Myxomycetes: Biology, Systematics, Biogeography, and Ecology is a comprehensive overview of the body of accumulated knowledge that now exists on myxomycetes. Its broad scope takes an integrated approach to the knowledge of this organismal group, considering a number of important aspects of their genetics and molecular phylogeny. It also treats myxomycetes as a distinct group from fungi, and includes molecular information that discusses the systematics and evolutionary pathways of the group. Additionally, biomedical and engineering applicability is discussed, thus expanding the audience and use of the book in a multidisciplinary context. The book provides an authoritative resource for students, researchers and educators interested in the fields of protistology, microbial ecology, molecular microbiology, biogeography, mycology, biodiversity, and evolutionary biology, and will also interest the amateur naturalist and biologist.

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?

This book documents analyses of the Late Cretaceous dinosaur nesting sites of the Lameta Formation at Jabalpur, Districts Dhar and Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh; Districts Kheda and Panchmahal (Gujarat); and the Pisdura, Dongargaon and Pavna sectors in the Chandrapur Districts of Maharashtra, which are exposed in India along an east-west and central axis. In this work, special emphasis has been given to the dinosaur nesting sites of the east-central Narbada River region, including its regional geology. The work was undertaken to provide detailed information concerning dinosaur eggs, eggshell fragments, nests and clutches found in the Lameta Formation of peninsular India. Prior to the present work there had been no detailed review of systematic work on the taxonomy, and of micro- and ultrastructural studies of dinosaur eggs and eggshells from the Lameta Formation. The study documents the field and laboratory investigations that facilitated the reconstruction of the morphotaxonomy, models for the burial pattern of eggs and eggshells, taphonomic implications,and the palaeoenvironmental context and palaeoecological conditions during the Late Cretaceous at the time of the extrusion of the Deccan traps, which may have been partly responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. The need to follow a parataxonomic classification for Indian dinosaur eggs and eggshell types is very apparent, and this book addresses this aspect in some detail. The emphasis on the application of parataxonomic schemes is based on the description of new oospecies and their comparison with previously known forms. The present work has led to the recovery of numerous nests, many collapsed eggs and hundreds of dinosaur eggshell fragments from the localities situated near the east, west and central Narbada River regions. It will be of interest to academics and professional palaeontologists, and all students of dinosaurs.

This book charts the history of how biological evolution has been depicted on British television and radio, from the first radio broadcast on evolution in 1925 through to the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species in 2009. Going beyond science documentaries, the chapters deal with a broad range of broadcasting content to explore evolutionary themes in radio dramas, educational content, and science fiction shows like Doctor Who. The book makes the case that the dominant use in science broadcasting of the 'evolutionary epic', a narrative based on a progressive vision of scientific endeavour, is part of the wider development of a standardised way of speaking about science in society during the 20th century. In covering the diverse range of approaches to depicting evolution used in British productions, the book demonstrates how their success had a global influence on the genres and formats of science broadcasting used today.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

This volume presents a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in symbiosis research. It covers molecular, organellar, cellular, immunologic, genetic and evolutionary aspects of symbiotic interactions in humans and other model systems. The book also highlights new approaches to interdisciplinary research and therapeutic applications. Symbiosis refers to any mutually beneficial interaction between different organisms. The symbiotic origin of cellular organelles and the exchange of genetic material between hosts and their bacterial and viral symbionts have helped shaped the current diversity of life. Recently, symbiosis has gained a new level of recognition, due to the realization that all organisms function as a holobiome and that any kind of interference with the hosts influences their symbionts and vice versa, and can have profound consequences for the survival of both. For example, in humans, the microbiome, i.e., the entirety of all the microorganisms living in association with the intestines, oral cavity, urogenital system and skin, is partially inherited during pregnancy and influences the maturation and functioning of the human immune system, protects against pathogens and regulates metabolism. Symbionts also regulate cancer development, wound healing, tissue regeneration and stem cell function. The medical applications of this new realization are vast and largely uncharted. The composition and robustness of human symbionts could make them a valuable diagnostic tool for predicting impending diseases, and the manipulation of symbionts could yield new strategies for the treatment of incurable diseases.

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 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.

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 book supplies the evolutionary and genetic framework that Charles Murray, towards the end of Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, predicts will one day explain revolutionary change in American society. Murray's Coming Apart documents 50 years of changed college admissions, government incentives, mating and migration patterns that have wrought national divisions across indexes of marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. The framework discussed is life history evolution, a sub-discipline within evolutionary biology singly capable of explaining why violent crime, property crime, low marriage rates, father absence, early birth, low educational achievement, low income, poverty, lack of religiosity and reduced achievement striving will reliably co-occur as part of a complex. This complex augments facultatively, developmentally and evolutionarily in response to unpredictable and uncontrollable sources of mortality. The uncertain tenure of life wrought by unpredictable and uncontrollable mortality selects for a present-oriented use of bioenergetics resources recognizable as the social ills of Fishtown, Murray's archetypal working class community. In turn, the thirty years of life history literature herein reviewed confirms the biological logic of elite intermarriage and sequestration. The source of life history variation, policy implications, and demography are discussed.

This book defends that the pursuit of originality constitutes one of the most important characteristics of creativity, but that originality refers, etymologically, to both origin and originary. Hence, the book is structured into two parts, dedicated, respectively, to the creative categories of origin and the creative categories of originary. Within the former are creation myths, games - the origin of all cultural activity, the dialectic chaos-order, axial civilizations - the germ of our time, and the struggle between generations - a factor of social transformation, and, within the second, creative capitalism, creative work in the context of the global economy of risk and uncertainty, and representative democracy. However, these two concepts are not isolated, but deeply interrelated, in a way that explains how creative originality builds a temporal narrative. It has been dislocated in late modernity and, with it, creativity has been broken.

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.

This book proposes a new way to think about evolution. The author carefully brings together evidence from diverse fields of science. In the process, he bridges the gaps between many different--and usually seen as conflicting--ideas to present one integrative theory named ONCE, which stands for Organic Nonoptimal Constrained Evolution. The author argues that evolution is mainly driven by the behavioral choices and persistence of organisms themselves, in a process in which Darwinian natural selection is mainly a secondary--but still crucial--evolutionary player. Within ONCE, evolution is therefore generally made of mistakes and mismatches and trial-and-error situations, and is not a process where organisms engage in an incessant, suffocating struggle in which they can't thrive if they are not optimally adapted to their habitats and the external environment. Therefore, this unifying view incorporates a more comprehensive view of the diversity and complexity of life by stressing that organisms are not merely passive evolutionary players under the rule of external factors. This insightful and well-reasoned argument is based on numerous fascinating case studies from a wide range of organisms, including bacteria, plants, insects and diverse examples from the evolution of our own species. The book has an appeal to researchers, students, teachers, and those with an interest in the history and philosophy of science, as well as to the broader public, as it brings life back into biology by emphasizing that organisms, including humans, are the key active players in evolution and thus in the future of life on this wonderful planet.

Darwinian evolution is an imaginative problem that has been passed down to us unsolved. It is our most powerful explanation of humanity's place in nature, but it is also more cognitively demanding and less emotionally satisfying than any myth. From the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has pushed our capacity for storytelling into overdrive, sparking fairy tales, adventure stories, political allegories, utopias, dystopias, social realist novels, and existential meditations. Though this influence on literature has been widely studied, it has not been explained psychologically. This book argues for the adaptive function of storytelling, integrates traditional humanist scholarship with current knowledge about the evolved and adapted human mind, and calls for literary scholars to reframe their interpretation of the first authors who responded to Darwin.

This timely book revisits cryptic female choice in arthropods, gathering detailed contributions from around the world to address key behavioral, ecological and evolutionary questions. The reader will find a critical summary of major breakthroughs in taxon-oriented chapters that offer many new perspectives and cases to explore and in many cases unpublished data. Many groups of arthropods such as spiders, harvestmen, flies, moths, crickets, earwigs, beetles, eusocial insects, shrimp and crabs are discussed. Sexual selection is currently the focus of numerous and controversial theoretical and experimental studies. Selection in mating and post-mating patterns can be shaped by several different mechanisms, including sperm competition, extreme sexual conflict and cryptic female choice. Discrimination among males during or after copulation is called cryptic female choice because it occurs after intromission, the event that was formerly used as the definitive criterion of male reproductive success and is therefore usually difficult to detect and confirm. Because it sequentially follows intra- and intersexual interactions that occur before copulation, cryptic female choice has the power to alter or negate precopulatory sexual selection. However, though female roles in biasing male paternity after copulation have been proposed for a number of species distributed in many animal groups, cryptic female choice continues to be often underestimated. Furthermore, in recent years the concept of sexual conflict has been frequently misused, linking sexual selection by female choice irrevocably and exclusively with sexually antagonistic co-evolution, without exploring other alternatives. The book offers an essential source of information on how two fields, selective cooperation and individual sex interests, work together in the context of cryptic female choice in nature, using arthropods as model organisms. It is bound to spark valuable discussions among scientists working in evolutionary biology across the world, motivating new generations to unveil the astonishing secrets of sexual biology throughout the animal kingdom.

Who are the Native Americans? When and how did they colonize the New World? What proportion of the biological variation in contemporary Amerindian populations was "made in America" and what was brought from Siberia? This book is a unique synthesis of the genetic, archaeological, and demographic evidence concerning the Native peoples of the Americas, using case studies from contemporary Amerindian and Siberian indigenous groups to unravel the mysteries. It culminates in an examination of the devastating collision between European and Native American cultures following Contact, and the legacy of increased incidence of chronic diseases that still accompanies the acculturation of Native peoples today.

This new edition captures the advances made in the field of evolutionary systems biology since the publication of the first edition. The first edition focused on laying the foundations of evolutionary systems biology as an interdisciplinary field, where a way of thinking and asking questions is combined with a wide variety of tools, both experimental and theoretical/computational. Since publication of the first edition, evolutionary systems biology is now a well-known term describing this growing field. The new edition provides an overview of the current status and future developments of this interdisciplinary field. Chapters highlight several key achievements from the last decade and outline exciting new developments, including an understanding of the interplay between complexity and predictability in evolutionary systems, new viewpoints and methods to study organisms in evolving populations at the level of the genome, gene regulatory network, and metabolic network, and better analysis and modeling techniques that will open new avenues of scientific inquiry.