Reframing Darwin

Reframing Darwin PDF Author: Jeanette Hoorn
Publisher: Miegunyah Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
In celebration of the the bicentenary year of Charles Darwin's birth and complementing the Darwin's Cornucopia, Evolution, Science and Art exhibit in Australia, this record highlights the impact of Darwinian thought on Australian art, science, and culture. Comprehensive and unique, this collection of insightful essays reflects upon topics ranging from the voyage of the HMS Beagle to bioethics and cloning. This volume shows how pervasive the ideas of Charles Darwin are in the Australian arts and sciences and depicts the great influence his thinking has had in the international community and in cultures the world over.

Reframing Darwin

Reframing Darwin PDF Author: Jeanette Hoorn
Publisher: Miegunyah Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
In celebration of the the bicentenary year of Charles Darwin's birth and complementing the Darwin's Cornucopia, Evolution, Science and Art exhibit in Australia, this record highlights the impact of Darwinian thought on Australian art, science, and culture. Comprehensive and unique, this collection of insightful essays reflects upon topics ranging from the voyage of the HMS Beagle to bioethics and cloning. This volume shows how pervasive the ideas of Charles Darwin are in the Australian arts and sciences and depicts the great influence his thinking has had in the international community and in cultures the world over.

Owen's Ape and Darwin's Bulldog

Owen's Ape and Darwin's Bulldog PDF Author: Christopher E. Cosans
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253220513
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
After Richard Owen criticized Darwin's Origin, he was labeled a "creationist" by many, and his work on ape anatomy was derided by Darwin's "bulldog" Thomas Huxley. In this close analysis of Owen's texts, Christopher E. Cosans argues that Owen's thought was much more sophisticated than Huxley portrayed it. In addition to considering Owen and Huxley's anatomical debate, Owen's Ape and Darwin's Bulldog examines their philosophical dispute. Huxley embraced the metaphysics of Descartes, while Owen felt philosophy of science should rest on Kant's claim that sense-perception does not tell us how things-in-themselves "really are." Owen thought the creationist-Darwinist dispute was unproductive, and held that both 19th century special creationists and Darwin's suggestion in the Origin that God created the first life forms unnecessarily brought supernatural causation into science. With the hindsight of how the theory of evolution has progressed over the last three centuries, the Owen-Huxley debate affords the history and philosophy of science a case study. It sheds light on theories of knowledge that have been advanced by Quine, Wittgenstein, Hanson, and Putnam. Owen's Ape and Darwin's Bulldog also examines Malthus, Mill and Marx for the influence of economic thought on early evolutionary theories, and considers broader ideas about how science and society interact.

The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms

The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms PDF Author: Robert F. Shedinger
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532658354
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Is Darwinian evolution really the most successful scientific theory ever proposed--or even the best idea anyone has ever had, as Daniel Dennett once put it? The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms provides a comprehensive critical reading of the literature of evolutionary biology from Darwin to Dobzhansky to Dawkins, revealing this popular account of evolution to be a grand narrative of Darwinian triumph that greatly overstates the empirical validity of modern evolutionary theory. The mechanisms driving the evolutionary process truly remain a mystery more than one hundred fifty years after Origin of Species, a fact that can free religion scholars to think in more creative ways about the positive contributions religious reflection might make to our understanding of life's origin and diversity. The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms calls for an embrace of mystery, understood not as an abdication of the scientific quest for truth but as a courageous and humble acknowledgment of the limits of human reason and an openness to a fundamentally religious orientation toward life.

Reframing Russian Modernism

Reframing Russian Modernism PDF Author: Irina Shevelenko
Publisher:
ISBN: 0299320405
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Presents modernism in Russia through the lens of its engagement with politics, science, religion, and other social practices. In the early twentieth century, when many Russian social institutions looked to the past, modernist arts powerfully amplified a gamut of new ideas about individual and collective transformation.

Lyell and Darwin, Geologists

Lyell and Darwin, Geologists PDF Author: Martin J.S. Rudwick
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000939146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
The studies in this second volume by Martin Rudwick (the first being The New Science of Geology: Studies in the Earth Science in the Age of Reform) focus on the figures of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin. Lyell rose to be of pivotal importance in the second quarter of the 19th century because he challenged other geologists throughout Europe by probing their methods and conclusions to the limit. While adopting their goal of reconstructing the contingent history of the earth, he claimed that the physical processes observable in action in the present could explain far more about the past than was commonly believed, and that it was unnecessary to postulate occasional catastrophic events of still greater intensity. Far more controversial was Lyell's further claim that the earth and its life had always been in a stable steady state, rather than developing in a broadly linear or directional fashion. His younger friend Charles Darwin first made his name as a Lyellian geologist; Darwin's early work in geology, studied here, provided important foundations for his later and more famous research on speciation and other biological problems.

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels

Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels PDF Author: John Glendening
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134088345
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Criticism about the neo-Victorian novel — a genre of historical fiction that re-imagines aspects of the Victorian world from present-day perspectives — has expanded rapidly in the last fifteen years but given little attention to the engagement between science and religion. Of great interest to Victorians, this subject often appears in neo-Victorian novels including those by such well-known authors as John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, Graham Swift, and Mathew Kneale. This book discusses novels in which nineteenth-century science, including geology, paleontology, and evolutionary theory, interacts with religion through accommodations, conflicts, and crises of faith. In general, these texts abandon conventional religion but retain the ethical connectedness and celebration of life associated with spirituality at its best. Registering the growth of nineteenth-century secularism and drawing on aspects of the romantic tradition and ecological thinking, they honor the natural world without imagining that it exists for humans or functions in reference to human values. In particular, they enact a form of wonderment: the capacity of the mind to make sense of, creatively adapt, and enjoy the world out of which it has evolved — in short, to endow it with meaning. Protagonists who come to experience reality in this expansive way release themselves from self-anxiety and alienation. In this book, Glendening shows how, by intermixing past and present, fact and fiction, neo-Victorian narratives, with a few instructive exceptions, manifest this pattern.

Chaos and Nonlinear Psychology

Chaos and Nonlinear Psychology PDF Author: David Schuldberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190465026
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
The pandemic, and our response to it, has shown how unpredictable, irrational, illogical, suddenly changing, and muddled human interactions can be in a time of crisis. How can we make sense of such confusing and baffling behavior? This book reveals how chaos and nonlinear dynamics can bring new understanding to everyday topics in social sciences. It brings together chapters from leaders at the intersection of psychology and chaos and complexity theories. Conceptual and user-friendly, it is built around six themes: 1) Seeing nonlinearity, 2) Finding patterns, 3) using Simple models, 4) Intervening nonlinearly, and 6) teaching a new Worldview. It takes no specialized study-although there is more sophisticated material and optional math for those wishing it. The techie will, in addition, find concepts and diagrams to ponder. The volume is engaging, at times startling-whether about the weather, Internet, organizations, family dynamics, health, evolution, or falling in love. It reveals how many social, personal, clinical, research, and life phenomena become understandable and can be modelled in the light of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems (NDS) theory. It even offers a broadening worldview, happening already in other sciences, toward a more dynamic, interconnected, and evolving picture, including process-oriented appreciation of one's own experience. The book offers those in the field of psychology and the social sciences a stunning new perspective on human behaviour.

"Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present "

Author: Tricia Cusack
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351566733
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Before the eighteenth century, the ocean was regarded as a repulsive and chaotic deep. Despite reinvention as a zone of wonder and pleasure, it continued to be viewed in the West and elsewhere as ?uninhabited?, empty space. This collection, spanning the eighteenth century to the present, recasts the ocean as ?social space?, with particular reference to visual representations. Part I focuses on mappings and crossings, showing how the ocean may function as a liminal space between places and cultures but also connects and imbricates them. Part II considers ships as microcosmic societies, shaped for example by the purpose of the voyage, the mores of shipboard life, and cross-cultural encounters. Part III analyses narratives accreted to wrecks and rafts, what has sunk or floats perilously, and discusses attempts to recuperate plastic flotsam. Part IV plumbs ocean depths to consider how underwater creatures have been depicted in relation to emergent disciplines of natural history and museology, how mermaids have been reimagined as a metaphor of feminist transformation, and how the symbolism of coral is deployed by contemporary artists. This engaging and erudite volume will interest a range of scholars in humanities and social sciences, including art and cultural historians, cultural geographers, and historians of empire, travel, and tourism.

Ribbon of Darkness

Ribbon of Darkness PDF Author: Barbara Maria Stafford
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663051X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Over the course of her career, Barbara Stafford has established herself the preeminent scholar of the intersections of the arts and sciences, articulating new theories and methods for understanding the sublime, the mysterious, the inscrutable. Omnivorous in her research, she has published work that embraces neuroscience and philosophy, biology and culture, pinpointing connections among each discipline’s parallel concerns. Ribbon of Darkness is a monument to the scope of her work and the range of her intellect. At times associative, but always incisive, the essays in this new volume take on a distinctly contemporary purpose: to uncover the ethical force and moral aspects of overlapping scientific and creative inquiries. This shared territory, Stafford argues, offers important insights into—and clarifications of—current dilemmas about personhood, the supposedly menial nature of manual skill, the questionable borderlands of gene editing, the potentially refining value of dualism, and the limits of a materialist worldview. Stafford organizes these essays around three concepts that structure the book: inscrutability, ineffability, and intuitability. All three, she explains, allow us to examine how both the arts and the sciences imaginatively infer meaning from the “veiled behavior of matter,” bringing these historically divided subjects into a shared intellectual inquiry and imbuing them with an ethical urgency. A vanguard work at the intersection of the arts and sciences, this book will be sure to guide readers from either realm into unfamiliar yet undeniably fertile territory.

Venomous encounters

Venomous encounters PDF Author: Peter Hobbins
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526106280
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
How do we know which snakes are dangerous? This seemingly simple question caused constant concern for the white settlers who colonised Australia after 1788. Facing a multitude of serpents in the bush, their fields and their homes, colonists wanted to know which were the harmful species and what to do when bitten. But who could provide this expertise? Liberally illustrated with period images, Venomous Encounters argues that much of the knowledge about which snakes were deadly was created by observing snakebite in domesticated creatures, from dogs to cattle. Originally accidental, by the middle of the nineteenth century this process became deliberate. Doctors, naturalists and amateur antidote sellers all caused snakes to bite familiar creatures in order to demonstrate the effects of venom - and the often erratic impact of 'cures'. In exploring this culture of colonial vivisection, Venomous Encounters asks fundamental questions about human-animal relationships and the nature of modern medicine.