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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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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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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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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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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...
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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,...
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The marvelous microbes that made life on Earth possible and support our very existence
For almost four billion years, microbes had the primordial oceans all to themselves. The stewards of Earth, these organisms transformed the chemistry of our planet to make it habitable for plants, animals, and us. Life's Engines takes readers deep into the microscopic world to explore how these marvelous creatures made life on Earth possible-and how human life...
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"What is life? In The Biology of Wonder, scientist Andreas Weber resolves this fundamental enigma, arguing that humans, like all living beings, are creative, evolutionary forces who cannot exist apart from nature. This landmark work demonstrates that our connection to Earth's complex web of dynamic, interconnected relationships underpins the entire range of human experience, giving rise to a new ecological ethos."--
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"How does life work? How does nature produce the right numbers of zebras and lions on the African savanna, or fish in the ocean? How do our bodies produce the right numbers of cells in our organs and bloodstream? In [this book] ... Sean Carroll tells the stories of the pioneering scientists who sought the answers to such simple yet profoundly important questions, and shows how their discoveries matter for our health and the health of the planet we...
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"What defines who we are? For decades, the biological answer has been our genes. In The Master Builder, leading biologist Alfonso Martinez Arias breaks with decades of scientific and popular tradition to make a bold argument: what defines us is our cells. Drawing on new research from his lab and others, Martinez Arias reveals that we are composed of a thrillingly complex, constantly rearranging symphony of cells that know how to count, feel, and ultimately...
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"A history of American ideas about life and death includes coverage of topics ranging from the 17th-century Englishman who investigated a belief about life starting with eggs and the heated debates over Darwin's evolutionary findings to the role of the Space Age in changing views on planetary life to the 1970s trends in cryogenics." --
"[...] Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has written a [...] history of American ideas about...
16) Life
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Four years in the making, and filmed over 3000 days across every continent and in every habitat, see 130 incredible stories from frontiers of the natural world. Discover the glorious variety of life on Earth and the spectacular and extraordinary tactics animals and plants have developed to stay alive. This is evolution in action: individual creatures under extreme pressure to overcome challenges from adversaries and their environment.
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"Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works-the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more-have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong. In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far...
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