Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Life Sciences - Evolution

Two hundred sixty million years ago, life on Earth suffered wave after wave of cataclysmic extinctions, with the worst wiping out nearly every species on the planet. The Worst of Times delves into the mystery behind these extinctions and sheds light on the fateful role the primeval supercontinent, known as Pangea, might have played in causing these global catastrophes. Drawing on the latest discoveries as well as his own firsthand experiences conducting field expeditions to remote corners of the world, Paul Wignall reveals what scientists are only now beginning to understand about...

Neotropical Biogeography: Regionalization and Evolution presents the most comprehensive single-source treatment of the Neotropical region derived from evolutionary biogeographic studies. The book provides a biogeographic regionalization based on distributional patterns of plant and animal taxa, discusses biotic relationships drawn from track and cladistic biogeographic analyses, and identifies cenocrons (subsets of taxa within biotas identified by their common origin and evolutionary history). It includes maps, area cladograms and vegetation profiles.

The...

'The Essential Tension' explores how agents that naturally compete come to act together as a group. The author argues that the controversial concept of multilevel selection is essential to biological evolution, a proposition set to stimulate new debate.

The idea of one collective unit emerging from the cooperative interactions of its constituent (and mutually competitive) parts has its roots in the ancient world. More recently, it has illuminated studies of animal behavior, and played a controversial role in evolutionary biology.

In Part I, the author explores the...

Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine is the first book in English on the history of evolutionary theory in Japan. Bringing to life more than a century of ideas, G. Clinton Godart examines how and why Japanese intellectuals, religious thinkers of different faiths, philosophers, biologists, journalists, activists, and ideologues engaged with evolutionary theory and religion. How did Japanese religiously think about evolution? What were their main concerns? Did they reject evolution on religious grounds, or--as was more often the case--how did they combine evolutionary theory with their religious...

2017 Reprint of 1919 Edition.  “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution” is a 1902 work by Russian anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin explores the role of mutually-beneficial cooperation and reciprocity (or "mutual aid") in the animal kingdom and human societies both past and present.  It is an argument against the competition-centered theories of so-called social Darwinism, as well as the romantic depictions of cooperation presented by writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued it was motivated by universal love rather than self-interest....

Vertebrates possess lineage-specific characteristics. These include paired anterior sense organs and a robust, modular head skeleton built of cellular cartilage and bone. All of these structures are derived, at least partly, from an embryonic tissue unique vertebrates - the neural crest. The evolutionary history of the neural crest, and neural crest cells, has been difficult to reconstruct. This volume will use a comparative approach to survey the development of the neural crest in vertebrates, and neural crest-like cells, across the metazoa. This information will be used to reveal neural...

The Cardiovascular System: Phenotypic and Physiological Responses, Volume 37, part of a two-volume set, provides comprehensive coverage of the current state of knowledge in this very active and growing field of research, also highlighting the tremendous diversity in cardiovascular morphology and function among the various fish taxa and the anatomical and physiological plasticity shown by this system when faced with various abiotic and biotic challenges. Specific chapters in this updated book include Research Technologies/Methodology for Studying Fish Cardiovascular Function,...