In the Light of Evolution: Essays from the Laboratory and Field - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook In the Light of Evolution: Essays from the Laboratory and Field write by Jonathan Losos. This book was released on 2016-04-22. In the Light of Evolution: Essays from the Laboratory and Field available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. A collection of essays by leading scientists, and includes essays by science writer Carl Zimmer, historian Janet Browne, and a foreword by journalist David Quammen. As Quammen says in his foreword, the book collects "reports from the field, plainspoken descriptions of lifetime obsessions, hard-earned bits of wisdom, and works in progress, pried loose from some of the most interesting, eminent researchers in evolutionary biology...” The book is intended for anyone with an interest in evolution, and it can be used in a wide variety of courses, including major's and non-major's introductory biology and evolution classes. For anyone who is fascinated by evolutionary biology and who desire to understand better the day-by-day, species, ecosystem-by-ecosystem texture of its practice as a scientific profession.
On Purpose
On Purpose - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook On Purpose write by Michael Ruse. This book was released on 2019-11-26. On Purpose available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. "A brief, accessible history of the idea of purpose in Western thought, from ancient Greece to the present. Can we live without the idea of purpose? Should we even try to? Kant thought we were stuck with purpose, and even Darwin's theory of natural selection, which profoundly shook the idea, was unable to kill it. Indeed, teleological explanation--what Aristotle called understanding in terms of "final causes"--Seems to be making a comeback today, as both religious proponents of intelligent design and some prominent secular philosophers argue that any explanation of life without the idea of purpose is missing something essential. In On Purpose, Michael Ruse explores the history of the idea of purpose in philosophical, religious, scientific, and historical thought, from ancient Greece to the present. Accessibly written and filled with literary and other examples, the book examines "purpose" thinking in the natural and human world. It shows how three ideas about purpose have been at the heart of Western thought for more than two thousand years. In the Platonic view, purpose results from the planning of a human or divine being; in the Aristotelian, purpose stems from a tendency or principle of order in the natural world; and in the Kantian, purpose is essentially heuristic, or something to be discovered, an idea given substance by Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. On Purpose traces the profound and fascinating implications of these ways of thinking about purpose."--
Relentless Evolution
Relentless Evolution - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Relentless Evolution write by John N. Thompson. This book was released on 2013-04-15. Relentless Evolution available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. At a glance, most species seem adapted to the environment in which they live. Yet species relentlessly evolve, and populations within species evolve in different ways. Evolution, as it turns out, is much more dynamic than biologists realized just a few decades ago. In Relentless Evolution, John N. Thompson explores why adaptive evolution never ceases and why natural selection acts on species in so many different ways. Thompson presents a view of life in which ongoing evolution is essential and inevitable. Each chapter focuses on one of the major problems in adaptive evolution: How fast is evolution? How strong is natural selection? How do species co-opt the genomes of other species as they adapt? Why does adaptive evolution sometimes lead to more, rather than less, genetic variation within populations? How does the process of adaptation drive the evolution of new species? How does coevolution among species continually reshape the web of life? And, more generally, how are our views of adaptive evolution changing? Relentless Evolution draws on studies of all the major forms of life—from microbes that evolve in microcosms within a few weeks to plants and animals that sometimes evolve in detectable ways within a few decades. It shows evolution not as a slow and stately process, but rather as a continual and sometimes frenetic process that favors yet more evolutionary change.
A Taste for the Beautiful
A Taste for the Beautiful - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook A Taste for the Beautiful write by Michael J. Ryan. This book was released on 2019-06-25. A Taste for the Beautiful available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. "In A Taste for the Beautiful, Michael Ryan, one of the world's leading authorities on animal behavior, tells the remarkable story of how he and other scientists have taken up where Darwin left off, transforming our understanding of sexual selection and shedding new light on animal and human behavior. Drawing on cutting-edge science, Ryan explores the key questions: Why do animals perceive certain traits as beautiful and others not? Do animals have an inherent sexual aesthetic and, if so, where is it rooted? Ryan argues that the answers lie in the brain--particularly of females, who act as biological puppeteers, spurring the development of beautiful traits in males."--Back cover
The Physics of Evolution
The Physics of Evolution - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Physics of Evolution write by Michael W. Roth. This book was released on 2023-06-06. The Physics of Evolution available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book provides an introduction to the significant role of physics in evolution, based on the ideas of matter and energy resource flow, organism self-copying, and ecological change. The text employs these ideas to create quantitative models for important evolutionary processes. Many fields of science and engineering have come up against the problem of complex design—when details become so numerous that computer power alone cannot make progress. Nature solved the complex-design problem using evolution, yet how it did so has been a mystery. Both laboratory experiments and computer-simulation attempts eventually stopped evolving. Something more than Darwin’s ideas of heredity, variation, and selection was needed. The solution is that there is a fourth element to evolution: ecological change. When a new variation is selected, this can change the ecology, and the new ecology can create new opportunities for even more new variations to be selected. Through this endless cycle, complexity can grow automatically. This book uses the physics of resource flow to describe this process in detail, developing quantitative models for many evolutionary processes, including selection, multicellularity, coevolution, sexual reproduction, and the Serengeti Rules. The text demonstrates that these models are in conceptual agreement with numerous examples of biological phenomena, and reveals, through physics, how complex design can arise naturally. This will serve as a key text on the part physics plays in evolution, and will be of great interest to students at the university level and above studying biophysics, physics, systems biology, and related fields.
