[PDF] Darwin Comes To Town eBook

Author : Menno Schilthuizen
Publisher : Picador
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 50,16 MB
Release : 2018-04-03
Category : Science
ISBN : 1250127831

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*Carrion crows in the Japanese city of Sendai have learned to use passing traffic to crack nuts. *Lizards in Puerto Rico are evolving feet that better grip surfaces like concrete. *Europe’s urban blackbirds sing at a higher pitch than their rural cousins, to be heardover the din of traffic. How is this happening? Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of “urban ecologists” studying how our manmade environments are accelerating and changing the evolution of the animals and plants around us. In Darwin Comes to Town, he takes us around the world for an up-close look at just how stunningly flexible and swift-moving natural selection can be. With human populations growing, we’re having an increasing impact on global ecosystems, and nowhere do these impacts overlap as much as they do in cities. The urban environment is about as extreme as it gets, and the wild animals and plants that live side-by-side with us need to adapt to a whole suite of challenging conditions: they must manage in the city’s hotter climate (the “urban heat island”); they need to be able to live either in the semidesert of the tall, rocky, and cavernous structures we call buildings or in the pocket-like oases of city parks (which pose their own dangers, including smog and free-rangingdogs and cats); traffic causes continuous noise, a mist of fine dust particles, and barriers to movement for any animal that cannot fly or burrow; food sources are mainly human-derived. And yet, as Schilthuizen shows, the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is not just surviving, but evolving ways of thriving. Darwin Comes toTown draws on eye-popping examples of adaptation to share a stunning vision of urban evolution in which humans and wildlife co-exist in a unique harmony. It reveals that evolution can happen far more rapidly than Darwin dreamed, while providing a glimmer of hope that our race toward over population might not take the rest of nature down with us.

Author : Chris D. Thomas
Publisher : PublicAffairs
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 43,15 MB
Release : 2017-09-05
Category : Nature
ISBN : 1610397282

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Human activity has irreversibly changed the natural environment. But the news isn't all bad. It's accepted wisdom today that human beings have permanently damaged the natural world, causing extinction, deforestation, pollution, and of course climate change. But in Inheritors of the Earth, biologist Chris Thomas shows that this obscures a more hopeful truth -- we're also helping nature grow and change. Human cities and mass agriculture have created new places for enterprising animals and plants to live, and our activities have stimulated evolutionary change in virtually every population of living species. Most remarkably, Thomas shows, humans may well have raised the rate at which new species are formed to the highest level in the history of our planet. Drawing on the success stories of diverse species, from the ochre-colored comma butterfly to the New Zealand pukeko, Thomas overturns the accepted story of declining biodiversity on Earth. In so doing, he questions why we resist new forms of life, and why we see ourselves as unnatural. Ultimately, he suggests that if life on Earth can recover from the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, it can survive the onslaughts of the technological age. This eye-opening book is a profound reexamination of the relationship between humanity and the natural world.

Author : Menno Schilthuizen
Publisher :
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 12,7 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Evolution (Biology).
ISBN : 9780198503927

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How do new animal and plant species come about? How quickly does it happen? And what are species anyway? Schilthuizen, reputed scientist and journalist, launches into the debate that has baffled biologists ever since Darwin, with tremendous energy and wit. The whole subject leaps to life andits significance for understanding biodiversity comes clear. This is a fascinating read that will appeal equally to the lay reader and to students getting to grips with the fundementals of a complex subject.

Author : Ruth Padel
Publisher : Knopf
Page : 162 pages
File Size : 24,21 MB
Release : 2011-11-23
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 030795952X

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This remarkable book brings us an intimate and moving interpretation of the life and work of Charles Darwin, by Ruth Padel, an acclaimed British poet and a direct descendant of the famous scientist. Charles Darwin, born in 1809, lost his mother at the age of eight, repressed all memory of her, and poured his passion into solitary walks, newt collecting, and shooting. His five-year voyage on H.M.S. Beagle, when he was in his twenties, changed his life. Afterward, he began publishing his findings and working privately on groundbreaking theories about the development of animal species, including human beings, and he made a nervous proposal to his cousin Emma. Padel’s poems sparkle with nuance and feeling as she shows us the marriage that ensued, and the rich, creative atmosphere the Darwins provided for their ten children. Charles and Emma were happy in each other, but both were painfully aware of the gulf between her deep Christian faith and his increasing religious doubt. The death of three of their children accentuated this gulf. For Darwin, death and extinction were nature’s way of developing new species: the survival of the fittest; for Emma, death was a prelude to the afterlife. These marvelous poems—enriched by helpful marginal notes and by Padel’s ability to move among multiple viewpoints, always keeping Darwin at the center—bring to life the great scientist as well as the private man and tender father. This is a biography in rare form, with an unquantifiable depth of family intimacy and warmth.

Author : Menno Schilthuizen
Publisher : Picador
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 10,9 MB
Release : 2019-04-02
Category : Science
ISBN : 125012784X

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From evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen, a book that will make you see yourself and the world around you in an entirely new way *Carrion crows in the Japanese city of Sendai have learned to use passing traffic to crack nuts. *Lizards in Puerto Rico are evolving feet that better grip surfaces like concrete. *Europe’s urban blackbirds sing at a higher pitch than their rural cousins, to be heard over the din of traffic. How is this happening? Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of “urban ecologists” studying how our manmade environments are accelerating and changing the evolution of the animals and plants around us. In Darwin Comes to Town, he takes us around the world for an up-close look at just how stunningly flexible and swift-moving natural selection can be. With human populations growing, we’re having an increasing impact on global ecosystems, and nowhere do these impacts overlap as much as they do in cities. The urban environment is about as extreme as it gets, and the wild animals and plants that live side-by-side with us need to adapt to a whole suite of challenging conditions: they must manage in the city’s hotter climate (the “urban heat island”); they need to be able to live either in the semidesert of the tall, rocky, and cavernous structures we call buildings or in the pocket-like oases of city parks (which pose their own dangers, including smog and free-rangingdogs and cats); traffic causes continuous noise, a mist of fine dust particles, and barriers to movement for any animal that cannot fly or burrow; food sources are mainly human-derived. And yet, as Schilthuizen shows, the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is not just surviving, but evolving ways of thriving. Darwin Comes toTown draws on eye-popping examples of adaptation to share a stunning vision of urban evolution in which humans and wildlife co-exist in a unique harmony. It reveals that evolution can happen far more rapidly than Darwin dreamed, while providing a glimmer of hope that our race toward over population might not take the rest of nature down with us.

Author : Carolyn Meyer
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 14,11 MB
Release : 2009
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN : 9780152061944

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Just in time for Charles Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species," Meyer tells the story of his restless childhood, unrequited teenage love, and a passion for studying nature that was so great, Darwin would sacrifice everything to pursue it.

Author : Dan Simmons
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 656 pages
File Size : 49,48 MB
Release : 2007-08-28
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0061841757

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A series of high-speed fatal car wrecks -- accidents that seem. as if they may have been staged -- is leading Darwin Minor down a dangerous road. A reluctantexpert on violent ways to die, he sifts clues from wreckage the way a brilliant coroner extracts damning information from a victim's corpse. But the deeper hedigs, the more enemies he seems to make, and the wider the conspiracy seems to grow. Before long, he'll find himself relying on deadly resources of his own inorder to save his life -- and those of untold others.

Author : Stephen Jay Gould
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 45,17 MB
Release : 1992-07-17
Category : Science
ISBN : 0393340414

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More than any other modern scientists, Stephen Jay Gould has opened up to millions the wonders of evolutionary biology. His genius as an essayist lies in his unmatched ability to use his knowledge of the world, including popular culture, to illuminate the realm of science. Ever Since Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould's first book, has sold more than a quarter of a million copies. Like all succeeding collections by this unique writer, it brings the art of the scientific essay to unparalleled heights.

Author : David Dobbs
Publisher : Pantheon
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 49,21 MB
Release : 2009-02-25
Category : Nature
ISBN : 0307490076

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Explores the century-long controversy over the orgins of coral reefs, a debate that split the world of nineteenth-century science, looking at the diverse roles of Louis Agassiz, his son Alexander, and Charles Darwin and reflecting on how the search for the truth shed new light on the formation of Earth and its natural wonders.

Author : Tristan Donovan
Publisher : Chicago Review Press
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 16,88 MB
Release : 2015-04-01
Category : Nature
ISBN : 1569761035

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We tend to think of cities as a realm apart, somehow separate from nature, but nothing could be further from the truth. In Feral Cities, Tristan Donovan digs below the urban gloss to uncover the wild creatures that we share our streets and homes with, and profiles the brave and fascinating people who try to manage them. Along the way readers will meet the wall-eating snails that are invading Miami, the boars that roam Berlin, and the monkey gangs of Cape Town. From feral chickens and carpet-roaming bugs to coyotes hanging out in sandwich shops and birds crashing into skyscrapers, Feral Cities takes readers on a journey through streets and neighborhoods that are far more alive than we often realize, shows how animals are adjusting to urban living, and asks what messages the wildlife in our metropolises have for us.