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"The renowned Nobel Prize-winning scientist's elegant and concise explanation of the fundamental ideas in biology and their uses today. Hailed by Philip Pullman as "a great communicator" who is also "as distinguished a scientist as there could be," Paul Nurse writes with delight at life's richness and a sense of the urgent role of biology in our time. With What Is Life? he delivers a brief but powerful work of popular science in the vein of Carlo...
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Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in...
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Life is an enduring mystery. Yet, science tells us that living beings are merely sophisticated structures of lifeless molecules. If this view is correct, where do the seemingly purposeful motions of cells and organisms originate? In Life's Ratchet, physicist Peter M. Hoffmann locates the answer to this age-old question at the nanoscale.
Below the calm, ordered exterior of a living organism lies microscopic chaos, or what Hoffmann calls the molecular...
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In his 1910 preface Alfred Russel Wallace writes that his book, subtitled "A Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose," is a half-century of thought on evolution, covering plant life, geological formations, natural selection and, finally (going a step further than Darwin), the idea that evolution might suggest that the universe had a purpose or a "Life Principle"-the ultimate purpose of that life-development being Man.
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"Using a wide variety of stunning photographs, author Kevin Kurtz poses thought-provoking questions to help readers determine if things are living or nonliving. For example, if most (but not all) living things can move, can any nonliving things move? As part of the Compare and Contrast series, this is a unique look at determining whether something is living or nonliving."--
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Natalie Angier has taken great pains to learn her science from the molecule up. She knows all that scientists know-and sometimes more-about the power of symmetry in sexual relations, about the brutal courting habits of dolphins, about the grand deceit of orchids, and about the impact of female and male preferences on evolution. The Beauty of the Beastly takes the pulse of everything from the supple structure of DNA to the erotic ways of barn swallows,...
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Key biological terms are defined in a way that all readers can understand in this book that explains the essential concepts of life processes and how living and nonliving things relate to each other. The basics of feeding, respiration, waste, and reproduction, among other important activities that sustain living things, are explained in clear, simple language, with colorful photographs to illustrate them. Non-living things are defined and described,...
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Science is real - and really beautiful. Artist and lay scientist Iris Gottlieb deftly explores the strange-but-true world of science, giving a curated ride through the great mysteries of the universe. With clever visual metaphors and concise factual explanations, she explains neap tides, naked mole rats, whale falls, the human heart, the Uncertainty Principle, string theory, and how glaciers are like Snickers bars. Seeing Science offers just the...
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The global temperature is rising, the ice caps are melting, and levels of pollution across the world have reached unprecedented heights. According to eminent scientist James Lovelock, in order to survive an assault from her dependents, the Earth is lurching ever closer to a permanent "hot state." Within the next century, we will almost certainly be forced to give up many of the comforts of western living as supplies are threatened. Only the fittest-and...
17) Purpose & desire: what makes something "alive" and why modern Darwinism has failed to explain it
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"SUNY professor, biologist, and physiologist J. Scott Turner argues that modern Darwinism's materialist and mechanistic biases have led to a scientific dead end, unable to define what life is--and only an openness to the qualities of "purpose and desire" will move the field forward. Turner surveys the history of evolutionary thought, identifying "purpose and desire" as the keys to a coherent science of life and its evolution. In Purpose and Desire,...
18) What's alive?
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Are you like a cat? You don't look like a cat. But you and a cat have something in common: You are both alive. People and plants and animals are all alive, but is a doll alive? Or your tricycle? How can you tell? Read and find out what makes something alive, and what all living things need to stay healthy. This nonfiction picture book is an excellent choice to share during homeschooling, in particular for children ages 4 to 6. It's a fun way to learn...
20) Life
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"Discusses all the different forms of life on Earth, including plants and animals"--Provided by publisher.
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