The Meme Machine

The Meme Machine
Susan Blackmore (Author), Richard Dawkins (Foreword)
(110)

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Organic

What is a meme? First coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation: stories, fashions, inventions, recipes, songs, ways of plowing a field or throwing a baseball or making a sculpture. The meme is also one of the most important--and controversial--concepts to emerge since The Origin of Species appeared nearly 150 years ago.
In The Meme Machine Susan Blackmore boldly asserts: "Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection." Indeed, Blackmore shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began, a survival of the fittest amongst competing ideas and behaviors. Ideas and behaviors that proved most adaptive--making tools, for example, or using language--survived and flourished, replicating themselves in as many minds as possible. These memes then passed themselves on from generation to generation by helping to ensure that the genes of those who acquired them also survived and reproduced. Applying this theory to many aspects of human life, Blackmore offers brilliant explanations for why we live in cities, why we talk so much, why we can't stop thinking, why we behave altruistically, how we choose our mates, and much more.
With controversial implications for our religious beliefs, our free will, our very sense of "self," The Meme Machine offers a provocative theory everyone will soon be talking about.

• Rank: #653119 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .93" h x 6.44" w x 9.59" l, 1.40 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Perishable Material Culture in Prehistory: Investigating the Missing Majority

Perishable Material Culture in Prehistory: Investigating the Missing Majority
Linda M. Hurcombe (Author)

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Organic

Perishable Material Culture in Prehistory provides new approaches and integrates a broad range of data to address a neglected topic, organic material in the prehistoric record. Providing news ideas and connections and suggesting revisionist ways of thinking about broad themes in the past, this book demonstrates the efficacy of an holistic approach by using examples and cases studies.

No other book covers such a broad range of organic materials from a social and object biography perspective, or concentrates so fully on approaches to the missing components of prehistoric material culture. This book will be an essential addition for those people wishing to understand better the nature and importance of organic materials as the ’missing majority’ of prehistoric material culture.

• Published on: 2014-05-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.53" h x 7.32" w x .67" l, .0 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 292 pages

I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History

I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History
Stephen Jay Gould (Author)
(19)

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Organic

Gould’s final essay collection is based on his remarkable series for Natural History magazine—exactly 300 consecutive essays, with never a month missed, published from 1974 to 2001. Both an intellectually thrilling journey into the nature of scientific discovery and the most personal book he ever published.

• Rank: #163713 in Books
• Published on: 2011-10-01
• Released on: 2011-08-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.08" h x 6.34" w x 8.96" l, 1.43 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

The Theory of Evolution (Canto)

The Theory of Evolution (Canto)
John Maynard Smith (Author), Richard Dawkins (Foreword)
(3)

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Organic

All living plants and animals, including man, are the modified descendants of one or a few simple living things. A hundred years ago Darwin and Wallace in their theory of natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, explained how evolution could have happened, in terms of processes known to take place today. In this book John Maynard Smith describes how their theory has been confirmed, but at the same time transformed, by recent research, and in particular by the discovery of the laws of inheritance.

• Rank: #465556 in Books
• Published on: 1993-07-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .92" h x 5.86" w x 8.34" l, 1.12 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 380 pages

Life in Darwin's Universe: Evolution and the Cosmos

Life in Darwin's Universe: Evolution and the Cosmos
Gene Bylinsky (Author), Wayne McLoughlin (Author)
(3)

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Organic

The unique premise of LIFE IN DARWIN'S UNIVERSE is that just as the laws of physics and chemistry apply throughout the cosmos, so must Darwin's principles of evolution. Bylinsky's journey through time and space gives us a scientific view of what life might be like on uninhabited planets of the galaxies -- how the evolutionary push of life might respond to different physical requirements. Bylinsky even speculates on what creatures might have dominated Earth had conditions here been somewhat different. "What can be so interesting as the story of life's slow and magnificent development in a complex universe?...With verve and imagination...Bylinsky's telling is successful and timely." --Isaac Asimov

• Rank: #940448 in Books
• Published on: 1981-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 238 pages

Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species

Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species
Dr. Sean B. Carroll (Author)
(53)

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Organic

An award-winning biologist takes us on the dramatic expeditions that unearthed the history of life on our planet.

 

Just 150 years ago, most of our world was an unexplored wilderness. Our sense of its age was vague and vastly off the mark, and much of the knowledge of our own species’ history was a set of fantastic myths and fairy tales. In the tradition of The Microbe Hunters and Gods, Graves, and Scholars, Sean Carroll leads a rousing voyage that recounts the most important discoveries in two centuries of natural history: from Darwin’s trip around the world to Charles Walcott’s discovery of pre-Cambrian life in the Grand Canyon; from Louis and Mary Leakey’s investigation of our deepest past in East Africa to the trailblazers in modern laboratories who have located a time clock in our DNA.

• Rank: #275131 in Books
• Published on: 2009-12-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00" h x 5.20" w x 7.90" l, .70 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Shattering the Myths of Darwinism

Shattering the Myths of Darwinism
Richard Milton (Author)
(71)

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Organic

Compelling evidence that the most important assumptions on which Darwinism rests are wrong. 
The controversial best-seller that sent Oxford University and Nature magazine into a frenzy has at last come to the United States. Shattering the Myths of Darwinism exposes the gaping holes in an ideology that has reigned unchallenged over the scientific world for a century. Darwinism is considered to be hard fact, the only acceptable explanation for the formation of life on Earth, but with keen insight and objectivity Richard Milton reveals that the theory totters atop a shambles of outdated and circumstantial evidence which in any less controversial field would have been questioned long ago. Sticking to the facts at hand and tackling a vast array of topics, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism offers compelling evidence that the theory of evolution has become an act of faith rather than a functioning science, and that not until the scientific method is applied to it and the right questions are asked will we ever get the true answers to the mystery of life on Earth. 

• Rank: #547400 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-01
• Released on: 2000-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .85" h x 5.91" w x 9.18" l, .95 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change

The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change
Vaclav Smil (Author)
(7)

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Organic

In his latest book, Vaclav Smil tells the story of the Earth?s biosphere from its origins to its near- and long-term future. He explains the workings of its parts and what is known about their interactions. With essay-like flair, he examines the biosphere?s physics, chemistry, biology, geology, oceanography, energy, climatology, and ecology, as well as the changes caused by human activity. He provides both the basics of the story and surprising asides illustrating critical but often neglected aspects of biospheric complexity.Smil begins with a history of the modern idea of the biosphere, focusing on the development of the concept by Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky. He explores the probability of life elsewhere in the universe, life?s evolution and metabolism, and the biosphere?s extent, mass, productivity, and grand-scale organization. Smil offers fresh approaches to such well-known phenomena as solar radiation and plate tectonics and introduces lesser-known topics such as the quarter-power scaling of animal and plant metabolism across body sizes and metabolic pathways. He also examines two sets of fundamental relationships that have profoundly influenced the evolution of life and the persistence of the biosphere: symbiosis and the role of life?s complexity as a determinant of biomass productivity and resilience. And he voices concern about the future course of human-caused global environmental change, which could compromise the biosphere?s integrity and threaten the survival of modern civilization.

• Rank: #288928 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .74" h x 7.82" w x 9.00" l, 1.42 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 356 pages