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- Every living thing : the great and deadly race to know all life / by Roberts, Jason(President of Panmedia Corporation),author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."From the bestselling author of A Sense of the World comes this dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously-researched story of two scientific rivals and their race to survey all life on Earth. In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible--how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species? Stunned by life's diversity, both fell far short of their goal. But in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, on humanity's role in shaping the fate of our planet and on humanity itself. The rivalry between these two unique, driven individuals created reverberations that still echo today. Linnaeus, with the help of acolyte explorers he called "apostles" (only half of whom returned alive), gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate and homo sapiens--but he also denied species change and promulgated racist pseudo-science. Buffon coined the term reproduction, formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, and argued passionately against prejudice. It was a clash that, during their lifetimes, Buffon seemed to be winning. But their posthumous fates would take a very different turn. With elegant, propulsive prose grounded in more than a decade of research, featuring appearances by Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Darwin, bestselling author Jason Roberts tells an unforgettable true-life tale of intertwined lives and enduring legacies, tracing an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day"--- Subjects: Biographies.; Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de, 1707-1788.; Linné, Carl von, 1707-1778.; Biology; Life (Biology); Natural history; Naturalists; Naturalists;
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- The Life of Mammals. by Attenborough, David,film director.; Attenborough, David,actor.; BBC Studios (Firm),dst; Kanopy (Firm),dst;
David AttenboroughOriginally produced by BBC Studios in 2002.David Attenborough introduces us to the most diverse group of animals ever to live on Earth. From the tiny two-inch pygmy shrew to the enormous blue whale, THE LIFE OF MAMMALS is the story of 4,000 species which have outlived the dinosaurs and conquered the farthest places on Earth.Mode of access: World Wide Web.- Subjects: Documentary films.; Science.; Biology.; Zoology.; Environmental sciences.; Documentary films.; Television series.; Motion pictures.; Nature.; Documentary television programs.;
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- Bitch : on the female of the species / by Cooke, Lucy,1970-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."It's a tale as old as time: the philandering man wants to chase sex with whomever, wherever, and at all costs-and to avoid supporting his offspring at all costs, too-while leaving a long-suffering wife to clean up his mess. You can find the idea in comedians' routines, inane self-help books, and any number of movies, novels, and television shows. It almost all comes from evolutionary biology and psychology, and the tale boils down to this: Females are naturally submissive, passive, and maternal, while males are necessarily dominant, competitive, and promiscuous. And as Lucy Cooke shows in Bitch, it's almost completely wrong. In its place, Cooke offers a new vision of the female sex: depending on which one you choose, you can find females that are inherently as promiscuous, competitive, strategically cooperative, ardent, aggressive, dominant, dynamic, complex and variable as evolutionary psychology's stereotypical male. So how did the idea of the passive female get so entrenched? Tracing biology from Darwin to today, Cooke shows how the men behind breakthrough theories in evolution have infused their ideas with a massive dose of societal sexism. Cooke surfs the work of two generations of feminist evolutionary biologists, showing how they've pushed back against the blinkered views of evolution's founding fathers to reveal the true diversity of nature. She meets with pioneering scientists--Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Jeanne Altmann, Mary-Jane West-Eberhard, Patricia Gowaty and more--following their work around the globe. From the dominant female lemurs of Madagascar to same-sex female albatross couples in Hawaii to female killer whale elders in the Salish sea, Cooke takes us on a journey through a side of nature that's much less binary, less heterosexual, and less sexist than we have been led to expect. Fierce, funny, and revolutionary, Bitch is a scientific manifesto that shows us an entirely new perspective on what it means to be a female animal, with serious implications for all of us today"--- Subjects: Females; Psychology, Comparative.; Sexual behavior in animals.; Sexual dimorphism (Animals); Social behavior in animals.; Women.; Women;
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Results 11 to 13 of 13 | « previous