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Niche Construction

Author: F. John Odling-Smee

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-02-15

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 1400847265

The seemingly innocent observation that the activities of organisms bring about changes in environments is so obvious that it seems an unlikely focus for a new line of thinking about evolution. Yet niche construction--as this process of organism-driven environmental modification is known--has hidden complexities. By transforming biotic and abiotic sources of natural selection in external environments, niche construction generates feedback in evolution on a scale hitherto underestimated--and in a manner that transforms the evolutionary dynamic. It also plays a critical role in ecology, supporting ecosystem engineering and influencing the flow of energy and nutrients through ecosystems. Despite this, niche construction has been given short shrift in theoretical biology, in part because it cannot be fully understood within the framework of standard evolutionary theory. Wedding evolution and ecology, this book extends evolutionary theory by formally including niche construction and ecological inheritance as additional evolutionary processes. The authors support their historic move with empirical data, theoretical population genetics, and conceptual models. They also describe new research methods capable of testing the theory. They demonstrate how their theory can resolve long-standing problems in ecology, particularly by advancing the sorely needed synthesis of ecology and evolution, and how it offers an evolutionary basis for the human sciences. Already hailed as a pioneering work by some of the world's most influential biologists, this is a rare, potentially field-changing contribution to the biological sciences.

Organism and Environment

Author: Sonia E. Sultan

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 019958706X

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Contents: 1.

Mapping the Future of Biology

Author: Anouk Barberousse

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2009-02-26

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1402096364

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Carving Nature at its Joints? In order to map the future of biology we need to understand where we are and how we got there. Present day biology is the realization of the famous metaphor of the organism as a bete ˆ machine elaborated by Descartes in Part V of the Discours,a realization far beyond what anyone in the seventeenth century could have im- ined. Until the middle of the nineteenth century that machine was an articulated collection of macroscopic parts, a system of gears and levers moving gasses, solids, and liquids, and causing some parts of the machine to move in response to the force produced by others. Then, in the nineteenth century, two divergent changes occurred in the level at which the living machine came to be investigated. First, with the rise of chemistry and the particulate view of the composition of matter, the forces on macroscopic machine came to be understood as the ma- festation of molecular events, and functional biology became a study of molecular interactions. That is, the machine ceased to be a clock or a water pump and became an articulated network of chemical reactions. Until the ?rst third of the twentieth century this chemical view of life, as re?ected in the development of classical b- chemistry treated the chemistry of biological molecules in much the same way as for any organic chemical reaction, with reaction rates and side products that were the consequence of statistical properties of the concentrations of reactants.

Evolutionary Ethnobiology

Author: Ulysses Paulino Albuquerque

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-09-23

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 331919917X

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Ethnobiology is a fascinating science. To understand this vocation it needs to be studied under an evolutionary point of view that is very strong and significant, although this aspect is often poorly approached in the literature. This is the first book to compile and discuss information about evolutionary ethnobiology in English.

Evolutionary Causation

Author: Tobias Uller

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0262039923

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A comprehensive treatment of the concept of causation in evolutionary biology that makes clear its central role in both historical and contemporary debates. Most scientific explanations are causal. This is certainly the case in evolutionary biology, which seeks to explain the diversity of life and the adaptive fit between organisms and their surroundings. The nature of causation in evolutionary biology, however, is contentious. How causation is understood shapes the structure of evolutionary theory, and historical and contemporary debates in evolutionary biology have revolved around the nature of causation. Despite its centrality, and differing views on the subject, the major conceptual issues regarding the nature of causation in evolutionary biology are rarely addressed. This volume fills the gap, bringing together biologists and philosophers to offer a comprehensive, interdisciplinary treatment of evolutionary causation. Contributors first address biological motivations for rethinking evolutionary causation, considering the ways in which development, extra-genetic inheritance, and niche construction challenge notions of cause and process in evolution, and describing how alternative representations of evolutionary causation can shed light on a range of evolutionary problems. Contributors then analyze evolutionary causation from a philosophical perspective, considering such topics as causal entanglement, the commingling of organism and environment, and the relationship between causation and information. Contributors John A. Baker, Lynn Chiu, David I. Dayan, Renée A. Duckworth, Marcus W Feldman, Susan A. Foster, Melissa A. Graham, Heikki Helanterä, Kevin N. Laland, Armin P. Moczek, John Odling-Smee, Jun Otsuka, Massimo Pigliucci, Arnaud Pocheville, Arlin Stoltzfus, Karola Stotz, Sonia E. Sultan, Christoph Thies, Tobias Uller, Denis M. Walsh, Richard A. Watson

Adam's Tongue

Author: Derek Bickerton

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2009-03-17

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0809022818

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One of the world's leading researchers into the evolution of language argues that the acquisition of words changed the structure of early human's brains, which set into motion the limitless creativity that allowed people to make the world that exists today.

Evolution and Learning

Author: Bruce H. Weber

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9780262232296

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Essays on the contributions to historical and contemporary evolutionary theory of the Baldwin effect, which postulates the effects of learned behaviors on evolutionary change.

Neurodiversity in the Classroom

Author: Thomas Armstrong

Publisher: ASCD

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1416614834

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This book by best-selling author Thomas Armstrong offers classroom strategies for ensuring the academic success of students in five special-needs categories: learning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, intellectual disabilities, and emotional and behavioral disorders.

How Users Matter

Author: Nelly Oudshoorn

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2005-08-12

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0262651092

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Users have become an integral part of technology studies. The essays in this volume look at the creative capacity of users to shape technology in all phases, from design to implementation. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, including a feminist focus on users and use (in place of the traditional emphasis on men and machines), concepts from semiotics, and the cultural studies view of consumption as a cultural activity, these essays examine what users do with technology and, in turn, what technology does to users. The contributors consider how users consume, modify, domesticate, design, reconfigure, and resist technological development—and how users are defined and transformed by technology. The essays in part I show that resistance to and non-use of a technology can be a crucial factor in the eventual modification and improvement of that technology; examples considered include the introduction of the telephone into rural America and the influence of non-users of the Internet. The essays in part II look at advocacy groups and the many kinds of users they represent, particularly in the context of health care and clinical testing. The essays in part III examine the role of users in different phases of the design, testing, and selling of technology. Included here is an enlightening account of one company's design process for men's and women's shavers, which resulted in a "Ladyshave" for users assumed to be technophobes. Taken together, the essays in How Users Matter show that any understanding of users must take into consideration the multiplicity of roles they play—and that the conventional distinction between users and producers is largely artificial.