Nature's Machines: An Introduction to Organismal Biomechanics presents the fundamental principles of biomechanics in a concise, accessible way while maintaining necessary rigor. It covers the central principles of whole-organism biomechanics as they apply across the animal and plant kingdoms, featuring brief, tightly-focused coverage that does for biologists what H. M. Frost's 1967 Introduction to Biomechanics did for physicians. Frequently encountered, basic concepts such as stress and strain, Young's modulus, force coefficients, viscosity, and Reynolds number are introduced in early chapters in a self-contained format, making them quickly available for learning and as a refresher. More sophisticated, integrative concepts such as viscoelasticity or properties of hydrostats are covered in the later chapters, where they draw on information from multiple earlier sections of the book. Animal and plant biomechanics is now a common research area widely acknowledged by organismal biologists to have broad relevance. Most of the day-to-day activities of an animal involve mechanical processes, and to the extent that organisms are shaped by adaptive evolution, many of those adaptations are constrained and channelized by mechanical properties. The similarity in body shape of a porpoise and a tuna is no coincidence. Many may feel that they have an intuitive understanding of many of the mechanical processes that affect animals and plants, but careful biomechanical analyses often yield counterintuitive results: soft, squishy kelp may be better at withstanding pounding waves during storms than hard-shelled mollusks; really small swimmers might benefit from being spherical rather than streamlined; our bones can operate without breaking for decades, whereas steel surgical implants exhibit fatigue failures in a few months if not fully supported by bone.

An expert palaeoarchaeologist reveals how our understanding of the evolution of our species has been transformed by momentous discoveries and technological advancements. Who are we? How do scientists define Homo sapiens, and how does our species differ from the extinct hominins that came before us? This illuminating book explores how the latest scientific advances, especially in genetics, are revolutionizing our understanding of human evolution. Paul Pettitt reveals the extraordinary story of how our ancestors adapted to unforgiving and relentlessly changing climates, leading to remarkable innovations in art, technology and society that we are only now beginning to comprehend. Drawing on twenty-five years of experience in the field, Paul Pettitt immerses readers in the caves and rockshelters that provide evidence of our African origins, dispersals to the far reaches of Eurasia, Australasia and ultimately the Americas. Popular accounts of the evolution of Homo sapiens emphasize biomolecular research, notably genetics, but this book also draws from the wealth of information from specific excavations and artefacts, including the author's own investigations into the origins of art and how it evolved over its first 25,000 years. He focuses in particular on behaviour, using archaeological evidence to bring an intimate perspective on lives as they were lived in the almost unimaginably distant past.

Before Mendel, who came closest to the truth about heredity? This book examines the activities of sheep breeders able to transform the appearance and qualities of their stock by combining different traits of body or wool into new patterns. Exploiting what were then untried procedures - individual trait selection, very close inbreeding and progeny testing - they demonstrated inheritance from both sexes and showed how it could be stabilised. Major advances in breeding are associated with the English farmer Robert Bakewell (1725-1795). By the following century, when the same procedures had been established at breeding centres in central Europe, theory as well as practice became the subject of wider attention. In the Brno Sheep Breeders' Society, discussions of patterns of heredity finally gave way to the physiological question, 'What is inherited and how?' The question was posed by Cyrill Napp, abbot of the monastery to which Mendel was admitted six years later.

A breakthrough theory that tools and technology are the real drivers of human evolution. Although humans are one of the great apes, along with chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, we are remarkably different from them. Unlike our cousins who subsist on raw food, spend their days and nights outdoors, and wear a thick coat of hair, humans are entirely dependent on artificial things, such as clothing, shelter, and the use of tools, and would die in nature without them. Yet, despite our status as the weakest ape, we are the masters of this planet. Given these inherent deficits, how did humans come out on top? In this fascinating new account of our origins, leading archaeologist Timothy Taylor proposes a new way of thinking about human evolution through our relationship with objects. Drawing on the latest fossil evidence, Taylor argues that at each step of our species' development, humans made choices that caused us to assume greater control of our evolution. Our appropriation of objects allowed us to walk upright, lose our body hair, and grow significantly larger brains. As we push the frontiers of scientific technology, creating prosthetics, intelligent implants, and artificially modified genes, we continue a process that started in the prehistoric past, when we first began to extend our powers through objects. Weaving together lively discussions of major discoveries of human skeletons and artifacts with a reexamination of Darwin's theory of evolution, Taylor takes us on an exciting and challenging journey that begins to answer the fundamental question about our existence: what makes humans unique, and what does that mean for our future?

Immunology is a nodal subject that links many areas of biology. It permeates the biosciences, and also plays crucial roles in diagnosis and therapy in areas of clinical medicine ranging from the control of infectious and autoimmune diseases to tumour therapy. Monoclonal antibodies and small molecule modulators of immunity are major factors in the pharmaceutical industry and now constitute a multi billion dollar business. Students in these diverse areas are frequently daunted by the complexity of immunology and the astonishing array of unusual mechanisms that go to make it up. Starting from Dobzhansky's famous slogan, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", this book will serve to illuminate how evolutionary forces shaped immunity and thus provide an explanation for how many of its counter intuitive oddities arose. By doing so it will provide a conceptual framework on which students may organise the rapidly growing flood of immunological knowledge.

Why do we think that we can understand animal voices - such as the aggressive barking of a pet dog, and the longing meows of the family cat? Why do we think of deep voices as dominant and high voices as submissive. Are there universal principles governing our own communication system? Can we even see how close animals are related to us by constructing an evolutionary tree based on similarities and dissimilarities in acoustic signaling? Research on the role of emotions in acoustic communication and its evolution has often been neglected, despite its obvious role in our daily life. When we infect others with our laugh, soothe a crying baby with a lullaby, or get goose bumps listening to classical music, we are barely aware of the complex processes upon which this behavior is based. It is not facial expressions or body language that are affecting us, but sound. They are present in music and speech as "emotional prosody" and allow us to communicate not only verbally but also emotionally. This groundbreaking book presents a thorough exploration into how acoustically conveyed emotions are generated and processed in both animals and man. It is the first volume to bridge the gap between research in the acoustic communication of emotions in humans with those in animals, using a comparative approach. With the communication of emotions being an important research topic for a range of scientific fields, this book is valuable for those in the fields of animal behaviour, anthropology, evolutionary biology, human psychology, linguistics, musicology, and neurology.

This book summarizes current advances in our understanding of how infectious disease represents an ecological interaction between a pathogenic microorganism and the host species in which that microbe causes illness. The contributing authors explain that pathogenic microorganisms often also have broader ecological connections, which can include a natural environmental presence; possible transmission by vehicles such as air, water, and food; and interactions with other host species, including vectors for which the microbe either may or may not be pathogenic. This field of science has been dubbed disease ecology, and the chapters that examine it have been grouped into three sections. The first section introduces both the role of biological community interactions and the impact of biodiversity on infectious disease. In turn, the second section considers those diseases directly affecting humans, with a focus on waterborne and foodborne illnesses, while also examining the critical aspect of microbial biofilms. Lastly, the third section presents the ecology of infectious diseases from the perspective of their impact on mammalian livestock and wildlife as well as on humans. Given its breadth of coverage, the volume offers a valuable resource for microbial ecologists and biomedical scientists alike.

This fully updated second edition explores protocols that address the most challenging aspects of experimental work in ancient DNA, such as preparing ancient samples for DNA extraction, the DNA extraction itself, and transforming extracted ancient DNA molecules for sequencing library preparation. The volume also examines the analysis of high-throughput sequencing data recovered from ancient specimens, which, because of the degraded nature of ancient DNA and common co-extraction of contaminant DNA, has challenges that are unique compared to data recovered from modern specimens.Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Authoritative and cutting-edge, Ancient DNA: Methods and Protocols, Second Edition aims to serve both experts and beginners by presenting protocols in a manner that makes them easily accessible for everyday use in the lab.

The last decades of the 20th century witnessed strongly growing interest in evolutionary approaches to the human past. Even now, however, there is little real agreement on what "evolutionary archaeology" is all about. A major obstacle is the lack of consensus on how to define the basic principles of Darwinian thought in ways that are genuinely relevant to the archaeological sciences. Each chapter in this new collection of specially invited essays focuses on a single major concept and its associated key words, summarizes its historic and current uses, and then reviews case studies illustrating that concept's present and probable future role in research. What these authors say shows the richness and current diversity of thought among those today who insist that Darwinism has a key role to play in archaeology. Each chapter includes definitions of related key words. Because the same key words may have the same or different meanings in different conceptual contexts, many of these key words are addressed in more than one chapter. In addition to exploring key concepts, collectively the book's chapters show the broad range of ideas and opinions in this intellectual arena today. This volume reflects--and clarifies--debate today on the role of Darwinism in modern archaeology, and by doing so, may help shape the directions that future work in archaeology will take.

Darwin did not discover evolution. He didn't trip over it on the way to somewhere else the way Columbus discovered the New World. Like the atom, planetary orbits, and so many other scientific constructs, evolution was invented in order to explain striking phenomena. And it has been most successful. A century and a half has not simply confirmed Darwin's work, it has linked evolution to the mechanisms of life on the molecular scale. It is what life does. Where Darwin had drawn his theories from forest and field, we now set them in the coiling and uncoiling of twists of DNA, linking where they might, with a host of molecular bits and pieces scurrying about. Darwin, himself, however, has been a closed story. A century and a half of study of the man and his work, including close readings of his books, his notebooks and letters, and even the books he read, has led to a working appreciation of his genius. The 'success' of this account has, however, kept us from seeing several important issues: most notably, why did he pursue evolution in the first place? Buckets from an English Sea offers a new view of what inspired Darwin and provoked his work. Stunning events early in the voyage of the Beagle challenged his deeply held conviction that people are innately good. This study of 1832 highlights the resources available to the young Darwin as he worked to secure humanity's innate goodness.

The philosophically most challenging science today, arguably, is no longer physics but biology. It is hardly an exaggeration to state that Charles Darwin has shaped modern evolutionary biology more significantly than anyone else. Moreover, since Darwin's day, philosophers and scientists have realized the enormous philosophical potential of Darwinism and have tried to expand his insights well beyond the limits of biology. However, no consensus has been achieved. The aim of this collection of essays is to revive a comprehensive discussion of the meaning and the philosophical implications of "Darwinism." The contributors to Darwinism and Philosophy are international scholars from the fields of philosophy, science, and history of ideas. A strength of this collection is that it brings together sustained reflection from American and Continental philosophical traditions. The conclusions of the contributors vary, but taken together their essays successfully map the problems of interpreting "Darwinism."

Evolutionary developmental biology or evo-devo is a field of biological research that compares the underlying mechanisms of developmental processes in different organisms to infer the ancestral condition of these processes and elucidate how they have evolved. It addresses questions about the developmental bases of evolutionary changes and evolution of developmental processes. The book's content is divided into three parts, the first of which discusses the theoretical background of evo-devo. The second part highlights new and emerging model organisms in the evo-devo field, while the third and last part explores the evo-devo approach in a broad comparative context. To the best of our knowledge, no other book combines these three evo-devo aspects: theoretical considerations, a comprehensive list of emerging model species, and comparative analyses of developmental processes. Given its scope, the book will offer readers a new perspective on the natural diversity of processes at work in cells and during the development of various animal groups, and expand the horizons of seasoned and young researchers alike.

This highly acclaimed book brings the cumulative results of a century and a half of kinship studies in anthropology into the focus of current debates on the origin of modern humans in Africa and on an entangled bit of human evolutionary history commonly subsumed under the heading of the "peopling of the Americas." This erudite study is based on a database of some 2,500 kinship vocabularies representing roughly 600 African languages, 140 Australian languages, 500 Austronesian languages, 200 Papuan languages, 350 languages of Eurasia (excluding Indo-Europeans), 440 North and Middle American Indian languages, and 200 South American languages. This valuable reference will take the reader to the dawn of kinship studies in the 19th century Western science in order to elicit the wider context of anthropological interest in kinship systems and the interdisciplinary salience of the phenomenon of kinship. The book also examines the founder of kinship studies in anthropology, American lawyer and Iroquois ethnographer, Lewis Henry Morgan, and the circumstances of his life that generated his interest in human kinship. The study ventures into the intricacies of scientific and quasi-scientific debates in the 19th century, and treats 19th century science as embedded in a myth featuring divinity, humanity and animality as principal characters. This account is divided into four sections, each of which is structured as a triad (philosophy, psychology and physiology; logic, semiotics and reproduction; religion, hermeneutics and evolution; law, grammar and speech). This far-reaching historical journey aims at formulating an idea of what human kinship might be all about, especially in the light of the widespread uncertainties about this question caused by the constructivist turn in anthropology. Eventually our ideas regarding human origins, ancient population dispersals and the homeland of modern humans are inextricably linked to our ideas about kinship. As a book that brings together evolutionary and sociocultural anthropology, The Genius of Kinship will be a critical addition for all Anthropology collections.

While much has been written about the impact of Darwin's theories on U.S. culture, and countless scholarly collections have been devoted to the science of evolution, few have addressed the specific details of Darwin's theories as a cultural force affecting U.S. writers. "America's Darwin" fills this gap and features a range of critical approaches that examine U.S. textual responses to Darwin's works.

The scholars in this collection represent a range of disciplines--literature, history of science, women's studies, geology, biology, entomology, and anthropology. All pay close attention to the specific forms that Darwinian evolution took in the United States, engaging not only with Darwin's most famous works, such as "On the Origin of Species," but also with less familiar works, such as "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals."

Each contributor considers distinctive social, cultural, and intellectual conditions that affected the reception and dissemination of evolutionary thought, from before the publication of "On the Origin of Species" to the early years of the twenty-first century. These essays engage with the specific details and language of a wide selection of Darwin's texts, treating his writings as primary sources essential to comprehending the impact of Darwinian language on American writers and thinkers. This careful engagement with the texts of evolution enables us to see the broad points of its acceptance and adoption in the American scene; this approach also highlights the ways in which writers, reformers, and others reconfigured Darwinian language to suit their individual purposes.

"America's Darwin" demonstrates the many ways in which writers and others fit themselves to a narrative of evolution whose dominant motifs are contingency and uncertainty. Collectively, the authors make the compelling case that the interpretation of evolutionary theory in the U.S. has always shifted in relation to prevailing cultural anxieties.

The debate over teaching evolution in the public schools remains one of the most emotionally charged controversies in twentieth-century America. This third edition of Edward J. Larson's highly acclaimed study - which ranges from before the Scopes trial of 1925 to the creationism disputes of the 1980's - offers the first comprehensive account of the educational and legal battles errupting from this persistent belief.

This book takes the reader on a journey, navigating the enigmatic aspects of cooperation; a journey that starts inside the body and continues via our thoughts to the human super-organism. Cooperation is one of life's fundamental principles. We are all made of parts - genes, cells, organs, neurons, but also of ideas, or 'memes'. Our societies too are made of parts - us humans. Is all this cooperation fundamentally the same process? From the smallest component parts of our bodies and minds to our complicated societies, everywhere cooperation is the organizing principle. Often this cooperation has emerged because the constituting parts have benefited from the interactions, but not seldom the cooperating units appear to lose on the interaction. How then to explain cooperation? How can we understand our intricate societies where we regularly provide small and large favors for people we are unrelated to, know, or even never expect to meet again? Where does the idea come from that it is right to risk one's life for country, religion or freedom? The answers seem to reside in the two processes that have shaped humanity: biological and cultural evolution.

Bryan Sykes brings together a world-class set of contributors to debate just what the links between genes, language, and the archaeological record can tell us about human evolution. The eight lively essays offer widely differing opinions, pose more questions than they offer answers, eschew jargon, and pursue controversy. Guaranteed to fascinate anyone who has ever wondered how the fossil record, the incredible diversity of human language, and our genetic inheritance might combine to give a glimpse of human origins.

Basics in Human Evolution offers a broad view of evolutionary biology and medicine. The book is written for a non-expert audience, providing accessible and convenient content that will appeal to numerous readers across the interdisciplinary field. From evolutionary theory, to cultural evolution, this book fills gaps in the readers' knowledge from various backgrounds and introduces them to thought leaders in human evolution research.

"As a sex writer, Jesse Bering is fearless--and peerless." --Dan Savage
"You are a sexual deviant. A pervert, through and through." We may not want to admit it, but as the award-winning columnist and psychologist Jesse Bering reveals in "Perv," there is a spectrum of perversion along which we all sit. Whether it's voyeurism, exhibitionism, or your run-of-the-mill foot fetish, we "all" possess a suite of sexual tastes as unique as our fingerprints--and as secret as the rest of the skeletons we've hidden in our closets.
Combining cutting-edge studies and critiques of landmark research and conclusions drawn by Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, and the "DSM-5," Bering pulls the curtain back on paraphilias, arguing that sexual deviance is commonplace. He explores the countless fetishists of the world, including people who wear a respectable suit during the day and handcuff a willing sexual partner at night. But he also takes us into the lives of "erotic outliers," such as a woman who falls madly in love with the Eiffel Tower; a pair of "deeply "affectionate identical twins; those with a particular penchant for statues; and others who are enamored of crevices "not "found on the human body.
Moving from science to politics, psychology, history, and his own reflections on growing up gay in America, Bering confronts hypocrisy, prejudice, and harm as they relate to sexuality on a global scale. Humanizing so-called deviants while at the same time asking serious questions about the differences between thought and action, he presents us with a challenge: to understand that our best hope of solving some of the most troubling problems of our age hinges entirely on the "amoral "study of sex.
As kinky as it is compassionate, illuminating, and engrossing, "Perv "is an irresistible and deeply personal book. "I can't promise you an orgasm at the end of our adventure," Bering writes, "but I "can" promise you a better understanding of why you get the ones you do."

This book presents 19 selected contributions to the 20th Evolutionary Biology Meeting in Marseille, which took place in September 2016. They are grouped under the following major themes: * Self/Nonself Evolution * Species Evolution and Evolution of Complex Traits * Methods and Concepts The aims of the annual meetings in Marseille - which bring together leading evolutionary biologists and other scientists using evolutionary biology concepts, e.g. for medical research - are to promote the exchange of ideas and to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations. Offering a revealing overview of the latest findings in the field of evolutionary biology, this book represents an invaluable source of information for scientists, teachers and advanced students alike.

This is a fascinating encyclopedia comparing the most important adaptations and evolutions in the natural world with the most important discoveries and inventions of human history. Welcome to the amazing world of adaptations, where species-including humans-develop fascinating new capabilities to ensure a competitive edge in their environment, or in some cases, survival itself. Encyclopedia of Adaptations in the Natural World is a wide-ranging catalog of the most important of those adaptations-from photosynthesis to the the peculiar "vampire"-like behavior of the tiny life form called the prion. The seven chapters in the Encyclopedia cover the key survival challenges all organisms face. Entries within those chapters cover specific adaptations from all forms of life, including animals, plants, bacteria, algae, fungi, and viruses. For each adaptation, the book also describes a related technological breakthrough in the human world, showing how engineers today study natural processes to help them develop new inventions. Provides diagrams of the process of photosynthesis, the functional areas of the human brain, and the bluefin tuna Includes 58 photographs and electron microscope images illustrating the adaptations in the book Presents bibliographic listings of key reference books, internet resources, and academic papers for further reading