This book pinpoints the evolutionary connection between the global ecological crisis and transgenerational learning and education. As Julian Huxley (1887-1975) described, the cumulative passing down of knowledge, skills, and ideas by one generation to the next over eons of time, which has been afforded by the advent of complex languages in the evolutionary past, is chiefly responsible for humanity’s planetary superdominance. However, given that the drive of the human species to increase its control over the natural world has, today, run up against ecological limits, there is an evolutionary-existential choice to be made in relation to the ultimate purposes of formal education. Should humanity “double down” on the anthropocentric humanist project of superdominance, including the goals of unlimited economic growth, development, and scientific and technological progress? Alternatively, should a biocentric anti-humanist and/or postmodernist deconstruction of formal education take place? Or should a holistic organicist orientation, emphasizing biological wisdom, help to shape its future? As this book shows, the answers to these philosophical questions on the parts of educators, prospective teachers, and learners will, going forward, play a key role in deciding the evolutionary trajectories of all life-forms on the planet.
It has been said that new discoveries and developments in the human, social, and natural sciences hang “in the air” (Bowler, 1983; 2008) prior to their consummation. While neo-Darwinist biology has been powerfully served by its mechanistic metaphysic and a reductionist methodology in which living organisms are considered machines, many of the chapters in this volume place this paradigm into question. Pairing scientists and philosophers together, this volume explores what might be termed “the New Frontiers” of biology, namely contemporary areas of research that appear to call an updating, a supplementation, or a relaxation of some of the main tenets of the Modern Synthesis. Such areas of investigation include: Emergence Theory, Systems Biology, Biosemiotics, Homeostasis, Symbiogenesis, Niche Construction, the Theory of Organic Selection (also known as “the Baldwin Effect”), Self-Organization and Teleodynamics, as well as Epigenetics. Most of the chapters in this book offer critical reflections on the neo-Darwinist outlook and work to promote a novel synthesis that is open to a greater degree of inclusivity as well as to a more holistic orientation in the biological sciences.
This book pinpoints the evolutionary connection between the global ecological crisis and transgenerational learning and education. As Julian Huxley (1887-1975) described, the cumulative passing down of knowledge, skills, and ideas by one generation to the next over eons of time, which has been afforded by the advent of complex languages in the evolutionary past, is chiefly responsible for humanity’s planetary superdominance. However, given that the drive of the human species to increase its control over the natural world has, today, run up against ecological limits, there is an evolutionary-existential choice to be made in relation to the ultimate purposes of formal education. Should humanity “double down” on the anthropocentric humanist project of superdominance, including the goals of unlimited economic growth, development, and scientific and technological progress? Alternatively, should a biocentric anti-humanist and/or postmodernist deconstruction of formal education take place? Or should a holistic organicist orientation, emphasizing biological wisdom, help to shape its future? As this book shows, the answers to these philosophical questions on the parts of educators, prospective teachers, and learners will, going forward, play a key role in deciding the evolutionary trajectories of all life-forms on the planet.
How computer animation technologies became vital visualization tools in the life sciences Who would have thought that computer animation technologies developed in the second half of the twentieth century would become essential visualization tools in today’s biosciences? This book is the first to examine this phenomenon. Molecular Capture reveals how popular media consumption and biological knowledge production have converged in molecular animations—computer simulations of molecular and cellular processes that immerse viewers in the temporal unfolding of molecular worlds—to produce new regimes of seeing and knowing. Situating the development of this technology within an evolving field of historical, epistemological, and political negotiations, Adam Nocek argues that molecular animations not only represent a key transformation in the visual knowledge practices of life scientists but also bring into sharp focus fundamental mutations in power within neoliberal capitalism. In particular, he reveals how the convergence of the visual economies of science and entertainment in molecular animations extends neoliberal modes of governance to the perceptual practices of scientific subjects. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative metaphysics and Michel Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality, Nocek builds a media philosophy well equipped to examine the unique coordination of media cultures in this undertheorized form of scientific media. More specifically, he demonstrates how governmentality operates across visual practices in the biosciences and the popular mediasphere to shape a molecular animation apparatus that unites scientific knowledge and entertainment culture. Ultimately, Molecular Capture proposes that molecular animation is an achievement of governmental design. It weaves together speculative media philosophy, science and technology studies, and design theory to investigate how scientific knowledge practices are designed through media apparatuses.
Are you a fan of The Beatles? Have you followed the amazing Beatles story from the early days of the band through to individual chart success? Do you know all there is to know about the fab four? If so, what better way to test your knowledge than with the 500 questions in this quiz book, each one designed to find out how much you can recall about the history of The Beatles. This book covers the phenomenal success of the early years through to the band members' individual careers, relationships, families and beyond. The Beatles Quiz Book is packed with information about John, Paul, George and Ringo, including questions on many of their unforgettable hits, bestselling albums, song lyrics and much more. This quiz book is a must-have for anyone who likes the Beatles whether you are new to their music or are a lifelong fan. This tribute will appeal to fans of all ages and anyone interested in finding out about one of the most successful UK bands of all time.
This book identifies and describes facets of poetic inquiry, a research method/methodology/tool that uses poetry in the research process (information gathering, analysis and/or dissemination). Specifically, this book explores how and why it is in use, provides revelations around its unparalleled function(s) in research, and presents an exemplification of a close reading approach, trialled in the study framed in the book, that can draw further knowledge from the products of poetic inquiry studies. Poetic inquiry studies are somewhat established, and their findings are being published in academic journals and books however, poetic inquiry is currently undertheorized and noticeably missing from notable research methods textbooks and publications that discuss the merits of arts-based research. This may have the negative result of knowledge being lost or overlooked that could hold answers to previously unanswered questions that exist across the disciplines. In response to this problem, this book (drawing from the doctoral research study therein), highlights poetic inquiry’s theoretical underpinnings and pragmatic uses in research and scholarship that can be adopted and adapted by new and established scholars. This is done using the tenets of poetic inquiry as a frame and includes in-depth literature review and an exploration of the findings of interview with four notable poetic inquiry scholars in education in Canada. Detailed profiles for each participant have been created to analyze and emphasize their distinctive poetics and approaches to scholarship. Lastly, this book considers ways that poetic inquiry can inform teaching practices, as poetry is seen to permeate the participants’ lives and influence their approaches to teaching at the post-secondary level. This book is written for both early career and well-established scholars who have an interest in exploring ways that poetic inquiry (which marries art and epistemology) can enhance their research and teaching practices.
There is a new form of design practice within the contemporary fashion industry which is active in complex forms of social commentary and critique. While fashion in the modernist era has shown signs of criticism and subversion, these were either in the form of subcultures or perversions, such as punk or BDSM styling. Today, however, these genres have been absorbed into the fashion industry itself, meaning that “critical fashion” is now far from limited to the subcultures from which it came. This book explores this new space for criticism within the popular fashion sphere to demonstrate how designers are disrupting conventions, challenging beliefs and stirring change from within the system itself. Critical Fashion Practice considers a range of contemporary designers across the globe, from the US to Japan, whose conceptual designs embody this critical language, including case studies such as Rei Kawakubo's deconstructive silhouettes for Comme des Garçons and Walter Van Beirendonck's sadomasochistic menswear collections, amongst other key players such as Miuccia Prada, Vivienne Westwood and Viktor & Rolf. Arguing that the rise of critical fashion coincides with a noticeable decline in the criticality of art, Geczy and Karaminas go beyond slotting fashion into previously established art theories. Conceiving a new cultural role for fashion that affords insight into identity, class, race, sexuality and gender, this book shows how fashion can not only reflect and comment on, but can also be a part of social change.
This groundbreaking novel, set in the affluent London suburb of Blackheath, tells the tumultuous story of two couples whose lives overlap with shocking consequences. Holding a mirror up to contemporary gender politics and exposing the flaws and failures of so-called equal parenting, this moving and sharply comic tale of life-after-children reveals the awful truth at the heart of modern family life: love is not enough.
Sprung from a prison in the centre of a star, the universe's last criminal is employed to kill the population of a planet. It is a crime that will tear apart an interstellar utopia. Keeping ahead of detection and preparing the crime, the killer voyages to numerous worlds and hones the instincts required for murder. And wonders who is behind the contract. Roberts' new novel is an extraordinary fusing of ideas, exotic locations, personal drama and an enquiry into the nature of crime in a society that thinks it has forgotten how to commit it.
Two narrators tell the story of the simmering tensions between their two communities as they travel out to a new planet, colonise it, then destroy themselves when the tensions turn into outright war. Adam Roberts is a new writer completely in command of the SF genre. This is a novel that is at once entertaining and philosophical. The attitudes and prejudices of its characters are subtlety drawn and ring completely true despite the alien circumstances they find themselves in. The grasp of science and its impact on people is instinctive. But above all it is the epic and colourful world building that marks SALT out - the planet Salt rivals Dune in its desolation and is a suitably biblical setting for a novel that is powered by the corrupting influence of imperfectly remembered religions on distant societies. From the early scenes set on a colony ship towed by a massive ice meteorite, to the description of a planet covered in sodium chloride, to the chilling narrative of a world sliding into its first war, this is a novel from a writer who shouts star quality.
Life itself could never have been sustainable without seabirds. As Adam Nicolson writes: "They are bringers of fertility, the deliverers of life from ocean to land." A global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds on our planet is in freefall, dropping by nearly 70% in the last sixty years, a billion fewer now than there were in 1950. Of the ten birds in this book, seven are in decline, at least in part of their range. Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of the seabird colony, rolling around the bays and headlands of high latitudes, will this century become little but a memory. Seabirds have always entranced the human imagination and NYT best-selling author Adam Nicolson has been in love with them all his life: for their mastery of wind and ocean, their aerial beauty and the unmatched wildness of the coasts and islands where every summer they return to breed. The seabird’s cry comes from an elemental layer in the story of the world. Over the last couple of decades, modern science has begun to understand their epic voyages, their astonishing abilities to navigate for tens of thousands of miles on featureless seas, their ability to smell their way towards fish and home. Only the poets in the past would have thought of seabirds as creatures riding the ripples and currents of the entire planet, but that is what the scientists are seeing now today.
‘I’m working on a novel intended to express the feel of England in Edward III’s time ... The fourteenth century of my novel will be mainly evoked in terms of smell and visceral feelings, and it will carry an undertone of general disgust rather than hey-nonny nostalgia’ – Anthony Burgess, 1973 The Black Prince is a brutal historical tale of chivalry, religious belief, obsession, siege and bloody warfare. From disorientating depictions of medieval battles to court intrigues and betrayals, the campaigns of Edward, the Black Prince, are brought to vivid life. This rambunctious book, based on a completed screenplay by Anthony Burgess, showcases Adam Roberts in complete control of the novel as a way of making us look at history with fresh eyes, all while staying true to the linguistic pyrotechnics and narrative verve of Burgess’s best work.
Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics examines the roles that queens consort played in dynastic politics and cultural transfer between their natal and marital courts during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This collection of essays analyses the part that these queens played in European politics, showing how hard and soft power, high politics and cultural influences, cannot be strictly separated. It shows that the root of these consorts’ power lay in their dynastic networks and the extent to which they cultivated them. The consorts studied in this book come from territories such as Austria, Braunschweig, Hanover, Poland, Portugal, Prussia and Saxony and travel to, among other places, Britain, Naples, Russia, Spain and Sweden. The various chapters address different types of cultural manifestation, among them collecting, portraiture, panegyric poetry, libraries, theatre and festivals, learning, genealogical literature and architecture. The volume significantly shifts the direction of scholarship by moving beyond a focus on individual historical women to consider ‘queens consort’ as a category, making it valuable reading for students and scholars of early modern gender and political history.
Written by leading experts in the field, Stellar Spectral Classification is the only book to comprehensively discuss both the foundations and most up-to-date techniques of MK and other spectral classification systems. Definitive and encyclopedic, the book introduces the astrophysics of spectroscopy, reviews the entire field of stellar astronomy, and shows how the well-tested methods of spectral classification are a powerful discovery tool for graduate students and researchers working in astronomy and astrophysics. The book begins with a historical survey, followed by chapters discussing the entire range of stellar phenomena, from brown dwarfs to supernovae. The authors account for advances in the field, including the addition of the L and T dwarf classes; the revision of the carbon star, Wolf-Rayet, and white dwarf classification schemes; and the application of neural nets to spectral classification. Copious figures illustrate the morphology of stellar spectra, and the book incorporates recent discoveries from earth-based and satellite data. Many examples of spectra are given in the red, ultraviolet, and infrared regions, as well as in the traditional blue-violet optical region, all of which are useful for researchers identifying stellar and galactic spectra. This essential reference includes a glossary, handy appendixes and tables, an index, and a Web-based resource of spectra. In addition to the authors, the contributors are Adam J. Burgasser, Margaret M. Hanson, J. Davy Kirkpatrick, and Nolan R. Walborn.
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