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Essence in the Age of Evolution by Christopher J. Austin Pdf
This book offers a novel defence of a highly contested philosophical position: biological natural kind essentialism. This theory is routinely and explicitly rejected for its purported inability to be explicated in the context of contemporary biological science, and its supposed incompatibility with the process and progress of evolution by natural selection. Christopher J. Austin challenges these objections, and in conjunction with contemporary scientific advancements within the field of evolutionary-developmental biology, the book utilises a contemporary neo-Aristotelian metaphysics of "dispositional properties", or causal powers, to provide a theory of essentialism centred on the developmental architecture of organisms and its role in the evolutionary process. By defending a novel theory of Aristotelian biological natural kind essentialism, Essence in the Age of Evolution represents the fresh and exciting union of cutting-edge philosophical insight and scientific knowledge.
Closing Human Evolution: Life in the Ultimate Age by Ladislav Kováč Pdf
This volume analyses the evolution of humankind by combining approaches from science and the arts. It offers a novel perspective on the evolution of life on Earth, based on a recent reformulation of the second law of thermodynamics in terms of the “maximum entropy production principle.” In essence, the Earth is but one of many “white holes” in the universe, where life functions as a specific arrangement for the rapid dissipation of energy gradients by generating self-organized structures. Evolution of life in the universe is a creative process of increasing complexity as a Bayesian ratchet of knowledge accumulation, advancing in an evolutionary maze characterized by myriad blind alleys. On Earth, the human species has progressed more than any other by creating artefacts that have become both agents and products of in our cumulative cultural evolution. Culture has dramatically enhanced the rate of dissipation of energy gradients. Extrapolating from the acceleration of cultural evolution suggests that humanity will reach the Civilization Singularity in the middle of the 21st century, a point in time at which the rate of changes, and hence their unpredictability and uncontrollability, will converge to infinity. Humankind has now entered the ultimate age, in which the exuberance and splendour of human feats may be metaphorically likened to fireworks. The author highlights a new role of scientists as intellectuals who can create “music for the fireworks” by analysing the consequences of the astounding dynamics in order to make the closing phase of human evolution a sublime one marked by minimal political and social tensions.
The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy by Kathrin Koslicki,Michael J. Raven Pdf
Essences have been assigned important but controversial explanatory roles in philosophical, scientific, and social theorizing. Is it possible for the same organism to be first a caterpillar and then a butterfly? Is it impossible for a human being to transform into an insect like Gregor Samsa does in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis? Is it impossible for Lot’s wife to survive being turned into a pillar of salt? Traditionally, essences (or natures) have been thought to help answer such central questions about existence, identity, persistence, and modality. These questions are not only of great philosophical interest, they also are of great interest to society at large. This Handbook surveys the state of the art on essence. Core issues about essence are discussed in 33 chapters, all of them written exclusively for this volume by leading experts. They are organized into the following four major parts, each with its own introduction that provides a summary and comparison of the part’s chapters: History Essence and Essentialisms: Themes and Variations Applications Anti-Essentialist Challenges. The volume is accessible enough for students while also providing enough details to make it a valuable reference for researchers. While the notion of essence has been targeted for sustained criticisms since antiquity, recent work has renewed interest in the topic. This Handbook explains and synthesizes much of this current interest, placing essence within its historical context and drawing connections to many contemporary areas of philosophy as well as to scholarly work in other disciplines. With cross-references in each chapter and a comprehensive index, The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy is a useful resource and essential reading for anyone, whether in or out of academic philosophy, seeking clarification on one of philosophy’s most distinctive and notorious notions.
Biological Essentialism addresses three main issues. The first concerns the essences (natures, identities) of biological taxa, particularly species. Kripke and other metaphysicians hold that these essences are (at least partly) intrinsic, underlying, probably largely genetic properties. This view, based largely on intuitions, is dismissed by the consensus in the philosophy of biology as being incompatible with Darwinism and reflecting ignorance of biology. Biological Essentalism argues that the demands of biological explanation show that the metaphysicians are right. The positive view of the consensus is that the essences are wholly relational: taxa must have certain histories. Biological Essentialism argues that there is indeed an historical component to the essence, but this component presupposes an intrinsic component. Its second issue concerns the essences of biological individuals. Metaphysicians have had much to say about this, again on the basis of intuitions. Many hold that an individual is essentially a member of its species. This has recently been unequivocally rejected by philosophers of biology. Biological Essentialism appeals to biological explanation again to argue for essential membership; furthermore, to argue for the Kripkean view that an organism's essence is partly intrinsic and partly relational (a matter of origin). Finally, the book addresses the lively contemporary issue of whether race is biologically “real”. From the perspective developed earlier, the book argues that there are indeed racial kinds, in some sense, that are “in the realm of the biological”. These kinds also have partly historical and partly intrinsic underlying essences.
"The evolutionary vision" is a term coined by economist Kenneth E. Boulding to describe a unified view of evolution that encompasses all levels of reality, from the cosmic or physical through the biological, ecological, and sociobiological to the sociocultural. It focuses less on systems or any particular entity than on the processes through which they evolve. In this volume various approaches to the self-organization of matter and information are outlined by authors who are among the chief developers of this new paradigm. They focus on the general laws governing evolutionary dynamics across all levels of evolution, including the evolution of humans and human systems.
Evolutionary Biology of Aging by Michael R. Rose Pdf
This unique book looks at the biology of aging from a fundamentally new perspective, one based on evolutionary theory rather than traditional concepts which emphasize molecular and cellular processes. The basis for this approach lies in the fact that natural selection, as a powerful determining force, tends to decline in importance with age. Many of the characteristics we associate with aging, the author argues, are more the result of this decline than any mechanical imperative contained within organic structures. This theory in turn yields the most fruitful avenues for seeking answers to the problem of aging, and should be recognized as the intellectual core of gerontology and the foundation for future research. The author ably surveys the vast literature on aging, presenting mathematical, experimental, and comparative findings to illustrate and support the central thesis. The result is the first complete synthesis of this vital field. Evolutionary biologists, gerontologists, and all those concerned with the science of aging will find it a stimulating, strongly argued account.
Why is life the way it is? Bacteria evolved into complex life just once in four billion years of life on earth-and all complex life shares many strange properties, from sex to ageing and death. If life evolved on other planets, would it be the same or completely different? In The Vital Question, Nick Lane radically reframes evolutionary history, putting forward a cogent solution to conundrums that have troubled scientists for decades. The answer, he argues, lies in energy: how all life on Earth lives off a voltage with the strength of a bolt of lightning. In unravelling these scientific enigmas, making sense of life's quirks, Lane's explanation provides a solution to life's vital questions: why are we as we are, and why are we here at all? This is ground-breaking science in an accessible form, in the tradition of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.
How Evolution Shapes Our Lives by Jonathan B. Losos,Richard E. Lenski Pdf
An authoritative exploration of why understanding evolution is crucial to human life today It is easy to think of evolution as something that happened long ago, or that occurs only in "nature," or that is so slow that its ongoing impact is virtually nonexistent when viewed from the perspective of a single human lifetime. But we now know that when natural selection is strong, evolutionary change can be very rapid. In this book, some of the world's leading scientists explore the implications of this reality for human life and society. With some twenty-three essays, this volume provides authoritative yet accessible explorations of why understanding evolution is crucial to human life—from dealing with climate change and ensuring our food supply, health, and economic survival to developing a richer and more accurate comprehension of society, culture, and even what it means to be human itself. Combining new essays with essays revised and updated from the acclaimed Princeton Guide to Evolution, this collection addresses the role of evolution in aging, cognition, cooperation, religion, the media, engineering, computer science, and many other areas. The result is a compelling and important book about how evolution matters to humans today. The contributors are Dan I. Andersson, Francisco J. Ayala, Amy Cavanaugh, Cameron R. Currie, Dieter Ebert, Andrew D. Ellington, Elizabeth Hannon, John Hawks, Paul Keim, Richard E. Lenski, Tim Lewens, Jonathan B. Losos, Virpi Lummaa, Jacob A. Moorad, Craig Moritz, Martha M. Muñoz, Mark Pagel, Talima Pearson, Robert T. Pennock, Daniel E. L. Promislow, Erik M. Quandt, David C. Queller, Robert C. Richardson, Eugenie C. Scott, H. Bradley Shaffer, Joan E. Strassmann, Alan R. Templeton, Paul E. Turner, and Carl Zimmer.
Evolution and the Diversity of Life by Ernst Mayr Pdf
The diversity of living forms and the unity of evolutionary processes are the focus of these essays. The collection helps form much of the basis of contempoary undertanding of evolutionary biology.
The history of the evolution of life, incomplete as it yet is, already reveals to us how the intellect has been formed, by an uninterrupted progress, along a line which ascends through the vertebrate series up to man. It shows us in the faculty of understanding an appendage of the faculty of acting, a more and more precise, more and more complex and supple adaptation of the consciousness of living beings to the conditions of existence that are made for them. Hence should result this consequence that our intellect, in the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment, to represent the relations of external things among themselves — in short, to think matter. Such will indeed be one of the conclusions of the present essay. We shall see that the human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects, more especially among solids, where our action finds its fulcrum and our industry its tools; that our concepts have been formed on the model of solids; that our logic is, pre-eminently, the logic of solids; that, consequently, our intellect triumphs in geometry, wherein is revealed the kinship of logical thought with unorganized matter, and where the intellect has only to follow its natural movement, after the lightest possible contact with experience, in order to go from discovery to discovery, sure that experience is following behind it and will justify it invariably. But from this it must also follow that our thought, in its purely logical form, is incapable of presenting the true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolutionary movement. Created by life, in definite circumstances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, of which it is only an emanation or an aspect? Deposited by the evolutionary movement in the course of its way, how can it be applied to the evolutionary movement itself? As well contend that the part is equal to the whole, that the effect can reabsorb its cause, or that the pebble left on the beach displays the form of the wave that brought it there. In fact, we do indeed feel that not one of the categories of our thought — unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality, intelligent finality, etc. — applies exactly to the things of life: who can say where individuality begins and ends, whether the living being is one or many, whether it is the cells which associate themselves into the organism or the organism which dissociates itself into cells? In vain we force the living into this or that one of our molds. All the molds crack. They are too narrow, above all too rigid, for what we try to put into them. Our reasoning, so sure of itself among things inert, feels ill at ease on this new ground. It would be difficult to cite a biological discovery due to pure reasoning. And most often, when experience has finally shown us how life goes to work to obtain a certain result, we find its way of working is just that of which we should never have thought. Yet evolutionist philosophy does not hesitate to extend to the things of life the same methods of explanation which have succeeded in the case of unorganized matter. It begins by showing us in the intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame, perhaps accidental, which lights up the coming and going of living beings in the narrow passage open to their action; and lo! forgetting what it has just told us, it makes of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun which can illuminate the world. Boldly it proceeds, with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal reconstruction of all things, even of life. True, it hurtles in its course against such formidable difficulties, it sees its logic end in such strange contradictions, that it very speedily renounces its first ambition. "It is no longer reality itself," it says, "that it will reconstruct, but only an imitation of the real, or rather a symbolical image; the essence of things escapes us, and will escape us always; we move among relations; the absolute is not in our province; we are brought to a stand before the Unknowable." — But for the human intellect, after too much pride, this is really an excess of humility. If the intellectual form of the living being has been gradually modeled on the reciprocal actions and reactions of certain bodies and their material environment, how should it not reveal to us something of the very essence of which these bodies are made? Action cannot move in the unreal. A mind born to speculate or to dream, I admit, might remain outside reality, might deform or transform the real, perhaps even create it — as we create the figures of men and animals that our imagination cuts out of the passing cloud. But an intellect bent upon the act to be performed and the reaction to follow, feeling its object so as to get its mobile impression at every instant, is an intellect that touches something of the absolute. Would the idea ever have occurred to us to doubt this absolute value of our knowledge if philosophy had not shown us what contradictions our speculation meets, what dead-locks it ends in? But these difficulties and contradictions all arise from trying to apply the usual forms of our thought to objects with which our industry has nothing to do, and for which, therefore, our molds are not made. Intellectual knowledge, in so far as it relates to a certain aspect of inert matter, ought, on the contrary, to give us a faithful imprint of it, having been stereotyped on this particular object. It becomes relative only if it claims, such as it is, to present to us life — that is to say, the maker of the stereotype-plate. Must we then give up fathoming the depths of life? Must we keep to that mechanistic idea of it which the understanding will always give us — an idea necessarily artificial and symbolical, since it makes the total activity of life shrink to the form of a certain human activity which is only a partial and local manifestation of life, a result or by-product of the vital process? We should have to do so, indeed, if life had employed all the psychical potentialities it possesses in producing pure understandings — that is to say, in making geometricians. But the line of evolution that ends in man is not the only one. On other paths, divergent from it, other forms of consciousness have been developed, which have not been able to free themselves from external constraints or to regain control over themselves, as the human intellect has done, but which, none the less, also express something that is immanent and essential in the evolutionary movement. Suppose these other forms of consciousness brought together and amalgamated with intellect: would not the result be a consciousness as wide as life? And such a consciousness, turning around suddenly against the push of life which it feels behind, would have a vision of life complete — would it not? — even though the vision were fleeting. It will be said that, even so, we do not transcend our intellect, for it is still with our intellect, and through our intellect, that we see the other forms of consciousness. And this would be right if we were pure intellects, if there did not remain, around our conceptual and logical thought, a vague nebulosity, made of the very substance out of which has been formed the luminous nucleus that we call the intellect. Therein reside certain powers that are complementary to the understanding, powers of which we have only an indistinct feeling when we remain shut up in ourselves, but which will become clear and distinct when they perceive themselves at work, so to speak, in the evolution of nature. They will thus learn what sort of effort they must make to be intensified and expanded in the very direction of life. This amounts to saying that theory of knowledge and theory of life seem to us inseparable. A theory of life that is not accompanied by a criticism of knowledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the concepts which the understanding puts at its disposal: it can but enclose the facts, willing or not, in pre-existing frames which it regards as ultimate. It thus obtains a symbolism which is convenient, perhaps even necessary to positive science, but not a direct vision of its object. On the other hand, a theory of knowledge which does not replace the intellect in the general evolution of life will teach us neither how the frames of knowledge have been constructed nor how we can enlarge or go beyond them. It is necessary that these two inquiries, theory of knowledge and theory of life, should join each other, and, by a circular process, push each other on unceasingly. Together, they may solve by a method more sure, brought nearer to experience, the great problems that philosophy poses. For, if they should succeed in their common enterprise, they would show us the formation of the intellect, and thereby the genesis of that matter of which our intellect traces the general configuration. They would dig to the very root of nature and of mind. They would substitute for the false evolutionism of Spencer — which consists in cutting up present reality, already evolved, into little bits no less evolved, and then recomposing it with these fragments, thus positing in advance everything that is to be explained — a true evolutionism, in which reality would be followed in its generation and its growth. But a philosophy of this kind will not be made in a day. Unlike the philosophical systems properly so called, each of which was the individual work of a man of genius and sprang up as a whole, to be taken or left, it will only be built up by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting and improving one another. So the present essay does not aim at resolving at once the greatest problems. It simply desires to define the method and to permit a glimpse, on some essential points, of the possibility of its application. Its plan is traced by the subject itself. In the first chapter, we try on the evolutionary progress the two ready-made garments that our understanding puts at our disposal, mechanism and finality; we show that they do not fit, neither the one nor the other, but that one of them might be recut and resewn, and in this new form fit less badly than the other. In order to transcend the point of view of the understanding, we try, in our second chapter, to reconstruct the main lines of evolution along which life has traveled by the side of that which has led to the human intellect. The intellect is thus brought back to its generating cause, which we then have to grasp in itself and follow in its movement. It is an effort of this kind that we attempt — incompletely indeed — in our third chapter. A fourth and last part is meant to show how our understanding itself, by submitting to a certain discipline, might prepare a philosophy which transcends it. For that, a glance over the history of systems became necessary, together with an analysis of the two great illusions to which, as soon as it speculates on reality in general, the human understanding is exposed...
Ray Kurzweil is the inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era, an international authority on artificial intelligence, and one of our greatest living visionaries. Now he offers a framework for envisioning the twenty-first century--an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live. Kurzweil's prophetic blueprint for the future takes us through the advances that inexorably result in computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain by the year 2020 (with human-level capabilities not far behind); in relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers; and in information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways. Optimistic and challenging, thought-provoking and engaging, The Age of Spiritual Machines is the ultimate guide on our road into the next century.
What can we expect from the future? According to visionary and futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, we will see a new type of human emerge in the world. She calls this the Universal Human, and it could be the key to our survival as a species. The Universal Human is connected through the heart to the whole of life, evolving consciously and helping to cocreate a new kind of spiritual path, something we’ve never experienced before, but which is perfect for our time. Emergence lays out the blueprints for birthing this new kind of human, explaining all the steps in what Hubbard calls “an intimate and practical process for all who wish to make the transition to the next stage of evolution.”
For all the discussion in the media about creationism and 'Intelligent Design', virtually nothing has been said about the evidence in question - the evidence for evolution by natural selection. Yet, as this succinct and important book shows, that evidence is vast, varied, and magnificent, and drawn from many disparate fields of science. The very latest research is uncovering a stream of evidence revealing evolution in action - from the actual observation of a species splitting into two, to new fossil discoveries, to the deciphering of the evidence stored in our genome. Why Evolution is True weaves together the many threads of modern work in genetics, palaeontology, geology, molecular biology, anatomy, and development to demonstrate the 'indelible stamp' of the processes first proposed by Darwin. It is a crisp, lucid, and accessible statement that will leave no one with an open mind in any doubt about the truth of evolution.
Wiley-Blackwell Student Dictionary of Human Evolution by Bernard Wood Pdf
Not so long ago, all a student studying human evolution needed was a familiarity with the relatively sparse fossil record and what limited information there was about the context of the sites, a basic knowledge of gross anatomy and archeology, and an understanding of simple analytical methods. Times have changed. The fossil record has grown exponentially, imaging techniques have advanced dramatically, quantitative methods have burgeoned, and molecular biology has revolutionized our understanding of genetics, evolutionary history, and development. Added to this are advances in the archeological, biological, and earth sciences that help interpret the context of the fossil evidence and reconstruct behavior. But presently there is nowhere students of human evolution cna easily find out about topics as disparate as ameloblast, Coopers Cave, daily secretion rate, the effect hypothesis, homeobox genes, insolation, phylogenetically independent contrasts, quantitative trait locus, semicircular canals, and tephrostratigraphy. The Wiley Blackwell Student Dictionary of Human Evolution contains upwards of 2500 entries, all drafted with an eye on the student user. It is an indispensable source for those studying human evolution.