Agrobiodiversity: Integrating Knowledge for a Sustainable Future

Experts discuss the challenges faced in agrobiodiversity and conservation, integrating disciplines that range from plant and biological sciences to economics and political science. Wide-ranging environmental phenomena—including climate change, extreme weather events, and soil and water availability—combine with such socioeconomic factors as food policies, dietary preferences, and market …

Animal Beauty: On the Evolution of Biological Aesthetics

An illustrated exploration of colors and patterns in the animal kingdom, what they communicate, and how they function in the social life of animals. Are animals able to appreciate what humans refer to as “beauty”? The term scarcely ever appears nowadays in a scientific description of living things, but we humans may nonetheless find the colors, patterns, and songs of animals to be beauti…

The Market in Mind: How Financialization Is Shaping Neuroscience, Translation…

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9780262352963

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Evolutionary Causation: Biological and Philosophical Reflections

A comprehensive treatment of the concept of causation in evolutionary biology that makes clear its central role in both historical and contemporary debates. Most scientific explanations are causal. This is certainly the case in evolutionary biology, which seeks to explain the diversity of life and the adaptive fit between organisms and their surroundings. The nature of causation in evolutionar…

Convergent Evolution on Earth: Lessons for the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

An analysis of patterns of convergent evolution on Earth that suggests where we might look for similar convergent forms on other planets. Why does a sea lily look like a palm tree? And why is a sea lily called a “lily” when it is a marine animal and not a plant? Many marine animals bear a noticeable similarity in form to land-dwelling plants. And yet these marine animal forms evolved in …

Contingency and Convergence: Toward a Cosmic Biology of Body and Mind

Can we can use the patterns and processes of convergent evolution to make inferences about universal laws of life, on Earth and elsewhere? In this book, Russell Powell investigates whether we can use the patterns and processes of convergent evolution to make inferences about universal laws of life, on Earth and elsewhere. Weaving together disparate philosophical and empirical threads, Powell…

OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose

The history of an unnatural disaster—drug overdose—and the emergence of naloxone as a social and technological solution. For years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys—an ugly death awaiting social deviants—neither scientifically nor clinically interesting. But over the last several years, overdose preven…

When Blood Breaks Down: Life Lessons from Leukemia

A leading cancer specialist tells the compelling stories of three adult leukemia patients and their treatments, the disease itself, and the drugs developed to treat it. When you are told that you have leukemia, your world stops. Your brain can't function. You are asked to make decisions about treatment almost immediately, when you are not in your right mind. And yet you pull yourself together …

Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences

Scientific philosophers examine the nature and significance of levels of organization, a core structural principle in the biological sciences. This volume examines the idea of levels of organization as a distinct object of investigation, considering its merits as a core organizational principle for the scientific image of the natural world. It approaches levels of organization—roughly, the…

Good Ethics and Bad Choices: The Relevance of Behavioral Economics for Medica…

An analysis of how findings in behavioral economics challenge fundamental assumptions of medical ethics, integrating the latest research in both fields. Bioethicists have long argued for rational persuasion to help patients with medical decisions. But the findings of behavioral economics—popularized in Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge and other books—show that arguments depending on rational …