Gene Avatars

Gene Avatars PDF

Author: Pierre-Henri Gouyon

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2007-05-08

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0306475707

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

`Why life?' Questions of this type were for a long time the prerogative of philosophers who left the `how' question to scientists. Nowadays, Darwin's successors no longer have any qualms about addressing the `why' as well as the `how'. Over a century ago, Darwin modestly admitted having 'thrown some light on the origin of species - this mystery of mysteries'. Two major advances in the following decades helped biologists answer many of the questions he left unsolved. The first was the discovery of the laws of heredity, the second that of DNA. Both provided Darwinian theory with the foundations that were lacking and led to the all-embracing neo-Darwinian synthesis. Since then, Theodosius Dobzhansky's aphorism `nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution' has proven true more than once. This does not suit everyone, as evolutionist ideas have not lost their power to cause a scandal. Darwin toppled man from his pedestal. Evolutionary genetics - the subject of this book - sends the individual crashing. Considered until recently to be the target of selection and the focus of evolution, the individual has been usurped by the gene. The individual is nothing but the gene's avatar.

The Gene

The Gene PDF

Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-05-17

Total Pages: 624

ISBN-13: 1476733538

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History Now includes an excerpt from Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book Song of the Cell! From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick” (Elle). “Sid Mukherjee has the uncanny ability to bring together science, history, and the future in a way that is understandable and riveting, guiding us through both time and the mystery of life itself.” —Ken Burns “Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene: An Intimate History, in which he braids science, history, and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of Paradise Lost” (The New York Times). In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices. “Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…[and] swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry” (The Washington Post). Throughout, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—reminds us of the questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In riveting and dramatic prose, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome. “A fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are—and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), The Gene is the revelatory and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. “The Gene is a book we all should read” (USA TODAY).

Population Genetics and Evolution

Population Genetics and Evolution PDF

Author: Gerdina de Jong

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 3642730698

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

At least since the 1940s neo-Darwinism has prevailed as the consensus view in the study of evolution. The mechanism of evolution in this view is natural selection leading to adaptation, working on a substrate of adapta tionally random mutations. As both the study of genetic variation in natural populations, and the study of the mathematical equations of selec tion are reckoned to a field called population genetics, population genetics came to form the core in the theory of evolution. So much so, that the fact that there is more to the theory of evolution than population genetics became somewhat obscured. The genetics of the evolutionary process, or the genetics of evolutionary change, came close to being all of evolutionary biology. In the last 10 years, this dominating position of population genetics within evolutionary biology has been challenged. In evolutionary ecology, optimization theory proved more useful than population genetics for interesting predictions, especially of life history strategies. From develop mental biology, constraints in development and the role of internal regula tion were emphasized. From paleobiology, a proposal was put forward to describe the fossil record and the evolutionary process as a series of punc tuated equilibria; thus exhorting population geneticists to give a plausible account of how such might come about. All these developments tend to obscure the central role of population genetics in evolutionary biology.

Natural Corporate Management

Natural Corporate Management PDF

Author: William C. Frederick

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-08

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1351277545

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This groundbreaking new book by business scholar William C. Frederick presents an innovative, exciting – even revolutionary – view of corporate management and the challenges it confronts in today's world. The author proposes a management paradigm shift transforming the way corporations do business. Management scholarship and research may well be rechanneled from current orientations to new models, concepts, and theories of what it takes to manage corporations in a planetary world confronting climate change, energy crises, and securing the well-being of all global citizens. Natural Corporate Management (NCM) is an awareness and an acceptance by the managers of today's business corporations of the close functional linkage between natural forces and human economic choices. NCM is not a set of techniques or methods but is a growing consciousness by managers of the presence and influence of nature in all managerial decisions. The book's central theme is that business and nature are locked into an evolutionary partnership that defines all aspects of corporate management, including decisions, policy, goal-seeking, organizational design, workplace behavior, and productive operations. This partnership of Nature and Nurture yields economic, social, and ecological dividends for corporations, their stakeholders, and the global community. An "Evolutionary Cascade" depicts the various phases of evolutionary change – physical, organic, genetic, human, neurological, symbolic – beginning with the Big Bang origin of the Universe and continuing to modern times. These evolutionary events collectively influence the operational activities of all business firms. A "Natural Theory of the Firm" summarizes the NCM approach, as well as the mind-set of corporate managers, and the bio-socio-economic consequences of their decisions. This theoretically-innovative book proposes an agenda of corporate actions to promote long-term sustainability and economic well-being of business, its stakeholders, and planetary citizens everywhere. It will be essential reading for managers and researchers at all levels who wish to engage seriously with the challenges of organic life and its long-term sustainability.

Research Handbook on the Law of Virtual and Augmented Reality

Research Handbook on the Law of Virtual and Augmented Reality PDF

Author: Woodrow Barfield

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2018-12-28

Total Pages: 712

ISBN-13: 1786438593

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Virtual and augmented reality raise significant questions for law and policy. When should virtual world activities or augmented reality images count as protected First Amendment ‘speech’, and when are they instead a nuisance or trespass? When does copying them infringe intellectual property laws? When should a person (or computer) face legal consequences for allegedly harmful virtual acts? The Research Handbook on the Law of Virtual and Augmented Reality addresses these questions and others, drawing upon free speech doctrine, criminal law, issues of data protection and privacy, legal rights for increasingly intelligent avatars, and issues of jurisdiction within virtual and augmented reality worlds.

The Science of Avatar

The Science of Avatar PDF

Author: Stephen Baxter

Publisher: Orbit

Published: 2012-05-29

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0316224014

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Audiences around the world have been enchanted by James Cameron's visionary Avatar, with its glimpse of the Na'vi on the marvelous world of Pandora. But the movie is not entirely a fantasy; there is a scientific rationale for much of what we saw on the screen, from the possibility of travel to other worlds, to the life forms seen on screen and the ecological and cybernetic concepts that underpin the 'neural networks' in which the Na'vi and their sacred trees are joined, as well as to the mind-linking to the avatars themselves. From popular science journalist and acclaimed science fiction author Stephen Baxter, The Science of Avatar is a guide to the rigorous fact behind the fiction. It will enhance the readers' enjoyment of the movie experience by drawing them further into its imagined world.

The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory

The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory PDF

Author: Susan Wise Bauer

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2015-05-11

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 0393243273

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A riveting road map to the development of modern scientific thought. In the tradition of her perennial bestseller The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer delivers an accessible, entertaining, and illuminating springboard into the scientific education you never had. Far too often, public discussion of science is carried out by journalists, voters, and politicians who have received their science secondhand. The Story of Western Science shows us the joy and importance of reading groundbreaking science writing for ourselves and guides us back to the masterpieces that have changed the way we think about our world, our cosmos, and ourselves. Able to be referenced individually, or read together as the narrative of Western scientific development, the book's twenty-eight succinct chapters lead readers from the first science texts by Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle through twentieth-century classics in biology, physics, and cosmology. The Story of Western Science illuminates everything from mankind's earliest inquiries to the butterfly effect, from the birth of the scientific method to the rise of earth science and the flowering of modern biology. Each chapter recommends one or more classic books and provides entertaining accounts of crucial contributions to science, vivid sketches of the scientist-writers, and clear explanations of the mechanics underlying each concept. The Story of Western Science reveals science to be a dramatic undertaking practiced by some of history's most memorable characters. It reminds us that scientific inquiry is a human pursuit—an essential, often deeply personal, sometimes flawed, frequently brilliant way of understanding the world. The Story of Western Science is an "entertaining and unique synthesis" (Times Higher Education), a "fluidly written" narrative that "celebrates the inexorable force of human curiosity" (Wall Street Journal), and a "bright, informative resource for readers seeking to understand science through the eyes of the men and women who shaped its history" (Kirkus). Previously published as The Story of Science.

Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds PDF

Author: Jean-Claude Heudin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2003-06-26

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 3540450165

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Virtual Worlds 2000 is the second in a series of international scientific conferences on virtual worlds held at the International Institute of Multimedia in Paris La Défense (Pôle Universitaire Léonard de Vinci). The term "virtual worlds" generally refers to virtual reality applications or experi ences. We extend the use of these terms to describe experiments that deal with the idea of synthesizing digital worlds on computers. Thus, virtual worlds could be de fined as the study of computer programs that implement digital worlds. Constructing such complex artificial worlds seems to be extremely difficult to do in any sort of complete and realistic manner. Such a new discipline must benefit from a large amount of work in various fields: virtual reality and advanced computer graphics, artificial life and evolutionary computation, simulation of physical systems, and more. Whereas virtual reality has largely concerned itself with the design of 3D immersive graphical spaces, and artificial life with the simulation of living organisms, the field of virtual worlds, is concerned with the synthesis of digital universes considered as wholes, with their own "physical" and "biological" laws.

Avatar: The Last Airbender--North and South Library Edition

Avatar: The Last Airbender--North and South Library Edition PDF

Author: Gene Luen Yang

Publisher: Dark Horse Comics

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1506701957

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

When Katara and Sokka return home to the Southern Water Tribe, they are shocked to find that it has gone from a small village to a bustling city! Malina, a Northerner, is behind the change and plans to unify the two groups, but Gilak, a Southerner, leads a fierce rebellion to stop her. In the face of these two opposing tribes, Katara will have to make peace with her nostalgia and distrust to save the home she loves from being permanently torn apart. This special, oversized edition of Avatar: the Last Airbender -- North and South features volumes 1-3 with annotations by writer Gene Luen Yang and artists Gurihiru, as well as a sketchbook section with new, behind-the-scenes material!