Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution

ISBN-13: 9780387987729 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 368 str.

Margulis Lynn (University of Massachuset;Dorion Sagan

Opis

"Lynn Margulis is one of the most successful synthetic thinkers in modern biology. This collection of her work, enhanced by essays co-authored with Dorion Sagan, is a welcome introduction to the full breadth of her many contributions." EDWARD O. WILSON, AUTHOR OF THE DIVERSITY OF LIFE "An important contribution to the history of the 20th century. Read it and you will taste the flavor of real science." JAMES LOVELOCK, AUTHOR OF GAIA: A NEW LOOK AT LIFE ON EARTH "Truly inspirational and of fundamental importance. This thoughtful series of essays on some of the largest questions concerning the nature of life on earth deserves careful study."PETER RAVEN, MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN

Recenzje

"Although admitting that many predictions of the Gaia Hypothesis remain unproven, Slanted Truths charts the rise of Gaia from obscurity to the pages of the world's leading scientific journals." Trends in Ecology and Evolution "Twenty-four reprinted essays ... ranging from a memoir of J. Robert Oppenheimer through ... to some reflections on science education." Science

Spis treści

I Memoirs.- 1 Sunday with J. Robert Oppenheimer.- 2 The Red Shoe Dilemma.- II Symbiosis and Individuality.- 3 Marriage of Convenience.- 4 Swimming Against the Current.- 5 The Uncut Self.- 6 Power to the Protoctists.- 7 From Kefir to Death.- 8 Kingdom Animalia: The Zoological Malaise From a Microbial Perspective.- 9 Speculation on Speculation.- III Gaia.- 10 The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere-The Gaia Hypothesis.- 11 Gaia and Philosophy.- 12 The Global Sulfur Cycle and Emiliania Huxleyi.- 13 Descartes, Dualism, and Beyond.- 14 What Narcissus Saw: The Oceanic “EYE”.- 15 A Good Four-Letter Word.- 16 The BIOTA and GAIA: One Hundred Fifty Years of Support for Environmental Sciences.- 17 GAIA and the Colonization of Mars.- 18 Futures.- 19 A Pox Called Man.- IV Evolution and Evolutionists.- 20 Big Trouble in Biology: Physiological Autopoiesis versus Mechanistic neo-Darwinism.- 21 The Riddle of Sex.- 22 Words as Battle Cries-Symbiogenesis and the New Field of Endocytobiology.- 23 Science Education, USA: Not Science, Not Yet Education.- 24 An Epistemological Afterword.- References.- Professional Literature on Gaia.- Popular Literature on Gaia.- Contributors.

O autorze

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan here present their fourth book as a writing team, a collection of their essays on Gaia theory, symbiosis, individuality, and the way science is practiced nowadays. Lynn Margulis is most famous for her now-widely-accepted proposition that the cells of higher plants and animals are not individuals but symbiotic unions of more primitive cells. In these essays, perhaps more clearly than in any of Margulis and Sagan's previous books, we can see how her seemingly disparate interests combine into a coherent and very provocative scientific world-view about the tendency of life to form complex communities.