William H. Calvin's Books

A Brain for All Seasons

Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change

By: William H. Calvin

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A Brain for All Seasons

Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change

By: William H. Calvin

Winner of the 2002 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science Mankind has recently come to the shocking realization that our ancestors survived hundreds of abrupt and severe changes to Earth's climate. In this unique travelogue, William H. Calvin takes us around the globe and back in time, showing us how such cycles of cool, crash, and burn provided the impetus for enormous increases in the intelligence and complexity of human beings--and warning us of human activities that could trigger similarly massive shifts in the planet's climate.

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Page Count

350

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226092038

ISBN 13

9780226092034

The Throwing Madonna

Essays on the Brain

By: William H. Calvin

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The Throwing Madonna

Essays on the Brain

By: William H. Calvin

A group of 17 essays: The Throwing Madonna; The Lovable Cat: Mimicry Strikes Again; Woman the Toolmaker? Did Throwing Stones Lead to Bigger Brains? The Ratchets of Social Evolution; The Computer as Metaphor in Neurobiology; Last Year in Jerusalem; Computing Without Nerve Impulses; Aplysia, the Hare of the Ocean; Left Brain, Right Brain: Science or the New Phrenology? What to Do About Tic Douloureux; Linguistics and the Brain's Buffer; The Woodrow Wilson Story; Thinking Clearly About Schizophrenia; Of Cancer Pain, Magic Bullets, and Humor; Linguistics and the Brain's Buffer; Probing Language Cortex: The Second Wave; and The Creation Myth, Updated: A Scenario for Humankind.

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Page Count

231

Publisher

William H. Calvin

Published Date

ISBN 10

0982916779

ISBN 13

9780982916773

The Cerebral Code

Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind

By: William H. Calvin

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The Cerebral Code

Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind

By: William H. Calvin

The Cerebral Code is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes could operate in the brain to shape mental images in only seconds, starting with shuffled memories no better than the jumble of our nighttime dreams, but evolving into something of quality, such as a sentence to speak aloud. Jung said that dreaming goes on continuously but you can't see it when you are awake, just as you can't see the stars in the daylight because it is too bright. Calvin's is a theory for what goes on, hidden from view by the glare of waking mental operations, that produces our peculiarly human type of consciousness with its versatile intelligence. As Piaget emphasized in 1929, intelligence is what we use when we don't know what to do, when we have to grope rather than using a standard response. Calvin tackles a mechanism for doing this exploration and improvement offline, as we think before we act or practice the art of good guessing. Surprisingly, the subtitle's mosaics of the mind is not a literary metaphor. For the first time, it is a description of a mechanism of what appears to be an appropriate level of explanation for many mental phenomena, that of hexagonal mosaics of electrical activity that compete for territory in the association cortex of the brain. This two-dimensional mosaic is predicted to grow and dissolve much as the sugar crystals do in the bottom of a supersaturated glass of iced tea. A Bradford Book

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Page Count

266

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262531542

ISBN 13

9780262531542

A Brief History of the Mind

From Apes to Intellect and Beyond

By: William H. Calvin

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A Brief History of the Mind

From Apes to Intellect and Beyond

By: William H. Calvin

This book looks back at the simpler versions of mental life in apes, Neanderthals, and our ancestors, back before our burst of creativity started 50,000 years ago. When you can't think about the future in much detail, you are trapped in a here-and-now existence with no "What if" and "Why me?" William H. Calvin takes stock of what we have now and then explains why we are nearing a crossroads, where mind shifts gears again. The mind's big bang came long after our brain size stopped enlarging. Calvin suggests that the development of long sentences--what modern children do in their third year--was the most likely trigger. To keep a half-dozen concepts from blending together like a summer drink, you need some mental structuring. In saying "I think I saw him leave to go home," you are nesting three sentences inside a fourth. We also structure plans, play games with rules, create structured music and chains of logic, and have a fascination with discovering how things hang together. Our long train of connected thoughts is why our consciousness is so different from what came before. Where does mind go from here, its powers extended by science-enhanced education but with its slowly evolving gut instincts still firmly anchored in the ice ages? We will likely shift gears again, juggling more concepts and making decisions even faster, imagining courses of action in greater depth. Ethics are possible only because of a human level of ability to speculate, judge quality, and modify our possible actions accordingly. Though science increasingly serves as our headlights, we are out driving them, going faster than we can react effectively.

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Page Count

240

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199728518

ISBN 13

9780199728510

Lingua Ex Machina

Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain

By: William H. Calvin,Derek Bickerton

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Lingua Ex Machina

Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain

By: William H. Calvin,Derek Bickerton

A neuroscientist and a linguist show how evolution could have given rise to structured language. A machine for language? Certainly, say the neurophysiologists, busy studying the language specializations of the human brain and trying to identify their evolutionary antecedents. Linguists such as Noam Chomsky talk about machinelike "modules" in the brain for syntax, arguing that language is more an instinct (a complex behavior triggered by simple environmental stimuli) than an acquired skill like riding a bicycle. But structured language presents the same evolutionary problems as feathered forelimbs for flight: you need a lot of specializations to fly even a little bit. How do you get them, if evolution has no foresight and the intermediate stages do not have intermediate payoffs? Some say that the Darwinian scheme for gradual species self-improvement cannot explain our most valued human capability, the one that sets us so far above the apes, language itself. William Calvin and Derek Bickerton suggest that other evolutionary developments, not directly related to language, allowed language to evolve in a way that eventually promoted a Chomskian syntax. They compare these intermediate behaviors to the curb-cuts originally intended for wheelchair users. Their usefulness was soon discovered by users of strollers, shopping carts, rollerblades, and so on. The authors argue that reciprocal altruism and ballistic movement planning were "curb-cuts" that indirectly promoted the formation of structured language. Written in the form of a dialogue set in Bellagio, Italy, Lingua ex Machina presents an engaging challenge to those who view the human capacity for language as a winner-take-all war between Chomsky and Darwin.

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Page Count

318

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262531984

ISBN 13

9780262531986

How Brains Think

Evolving Intelligence, Then And Now

By: William H. Calvin

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How Brains Think

Evolving Intelligence, Then And Now

By: William H. Calvin

If you're good at finding the one right answer to life's multiple-choice questions, you're "smart." But "intelligence" is what you need when contemplating the leftovers in the refrigerator, trying to figure out what might go with them; or if you're trying to speak a sentence that you've never spoken before. As Jean Piaget said, intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do, when all the standard answers are inadequate. This book tries to fathom how our inner life evolves from one topic to another, as we create and reject alternatives. Ever since Darwin, we've known that elegant things can emerge (indeed, self-organize) from "simpler" beginnings. And, says theoretical neurophysiologist William H. Calvin, the bootstrapping of new ideas works much like the immune response or the evolution of a new animal species -- except that the brain can turn the Darwinian crank a lot faster, on the time scale of thought and action. Drawing on anthropology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, and the neurosciences, Calvin also considers how a more intelligent brain developed using slow biological improvements over the last few million years. Long ago, evolving jack-of-all trades versatility was encouraged by abrupt climate changes. Now, evolving intelligence uses a nonbiological track: augmenting human intelligence and building intelligent machines.

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Page Count

151

Publisher

Basic Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0465066895

ISBN 13

9780465066896

Almost Us

Portraits of the Apes

By: William H. Calvin

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Almost Us

Portraits of the Apes

By: William H. Calvin

After you spot a dozen of your relatives among these candid portraits, you'll see why the great apes are called our close cousins. The portraits on the back cover show a frowning gorilla looking at a smiling one, an inquiring chimpanzee, a smiling orangutan gazing skyward, and a fashion portrait of a wet bonobo.

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Page Count

203

Publisher

William H. Calvin

Published Date

ISBN 10

1419619799

ISBN 13

9781419619793

How the Shaman Stole the Moon

In Search of Ancient Prophet-scientists : from Stonehenge to the Grand Canyon

By: William H. Calvin

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How the Shaman Stole the Moon

In Search of Ancient Prophet-scientists : from Stonehenge to the Grand Canyon

By: William H. Calvin

An introduction to the science of archaeoastronomy journeys to some of the world's most ancient ruins to detail the discoveries of ancient astronomers.

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Page Count

244

Publisher

Bantam

Published Date

ISBN 10

0553370820

ISBN 13

9780553370829

The Works of Thomas Reid, D.D.

Vol. 2

By: William Hamilton

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The Works of Thomas Reid, D.D.

Vol. 2

By: William Hamilton

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

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Page Count

538

Publisher

BoD – Books on Demand

Published Date

ISBN 10

3382191989

ISBN 13

9783382191986

Sovereign Grace

The Place and Significance of Christian Freedom in John Calvin's Political Thought

By: William R. Stevenson Jr.

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Sovereign Grace

The Place and Significance of Christian Freedom in John Calvin's Political Thought

By: William R. Stevenson Jr.

The Reformation thinker John Calvin had significant and unusual things to say about life in public encounter, things which both anticipate modern thinking and, says William Stevenson, can serve as important antidotes to some of modern thinking's broader pretensions. This study attempts to give a coherent picture of Calvin's political theory by following the stream that flows from his fascinating short essay, "On Christian Freedom," one chapter in the magisterial Institutes of the Christian Religion. Stevenson argues that a full examination of this essay yields not only a more thorough explication--and historical placement--of Calvin's political ideas proper but also a more complete and coherent picture of their theological underpinnings.

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Page Count

215

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0195352297

ISBN 13

9780195352290

How Brains Think

Evolving Intelligence, Then And Now

By: William H. Calvin

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How Brains Think

Evolving Intelligence, Then And Now

By: William H. Calvin

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Page Count

151

Publisher

Basic Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0465066895

ISBN 13

9780465066896

Sovereign Grace

The Place and Significance of Christian Freedom in John Calvin's Political Thought

By: William R. Stevenson

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Sovereign Grace

The Place and Significance of Christian Freedom in John Calvin's Political Thought

By: William R. Stevenson

The Reformation thinker John Calvin had significant and unusual things to say about life in public encounter, things which both anticipate modern thinking and, says William Stevenson, can serve as important antidotes to some of modern thinking's broader pretensions. Although much has been written about Calvin's political theory, a coherent picture has yet to emerge. He has been seen variously as a proto-liberal democrat, a reckless revolutionary, a "constructive" revolutionary, an unforgiving authoritarian, and an intransigent traditionalist. Can these pictures be reconciled? This study attempts such a reconciliation by following the stream that flows from Calvin's fascinating short essay "On Christian Freedom," one chapter in the magisterial Institutes of the Christian Religion.

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Page Count

215

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0195125061

ISBN 13

9780195125061

Book's by William H. Calvin

A Brain for All Seasons

A Brain for All Seasons

The Throwing Madonna

The Throwing Madonna

The Cerebral Code

The Cerebral Code

A Brief History of the Mind

A Brief History of the Mind

Lingua Ex Machina

Lingua Ex Machina

How Brains Think

How Brains Think

Almost Us

Almost Us

How the Shaman Stole the Moon

How the Shaman Stole the Moon

The Works of Thomas Reid, D.D.

The Works of Thomas Reid, D.D.

Sovereign Grace

Sovereign Grace

How Brains Think

How Brains Think

Sovereign Grace

Sovereign Grace

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