Brought to you by Penguin.
A place of exceptional diversity, rapid change, and high energy, for the past 100 million years Europe has literally been at the crossroads of the world. By virtue of its geology and geography, evolution in Europe proceeds faster than elsewhere. The continent has absorbed wave after wave of immigrant species over the millennia, taking them in, transforming them, and sometimes hybridising them.
Flannery's exploration of the nature of Europe reveals a compelling intellectual drama, with a cast of heroic researchers - of whom Tim Flannery is the most recent - whose discoveries have changed our understanding of life itself.
AudioLearn's college level courses presents Anatomy and Physiology. Developed by experienced professors and professionally narrated for easy listening, this course is a great way to explore the subject of college-level anatomy and physiology.
The audio is focused and high-yield, covering the most important topics you might expect to learn in a typical undergraduate anatomy and physiology course.
The material is accurate, up-to-date, and broken down into bite-size chapters. There are key takeaways following each chapter to drive home key points and quizzes to review commonly tested questions.
Here are the main topics we'll be covering:
Cell Anatomy and Physiology
Body Tissues
Integumentary System
Skeletal System
Muscles and the Muscular System
Central Nervous System
Peripheral Nervous System
Endocrine System
Heart Anatomy and Physiology
Blood and Blood Vessel Anatomy and Physiology
Lymphatic and Immune System
Respiratory System
Digestive System
Metabolism and Human Nutrition
Urinary System Fluids, Electrolytes, and the Acid-Base System
Male Reproductive System
Female Reproductive System
Developmental Anatomy and Physiology
We will conclude the course with a 200-question practice test.
Also included is a follow-along PDF manual containing the entire text of this audio course as well as over a hundred images, figures, and illustrations we'll be discussing.
To get the most out of this course, we recommend that you listen to the entire audio once while following along in your PDF manual, then go back and listen to areas you found challenging.
Most people are familiar with the dodo and the dinosaur, but extinction has occurred throughout the history of life, with the result that nearly all the species that have ever existed are now extinct. Today, species are disappearing at an ever increasing rate, while past losses have occurred during several great crises. Issues such as habitat destruction, conservation, climate change, and, during major crises, volacanism and meteorite impact, can all contribute towards the demise of a group.
In this Very Short Introduction, Paul B. Wignall looks at the causes and nature of extinctions, past and present, and the factors that can make a species vulnerable. Summarizing what we know about all of the major and minor extinction events, he examines some of the greatest debates in modern science, such as the relative role of climate and humans in the death of the Pleistocene megafauna, including mammoths and giant ground sloths, and the roles that global warming, ocean acidification, and deforestation are playing in present-day extinctions.
Focusing attention can help an animal find food or flee a predator. It also may have led to consciousness. Tracing evolution over millions of years, Michael S. A. Graziano uses examples from the natural world to show how neurons first allowed animals to develop simple forms of attention: taking in messages from the environment, prioritizing them, and responding as necessary.
Then some animals evolved covert attention-a roving mental focus that can take in information apart from where the senses are pointed, like hearing sirens at a distance or recalling a memory.
Graziano proposes that in order to monitor and control this specialized attention, the brain evolved a simplified model of it-a cartoonish self-description depicting an internal essence with a capacity for knowledge and experience. In other words, consciousness.
In this eye-opening work, Graziano accessibly explores how this sense of an inner being led to empathy and formed us into social beings. The theory may point the way to engineers for building consciousness artificially. Graziano discusses what a future with artificial consciousness might be like, including both advantages and risks, and what AI might mean for our evolutionary future.
Brought to you by Penguin.
This Penguin Classic is performed by accomplished voice actor Ben Arogundade who is known for his voice work in Doctor Who and Horizons. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by William Bynum and the cover design is by Damien Hirst.
The Origin of Species is one of the most important and influential books of its time and remains one of the most significant contributions to philosophical and scientific thought. The theories Darwin sets out here had an immediate and profound impact on the literature and philosophical thought of his contemporaries, and continue to provoke thought and debate today. Written for the general public of the 1850's, The Origin of Species laid out an evolutionary view of the world which challenged contemporary beliefs about divine providence and the fixity of species. He also set forth the results of his pioneering work on the interdependence of species: the ecology of animals and plants.
Tour the wonders and mysteries of your brain.
Our world teems with the unexpected: marsupial wolves, carnivorous plants, flocks of starlings, and many more surprising phenomena. In this audio course, you'll explore the most fascinating of these natural wonders: consciousness. Named one of America's top 300 professors by Princeton Review, your guide is Kevin Corcoran, an expert on consciousness and the philosophy of the mind. Translating complex topics into accessible lectures, he'll help you unlock the secrets of the human brain.
Have you ever watched a fiery sunset or heard a Mozart concerto? You and I could soak up such sights and sounds in the same predictable ways computers or car engines do. But our minds go beyond processing information. We have conscious experiences filled with vibrant colors, thorny textures, pungent smells, and tangy flavors.
Under Prof. Corcoran's tutelage, you'll take a journey filled with vivid examples, philosophical reflections, and astonishing insights from scientific research. Along the way, you'll answer big questions about the self, the human mind, and the world.
Each lecture will amaze and inform you. From competing theories of consciousness to the meaning of life itself, you'll tackle compelling topics about existence. If you're looking for an illuminating guide to the universe's most important questions, you'll love this course.
This course is part of the Learn25 collection.
Brought to you by Penguin.
Walking upright on two feet is a uniquely human skill. It defines us as a species.
It enabled us to walk out of Africa and to spread as far as Alaska and Australia. It freed our hands and freed our minds. We put one foot in front of the other without thinking - yet how many of us know how we do that, or appreciate the advantages it gives us? In this hymn to walking, neuroscientist Shane O'Mara invites us to marvel at the benefits it confers on our bodies and minds.
In Praise of Walking celebrates this miraculous ability. Incredibly, it is a skill that has its evolutionary origins millions of years ago, under the sea. And the latest research is only now revealing how the brain and nervous system performs the mechanical magic of balancing, navigating a crowded city, or running our inner GPS system.
Walking is good for our muscles and posture; it helps to protect and repair organs, and can slow or turn back the ageing of our brains. With our minds in motion we think more creatively, our mood improves and stress levels fall. Walking together to achieve a shared purpose is also a social glue that has contributed to our survival as a species.
As our lives become increasingly sedentary, we risk all this. We must start walking again, whether it's up a mountain, down to the park, or simply to school and work. We, and our societies, will be better for it.
Can we trust our senses to tell us the truth?
Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work.
Ever since Homo sapiens has walked the earth, natural selection has favored perception that hides the truth and guides us toward useful action, shaping our senses to keep us alive and reproducing. We observe a speeding car and do not walk in front of it; we see mold growing on bread and do not eat it. These impressions, though, are not objective reality. Just like a file icon on a desktop screen is a useful symbol rather than a genuine representation of what a computer file looks like, the objects we see every day are merely icons, allowing us to navigate the world safely and with ease.
The real-world implications for this discovery are huge. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that give the illusion of a more “attractive” body shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in consumers, and even dismantling the very notion that spacetime is objective reality, The Case Against Reality dares us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see.
A leading neuroscientist offers a history of the evolution of the brain from unicellular organisms to the complexity of animals and human beings today
Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This page-turning survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human.
In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms. By tracking the chain of the evolutionary timeline he shows how even the earliest single-cell organisms had to solve the same problems we and our cells have to solve each day. Along the way, LeDoux explores our place in nature, how the evolution of nervous systems enhanced the ability of organisms to survive and thrive, and how the emergence of what we humans understand as consciousness made our greatest and most horrendous achievements as a species possible.
*Includes a PDF of original reference illustrations from the text
An incisive examination of bioethics and American healthcare, and their profound affects on American culture over the last sixty years, from two eminent scholars.
An eye-opening look at the inevitable moral choices that come along with tremendous medical progress, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die is a primer for all Americans to talk more honestly about health care. Beginning in the 1950s when doctors still paid house calls but regularly withheld the truth from their patients, Amy Gutmann and Jonathan D. Moreno explore an unprecedented revolution in health care and explain the problem with Americas wanting everything that medical science has to offer without debating its merits and its limits. The result: Americans today pay far more for health care while having among the lowest life expectancies and highest infant mortality of any affluent nation.
Gutmann and Moreno?incisive, influential, and pragmatic thinkers (Arthur Caplan)?demonstrate that the stakes have never been higher for prolonging and improving life. From health care reform and death-with-dignity to child vaccinations and gene editing, they explain how bioethics came to dominate the national spotlight, leading and responding to a revolution in doctor-patient relations, a burgeoning world of organ transplants, and new reproductive technologies that benefit millions but create a host of legal and ethical challenges.
With striking examples, the authors show how breakthroughs in cancer research, infectious disease, and drug development provide Americans with exciting new alternatives, yet often painful choices. They address head-on the most fundamental challenges in American health care: Why do we pay so much for health care while still lacking universal coverage? How can medical studies adequately protect individuals who volunteer for them? Whats fair when it comes to allocating organs for transplants in truly life-and-death situations?
A lucid and provocative blend of history and public policy, this urgent work exposes the American paradox of wanting to have it all without paying the price.
In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful-and problematic-scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the 'markers' that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them.
TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today's science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: 'in our blood' is giving way to 'in our DNA.' This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately, she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously-and permanently-undermined.
Naming Darwin's Black Box to the National Review's list of the 100 most important nonfiction works of the twentieth century, George Gilder wrote that it 'overthrows Darwin at the end of the twentieth century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning.'
Discussing the book in the New Yorker in May 2005, H. Allen Orr said of Behe, 'he is the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and his arguments are by far the best known.' From one end of the spectrum to the other, Darwin's Black Box has established itself as the key text in the Intelligent Design movement-the one argument that must be addressed in order to determine whether Darwinian evolution is sufficient to explain life as we know it, or not.
For this edition, Behe has written a major new Afterword tracing the state of the debate in the decade since it began. It is his first major new statement on the subject and will be welcomed by the thousands who wish to continue this intense debate.
