transylvanian dinosaurs experienced a range of unpredictable successes as they evolved.Woven throughout the detailed history and science of these diminutive dinosaurs is the fascinating story of the man who first discovered them, the mysterious twentieth-century paleontologist Franz Baron Nopcsa, whose name is synonymous with Transylvanian dinosaurs. Hailed by some as the father of paleobiology, it was Nopcsa alone who understood the importance of the dinosaur discoveries in Transylvania; their story cannot be told without recounting his.Transylvanian Dinosaurs strikes an engaging balance between biography and scientific treatise and is sure to capture the imagination of professional paleontologists and amateur dinophiles alike.

    Extensive, in-depth, current research examples, an emphasis on problem solving, and a stunning art program engage students, helping them to understand fundamental concepts and processes.

    When scientists discovered forty years ago that about 98% of our DNA does not encode proteins, the non-protein-coding portion was labeled “junk” and attributed to molecular accidents that have accumulated in the course of evolution.Recent books by Richard Dawkins, Francis Collins and others have used this “junk DNA” as evidence for Darwinian evolution and evidence against intelligent design (since an intelligent designer would presumably not have filled our genome with so much garbage). But recent genome evidence shows that much of our non-protein-coding DNA performs essential biological functions. The Myth of Junk DNA is written for a general audience by biologist Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution. Citing some of the abundant evidence from recent genome projects, the book shows that “junk DNA” is not science, but myth.

    It is an accessible introductory book written for the interested layperson anyone interested in the big picture coming from modern science. It covers a wide range of topics including the origin and evolution of our universe, the nature and origin of life, the evolution of life including questions of birth and death, the evolution of cognition, the nature of consciousness, the possibility of extraterrestrial life and the future of the universe. The book is written in a narrative style, as these topics are all parts of a single story. It concludes with a discussion on the nature and future of science."

    In fact, these organs are now recognized by scientists to serve important biological functions.- fraudulent embryo drawings originating with nineteenth-century German racist Ernst Haeckel that are used to claim that vertebrate embryos are the same at the earliest stages of development (not true).Haeckel's bogus drawings were previously removed by the Texas State Board of Education during the 2003 biology textbook adoption process, but like creatures in a zombie film, they keep returning!In addition to promoting outdated science, most of the proposed instructional materials completely fail to meet the TEKS critical thinking requirements. The TEKS require instructional materials that will help students examine 'all sides of scientific evidence,' 'encourage critical thinking,' and 'analyze and evaluate' key claims of modern evolutionary theory. But out of the ten instructional materials the authors reviewed, only one made a serious effort to meet these requirements.

    In an evolutionary perspective the incarnation involved God entering the evolving human species to help it imitate the trinitarian altruism in whose image it was created and counter its tendency to self-absorption. Primarily, however, the evolutionary achievement of Jesus was to confront and overcome death in an act of cosmic significance, ushering humanity into the culminating stage of its evolutionary destiny, the full sharing of God's inner life. Previously such doctrines as original sin, the fall, sacrifice, and atonement stemmed from viewing death as the penalty for sin and are shown not only to have serious difficulties in themselves, but also to emerge from a Jewish culture preoccupied with sin and sacrifice that could not otherwise account for death. The death of Jesus on the cross is now seen as saving humanity, not from sin, but from individual extinction and meaninglessness. Death is now seen as a normal process that affect all living things and the religious doctrines connected with explaining it in humans are no longer required or justified. Similar evolutionary implications are explored affecting other subjects of Christian belief, including the Church, the Eucharist, priesthood, and moral behavior.

    This period was a crucible of evolution and teemed with anatomic creativity although the journey to formed vision actually began billionsof years before that. The Cambrian period, however, spawned nearly all morphologic forms of the eye, followed by descent over hundreds of millions of years providing an unimaginable variety of eyes with at least ten different designs. Some eyes display spectacular creativity with mirror, scanning or telephoto optics.Some of these ocular designs are merely curiosities, while others offer the finest visual potential packed into a small space, limited only by the laws of diffraction or physiological optics. For example, some spiders developed tiny, well-formed eyes with scanning optics and three visual pigments; scallops have 40-100 eyes circling their mantle, each of which has mirror optics and contains two separate retinae per eye; deep ocean fish have eyes shaped like tubes containing yellow lensesto break camouflage; and some birds have vision five times better than ours; but this is only part of the story. Each animal alive today has an eye that fits is niche perfectly demonstrating the intimacy of the evolutionary process as no other organ could. The evolution of the eye is one of thebest examples of Darwinian principles.Although few eyes fossilize in any significant manner, many details of this evolution are known and understood. From initial photoreception 3.75 billion years ago to early spatial recognition in the first cupped eyespot in Euglena to fully formed camera style eyes the size of beach balls inichthyosaurs, animals have processed light to compete and survive in their respective niches.It is evolution's greatest gift and its greatest triumph. This is the story of the evolution of the eye.

    The Lamarckian approach emphasizes the generation of developmental variations; Darwinism stresses selection. Lamarck's ideas were eventually eclipsed by Darwinian concepts, especially after the emergence of the Modern Synthesis in the twentieth century. The different approaches -- which can be seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive -- have important implications for the kinds of questions biologists ask and for the type of research they conduct. Lamarckism has been evolving -- or, in Lamarckian terminology, transforming -- since "Philosophie zoologique"'s description of biological processes mediated by "subtle fluids." Essays in this book focus on new developments in biology that make Lamarck's ideas relevant not only to modern empirical and theoretical research but also to problems in the philosophy of biology. Contributors discuss the historical transformations of Lamarckism from the 1820s to the 1940s, and the different understandings of Lamarck and Lamarckism; the Modern Synthesis and its emphasis on Mendelian genetics; theoretical and experimental research on such "Lamarckian" topics as plasticity, soft (epigenetic) inheritance, and individuality; and the importance of a developmental approach to evolution in the philosophy of biology. The book shows the advantages of a "Lamarckian" perspective on evolution. Indeed, the development-oriented approach it presents is becoming central to current evolutionary studies -- as can be seen in the burgeoning field of Evo-Devo. "Transformations of Lamarckism" makes a unique contribution to this research.