While other books deal with the contemporary issue of the right to die, no attempt has been made to demonstrate substantially the historic nature of this question beyond the borders of the United States. Whiting demonstrates that the right to die controversy stretches back more than two thousand years, and he explains how current attitudes and practices in the U.S. have been influenced by the legal and cultural development of the ancient western world. This perspective allows the reader to understand not only the origins of the controversy, but also the different perspectives that each age has contributed to the ongoing debate. Whiting discusses the development of legal rights within both western culture and the United States, then applies these developments to the question of the right to die. In an environment of public debate that features such emotional events as the exploits of Jack Kevorkian, the publication of how to suicide manuals, and the counterattacks of Right to Life groups, the United States is left with very few options.

Cosmic evolution, the idea that the universe and its constituent parts are constantly evolving, has become widely accepted only in the last 50 years. It is no coincidence that this acceptance parallels the span of the Space Age. Although cosmic evolution was first recognized in the physical universe early in the 20th century, with hints even earlier, the relationships among plan-ets, stars, and galaxies, and the evolution of the universe itself, became much better known through the discoveries by planetary probes and space tele-scopes in the latter half of the century. It was also during the last 50 years—a century after Darwin proposed that evolution by natural selection applies to life on our own planet—that researchers from a variety of disciplines began to seriously study the possibilities of extraterrestrial life and “the biological universe.” Considering biology from this broader cosmological perspective has expanded biological thinking beyond its sample-of-one straightjacket, incorporating biology into cosmic evolution. Astrobiology is now a robust discipline even though it has yet to find any life beyond Earth.

Evolution and Genetics, is one book in the Britannica Illustrated Science Library Series that covers today's most popular science topics, from digital TV to microchips to touchscreens and beyond. Perennial subjects in earth science, life science, and physical science are all explored in detail. Amazing graphics-more than 1,000 per title-combined with concise summaries help students understand complex subjects. Correlated to the science curriculum in grades 5-9, each title also contains a glossary with full definitions for vocabulary.

С позиций глобально-эволюционного подхода человек одновременно является действующим лицом нескольких самостоятельных, но зависящих друг от друга форм эволюционного процесса. Соответственно этому можно выделить три формы адаптации и три составляющих эволюционной стратегии выживания человечества - биологическую, социокультурную и технологическую. В работе анализируются актуальные и потенциальные последствия развития так называемых High Hume технологий (технологий управляемой эволюции) - наиболее важной из важнейших технологических адаптации человечества. Феномен биовласти в рамках глобально коэволюционной методологии рассматривается как один из центральных элементов механизма взаимной координации биологической и социокультурной форм эволюционного процесса - с одной стороны и технокультурного баланса - с другой. Книга предназначается для специалистов в области информационных и генных технологий, истории и философии науки, а также может быть использована в качестве учебного пособия по социокультурным и биополитическим аспектам современной науки технологии.

This text is designed for students and anyone else with an interest in the history of life on our planet. The author describes the biological evolution of Earth’s organisms, and reconstructs their adaptations to the life they led, and the ecology and environment in which they functioned. On the grand scale, Earth is a constantly changing planet, continually presenting organisms with challenges. Changing geography, climate, atmosphere, oceanic and land environments set a stage in which organisms interact with their environments and one another, with evolutionary change an inevitable result. The organisms themselves in turn can change global environments: oxygen in our atmosphere is all produced by photosynthesis, for example. The interplay between a changing Earth and its evolving organisms is the underlying theme of the book. The book has a dedicated website which explores additional enriching information and discussion, and provides or points to the art for the book and many other images useful for teaching. See: www.wiley.com/go/cowen/historyoflife.

This book examines the origins, development and fate of intelligent species in the observable part of our universe. It scrutinizes what kind of information about extraterrestrial intelligent life can be inferred from our own biological, cultural and scientific evolution and the likely future of mankind. There is emphasis on the geological conditions and consequences of life's conquest of land as the pre-condition for the emergence of life with our type of technical intelligence.

In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the "Third Rome." By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today-transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin. Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.

The 21st century, like the 20th century before it, promises to be a time of extraordinary scientific growth and innovation. However, the hope for new cures and explanations about the world is often accompanied by new ethical concerns. This series examines the science behind three current fields of research and explores the implications for future scientific developments. Readers are also introduced to some of the controversies surrounding these subject areas to better understand the risks and benefits associated with modern advances. With sections devoted to significant concepts and thinkers, these books help bring to life the excitement of the discovery process.

This book seeks to answer a very straightforward question: How did religion come to be? A common way of addressing such a question is to go back to a time prior to the existence of the phenomenon you wish to explain and show how various factors operated to bring the phenomenon into existence. To understand how the Roman Empire came to be, for example, one might show how the pre-empire conditions of the ancient Mediterranean world made Rome’s emergence possible or even inevitable. This book treats religion the same way. But this immediately raises a question: Can we truly envision a world prior to religion? As far back as we can trace human history, there has always been religion. Indeed, some believers regard religion as a divine gift transcending human history. Treating it as a consequence of the same haphazard stew of historical forces that drive human affairs seems to border on sacrilege.

Vol. 3 : ill. - 406 p.

Georges Cuvier was an eminent French naturalist and zoologist best known for establishing the scientific disciplines of comparative anatomy and palaeontology. A man from humble origins, born into a Protestant family, Cuvier excelled in his studies as a youth, becoming a tutor to a Protestant noble in Normandy after four years at the Caroline Academy in Stuttgart. From this position, which kept him at a distance from the more tumultuous events of the French Revolution, Cuvier established connections with the leading naturalists of his day, and in 1795 was appointed as a research assistant to the newly founded chair in comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Shortly thereafter, Cuvier was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences within the Institut de France, from which point his success and reputation grew. In 1799 he was appointed professor at Collège de France, and became titular professor himself at the Jardin des Plantes in 1802. In 1806 he became a foreign member of the Royal Society in London, and was appointed to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1812. Cuvier’s scientific achievements are manifold. He was the first to establish extinction as a natural and historical fact, and his ’catastrophist’ theory of geology eventually won out over the gradualist theories of his contemporaries Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Étienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire. His best-known work is the Le Règne Animale (The Animal Kingdom, 1817).