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Human Nature offers a wide-ranging and holistic view of human nature from all perspectives: scientific, historical, and sociological. Mary Clark takes the most recent data from a dozen or more fields, and works it together with clarifying anecdotes and thought-provoking images to challenge conventional Western beliefs with hopeful new insights. Balancing the theories of cutting-edge neuroscience with the insights of primitive mythologies, Mary Clark provides down-to-earth suggestions for peacefully resolving global problems. Human Nature builds up a coherent, and above all positive, picture of who we really are.
Why evolution is like a network, not a family tree—and why it matters for understanding the health of all living things In The Network of Life, David Mindell explains why the conventional narrative of evolution needs to evolve. Ever since Darwin, evolution has largely been thought to work like a family tree in which species are related through a series of branching events. But, today, a growing knowledge of the ways species share genetic materials in a process known as horizontal evolution has revealed that evolution is actually a network of shared genealogy in which species are more interconnected than previously thought. In this book, Mindell presents this new narrative of life’s evolu...
Despite widespread popular support for environmental action, Phillip F. Cramer argues that current U.S. environmental policy approaches fail to address the real threat of environmental insecurity. Cramer traces this failure to a reluctance to recognize and address the interconnectedness of natural forces--just as all elements within the environment are linked, so too should our perspectives on, and responses to, environmental degradation be linked. In this book Cramer provides an innovative holistic approach to environmental protection that incorporates the best lessons learned from the fields of biology, ethics, philosophy, political science, law, ecology, and international relations. He especially advocates local action and, providing illustrative examples, demonstrates how local action around the world is most effective when carried out within a global framework that supports information dissemination and international coordination. This book will energize to thought and action any scholar, student, or general reader concerned with environmental issues and our current trajectory toward environmental decay.
The comparative study of mediterranean type ecosystems has gained considerable momentum during the past two decades. Modem studies on these systems date from the work of Ray Specht, who studied the dynamics of the heath vegetation of south ern Australia. The results of these studies first appeared in 1957 (Specht and Rayson, 1957) and were summarized in 1973 (Specht, 1973). Specht followed this detailed work, which pointed to the central role of nutrients in limiting the productivity of the Australian heath, with a general comparison of the structural features of woody plant communities in mediterranean type ecosystems of Australia, southern France, and southern California (Specht, 1969a,b)....
We conceived the idea for this book after teaching a graduate seminar on 'Habitat Complexity' at The University of South Florida. Discussions during the seminar led us to conclude that similar goals were to be found in studies of the topic that spanned the breadth of ecological research. Yet, the exact meaning of 'habitat structure', and the way in which it was measured, seemed to differ widely among subdisciplines. Our own research, which involves several sorts of ecology, convinced us that the differences among subdisciplines were indeed real ones, and that they did inhibit communica tion. We decided that interchange of ideas among researchers working in marine ecology, plant-animal intera...
Tests were conducted to evaluate variability among observers for riparian vegetation data collection methods and data reduction techniques. The methods are used as part of a largescale monitoring program designed to detect changes in riparian resource conditions on Federal lands. Methods were evaluated using agreement matrices, the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity metric, the coefficient of variation, the percentage of total variability attributed to observers, and estimates of the number of sites needed to detect change. Community type (CT) cover data differed substantially among the six to seven observers that sampled the same sites. The mean within-site similarity in the vegetation data ranged f...