The biological and philosophical implications of the emergence of new collective individuals from associations of living beings.Our intuitive assumption that only organisms are the real individuals in the natural world is at odds with developments in cell biology, ecology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and other fields. Although organisms have served for centuries as nature's paradigmatic ind…
Essays from a range of disciplinary perspectives show the central role that cooperation plays in structuring our world. This collection reports on the latest research on an increasingly pivotal issue for evolutionary biology: cooperation. The chapters are written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and utilize research tools that range from empirical survey to conceptual modeling, re…
Functional genomics--the deconstruction of the genome to determine the biological function of genes and gene interactions--is one of the most fruitful new areas of biology. The growing use of DNA microarrays allows researchers to assess the expression of tens of thousands of genes at a time. This quantitative change has led to qualitative progress in our ability to understand regulatory process…
"From Tyrannosaurus rex to Heteropoda davidbowie: scientific naming as a joyful and creative act. Tyrannosaurus rex. Homo sapiens. Heteropoda davidbowie. Behind each act of scientific naming is a story. In this entertaining and illuminating book, Michael Ohl considers scientific naming as a joyful and creative act. There are about 1.8 million discovered and named plant and animal species, and m…
The vast differences between the brain's neural circuitry and a computer's silicon circuitry might suggest that they have nothing in common. In fact, as Dana Ballard argues in this book, computational tools are essential for understanding brain function. Ballard shows that the hierarchical organisation of the brain has many parallels with the hierarchical organisation of computing; as in silico…
This title begins the inquiry into the evolution of the collective sensitivities of life. Scientist-scholars from a range of fields - including biochemistry, cell biology, history of science, family therapy, genetics, microbial ecology, and primatology - trace the emergence and evolution of consciousness.
Contributors examine how regulatory & institutional environments affect the functioning of markets & propose reforms, arguing that quantitative methods should be used to guide policy & to reform rules & regulations. These essays offer methodologies for the assessment of policy alternatives.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"Today, in the age of CCTV, drones, medical body scans, and satellite images, photography is increasingly decoupled from human agency and human vision. In Nonhuman Photography, Joanna Zylinska offers a new philosophy of photography, going beyond the human-centric view to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent. Zylinska argues further that even those images produced by humans,…
In 1995, John Maynard Smith and E?ors Szathm?ary published their influential book 'The Major Transitions in Evolution'. In this volume, scholars reconsider and extend the earlier book's themes in light of recent developments in evolutionary biology.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
A Bradford book.""This collection of essays serves both as an introduction to Ruth Millikan's much-discussed volume Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories and as an extension and application of Millikan's central themes, especially in the philosophy of psychology.The title essay discusses meaning rationalism and argues that rationality is not in the head, indeed, that there is no le…