Paul Sponheim's theme is transformation-personal, social, cultural, and global. He addresses the violence, environmental destruction, and lost sense of self that plague modern society. In response, he finds a genuine desire among Americans for both individual and social transformation. He suggests, however, that we may have lost sight of the ......
Amphibians are ecological equivalents of the canary in the coal mine. Because they have little physiological control over their body temperatures or evaporative water loss, frogs and toads, salamanders and newts, and the tropical wormlike caecilians are closely tied to their environments, and various stages of their biphasic life cycle are ......
Successor to the classic work in shark studies, The Elasmobranch Fishes by John Franklin Daniel (first published 1922, revised 1928 and 1934), Sharks, Skates, and Rays provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of elasmobranch morphology. Coverage has been expanded from anatomy to include modern information on physiology and biochemistry. ......
The HIV epidemic has spawned a scientific effort unprecedented in the history of infectious disease research. This effort has merged aspects of clinical research, basic molecular biology, immunology, cell biology, epidemiology, and mathematical biology in ways that have not been seen before. In The Evolution of HIV Keith A. Crandall brings ......
Beggar's ticks and marsh pink. Tearthumbs and chairmaker's rush. Live oak, pitch pine, wild black cherry, sassafras, and loblolly pine. From eelgrass rooted in wrack lines on windswept back shores to hardy maritime forests sculpted by strong winds and salt spray, the Mid-Atlantic coast is rich with a variety of habitats and an abundance of ......
''In a species with a million individuals,'' writes John H. Gillespie, ''it takes roughly a million generations for genetic drift to change allele frequencies appreciably. There is no conceivable way of verifying that genetic drift changes allele frequencies in most natural populations. Our understanding that it does is entirely theoretical. Most ......
Are living organisms--as Descartes argued--just machines? Or is the nature of life such that it can never be fully explained by mechanistic models? In this thought-provoking and controversial book, eminent geophysicist Walter M. Elsasser argues that the behavior of living organisms cannot be reduced to physico-chemical causality. Suggesting that ......
The great dinosaur bone beds of the American and Canadian West are world famous and have yielded spectacular fossil finds. But the eastern United States and maritime Canada, where dinosaurs also roamed in great numbers, have been equally important to the study of these extraordinary creatures. Some dinosaur fossils have come from the bog iron and ......
How We Came to Believe in Gods, Demons, Miracles, & Magical Rites
Explains the apparently baffling phenomenon that educated people in industrialized countries believe in more than the physical world, just like people in all other times and places. Traces the evolution of the Christian god, man-gods, prophets, communion, and Bible stories. Also includes an survey
