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Ecology is the centerpiece of many of the most important decisions that face humanity. Roots of Ecology documents the deep ancestry of this now enormously important science from the early ideas of Herodotos, Plato, and Pliny, up through those of Linnaeus and Darwin, to those that inspired Ernst Haeckel's mid-nineteenth-century neologism ecology. Based on a long-running series of regularly published columns, this important work gathers a vast literature illustrating the development of ecological and environmental concepts, ideas, and creative thought that has led to our modern view of ecology. Roots of Ecology should be on every ecologist's shelf.
Doing Biology is written to engage the students in problem solving through embedded questions and exercises with actual data, real problems, and alternative explanations to examine, criticize, or defend. By recreating important moments in the development of modern biology students can attain a deeper understanding of both the process and content of biology.
This book was a revelation. I was simply enthralled by Joel Hagen's brilliance in reviewing the emergence of the discipline of ecosystem ecology (the study of biotic-abiotic interaction and nutrient flows in ecological systems). He does a magnificent job of introducing the personalities that midwived the new science. He explains their intellectual struggles, philosophical cross-currents, and different academic milieux. He also expertly illuminates sociopolitical context. Through his in-depth research he is able to dispel some misconceptions and truismsm, arriving at the heart of what made each scientist tick. Even when exploring some of the arcane figures and dead-end developments, he is so ...
Traces historical developments in scientific conceptions of physiology, ecology, behavior, and evolutionary biology during the mid-twentieth century Life Out of Balance focuses on a period in history when new ideas of self-regulation, adaptation, and fitness became central to a variety of biological disciplines. During the decades surrounding World War II, these ideas developed in several quite different contexts and led to greater debates about the merits of such models as applied to larger systems, including society at large. Particularly in its later cybernetic form, homeostasis seemed to provide new ways of discussing balance and regulation that avoided discredited approaches of earlier ...
The triumphs of recent biology - understanding hereditary disease, the modern theory of evolution - are all thanks to the fruit fly, the guinea pig, the zebra fish and a handful of other organisms, which have helped us unravel one of life's greatest mysteries - inheritance. Jim Endersby traces his story from Darwin hand-pollinating passion flowers in his back garden in an effort to find out whether his decision to marry his cousin had harmed their children, to today's high-tech laboratories, full of shoals of shimmering zebra fish, whose bodies are transparent until they are mature, allowing scientists to watch every step as a single fertilised cell multiples to become millions of specialised cells that make up a new fish. Each story has - piece by piece - revealed how DNA determines the characteristics of the adult organism. Not every organism was as cooperative as the fruit fly or zebra fish, some provided scientists with misleading answers or encouraged them to ask the wrong questions.
The papers in this volume represent original work to celebrate the centenary of the American Society of Zoologists. They illustrate the impressive nature of historical scholarship that has subsequently focused on the development of biology in the United States.
Samuel P. Hays is one of the most distinguished scholars in the field of environmental history and the leading thinker of its first generation. The range and quality of the scholarship collected here reflect his work as a teacher, scholar, and activist writing in environmental history and provide a powerful exclamation point to a long and distinguished career.The depth of Hays's research is evident on every page of this collection. He was not one who published just to publish; he wrote what was important and spoke to the heart of continuing debates about the environment from 1959, with the publication of Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency to the present day.As well as representing his...
This reader has been designed to accompany Giltrow’s Academic Writing, one of the key principles of which is that there is a close connection between the processes of reading and of writing academic prose. Each reading is preceded by introductory commentary, questions, and suggestions for discussion, and the book also includes a brief general introduction. As with Giltrow’s Academic Writing, her Academic Reading is a challenging text. At its core are examples of actual academic writing of the sort that students must learn to deal with daily, and to write themselves. As newcomers to the scholarly community, students can find that community’s ways of reading and writing mysterious, unpredictable and intimidating. Academic Reading demystifies the scholarly genres, shedding light on their discursive conventions. Throughout, Academic Reading respects the student writer; it engages the reader’s interest without ever condescending, and it avoids entirely the arbitrary and the dogmatic. The second edition is expanded to include twenty-one selections, nineteen of which come from scholarly publications, and more than half of which are new to this edition.
In evolution, most genes survive and spread within populations because they increase the ability of their hosts (or their close relatives) to survive and reproduce. But some genes spread in spite of being harmful to the host organism—by distorting their own transmission to the next generation, or by changing how the host behaves toward relatives. As a consequence, different genes in a single organism can have diametrically opposed interests and adaptations.Covering all species from yeast to humans, Genes in Conflict is the first book to tell the story of selfish genetic elements, those continually appearing stretches of DNA that act narrowly to advance their own replication at the expense ...
Shortlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize Sticky Fingers is the story of how one man's ego and ambition captured the 1960s youth culture of rock and roll and turned it into a hothouse of fame, power, politics, and riches that would last for fifty years. Drawn from dozens of hours of interviews with Jann Wenner, who granted Joe Hagan exclusive access to his vast personal archive, this biography reveals how Wenner manufactured an unforgettable cultural mythology in story and image every other week for five decades. Hagan captures in stunning detail the extraordinary stories behind Rolling Stone, the magazine that reinvented youth culture, and marketed the libertine world of late-sixties ...