Cells To Civilizations

The science of change from cells to culture Cells to Civilizations is the first unified account of how life transforms itself—from the production of bacteria to the emergence of complex civilizations. What are the connections between evolving microbes, an egg that develops into an infant, and a child who learns to walk and talk? Award-winning scientist Enrico Coen synthesizes the growth of living systems and creative processes, and he reveals that the four great life transformations—evolution, development, learning, and human culture—while typically understood separately, actually all revolve around shared core principles and manifest the same fundamental recipe. Coen blends provocative discussion, the latest scientific research, and colorful examples to demonstrate the links between these critical stages in the history of life. Coen tells a story rich with genes, embryos, neurons, and fascinating discoveries. He examines the development of the zebra, the adaptations of seaweed, the cave paintings of Lascaux, and the formulations of Alan Turing. He explores how dogs make predictions, how weeds tell the time of day, and how our brains distinguish a Modigliani from a Rembrandt. Locating commonalities in important findings, Coen gives readers a deeper understanding of key transformations and provides a bold portrait for how science both frames and is framed by human culture. A compelling investigation into the relationships between our biological past and cultural progress, Cells to Civilizations presents a remarkable story of living change.

From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower “A dazzling history of Western ideas.” —The Economist “Mr. Ferguson tells his story with characteristic verve and an eye for the felicitous phrase.” —Wall Street Journal “[W]ritten with vitality and verve . . . a tour de force.” —Boston Globe Western civilization’s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries. How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic—that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors. Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded the killer apps the West once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith in itself. Chronicling the rise and fall of empires alongside clashes (and fusions) of civilizations, Civilization: The West and the Rest recasts world history with force and wit. Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.

Demonstrates the way in which the discovery, application, and adaptation of materials has shaped the course of human history and the routines of our daily existence.

A systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations. Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child's growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations. Smil takes readers from bacterial invasions through animal metabolisms to megacities and the global economy. He begins with organisms whose mature sizes range from microscopic to enormous, looking at disease-causing microbes, the cultivation of staple crops, and human growth from infancy to adulthood. He examines the growth of energy conversions and man-made objects that enable economic activities—developments that have been essential to civilization. Finally, he looks at growth in complex systems, beginning with the growth of human populations and proceeding to the growth of cities. He considers the challenges of tracing the growth of empires and civilizations, explaining that we can chart the growth of organisms across individual and evolutionary time, but that the progress of societies and economies, not so linear, encompasses both decline and renewal. The trajectory of modern civilization, driven by competing imperatives of material growth and biospheric limits, Smil tells us, remains uncertain.

Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays to topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine. Lewis Thomas writes, "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us."

The origin of life on Earth is the basic view of the world’s concept. At present, its origin and development are treated either from the scientific evolutionary theory points of view or religious mythological ones. At the same time, the evolutionary theory fails to provide grounded explanations to a lot of events which have happened and are observed in nature. The data related to the complexity of life processes genetic programming and many biology and palaeontological facts cast doubt on the possibility of spontaneous occurrence of protein organisms during evolutionary transformations. They indicate that the protein life development occurred in the direction of the planned improvement through the complex technology’s implementation which requires specific scientific knowledge. Therefore, the necessity to formulate the new technological concept of the life appearance on Earth which is provided by the given book has occurred. It summarizes numerous well-known facts which are being interpreted as the result of the highly developed civilization technological developments. The stated views have more grounds for existence than the evolutionary theory and biblical ideas about the divine creation of the world. The fact that society treats all the ideas of the life creation as religious ones and that they are used by the theologians turns out to be the ideological problem. The book is aimed at overcoming the barrier of such non-perception. The analysis performed allows the reader to understand in which cases random events occur, and in which ones there is a logical purposeful intelligent activity, the result of which is the development of self-replicating protein organisms programmed to perform the work necessary to meet the needs of their creators on Earth. Reflections on the possible material nature of the highly developed mind carriers are given. According to the author, a human being is not a passive observer of random evolutionary changes in nature, but has his mission in the artificially developed system of energy supply of Earth along with other protein organisms. If the protein world, including humans, has been created for a specific purpose, then mankind must not violate its implementation and should follow its mission. A new worldview should introduce changes in the main mankind’s activity spheres: science, politics, religion and the human being’s personal life. The book is designed for a wide range of readers of various specialties. Conceptually, it is important for people who do not share the evolutionary theory provisions and existing religious beliefs.

It's world history. But not as we know it. c.1000AD- Erik the Red's daughter heads south from Greenland 1492- Columbus does not discover America 1531- the Incas invade Europe Freydis is the leader of a band of Viking warriors who get as far as Panama. Nobody knows what became of them. Five hundred years later, Christopher Columbus is sailing for the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. Even when captured, his faith in his mission is unshaken. Thirty years after that, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in a Europe ready for revolution. Fortunately, he has a recent guidebook to acquiring power - Machiavelli's The Prince. So, the stage is set for a Europe ruled by Incas and, when the Aztecs arrive on the scene, for a great war that will change history forever. 'Binet's best book yet- the work of a major writer just hitting his stride. A delightful counterfactual novel' ***** - Daily Telegraph

Throughout life, your conscious and subconscious intelligences shift you from one mode of life to another, in order to render you more successful while fulfilling your needs. Life has always been this way, while you persist to ignore it for various reasons. And so you live your life randomly, more or less in tune with yourself, with society, and with nature, more or less against norms and expectations, one mode of life after another, just the way it comes and just the way it happens, since you can never understand what goes on, you never learn about it in school, you never see it on TV, and everyone around does just the same. While living your life randomly, your ‘bad’ or ‘unfortunate’ modes of life replace inevitably your ‘good,’ ‘pleasant,’ or ‘fortunate’ ones. What you do, you enjoy the good and you try to avoid the rest, never predicting your life, never understanding your modes of life for what they truly are, and therefore you are never capable to control them. This manner of unconscious, unpredictable living can become frustrating at times, even dangerous, with everyone telling you that you are abnormal, sick, malfunctioning, mean, or disobedient every time you are switched naturally to your ‘bad’ or ‘forbidden’ modes of life. You do your best while refraining from temptations and ‘bad’ behavior, you try to remain within the hypothetical ‘neutral’ or ‘good’ modes of life the way society demands from you, it does not work since your subconscious forces you in every way to obey all its needs, and consequently, you fall in the wrong side of everything. You feel bad and guilty then, you hate yourself, you get sick or you are punished by society, and even worse, you are labeled as sick and suffering by medicine and as criminal and dysfunctional by justice. Modes of life are neither bad nor dysfunctional, since they are meant to facilitate you to cope with and adapt to all sudden changes from your immediate physical and social environment. While if you fail to predict and identify your own modes of life, or if you act against them in any manner, then you might end up in a hospital, in jail, or at the morgue, since it happens often. Throughout this book, you learn to identify and understand your modes of life, modes of intelligence, and modes of existence influencing you the most, while learning the multitude of modes of life, what triggers them, and how to access or avoid them in order to live a healthy, successful, fulfilling life.

How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch? If our technological society collapsed tomorrow what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible? Human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. It has built on itself for centuries, becoming vast and increasingly specialized. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latest—or even the most basic—technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, or even how to produce food for yourself? Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You can’t hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it. But Dartnell doesn’t just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them all—the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world.