Tag Archives: evolution

Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose – Deirdre Barrett

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose

Deirdre Barrett

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: February 22, 2010

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


How our once-helpful instincts got hijacked by our garish modern world. Have you ever wondered why some men choose pornography over actual women? Why so many people watch Friends instead of going out with their own buddies? Why a person would “feed” a plastic Pocket Pet while shirking real duties? Why both sides of every war see the other as the aggressor against whom their “Department of Defense” must respond? Harvard evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett explains how human instincts—for food, sex, or territorial protection—developed for life on the savannah ten thousand years ago, not for today’s world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. Evolution, quite simply, has been unable to keep pace with the rapid changes of modern life. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects—from candy to pornography to atomic bombs—that gratify outmoded but persistent drives with dangerous results. In the 1930s Dutch Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen found that birds that lay small, pale-blue eggs speckled with gray preferred to sit on giant, bright-blue, plaster dummies with black polka dots. He coined the term “supernormal stimuli” to describe these imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and, oddly, exert a stronger attraction than real things. Obviously these hard-wired preferences pose a danger to a species’ survival. Barrett’s singular insight is to apply this phenomenon for the first time to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment. Her book adroitly demonstrates how supernormal stimuli are a driving force in many of today’s most pressing problems, including obesity, our addiction to television and video games, and the past century’s extraordinarily violent wars. Man-made imitations, it turns out, have wreaked havoc on how we nurture our children, what food we put into our bodies, how we make love and war, and even how we understand ourselves. Barrett does more than pull the fire alarm to show how these unfettered instincts fuel dangerous excesses. There is a hopeful message here as well. Once we recognize how supernormal stimuli operate, we can craft new approaches to modern predicaments. Humans have one stupendous advantage over Tinbergen’s birds: a giant brain. The message of this book is that this gives us the unique ability to exercise self-control, override instincts that lead us astray, and save ourselves from civilization’s gaudy traps.

Excerpt from – 

Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose – Deirdre Barrett

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, PUR, Uncategorized, W. W. Norton & Company | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose – Deirdre Barrett

Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live – Marlene Zuk

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live

Marlene Zuk

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: March 18, 2013

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


“With…evidence from recent genetic and anthropological research, [Zuk] offers a dose of paleoreality.” —Erin Wayman, Science News We evolved to eat berries rather than bagels, to live in mud huts rather than condos, to sprint barefoot rather than play football—or did we? Are our bodies and brains truly at odds with modern life? Although it may seem as though we have barely had time to shed our hunter-gatherer legacy, biologist Marlene Zuk reveals that the story is not so simple. Popular theories about how our ancestors lived—and why we should emulate them—are often based on speculation, not scientific evidence. Armed with a razor-sharp wit and brilliant, eye-opening research, Zuk takes us to the cutting edge of biology to show that evolution can work much faster than was previously realized, meaning that we are not biologically the same as our caveman ancestors. Contrary to what the glossy magazines would have us believe, we do not enjoy potato chips because they crunch just like the insects our forebears snacked on. And women don’t go into shoe-shopping frenzies because their prehistoric foremothers gathered resources for their clans. As Zuk compellingly argues, such beliefs incorrectly assume that we’re stuck—finished evolving—and have been for tens of thousands of years. She draws on fascinating evidence that examines everything from adults’ ability to drink milk to the texture of our ear wax to show that we’ve actually never stopped evolving. Our nostalgic visions of an ideal evolutionary past in which we ate, lived, and reproduced as we were “meant to” fail to recognize that we were never perfectly suited to our environment. Evolution is about change, and every organism is full of trade-offs. From debunking the caveman diet to unraveling gender stereotypes, Zuk delivers an engrossing analysis of widespread paleofantasies and the scientific evidence that undermines them, all the while broadening our understanding of our origins and what they can really tell us about our present and our future.

Read original article – 

Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live – Marlene Zuk

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, PUR, Uncategorized, W. W. Norton & Company | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live – Marlene Zuk

Undeniable – Bill Nye & Corey S. Powell

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Undeniable

Evolution and the Science of Creation

Bill Nye & Corey S. Powell

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: November 4, 2014

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Seller: Macmillan


"Evolution is one of the most powerful and important ideas ever developed in the history of science. Every question it raises leads to new answers, new discoveries, and new smarter questions. The science of evolution is as expansive as nature itself. It is also the most meaningful creation story that humans have ever found."—Bill Nye Sparked by a controversial debate in February 2014, Bill Nye has set off on an energetic campaign to spread awareness of evolution and the powerful way it shapes our lives. In Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation , he explains why race does not really exist; evaluates the true promise and peril of genetically modified food; reveals how new species are born, in a dog kennel and in a London subway; takes a stroll through 4.5 billion years of time; and explores the new search for alien life, including aliens right here on Earth. With infectious enthusiasm, Bill Nye shows that evolution is much more than a rebuttal to creationism; it is an essential way to understand how nature works—and to change the world. It might also help you get a date on a Saturday night.

From: 

Undeniable – Bill Nye & Corey S. Powell

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Undeniable – Bill Nye & Corey S. Powell

The Equations of Life – Charles S. Cockell

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Equations of Life

How Physics Shapes Evolution

Charles S. Cockell

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $19.99

Publish Date: June 19, 2018

Publisher: Basic Books

Seller: Hachette Digital, Inc.


A groundbreaking argument for why alien life will evolve to be much like life here on Earth We are all familiar with the popular idea of strange alien life wildly different from life on earth inhabiting other planets. Maybe it's made of silicon! Maybe it has wheels! Or maybe it doesn't. In The Equations of Life , biologist Charles S. Cockell makes the forceful argument that the laws of physics narrowly constrain how life can evolve, making evolution's outcomes predictable. If we were to find on a distant planet something very much like a lady bug eating something like an aphid, we shouldn't be surprised. The forms of life are guided by a limited set of rules, and as a result, there is a narrow set of solutions to the challenges of existence. A remarkable scientific contribution breathing new life into Darwin's theory of evolution, The Equations of Life makes a radical argument about what life can–and can't–be.

Taken from:  

The Equations of Life – Charles S. Cockell

Posted in alo, Anchor, Basic Books, FF, GE, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Equations of Life – Charles S. Cockell

Evolution – Scientific American Editors

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Evolution

The Human Odyssey

Scientific American Editors

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $4.99

Publish Date: August 21, 2017

Publisher: Scientific American

Seller: Macmillan / Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC


The complex story of human evolution is a tale seven million years in the making. Each new discovery adds to or revises our story and our understanding of how we came to be the way we are. In this eBook, The Human Odyssey, we explore the evolution of those characteristics that make us human. The first section, “Where We Came From,” looks at our family tree and why some branches survived and not others. Swings in climate are emerging as a factor in what traits succeeded and failed, as we see in “Climate Shocks;” meanwhile in “Human Hybrids,” DNA analyses show that Homo sapiens interbred with other human species, which played a key role in our survival. Section Two, “What Makes Us Special,” examines those traits that separate us from other primates. Recent data indicate that our hairless skin was important to the rise of other human features, and other research is getting closer to illuminating how humans became monogamous, as shown in “The Naked Truth” and “Powers of Two,” respectively. In the final section, “Where We Are Going,” we speculate on the future of human evolution in a world where advances in technology, medicine and other areas protect us from harmful factors like disease, causing some scientists to claim that humans are no longer subject to natural selection and our evolution has ceased. Far from that, in “Still Evolving,” author John Hawks discusses how humans have evolved rapidly over the past 30,000 years, as seen in relatively recent traits like blue eyes or lactose tolerance, why such rapid evolution has been possible and what future generations might look like. Like us, our story will continue to evolve.

This article is from:

Evolution – Scientific American Editors

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Evolution – Scientific American Editors

Science in the Soul – Richard Dawkins

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Science in the Soul
Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
Richard Dawkins

Genre: Essays

Price: $13.99

Publish Date: August 8, 2017

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


The legendary biologist and bestselling author mounts a timely and passionate defense of science and clear thinking with this career-spanning collection of essays, including twenty pieces published in the United States for the first time. For decades, Richard Dawkins has been a brilliant scientific communicator, consistently illuminating the wonders of nature and attacking faulty logic. Science in the Soul brings together forty-two essays, polemics, and paeans—all written with Dawkins’s characteristic erudition, remorseless wit, and unjaded awe of the natural world. Though it spans three decades, this book couldn’t be more timely or more urgent. Elected officials have opened the floodgates to prejudices that have for half a century been unacceptable or at least undercover. In a passionate introduction, Dawkins calls on us to insist that reason take center stage and that gut feelings, even when they don’t represent the stirred dark waters of xenophobia, misogyny, or other blind prejudice, should stay out of the voting booth. And in the essays themselves, newly annotated by the author, he investigates a number of issues, including the importance of empirical evidence, and decries bad science, religion in the schools, and climate-change deniers. Dawkins has equal ardor for “the sacred truth of nature” and renders here with typical virtuosity the glories and complexities of the natural world. Woven into an exploration of the vastness of geological time, for instance, is the peculiar history of the giant tortoises and the sea turtles—whose journeys between water and land tell us a deeper story about evolution. At this moment, when so many highly placed people still question the fact of evolution, Dawkins asks what Darwin would make of his own legacy—“a mixture of exhilaration and exasperation”—and celebrates science as possessing many of religion’s virtues—“explanation, consolation, and uplift”—without its detriments of superstition and prejudice. In a world grown irrational and hostile to facts, Science in the Soul is an essential collection by an indispensable author. Advance praise for Science in the Soul “The illumination of Richard Dawkins’s incisive thinking on the intellectual world extends far beyond biology. What a treat to see so clearly how matter and meaning fit together, from fiction to philosophy to molecular biology, in one unified vision!” —Daniel C. Dennett, author of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds “I thank Thor and Zeus that in their infinite wisdom they chose to make the great wordsmith of our age a great rationalist, and vice versa.” —Matt Ridley, author of The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge “In this golden age of enlightened science writing, it is stunning that no scientist has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is time literature’s highest award be granted to a scientist whose writings have changed not just science but society. No living scientist is more deserving of such recognition than Richard Dawkins. . . .  Science in the Soul is the perfect embodiment of Nobel–quality literature.” —Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, columnist for Scientific American, and author of The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People “ Science in the Soul is packed with Dr. Dawkins’s philosophy, humor, anger, and quiet wisdom, leading the reader gently but firmly to inevitable conclusions that edify and educate.” —James Randi, author of The Faith Healers

More:

Science in the Soul – Richard Dawkins

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, ONA, oven, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Science in the Soul – Richard Dawkins

How Men Age – Richard G. Bribiescas

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

How Men Age

What Evolution Reveals about Male Health and Mortality

Richard G. Bribiescas

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $17.99

Publish Date: August 23, 2016

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Seller: Princeton University Press


While the health of aging men has been a focus of biomedical research for years, evolutionary biology has not been part of the conversation—until now. How Men Age is the first book to explore how natural selection has shaped male aging, how evolutionary theory can inform our understanding of male health and well-being, and how older men may have contributed to the evolution of some of the very traits that make us human. In this informative and entertaining book, renowned biological anthropologist Richard Bribiescas looks at all aspects of male aging through an evolutionary lens. He describes how the challenges males faced in their evolutionary past influenced how they age today, and shows how this unique evolutionary history helps explain common aspects of male aging such as prostate disease, loss of muscle mass, changes in testosterone levels, increases in fat, erectile dysfunction, baldness, and shorter life spans than women. Bribiescas reveals how many of the physical and behavioral changes that we negatively associate with male aging may have actually facilitated the emergence of positive traits that have helped make humans so successful as a species, including parenting, long life spans, and high fertility. Popular science at its most compelling, How Men Age provides new perspectives on the aging process in men and how we became human, and also explores future challenges for human evolution—and the important role older men might play in them.

Visit site: 

How Men Age – Richard G. Bribiescas

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, Oster, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Men Age – Richard G. Bribiescas

The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life – Nick Lane

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life
Nick Lane

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: July 20, 2015

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W. W. Norton


“One of the deepest, most illuminating books about the history of life to have been published in recent years.” —The Economist The Earth teems with life: in its oceans, forests, skies and cities. Yet there’s a black hole at the heart of biology. We do not know why complex life is the way it is, or, for that matter, how life first began. In The Vital Question, award-winning author and biochemist Nick Lane radically reframes evolutionary history, putting forward a solution to conundrums that have puzzled generations of scientists. For two and a half billion years, from the very origins of life, single-celled organisms such as bacteria evolved without changing their basic form. Then, on just one occasion in four billion years, they made the jump to complexity. All complex life, from mushrooms to man, shares puzzling features, such as sex, which are unknown in bacteria. How and why did this radical transformation happen? The answer, Lane argues, lies in energy: all life on Earth lives off a voltage with the strength of a lightning bolt. Building on the pillars of evolutionary theory, Lane’s hypothesis draws on cutting-edge research into the link between energy and cell biology, in order to deliver a compelling account of evolution from the very origins of life to the emergence of multicellular organisms, while offering deep insights into our own lives and deaths. Both rigorous and enchanting, The Vital Question provides a solution to life’s vital question: why are we as we are, and indeed, why are we here at all?

Link – 

The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life – Nick Lane

Posted in Casio, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, W. W. Norton & Company | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life – Nick Lane

An underground park in New York City? These guys are pushing to make it happen

An underground park in New York City? These guys are pushing to make it happen

By on 11 Nov 2015commentsShare

Once upon a time, an architect and a techie ventured into an abandoned trolly station under the Lower East Side of Manhattan and had a vision. They saw a lush green park spanning the entire one-acre space, flying in the face of everything they knew to be true about dank underground caverns — namely, that they’re not great for growing lush green parks.

Now, four years later, those crazy kids are bringing that vision to life. Or rather, they’re bringing a prototype of that vision to life in a 5,000 square-foot warehouse that’s not underground but is very dark.

In this video, the duo takes Wired through their so-called Lowline Lab to discuss how they plan to bring sunlight underground. Basically, it involves using mirrors to focus sunlight into 30 times its normal brightness, then directing that light underground through fiberoptic cables, and redistributing it through a ceiling made of aluminum panels. Easy peasy.

Source:

How New York’s ‘Lowline’ Underground Park Will Actually Work

, Wired.

Share

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.


Industrial Evolution: A Grist special seriesWe speak with the scientists, artists, and thinkers who see a high-tech, sustainable future on the horizon.

Get Grist in your inbox

Source:  

An underground park in New York City? These guys are pushing to make it happen

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Radius, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on An underground park in New York City? These guys are pushing to make it happen

What Did Monsanto Show Bill Nye to Make Him Fall “in Love” With GMOs?

Mother Jones

Bill Nye, the bow-tied erstwhile kids’ TV host, onetime dancer with the stars, and tireless champion of evolution and climate science, was never a virulent or wild-eyed critic of genetically modified crops. Back in 2005, he did a pretty nuanced episode of his TV show on it, the takeaway of which was hardly fire-breathing denunciation: “Let’s farm responsibly, let’s require labels on our foods, and let’s carefully test these foods case by case.”

In his book Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, published just last November, Nye reiterated these points. His concern about GMOs centered mainly on unintended consequences of growing them over large expanses—he cited the example of crops engineered to resist herbicides, which have been linked pretty decisively to the decline of monarch butterflies, which rely on abundant milkweeds, which in turn have been largely wiped out in the Midwest by GMO-enabled herbicide use. Nye praised certain GMOs, such as corn engineered to repel certain insects, but concluded that “if you’re asking me, we should stop introducing genes from one species into another,” because “we just can’t know what will happen to other species in that modified species’ ecosystem.”

Now, Nye’s doubts have evidently fallen away like milkweeds under a fine mist of herbicide. In a February interview filmed backstage on Bill Maher’s HBO show (starting about 3:40 in the below video), Nye volunteered that he was working on a revision of the GMO section of Undeniable. He gave no details, just that he “went to Monsanto and I spent a lot of time with the scientists there.” As a result, he added with a grin, “I have revised my outlook, and am very excited about telling the world. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world!”

Monsanto’s longtime chief technology officer, Robb Fraley, responded to the interview with an approving tweet featuring a photo of Nye at company HQ:

It will be interesting to hear what wonders within Monsanto’s R&D labs turned Nye from a nuanced GMO skeptic to a proud champion.

Original article: 

What Did Monsanto Show Bill Nye to Make Him Fall “in Love” With GMOs?

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, Meyers, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What Did Monsanto Show Bill Nye to Make Him Fall “in Love” With GMOs?