Chimeras and Consciousness: Evolution of the Sensory Self (MIT Press)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.13 (797 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0262015390 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 344 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-02-13 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Our planetmates, all of them conscious to some degree, were joined only recently by us, the aggressive modern humans.From social bacteria to urban citizens, all living beings participate in community life. Nested inside families within communities inside ecosystems, each metabolizes, takes in matter, expends energy, and excretes. Each of the members of our own and other species, in groups with incessantly shifting alliances, receives and processes information. Awareness and sensation led to astounding activities; millions of species incessantly interacted to form our planet's complex conscious system. Mergers of radically different life forms with myriad purposes -- the "chimeras" of the title -- underlie dramatic metamorphosis and other positive evolutionary change. The provocative essays in this book, going far beyond science but undergirded by the finest science, serve to put sensitive, sensible life in its cosmic context.. Since early bacteria avoided, produced, and eventually u
(William Irwin Thompson, poet, cultural historian, and founder of the Lindisfarne Association)I consider this to be an extremely important collection of papers that could change the nature of the currently unhealthy and unhelpful arguments about evolutionIt is a rich introduction to a vast field of research still little known to the general public and insufficiently appreciated by mainstream scientists. (Bruce Rinker, ecologist, science educator, and explorer; co-editor of Gaia in Turmoil) . Morowitz, Robinson Professor of Biology and Natural Philosophy, George Mason University)The
Krumbein, formerly at Oldenburg University in Germany, is counted among the founders of geomicrobiology and biogeochemistry, new scientific fields especially relevant to global climate and planetary biology.. Celeste A. Asikainen, a geologist, is the administrator of the Margulis Laboratory and a doctoral student.Wolfgang E
SEV said Groundbreaking. Who would think that consciousness, or awareness of non-self and self could extend all the way into the microbial world? This book shows how it all started. The chimeras part of the title reveal that this conscious life is not about organisms as individual discrete islands, but that throughout the history of life there have been mergers on grand scales to produce the forms we see today,. "This book is great" according to Andrew W. Brousseau. I think that this book should be read by anyone with an interest in science and most definitely by anyone who is a life/Earth scientist. It is full of essays by prominent scientists exploring a wide range of topics. All of them going more in-depth or giving a different light to the topic than you probably knew about.This book will make you think.. Walter J. Smith said microbiology's confirmation/correction of evolution theory. This collection of two dozen essays in modern scientific thought, even though too many of them written only for their respective specialists, is unequaled for its comprehensive overview of the emerging consensus regarding the imperatives for thinking with and through nature instead of warring against it.For the war against nature is no longer anything but a war with ourselves; it is a w