A biology professor's illuminating tour of the physical imperfections--from faulty knees to junk DNA--that make us human. "A funny, fascinating catalog of our collective shortcomings that's tough to put down."--Discover We humans like to think of ourselves as highly evolved creatures. But if we are supposedly evolution's greatest creation, why do we have such bad knees? Why do we catch head colds so often--two hundred times more often than a dog does? How come our wrists have so many useless bones? Why is the vast majority of our genetic code pointless? And are we really supposed to swallow and breathe through the same narrow tube? Surely there's been some kind of mistake? As professor of biology Nathan H. Lents explains in Human Errors, our evolutionary history is indeed nothing if not a litany of mistakes, each more entertaining and enlightening than the last. The human body is one big pile of compromises. But that is also a testament to our greatness: as Lents shows, humans have so many design flaws precisely because we are very, very good at getting around them. A rollicking, deeply informative tour of humans' four-billion-year-and-counting evolutionary saga, Human Errors both celebrates our imperfections and offers an unconventional accounting of the cost of our success.

'Thrilling, provocative and mind-expanding' Mail on Sunday 'Masterful and illuminating' DAVID EAGLEMAN Dr Joseph Jebelli takes us on a seven-million-year journey through our own heads, drawing on insights from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology, and philosophyto reveal how our brain's evolution turned us into Homo sapiens and beyond. Discover how memory has almost nothing to do with the past; magic mushroom use might be responsible for our intelligence; and how autism teaches us hugely positive lessons about our past and future. A single mutation is all it takes. 'Written with aplomb and an eye for arresting asides . . . This is an accessible and thought-provoking book' The Times

This anthology is a compilation of the best contributions from Symbolic Species Conferences I, II (which took place in 2006, 2007).

In 1997 the American anthropologist Terrence Deacon published The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain. The book is widely considered a seminal work in the subject of evolutionary cognition. However, Deacons book was the first step further steps have had to be taken. The proposed anthology is such an important associate.

The contributions are written by a wide variety of scholars each with a unique view on evolutionary cognition and the questions raised by Terrence Deacon - emergence in evolution, the origin of language, the semiotic 'missing link', Peirce's semiotics in evolution and biology, biosemiotics, evolutionary cognition, Baldwinian evolution, the neuroscience of linguistic capacities as well as phylogeny of the homo species, primatology, embodied cognition and knowledge types. "

In recent decades the humanities have been in thrall to postmodern skepticism, while Darwinists, brimming with confidence in the genuine progress they have made in the sciences of biology and psychology, have set their sights on rescuing the humanities from the ravages of postmodernism. In this volume, Eugene Goodheart attacks the neo-Darwinist approach to the arts and articulates a powerful defense of humanist criticism.

E. O. Wilson, the distinguished Harvard biologist, has spoken of converting philosophy into science, substituting science for religion, and formulating a biological theory of literature and the arts in "Consilence: The Unity of Knowledge." Goodheart demonstrates that Wilson's efforts, and those of his colleagues Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennett among others, have resulted in scientism rather than science. If, for example, Dawkins had contented himself in "The Selfish Gene" with the claim that Darwinism had made worthless other answers to the question of how we have evolved, he would have given offense only to creationists, but questions of meaning and purpose are of another order.

Contemporary Darwinist critiques err in assuming that art and traditional criticism aspire to truths that can be codified in terms of scientific laws. If this were so, we would have to regard the speculations of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Rousseau as worthless. Goodheart exposes the philistinism of literary Darwinism, the bad faith and inverted fundamentalism of the Darwinian approach to religion, and the dangers of the eff ort to create a Darwinian ethical system. Taken together, Goodheart's arguments show that in moving beyond their area of competence, the neo -Darwinists commit an ideology, not a science.

Although biologists recognize evolutionary ecology by name, many only have a limited understanding of its conceptual roots and historical development. Conceptual Breakthroughs in Evolutionary Ecology fills that knowledge gap in a thought-provoking and readable format. Written by a world-renowned evolutionary ecologist, this book embodies a unique blend of expertise in combining theory and experiment, population genetics and ecology. Following an easily-accessible structure, this book encapsulates and chronologizes the history behind evolutionary ecology. It also focuses on the integration of age-structure and density-dependent selection into an understanding of life-history evolution.

Arthur Milnes Marshall was a 19th-century scientist who gave lectures addressing the biological debates of his time. They covered topics including evolution, embryology, development and inheritance, with Charles Darwin's name and those of other important biologists distributed liberally throughout. Marshall was a zoologist, embryologist, anatomist and Darwin enthusiast, as well as an accomplished mountaineer and sportsman. He was a humanist, an admired academic teacher and brilliant public educator. The lectures reveal his passion for communicating his subject, to his students and to the working men and women of Manchester, and they provide a remarkable snapshot of the state of biological science at the close of the 19th century. His death in 1893 aged only 41, on a climbing expedition in the Lake District, left a fascinating time capsule in the form of lectures from a critical transitional period in the history of biology. Evolution by natural selection was the established doctrine but genes were undefined, with Mendel's work yet to be recognised. Embryology was suggesting recapitulation but ancestry, genetics and missing links awaited liberation from theoreticians and the stones of palaeontology. Microscopy was flourishing and cell science was finding its feet, but DNA and molecular science were far in the future. Had Marshall lived and worked into the 20th century, these lectures would undoubtedly have been superseded and forgotten. Instead, they reveal biology's transformation from a descriptive exercise to an experimental science, its rejection of purpose and design in evolution, and the shift of its axis from continental Europe to Britain and the United States. Professor Martin Luck discovered these lectures (published by CF Marshall in two volumes shortly after his brother's death) languishing in a university corridor. His careful curation, introductions to each lecture and copious annotations on the organisms, theories and scientists discussed, illuminate their significance as prequels to modern biology. Marshall's own story brings the lectures and their social context into sharp relief. Biology in Transition will interest anyone curious about the history of science, especially biology, evolution, genetics and its 19th-century pioneers.

Other animals are driven to spend essentially their whole lives just trying to get fed, stay alive, and get laid. That's about it. The same was true for our proto-human ancestors. And modern humans of course also require a Survival Drive and a Sex Drive in order to leave descendants. But today we spend most of our lives mainly just trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd. In What We Are, Queen's University biologist, Lonnie Aarssen, traces how our biocultural evolution has shaped Homo sapiens into the only creature that refuses to be what it is - the only creature preoccupied with a deeply ingrained, and absurd sentiment: I have a distinct 'mental life'-an 'inner self'-that exists separately and apart from 'material life', and so, unlike the latter, need not come to an end. This delusion conceivably gave our distant ancestors some wishful thinking for finding some measure of relief from the terrifying, uniquely human knowledge of the eventual loss of corporeal survival. But this came with an impulsive, nagging doubt - an obsessive underlying uncertainty: 'self-impermanence anxiety'. Biocultural evolution, however, was not finished. It also gave us two additional, uniquely human, primal drives, both serving to help quell the burden of this anxiety. Legacy Drive generates delusional cultural domains for 'extension' of self; and Leisure Drive generates pleasurable cultural domains for distraction - 'escape' - from self. Legacy Drive and Leisure Drive, Aarssen argues, represent two of the most profound consequences of human cognitive and cultural evolution. What We Are advances propositions regarding how a visceral susceptibility to self-impermanence anxiety has - paradoxically - played a pivotal role in rewarding the reproductive success of our ancestors, and has thus been a driving force in shaping fundamental motivations and cultural norms of modern humans. More than any other milestone in the evolution of human minds, self-impermanence anxiety, and its mitigating Drives for Legacy and Leisure, account for not just the advance of civilization over the past many thousands of years, but also now, its impending collapse. Effective management of this crisis, Aarssen insists, will require a deeper and more broadly public understanding of its Darwinian evolutionary roots - as laid out in What We Are.

A groundbreaking review of the seldom-studied semi-aquatic freshwater mammals, covering biology, behavior, and conservation. Semi-aquatic mammals are some of the rarest and most endangered mammals on earth. What binds them together in the minds of biologists, despite their diverse taxa and body forms, are evolutionary traits that allow them to succeed in two worlds-spending some time on land and some in the water. Semi-aquatic Mammals fills a crucial void in the literature by highlighting the important ecological roles and curious biology of these remarkable animals. In this unique book, wildlife ecologist Glynnis A. Hood presents the first comprehensive examination of a global suite of 140 freshwater semi-aquatic mammals. Each one has overcome the distinct ecological challenges of thriving in both aquatic and terrestrial habitats as part of everyday life. Covering millions of years, Hood's exploration begins with the extinct otter-like Buxolestes and extends to consider the geographical, physical, behavioral, and reproductive traits of its present-day counterparts. Hood explains how semi-aquatic mammals are able to navigate a viscous environment with almost no resistance to heat loss, reveals how they maintain the physical skills necessary to avoid predation and counter a more thermally changeable environment, and describes the array of adaptations that facilitate success in their multifaceted habitats. She also addresses specific conservation challenges faced by these mammals. Her analysis takes readers to the haunts of intriguing semi-aquatic mammals from around the world, * introducing the "paradoxical platypus," an Australian egg-laying monotreme that detects prey through electroreception * venturing into the swamps and mangroves of Southeast Asia, where fishing cats wave their paws above the water's surface to lure prey * trawling the streams and lakes of South America, where the female water opossum uses its backward-facing pouch to keep her babies warm during deep dives * spending time with species that engineer freshwater habitats into more productive and complex systems, including North American beavers and Africa's common hippopotamus Featuring award-winning artist Meaghan Brierley's stunning illustrations throughout, Semi-aquatic Mammals is an unparalleled reference on some of the world's most tenacious and fascinating mammals.

This work examines the cognitive capacity of great apes in order to better understand early man and the importance of memory in the evolutionary process. It synthesizes research from comparative cognition, neuroscience, primatology as well as lithic archaeology, reviewing findings on the cognitive ability of great apes to recognize the physical properties of an object and then determine the most effective way in which to manipulate it as a tool to achieve a specific goal. The authors argue that apes (Hominoidea) lack the human cognitive ability of imagining how to blend reality, which requires drawing on memory in order to envisage alternative future situations, and thereby modifying behavior determined by procedural memory. This book reviews neuroscientific findings on short-term working memory, long-term procedural memory, prospective memory, and imaginative forward thinking in relation to manual behavior. Since the manipulation of objects by Hominoidea in the wild (particularly in order to obtain food) is regarded as underlying the evolution of behavior in early Hominids, contrasts are highlighted between the former and the latter, especially the cognitive implications of ancient stone-tool preparation.

In Close Encounters with Humankind, paleoanthropologist Sang-Hee Lee explores some of our biggest evolutionary questions from unexpected new angles. Amongst other questions, she looks at what fossilised teeth tell us about our ancient life expectancy, what big data on fossils reveals about farming's problematic role in human evolution and how simple geometric comparisons of skull and pelvic fossils can suggest the origin of our social nature. Through a series of entertaining, bite-sized chapters, we gain new perspectives into our first hominin ancestors, our first steps on two feet, our first forays into toolmaking and hunting, and our continuing evolution. Lee's curious nature and surprising conclusions make Close Encounters with Humankind a delight to read.

Soil invertebrates make up diverse communities living in soil pores and on the soil surface, digging burrows and tunnels, processing organic matter and interacting with microbes. Soil is also a habitat of growing concern as many human activities cause soil degradation. This book documents the evolutionary history of soil invertebrates and their multitude of adaptations. Soil invertebrates live in a twilight zone: some have gone down to seek stability, constancy and rest, others have gone up and faced environmental variation, heat, cold and activity. And it all happens in a few decimetres, millimetres sometimes. Check out the wonderful life below ground in this book.

Evolution is the most creative, all-encompassing force in the universe. It has propelled the development of our world from the moment of the Big Bang through the various wonders of human achievement. Yet our discussion of evolution is often narrowly portrayed as a black-and-white debate between two opposing, entrenched camps, Godless Darwinists versus Creationist Fanatics. But into this rigid ideological warzone, a growing movement of bold, visionary thinkers is stepping out, armed with a set of radically unifying ideas that illuminate a new way of understanding of evolution in both scientific and spiritual terms. Carter Phipps calls them Evolutionaries. As the influential executive editor of "EnlightenNext" magazine, Phipps has made it his life's work to chart the strides in the emerging science and spirituality of evolution. This book will be the first popular guide to the exciting, progressive theories and thinkers that are prompting an explosive expansion of our consciousness about where we come from, who we are, and where we might be going. Is evolution spiritually directed? Does evolution have a purpose? Is human civilization nearing a point where we can take the reigns of evolution into our own hands, consciously shaping our bodies, our psychology, our environment, and our culture? And if so, what road should we take? Offering provocative and inspiring answers to these questions, "Evolutionaries" reveals a much more nuanced, more challenging, and - most importantly - more accurate picture of how evolution is being perceived in the spiritual, philosophical, and scientific circles at the leading edge of contemporary culture.

Annelida is a diverse group of animals, commonly referred to as segmented worms and currently comprising around 14000 described species. Found in most marine and freshwater areas, annelids have also successfully occupied many subterranean habitats. This volume documents annelid reproduction in the context of their phylogenetic relationships. It presents an introduction and overview to the current systematics of annelids and provides reviews to broad aspects of reproduction across Annelida. The chapters cover oogenesis, sperm, mating, early development, larval development and larval ecology. The book also covers some of the major clades (or purported clades) of annelids and addresses similar issues. The final chapter covers some of the more problematic annelid groups in terms of their phylogenetic placement.

'An insightful book with sparkling wit and humour that will appeal to new and seasoned readers of palaeontology.' Dr Anjana Khatwa, TV presenter and Earth Scientist It is difficult to conceive of the vast scale of the history of life on Earth, from the very first living organisms sparking into life in hydrothermal deep-sea vents to the dizzying diversity of life today. The evolution of life is a sweeping epic of a tale, with twists and turns, surprising heroes and unlikely survivors. The Earth beautifully distils this complex story into a meaningful scale. In taking a closer look at 47 carefully selected organisms over fifteen periods in our planetary history, this book tells the whole story of life on Earth, and the interconnectedness that unites us through our ecosystems and planetary history. Prepare to be confounded by the ingenuity of evolutionary biologies, humbled by our own brief part in this epic history, and disquieted by our disproportionate impact on the world we call home. 'An extraordinarily accessible and informative biography of life seen through the many forms it has generated and preserved in stone, beautifully presented. From tales of the well-known stars of palaeontology like Archaeopteryx to the many-sided cultural stories of the earliest bee fossil, everyone will learn something new.' Thomas Halliday, bestselling author of Otherlands: A World in the Making

Researchers who study ancient human diets tend to focus on meat eating, since the practice of butchery is very apparent in the archaeological record. In this volume, Julie Lesnik brings a different food source into view, tracing evidence that humans and their hominin ancestors also consumed insects throughout the entire course of human evolution. Lesnik investigates the role of insects in the diets of hunter-gatherers and our nonhuman primate cousins in order to deduce what insect consumption looked like in the past. She approaches the question from the perspectives of primatology, sociocultural anthropology, reproductive physiology, and paleoanthropology. Lesnik posits that women would likely spend more time foraging for and eating insects than men, arguing that this pattern is important to note because women are too often ignored in reconstructions of ancient human behavior. Because of the abundance of insects and the low risk of acquiring them, insects were a reliable food source that mothers used to feed their families over the past five million years. Although they are consumed worldwide to this day, insects are not usually considered to be food in Western societies. Tying together ancient history with our modern lives, Lesnik points out that insects are a highly nutritious and very sustainable food. Lesnik believes that if we accept that edible insects are a part of the human legacy, we may have new conversations about what is good to eat-both in past diets and for the future of food.

Virtually all aspects of human behavior show enormous variation both within and between cultural groups, including material culture, social organization and language. Thousands of distinct cultural groups exist: about 6,000 languages are spoken today, and it is thought that a far greater number of languages existed in the past but became extinct. Using a Darwinian approach, this book seeks to explain this rich cultural variation. There are a number of theoretical reasons to believe that cultural diversification might be tree-like, that is phylogenetic: material and non-material culture is clearly inherited by descendants, there is descent with modification, and languages appear to be hierarchically related. There are also a number of theoretical reasons to believe that cultural evolution is not tree-like: cultural inheritance is not Mendelian and can indeed be vertical, horizontal or oblique, evidence of borrowing abounds, cultures are not necessarily biological populations and can be transient and complex. Here, for the first time, this title tackles these questions of cultural evolution empirically and quantitatively, using a range of case studies from Africa, the Pacific, Europe, Asia and America. A range of powerful theoretical tools developed in evolutionary biology is used to test detailed hypotheses about historical patterns and adaptive functions in cultural evolution. Evidence is amassed from archaeological, linguist and cultural datasets, from both recent and historical or pre-historical time periods. A unifying theme is that the phylogenetic approach is a useful and powerful framework, both for describing the evolutionary history of these traits, and also for testing adaptive hypotheses about their evolution and co-evolution. Contributors include archaeologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and linguists, and this book will be of great interest to all those involved in these areas.

The book is the first thorough study of the role of phosphorus chemistry in the origin of life. This book starts with depiction of the phosphorus role in life creation and evolution. Then it outlines in vital processes how different phosphorus-containing compounds participate as biomarker in life evolution. Written by renowned scientists, it is suitable for researchers and students in organic phosphorus chemistry and biochemistry.

Wallace noticed on expeditions to the Amazon and the Malay archipelego that mammals in Southeast Asia are more advanced than their Australian cousins. His suggestion was that the two continents had split before the better adapted mammals had evolved in Asia. The isolated Australian marsupials were able to thrive, whilst those in Asia were driven to extinction by competition from more advanced mammals. This led to his theory of natural selection, which he presented to the Linnean Society in 1858 with Charles Darwin. This volume reprints those papers presented to the Linnean Society.

Evolution: The Whole Story contains everything you need to know about the development and survival of life on Earth. Each chapter of this accessible and lavishly illustrated book takes a major living group and presents thematic essays discussing the evolution of particular subgroups as they appeared on Earth with reference to detailed comparative anatomy, evolutionary legacies, and the breakthrough theories of eminent scientists. Accompanying the essays are amazing photographic features that investigate the characteristics of individual organisms in detail: in some, remarkable fossils, assembled skeletons, and lifelike reconstructions are presented and analyzed; while in others, living species are depicted and compared in detail to their direct ancestors, creatures that may have lived millions of years ago.

Dieses inspirierende und motivierende Lehrbuch zeichnet facherubergreifend ein beeindruckendes Gesamtbild der biologischen Vielfalt. Spannende Aspekte der Evolution der Erde und des Lebens werden durch interdisziplinare Verknupfung geowissenschaftlicher und biowissenschaftlicher Aspekte aus einer ganz neuen Perspektive anschaulich vermittelt. Der Schwerpunkt liegt hierbei - unter Einbeziehung aktuellster wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse - auf dem Verstandnis von Konzepten und Mechanismen. Dieses Buch richtet sich an Studierende der Bio- und Geowissenschaften und an alle an der Vielfalt des Lebens interessierten Leser. Das innovative Lehrbuchkonzept regt - gleichzeitig als Lesebuch, Bilderbuch und Lexikon der organismischen Biologie - sowohl Anfanger als auch Fortgeschrittene zu einem visuellen und intuitiven Lernen an. Jede Doppelseite bietet ein in sich geschlossenes, anschaulich bebildertes Kapitel mit themenbezogenem Glossar und weiterfuhrenden Verweisen. Fur Dozenten und Lehrer, fur Schule und Hochschule bietet dieses Buch ein reichhaltiges Nachschlagewerk und einen umfassenden Fundus an didaktisch durchdachten und lernfreundlich illustrierten Lehrmaterialien. Der Inhalt reicht von der Entstehung der Erde uber die geowissenschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen und die Verknupfung zwischen biologischer und geologischer Evolution bis zur Entstehung des Menschen von grundlegenden Mechanismen der Entstehung und Erhaltung der Diversitat bis zur globalen Verteilung der heutigen Biodiversitat von den Anfangen der biologischen Systematik in der griechischen Philosophie und der Bibel uber die darwinsche Evolution und die Struktur und Funktion von Arten und Organismen bis zu den modernen Erkenntnissen der Megasystematik und Phylogenie. Mit diesem einzigartigen Konzept verschafft dieses Lehrbuch einen soliden UEberblick uber die Erdgeschichte und Biodiversitat. Die Verknupfung der verschiedenen Fachdisziplinen foerdert das Verstandnis ubergeordneter Prinzipien und naturwissenschaftlicher Zusammenhange.

The discovery in the 1920s of a huge cache of fossils in the Gobi Desert fuelled a mania for dinosaurs that continues to the present. But the original goal of the expedition was to search for the origins of man. Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935), director of the American Museum of Natural History, stood at the forefront of the debate over human evolution and the expedition aimed to prove his theory of human origins. Osborn rejected the idea of primate ancestry and constructed a non-Darwinian theory that the evolution of man was the long adventurous story of individuals and groups exerting personal will-power and inborn characteristics to achieve both biological and spiritual success. It is an idea that still echoes today. Study of Osborn's thinking, however, has been obscured by the perception that racism influenced his theories. Brian Regal paints a different and more textured picture in this book - he shows that Osborn's views on race, like his political ideas, were motivated by his science, itself grounded in religious doctrine. His belief in the Central Asian origins of man, his role as an activist for eugenic reform and immigration controls, his support for Nordicism, his place in the 'New' versus 'Old' biology debate, his role in the Christian Fundamentalist controversy, the Scopes Monkey trial, and finally his construction of the 'Dawn Man' hypothesis - all stemmed from his desire to support his human evolution theory, and point the way to salvation. This biography charts Osborn's intellectual development, from its roots in the eclectic Christianity of his mother, through his student days with Arnold Guyot, James McCosh, and T.H. Huxley, to his mature work at the American Museum. It examines his trials and tribulations, friendships and conflicts, and the world in which he lived: all contributed to the construction of his theory. It is the dramatic story of a man holding onto ideas that for him represented the very meaning of life itself.

Sexual conflict permeates ancient religions, from injunctions about thy neighbor's wife to the sexual obligations of marriage. It is etched in written laws that dictate who can and cannot have sex with whom. Its manifestations shape our sexual morality, evoking approving accolades or contemptuous condemnation. It produces sexual double standards that flourish even in the most sexually egalitarian cultures on earth. And although every person alive struggles with sexual conflict, most of us see only the tip of the iceberg: dating deception, a politician's unsavory grab, the slow crumbling of a once-happy marriage, a romantic breakup that turns nasty. Bad Men shows that this "battle of the sexes" is deeper and far more pervasive than anyone has recognized, revealing the hidden roots of sexual conflict -- roots that originated over deep evolutionary time -- which characterise our sexual psychology. Providing novel insights into our minds and behaviours, Bad Men presents a unifying new theory of sexual conflict and offers practical advice for men and women seeking to avoid it.

Here is a book for everyone who has an interest in how our planet works, what has happened during its 4,550 million year history and what might happen in the future. It tells how Earth scientists study the pattern of events that have shaped the planet and guided the evolution of life on Earth. In clear and simple language it describes how the effects of these events are measured and the careful detective work needed to unravel the extraordinary complexity of Earth history. The latest advances in dating methods, including the detection of regular patterns of global climate change, are explained and illustrated with real case histories. Our environment is unexpectedly unstable.
Dramatic and catastrophic changes in the environment have directed the evolution of life and the rise of Man, and we can expect similar events in the future. If we are to control their effects, we will have to understand what to expect - and what could happen if we try to intervene in the 'natural' development of our home, the Earth.

Fitness and adaptation are fundamental characteristics of plant and animal species, enabling them to survive in their environment and to adapt to the inevitable changes in this environment. This is true for both the genetic resources of natural ecosystems as well as those used in agricultural production.

Extensive genetic variation exists between varieties/breeds in a species and amongst individuals within breeds. This variation has developed over very long periods of time. A major ongoing challenge is how to best utilize this variation to meet short-term demands whilst also conserving it for longer-term possible use.

Many animal breeding programs have led to increased performance for production traits but this has often been accompanied by reduced fitness. In addition, the global use of genetic resources prompts the question whether introduced genotypes are adapted to local production systems. Understanding the genetic nature of fitness and adaptation will enable us to better manage genetic resources allowing us to make efficient and sustainable decisions for the improvement or breeding of these resources.

This book had an ambitious goal in bringing together a sample of the world s leading scientists in animal breeding and evolutionary genetics to exchange knowledge to advance our understanding of these vital issues.