The diversity of social behavior among birds and primates is surpassed only by members of the Hymenopteran insects, including bees, ants, and the genus Polistes, or paper-wasps. This volume combines incisive reviews and new, unpublished data in studies of paper-wasps, a large and varied group whose life patterns are often studied by biologists interested in social evolution. While this research is significant to the natural history of paper-wasps, it also applies to topics of general interest such as the evolution of cooperation, social parasitism, kin recognition, and the division of labor.

Rough-and-tumble play provided one of the paradigmatic examples of the appli- tion of ethological methods, back in the 1970's. Since then, a modest number of - searchers have developed our knowledge of this kind of activity, using a variety of methods, and addressing some quite fundamental questions about age changes, sex diff- ences, nature and function of behaviour. In this chapter I will review work on this topic, mentioning particularly the interest in comparing results from different informants and different methods of investigation. Briefly, rough-and-tumble play (or R&T for short) refers to a cluster of behaviours whose core is rough but playful wrestling and tumbling on the ground; and whose general characteristic is that the behaviours seem to be agonistic but in a non-serious, playful c- text. The varieties of R&T, and the detailed differences between rough-and-tumble play and real fighting, will be discussed later. 2. A BRIEF HISTORY OF RESEARCH ON R&T In his pioneering work on human play, Groos (1901) described many kinds of rough-and-tumble play. However, R&T was virtually an ignored topic from then until the late 1960's. There was, of course, a flowering of observational research on children in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in North America; but this research had a strong practical o- entation, and lacked the cross-species perspective and evolutionary orientation present in Groos' work.

The volumes in this set, originally published between 1913 and 1997, draw together research by leading academics in the area of evolution and provide a rigorous examination of related key issues. The collection examines evolution from a broad range of disciplines, from the anthropological development of modern society, to the scientific examinations of cellular and genetic evolution. The collection includes volumes across the disciplines of biology, natural history, anthropology, sociology and religion. The 15 books that comprise this collection include rigorous examinations into the psychological evolution of the brain, philosophical and theological examinations of evolution, analysis of genetic and cellular evolution, discussions of Darwinian theory, the affect of survival of the fittest from both genetic and political standpoints and examinations into the affinity between man and ape. This collection brings back into print a collection of insightful and detailed books on the diverse subject of evolution and will be a must have resource for academics and students, not only of biology and anthropology, but of history, psychology and religion.

Most organisms and populations have to cope with hostile environments, threatening their existence. Their ability to respond phenotypically and genetically to these challenges and to evolve adaptive mechanisms is, therefore, crucial. The contributions to this book aim at understanding, from a evolutionary perspective, the impact of stress on biological systems. Scientists, applying different approaches spanning from the molecular and the protein level to individuals, populations and ecosystems, explore how organisms adapt to extreme environments, how stress changes genetic structure and affects life histories, how organisms cope with thermal stress through acclimation, and how environmental and genetic stress induce fluctuating asymmetry, shape selection pressure and cause extinction of populations. Finally, it discusses the role of stress in evolutionary change, from stress induced mutations and selection to speciation and evolution at the geological time scale. The book contains reviews and novel scientific results on the subject. It will be of interest to both researchers and graduate students and may serve as a text for graduate courses.

Sperm Competition and Sexual Selection presents the intricate ways in which sperm compete to fertilize eggs and how this has prompted reinterpretations of breeding behavior. This book provides a theoretical framework for the study of sperm competition, which is a central part of sexual selection. It also discusses the roles of females and the relationships between paternal care in sperm competition. The chapters focusing on taxonomic development are diverse and cover all the major animal groups, both vertebrate and invertebrate, and plants. The final chapter provides an overview discussing the relationship between sperm competition and sexual selection in terms of both function and mechanism and how these translate into species fitness. This book will be of prime interest to behaviorists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists, suggesting new avenues of research and new ways of approaching old problems.
Key Features
* The only up-to-date summary of a central and popular subject
* Well known editors and authors
* Provides a theoretical framework for the study of sperm competition
* Covers all major animal groups
* Includes a chapter on plants

Given the rapidly developing area of evolutionary medicine and public health, The Arc of Life examines ways in which research conducted by biological anthropologists can enrich our understanding of variation in human health outcomes. The book aims not only to showcase the perspective that biological anthropologists bring to the burgeoning field of evolutionary medicine, but to underscore the context of human life history -- especially the concept of evolutionary trade-offs and the ensuing biological processes that can affect health status over the life course. This dual emphasis on life history theory and life cycle biology will make for a valuable and unique, yet complementary, addition to books already available on the subject of evolution and health. The book consolidates diverse lines of research within the field of biological anthropology, stimulates new directions for future research, and facilitates communication between subdisciplines of human biology operating at the forefront of evolutionary medicine.

Volume: 1 Publisher: London, J. Murray Publication date: 1871 Subjects: Evolution Natural selection Heredity Human beings -- Origin Evolution Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.

Over the centuries, researchers have found bones and artefacts proving that modern humans have existed for millions of years. Mainstream science, however has suppressed these facts. Prejudices based on current scientific theory act as a 'knowledge filter', giving us a picture of prehistory that is largely inaccurate. This book reveals this hidden history.

Researchers in the field of ecological genomics aim to determine how a genome or a population of genomes interacts with its environment across ecological and evolutionary timescales. Ecological genomics is trans-disciplinary by nature. Ecologists have turned to genomics to be able to elucidate the mechanistic bases of the biodiversity their research tries to understand. Genomicists have turned to ecology in order to better explain the functional cellular and molecular variation they observed in their model organisms.

We provide an advanced-level book that covers this recent research and proposes future development for this field. A synthesis of the field of ecological genomics emerges from this volume."Ecological Genomics"covers a wide array of organisms (microbes, plants and animals) in order to be able to identify central concepts that motivate and derive from recent investigations in different branches of the tree of life.

"Ecological Genomics"covers 3 fields of research that have most benefited from the recent technological and conceptual developments in the field of ecological genomics: the study of life-history evolution and its impact of genome architectures; the study of the genomic bases of phenotypic plasticity and the study of the genomic bases of adaptation and speciation.

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Spontaneous self-cloning or clonality is a widespread phenomenon in the plant kingdom, and has a wide array of ecological and evolutionary implications. This volume is the outcome of an international workshop on clonal plant biology aimed at illustrating current progress and recent developments in the scientific study of clonality in plants. The first section of this book includes a collection of original research articles which demonstrate the wide variety of approaches and scientific challenges linked to clonality in plants. The topics covered in this section include ecological and evolutionary implications of sexual versus asexual propagation, including life-history evolution and sex-ratio dynamics, the importance of internal resource transport and remobilization of storage products for the invasiveness and competitiveness of clonal plants, a survey of clonal growth forms in grassland communities, and studies on the interactions between clonal plants and animals and fungi. The approaches used range from experimental studies on a broad variety of systems to mathematical modeling of clonal growth and its consequences. The second part features discussion and review papers on a diverse array of subjects, ranging from developmental considerations of clonality, principles of selection and evolution in clonal plants, a survey of clonality in algae, to potential implications of clonality for plant mating, and beyond. This part of the volume aims at presenting novel ideas and hypotheses, and at summarizing existing knowledge in previously under-researched areas, thereby providing directions for future research initiatives.

This book captures ongoing cutting-edge research in the field of clonal plant ecology and evolution. It is directed to anyone from the undergraduate to specialist level who is interested in the biology of the intriguing phenomenon of asexual propagation in plants.

The book integrates our understanding of the factors and processes underlying the evolution of multicellularity by providing several complementary perspectives (both theoretical and experimental) and using examples from various lineages in which multicellularity evolved. Recent years marked an increased interest in understanding how and why these transitions occurred, and data from various fields are providing new insights into the forces driving the several independent transitions to multicellular life as well as into the genetic and molecular basis for the evolution of this phenotype. The ultimate goal of this book is to facilitate the identification of general and unifying principles and mechanisms.

I Twenty-five years ago, at the Conference on the Comparative Reception of Darwinism held at the University of Texas in 1972, only two countries of the Iberian world-Spain and Mexico-were represented.' At the time, it was apparent that the topic had attracted interest only as regarded the "mainstream" science countries of Western Europe, plus the United States. The Eurocentric bias of professional history of science was a fact. The sea change that subsequently occurred in the historiography of science makes 1972 appear something like the antediluvian era. Still, we would like to think that that meeting was prescient in looking beyond the mainstream science countries-as then perceived-in order to test the variation that ideas undergo as they pass from center to periphery. One thing that the comparative study of the reception of ideas makes abundantly clear, however, is the weakness of the center/periphery dichotomy from the perspective of the diffusion of scientific ideas. Catholics in mainstream countries, for example, did not handle evolution much better than did their corre1igionaries on the fringes. Conversely, Darwinians in Latin America were frequently better placed to advance Darwin's ideas in a social and political sense than were their fellow evolutionists on the Continent. The Texas meeting was also a marker in the comparative reception of scientific ideas, Darwinism aside. Although, by 1972, scientific institutions had been studied comparatively, there was no antecedent for the comparative history of scientific ideas.

Following centuries of debate about "nature and nurture" the discovery of DNA established the idea that nature (genes) determines who we are, relegating nurture (environment) to icing on the cake. Since the 1950s, the new science of epigenetics has demonstrated how cellular environments and certain experiences and behaviors influence gene expression at the molecular level, with significant implications for health and wellbeing. To the amazement of scientists, mapping the human genome indirectly supported these insights. Anthropologists Margaret Lock and Gisli Palsson outline vituperative arguments from Classical times about the relationship between nature and nurture, furthered today by epigenetic findings and the demonstration of a "reactive genome." The nature/nurture debate, they show, can never be put to rest, because these concepts are in constant flux in response to the new insights science continually offers.

The poles undergo climate changes exceeding those in the rest of the world in terms of their speed and extent, and have a key role in modulating the climate of the Earth. Ecosystems adapted to polar environments are likely to become vulnerable to climate changes. Their responses allow us to analyse and foresee the impact of changes at lower latitudes. We need to increase our knowledge of the polar marine fauna of continental shelves, slopes and deep sea, as identifying the responses of species and communities is crucial to establishing efficient strategies against threats to biodiversity, using international and cross-disciplinary approaches. The IPY 2007-2009 was a scientific milestone. The outstanding contribution of Marine Biology is reflected in this volume and the next one on "Adaptation and Evolution in Marine Environments - The Impacts of Global Change on Biodiversity" from the series "From Pole to Pole", making these volumes a unique and invaluable component of the scientific outcome of the IPY.

Evolution is a critical challenge for many areas of science, technology and development of society. The book reviews general evolutionary facts such as origin of life and evolution of the genome and clues to evolution through simple systems. Emerging areas of science such as "systems biology" and "bio-complexity" are founded on the idea that phenomena need to be understood in the context of highly interactive processes operating at different levels and on different scales. This is where physics meets complexity in nature, and where we must begin to learn about complexity if we are to understand it. Similarly, there is an increasingly urgent need to understand and predict the evolutionary behavior of highly interacting man-made systems, in areas such as communications and transport, which permeate the modern world. The same applies to the evolution of human networks such as social, political and financial systems, where technology has tended to vastly increase both the complexity and speed of interaction, which is sometimes effectively instantaneous. The book contains reviews on such diverse areas as evolution experiments with microorganisms, the origin and evolution of viruses, evolutionary dynamics of genes and environment in cancer development, aging as an evolution-facilitating program, evolution of vision and evolution of financial markets.

The present monograph is the fourth of six volumes which review the Hypotricha, a major group of the spirotrichs. The book is about the Gonostomatidae, the Kahliellidae, and some taxa of unknown position in the hypotrichs. Gonostomum was previously misclassified in the Oxytrichidae because its type species Gonostomum affine has basically an 18-cirri pattern, which is dominant in the oxytrichids. A new hypothesis, considering also molecular data, postulates that this 18-cirri pattern evolved in the last common ancestor of the hypotrichs and therefore it appears throughout the Hypotricha tree. The simple dorsal kinety pattern, composed of only three bipolar dorsal kineties, and gene sequence analyses strongly suggest that Gonostomum branches off rather early in the phylogenetic tree. Thus, the Gonostomatidae, previously synonymised with the oxytrichids, are reactivated to include the name-bearing type genus and other genera (e.g., Paragonostomum, Wallackia, Cladotricha) which have the characteristic gonostomatid oral apparatus. The Kahliellidae are a rather vague group mainly defined via the preservation of parts of the parental infraciliature. The kahliellids preliminary comprise, besides the name-bearing type genus Kahliella, genera such as Parakahliella and its African pendant Afrokahliella or the monotypic Engelmanniella. In total 68 species distributed in 21 genera and subgenera are revised. As in the previous volumes almost all morphological, morphogenetic, molecular, faunistic, and ecological data, scattered in almost 700 papers, are compiled so that the four volumes (Oxytrichidae, Urostyloidea, Amphisiellidae and Trachelostylidae, Gonostomatidae and Kahliellida) provide a detailed insight into the biology of almost 500 species of hypotrichs. The series is an up-to-date overview about this highly interesting taxon of spirotrichous ciliates mainly addressed to taxonomists, cell biologists, ecologists, molecular biologists, and practitioners.

When, why, and how early humans began to eat meat are three of the most fundamental unresolved questions in the study of human origins. Before 2.5 million years ago the presence and importance of meat in the hominid diet is unkown. After stone tools appear in the fossil record it seems clear that meat was eaten in increasing quantities, but whether it was obtained through hunting or scavenging remains a topic of intense debate. This book takes a novel and strongly interdisciplinary approach to the role of meat in the early hominid diet, inviting well-known researchers who study the human fossil record, modern hunter-gatherers, and nonhuman primates to contribute chapters to a volume that integrates these three perspectives. Stanford's research has been on the ecology of hunting by wild chimpanzees. Bunn is an archaeologist who has worked on both the fossil record and modern foraging people. This will be a reconsideration of the role of hunting, scavening, and the uses of meat in light of recent data and modern evolutionary theory. There is currently no other book, nor has there ever been, that occupies the niche this book will create for itself.

This book summarizes the work of several decades, culminating in a revolutionary model of recent human evolution. It challenges current consensus views fundamentally, presenting in its support a mass of evidence, much of which has never been assembled before. This evidence derives primarily from archaeology, paleoanthropology, genetics, clinical psychology, neurosciences, linguistics and cognitive sciences. No even remotely similar thesis of recent human origins has ever been published, but some of the key elements of this book have been published by the author in major refereed journals in the last two years. Its implications are far-reaching and profoundly affect the way we perceive ourselves as a species. This book about what it means to be human is heavily referenced, with a bibliography of many hundreds of scientific entries.

A world of categones devmd of spirit waits for life to return. Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift The stock-in-trade of communicating hypotheses about the historical path of evolution is a graphical representation called a phylogenetic tree. In most such graphics, pairs of branches diverge from other branches, successively marching across abstract time toward the present. To each branch is tied a tag with a name, a binominal symbol that functions as does the name given to an individual human being. On phylogenetic trees the names symbolize species. What exactly do these names signify? What kind of information is communicated when we claim to have knowledge of the following types? "Tetonius mathewzi was ancestral to Pseudotetonius ambiguus. " "The sample of fossils attributed to Homo habzlis is too variable to contain only one species. " "Interbreeding populations of savanna baboons all belong to Papio anubis. " "Hylobates lar and H. pileatus interbreed in zones of geographic overlap. " While there is nearly universal agreement that the notion of the speczes is fundamental to our understanding of how evolution works, there is a very wide range of opinion on the conceptual content and meaning of such particular statements regarding species. This is because, oddly enough, evolutionary biolo gists are quite far from agreement on what a species is, how it attains this status, and what role it plays in evolution over the long term."

Mites are very small animals, characterized by wingless and eyeless bodies, in which sociality has been discovered. This book offers detailed descriptions of the diverse social systems and the social evolution of mites, ranging from genetic to ecological aspects. Through a broad spectrum of studies including traditional natural history, taxonomy, modern evolutionary and behavioral ecology, and theoretical models as well, the book addresses a number of important findings on plant mite evolution and species radiation, with the author succeeding in combining theoretical and practical approaches in behavioral ecology by proposing a new game theory. These findings reflect the complex evolutionary history of these taxa and also help to point out clearly what is known and what is not yet known to date. Mites have been considered a minor animal group, but the author shows that mites actually possess great diversity and therefore make unique materials for evolutionary and behavioral studies.

The relationship between systematics and ecology has recently been invigorated, and developed a long way from the "old" field of comparative biology. This change has been two-fold. Advances in phylogenetic research have allowed explicit phylogenetic hypotheses to be constructed for a range of different groups of organisms, and ecologists are now more aware that organism traits are influenced by the interaction of past and present. This volume discusses the impact of these modern phylogenetic methods on ecology, especially those using comparative methods.
Although unification of these areas has proved difficult, a number of conclusions can be drawn from the text. These include the need for a "working" bridge between evolutionary biologists using logic-based cladistic methods and those using probability-based statistical methods, for care in the selection of tree types for comparative studies and for systematists to attempt to analyse ecologically important groups.
Comparative ecologists and systematists need to come together to develop these ideas further, but this volume presents a very useful starting point for all those interested in systematics and ecology.

In order to describe the logic of morality, "contractualist " philosophers have studied how individuals behave when they choose to follow their moral intuitions. These individuals, contractualists note, often act as if they have bargained and thus reached an agreement with others about how to distribute the benefits and burdens of mutual cooperation. Using this observation, such philosophers argue that the purpose of morality is to maximize the benefits of human interaction. The resulting "contract " analogy is both insightful and puzzling. On one hand, it captures the pattern of moral intuitions, thus answering questions about human cooperation: why do humans cooperate? Why should the distribution of benefits be proportionate to each person's contribution? Why should the punishment be proportionate to the crime? Why should the rights be proportionate to the duties? On the other hand, the analogy provides a mere as-if explanation for human cooperation, saying that cooperation is "as if " people have passed a contract-but since they didn't, why should it be so? To evolutionary thinkers, the puzzle of the missing contract is immediately reminiscent of the puzzle of the missing "designer " of life-forms, a puzzle that Darwin's theory of natural selection essentially resolved. Evolutionary and contractualist theory originally intersected at the work of philosophers John Rawls and David Gauthier, who argued that moral judgments are based on a sense of fairness that has been naturally selected. In this book, Nicolas Baumard further explores the theory that morality was originally an adaptation to the biological market of cooperation, an arena in which individuals competed to be selected for cooperative interactions. In this environment, Baumard suggests, the best strategy was to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation in a fair way, so that those who offered less than others were left out of cooperation while those who offered more were exploited by their partners. It is with this evolutionary approach that Baumard ultimately accounts for the specific structure of human morality.

This volume brings together information about recent discoveries and current theories concerning the origin and early evolution of anthropoid primates monkeys, apes, and humans. Although Anthropoidea is one of the most dis tinctive groups of living primates, and the origin of the group is a frequent topic of discussion in the anthropological and paleontological literature, the topic of anthropoid origins has rarely been the foeus of direct discussion in primate evolution. Rather, diseussion of anthropoid origins appears as a ma jor side issue in volumes dealing with the origin of platyrrhines (Ciochon and Chiarelli, 1980), in discussions about the phylogenetic position of Tarsius, in descriptions of early anthropoid fossils, and in descriptions and revisions of various fossil prosimians. As a result, the literature on anthropoid origins has a long history of argument by advocacy, in which scholars with different views have expounded individual theories based on a small bit of evidence at hand, often with little consideration of alternative views and other types of evidence that have been used in their support. This type of scholarship struck us as a relatively unproductive approach to a critical issue in primate evolution."

Evolutionary Aesthetics is the attempt to understand the aesthetic judgement of human beings and their spontaneous distinction between "beauty" and "ugliness" as a biologically adapted ability to make important decisions in life. The hypothesis is - both in the area of "natural beauty" and in sexuality, with regard to landscape preferences, but also in the area of "artificial beauty" (i.e. in art and design) - that beauty opens up fitness opportunities, while ugliness holds fitness risks. In this book, this adaptive view of aesthetics is developed theoretically, presented on the basis of numerous examples, and its consequences for evolutionary anthropology are illuminated.