Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark

Book Description

In this exhilarating work, Barbara Hurd explores some of the most extraordinary places on earth, from sacred caves in India to secret caves in Arizona. With passionately informed prose, Hurd makes these strange dark spaces -- with their stalactites and blind cave fish and ancient galleries of white flowstone -- come to light, illuminating the natural history and spiritual territory of caves as powerfully as Kathleen Norris portrayed the Dakotas. Entering the Stone provides an awe-inducing tour through a fragile and beautiful subterranean world.

Customer Reviews:

An emotional meditation on life when light is gone.......2007-02-18

It is a strange blessing that I ran across an excerpt of this book online and sought it out. The local library had a copy. I wondered about the experience of a novice spelunking. What I found was one woman's meditation on sorrow and loss and fear and awareness, and how reason and passion, how space and solid, how dark and light criss-cross and make the liminal experiences telling.

Please don't fault her beforehand if I sound too intellectual about it, too. It's a beautifully written exploration of the meaning of life, but it's sometimes very down-to-earth, too.

Average customer rating:
Tree Flora of Malaya: A Manual For Foresters Volume Four
F. S. P.(Editor ) Ng
Manufacturer: Longmans, Green & Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 9679762025

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Tree Flora of Malaya: A Manual for Foresters: Vol Three
F.S.P. (editor) Ng
Manufacturer: Longmans, Green & Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0582724252

Average customer rating:
Tree flora of Malaya;: A manual for foresters (Malayan forest records)
Pusat Penyelidekan Hutan
Manufacturer: Longman
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

General | Plants | Biological Sciences | Science | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0582724120

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Insight Guide Tanzania & Zanzibar (Insight Guides)
Melissa Shales
Manufacturer: Insight Guides
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Africa | Travel | Subjects | Books
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Guidebooks | Reference & Tips | Travel | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 981234831X

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Tanzania and Zanzibar Insight Guide
*
Manufacturer: APA INSIGHT GUIDES (
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K7NB4A

Amazon.com

If you're going to draw together genetics, science in general, ethics, and religion, by definition it probably won't be a simple read. However,Genes, Genesis and God is so well written that the intelligent lay person can grasp the author's arguments.

Holmes Rolston III is a professor of philosophy at Colorado State University. This book is based on his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1997. What role, he asks, do genes play in the evolution of mankind? For Rolston, man is not seen just as a superior animal but as both a creator and creature of culture; this is what distinguishes us from the beasts.

He carefully examines recent evolutionary theories, including Richard Dawkins's "selfish gene" concept, which he finds not only misnamed but misleading.

The first couple of chapters of the book look at genes, what they are and how they work, and what they do and don't do. From this topic he moves on to the genesis of human culture, to the "evolution" of scientific ideas, to ethics, and finally to religion. Religion, he concludes in his final, deeply thoughtful, and clearly argued chapter, which will annoy atheist evolution advocates and fundamentalist creationists alike, does have a survival value for humankind and is not in any way incompatible with genetics or evolutionary theory.

This book is a valuable contribution to the philosophy of science. A single criticism would be that there is no reference to the recent work of Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, who pursue a very similar path of inquiry into the "evolution of the curious mind" in their Figments of Reality. --David V Barrett, Amazon.co.uk

Book Description

Can the phenomena of religion and ethics be reduced to the phenomena of biology? Holmes Rolston says no, and in this sweeping account of the subject, written with considerable verve and clarity, he challenges the sociobiological orthodoxy that would naturalize science, ethics, and religion. The book is thoroughly up to date on current biological thought and is written by one of the most well-respected figures in the philosophy of biology and religion. It is likely to provoke considerable controversy among a wide range of readers in such fields as philosophy, religious studies, and biology, as well as being suitable for courses on science and religion.

Customer Reviews:

Morality Emerging.......2004-09-01

This text is the product of Rolston's Gifford Lectures of 1997. His basic task is to relate cultural genesis to natural genesis and understand how value in culture has its links to value in nature. While Rolston argues for a continuity of culture and biological nature, he also contends that culture exceeds and emerges out of biology, so that genuine novelty occurs. In fact, Rolston believes that science, ethics and religion are emergent phenomenon in culture. He uses these three domains "for the generating, conserving, and distributing of values as test cases, demanding their incorporation into the larger picture of what is taking place on our planet" (xiii).

Much of the first third of the book addresses genetic theory, and Rolston surveys a wide variety of literature in this field. Perhaps one of the strengths of this book is the author's command of the wide literature pertaining to the subjects he addresses.

The final third of the book addresses issues related to ethics, love and religion. Although Rolston affirms value in nature, he does not believe that there is any ethics in nature. He examines and critiques various biological theories related to egoism and altruism. In the model he promotes, "one needs value naturalized as well as ethics humanized; then ethics will require appropriate respect for value, whether human or non-human" (280).

Rolston argues that ethics arise out of evolutionary natural history. It is a history in which values have already been arising. "Such genesis of ethics, distinctive to the human genius, testifies both to human uniqueness, emergent from natural history, and to the creative power evidenced in the spontaneous genetics, the primal source now transcended with the appearance of genuine and universal caring and altruism" (280).

From ethics emerges religion, and the capacity to be religious evolved within or emerged out of natural systems where there was no such capacity in non-humans. Rolston advocates a naturalizing of religion, by which he does not mean that religion can be explained away naturalistically. Rather the naturalizing of religion means that religion is generated by the human confrontation with the forces of nature. This means that religion comes as a response to prolific Earth.

While religion involves more than altruism, Rolston argues that altruism plays an important part in a variety of religious traditions. Religion functions to generate innovative ethical behavior, which in turn makes possible the human spirit. This spirit cannot exist outside a social covenant, however. Religion, then, is an emergent property from complex biodiversity through evolutionary history. In this emergence, God plays a role.

Thomas Jay Oord

How can something arise out of nothing?.......2004-06-05

Holmes Rolston (Templeton prize 2003) is a Philospher who uses a Dawinist perspective to analyse its implications for the nature of Humans whom he indicates are far above other creatures in key mental capacities. In particular he is interested in the origins of science (which evaluates the "is" of life), ethics and religion (which evaluate the "oughts" of life).

The driving force behind evolution is survival. If Darwinism struggles to find an explanation for human scientific rationality it goes into shear fits when it tries to explain ethical behaviour. Rolston devotes a chapter to each of these. In Darwinistic terms ethics and religion must be present or have persisted for some survival advantage. If the modern mankind now concludes that neither is strictly necessary does this mean that their genetic line is doomed for evolutionary extinction?

One of Rolston's key conclusions is that just as the qualities of oxygen and carbon don't give us any hint at what life forms might be like, in turn simple life does not predict the genius of the human mind including intentionality -we know there are other minds. The transitions from atom to life to mind reveal marked transitions each associated with a huge addition of information, genetic at the first level and cultural/historical at the next level. Such information requires a source.

Here are some quotable quotes:
"Why not recognise that there is a human genius, exemplified by science, that does transcend biology?"(p197)
"No theory can look at a protozoan and deduce an eye or a brain. There is no argument why this has happened, nor that it ought to have happened. There are no equations into which one can introduce amino acids, or microbes, or trilobites as initial conditions to specify variables and then solve them to produce dinosaurs, or mastodons, or persons." (p210)
"But the same science that demands a conscience has difficulty explaining and authorising conscience, for we struggle to understand how amoral nature evolved the moral animal,.."(p 215)
"Ethics is as undeniably present, ideal and real, as are genes, and just as much among the wonders of creation"(p283)
"..we still need to ask whether the animal in which such faith emerges, Homo Sapiens, is coping now because it is detecting the truth:there is a divine will for life to continue."(p296)
"It is implausible that life should have evolved a bad computational logic that is a good adaptive fit."(337)
"The idea of God has been among the most fertile in shaping history. That is the fertility that ultimately needs to be explained"(p348)
"For in fact, on Earth, there really isn't anything in rocks that suggests the possibility of Homo sapiens, much less the American Civil War, or the World Wide Web, and to say that all these possibilities are lurking there, even though nothing we know about rocks, or carbon atoms, or electrons and protons suggests this is simply to let possibilities float in from nowhere"(p352)
"Looking at a pool of amino acids and seeing dinosaurs or homo sapiens in them is something like looking at a pile of alphabetical letters and seeing Hamlet. In fact Hamlet is not lurking around a pile of A_Z's; such a play is not within their possibility space - not until Shakespeare comes around,.."(p355)
"For the lack of better explanations, the usual turn here is simply to conclude that nature is self-organising (autopoiesis), though, since no 'self' is present, this is better termed spontaneously organising. An autopoietic process can be just a name, like 'soporific' tendencies, used to label the mysterious genesis of more out of less, a seemingly scientific name that is really a sort of mystic chant over a miraculously fertile universe."(p359)

Brilliant.......2004-04-14

As a biochemist with a keen interest in philosophy and ethics I whole-heartdly devoured this book when I first becmae aware of it (after 2003 John Tempelton award was announced). Rolston (the founder of environmental ethics) expertly exposes the soft-underbelly of dominant voices and theories of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Offering a point for point refutation and showing a mastery of both science and philosophy Rolston makes a wonderful case in a series of chapters that comprised his Gifford Lectures.

I do believe the reviewer below me has missed many of the points of the book and does not understand what Rolston was attempting to show with the misplaced quotes below. Rolston never argues science away, rather biologic evolution is the foundation for his central thesis (scientists such as Ayala and Gould have also argued convincingly against the same flawed presuupositions esposed by Alexander, Wilson, Ruse et Al from a purely biologic standpoint).

The book needs to be read to truly appreciate the scope of its endeavor, my only regret is that Rolston published prior to the release of Consilence. It would have been interesting to see what Rolston (like Berry) would make out of Wilson's latest effort.

scholarly writing; questionable logic; conclusions lacking.......2002-05-14

It seems clear that the author knows his subject matter and the issues surrounding evolution and genetics as well as philosophy and ethics. It's much less clear that he has anything useful to add to the discussion. Instead, he devotes much of the book to quoting other scientists and writers, then criticizing their terminology and logic as being misleading or incomplete. Often it seems that he's missing the point of what those authors were trying to say; other times he's simply refuting an obvious misinterpretation.

The first 100 pages or so are spent in arriving at the following conclusions:
1. Life becomes more complex.
2. The word "selfish" should not be used about genes, because someone might mistakenly take it literally. Likewise the word "blind".

Regarding 1: Okay, I realize there is some debate about the reason for this and whether this is inevitable, but it seems clear that this has happened in our case, so why belabor the point?

Regarding 2: Well, if the intended audience for this book is those who might take it literally, I guess this was worthwhile. But then Rolston is doing a disservice to those of us who were never in danger of thinking that genes could be literally selfish. And, even worse, after firmly denouncing this terminology and taking shots at Dawkins for using it, he proceeds to infuse the entire remainder of the book with statements that genes are anything but selfish, rather they are "sharing". And far from being blind, genes are "smart". The author needs to read his own argument about mistakenly assigning human values to genes and apply it to this book.

On p. 141, Rolston asks "What is happening when a developed nation sends food to those underfed in a developing nation?" And responds with "...it no longer seems plausible to hold that the principal determinant is producing more offspring in the next generation." Again, does anyone actually think that? In a similar question on p. 267: "But then just where is Wilson getting these oughts that cannot be derived from biology, unless from the insights of ethicists (or theologians) that transcend biology?" The answer should be clear: all humans including scientists get their oughts from our genetic heritage. In the ancestral environment, it was an advantage to have these "moral" tendencies, and now we try to use logic to apply it to the whole world, even though it only evolved among small groups. Nothing more to it than that.

On pp. 192-211, Rolston contends that human minds evolved to use science, then argues that science is the result of "evolution transcending itself". But human minds did not evolve to use science. They evolved to help humans survive in the ancestral environment. Now we use them for other things, such as science, and again, I don't think the reader should ever have been in danger of thinking that this is the best way to use our minds in order to maximize our offspring. So what is the point of refuting this?

I'm afraid that much of this book falls into this pattern of quoting others, musing about possible failings in their logic, then moving on to the next subject as if the conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what the conclusion of this book is. If I had to guess, it would be "science is not sufficient to address moral questions". While that may be true in some sense, the criticism in this book leveled at scientific writings on the subject is not convincing, nor even particularly relevant to that issue. Science does have something to tell us about morality - though Rolston, and indeed many of us, might not comfortable with what it's telling us.

Naturalism, naturalistic fallacies, human religious nature.......2001-03-26

This work is well worth reading as a challenge to sociobiological thinking on values, ethics, and religion. One need not agree to the author's conclusions entirely to feel a breath of fresh air, and some common sense, applied to the Darwin debate, and the hopeless venture of deriving a genetic explanation for the religious evolutionary emergentism visible in world history and corresponding very little to the current regime of explanations. It is also true that challenging sociobiology is not so hard, and that by comparison almost any religious viewpoint looks superior! We still end back at square one, needing to find some resolution of the dilemma of naturalism, ethics, and evolution! That is, unless we abandon the scientific perspective and grant the exception of values altogether to any naturalistic account. Part of the problem is seen in the term 'naturalistic fallacy'. This is a fallacy in our own minds, but it would seem nature has few difficulties here for it does not honor this misnomer. Thus, the dilemma remains here of the boundaries of the natural and the transcendent, so-called. This is a point much clearer in a religion such as Buddhism, where no nonsense about man's 'spirit' is allowed to intrude on the 'self' whose phenomenology is assumed to be entirely natural. But this work cannot be faulted for not resolving the arcana of religion and does superbly as a challenge to the completely baffling oversimplifications of much ultra-Darwinian pontification of the subject of consciousness and ethics.

Genes, Genesis, and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History.(Review): An article from: Social Theory and Practice

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Genes, Genesis, and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History.(Review): An article from: Social Theory and Practice
James W. Kuhn
Manufacturer: Social Theory and Practice-Florida State University
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

General | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Social Theory and Practice, published by Social Theory and Practice-Florida State University on September 22, 2000. The length of the article is 2577 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Genes, Genesis, and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History.(Review)
Author: James W. Kuhn
Publication: Social Theory and Practice (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 2000
Publisher: Social Theory and Practice-Florida State University
Volume: 26 Issue: 3 Page: 530

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

New discoveries about algorithms are leading scientists beyond the Church-Turing Thesis, which governs the " algorithmic universe" and asserts the conventionality of recursive algorithms. A new paradigm for computation, the super-recursive algorithm, offers promising prospects for algorithms of much greater computing power and efficiency.

Super-Recursive Algorithms provides an accessible, focused examination of the theory of super-recursive algorithms and its ramifications for the computer industry, networks, artificial intelligence, embedded systems, and the Internet. The book demonstrates how these algorithms are more appropriate as mathematical models for modern computers, and how these algorithms present a better framework for computing methods in such areas as numerical analysis, array searching, and controlling and monitoring systems. In addition, a new practically-oriented perspective on the theory of algorithms, computation, and automata, as a whole, is developed. Problems of efficiency, software development, parallel and distributed processing, pervasive and emerging computation, computer architecture, machine learning, brain modeling, knowledge discovery, and intelligent systems are addressed.

Topics and Features:
* Encompasses and systematizes all main classes of super-recursive algorithms and the theory behind them

* Describes the strengthening link between the theory of super-recursive algorithms and actual algorithms close to practical realization

* Examines the theory's basis as a foundation for advancements in computing, information science, and related technologies

* Encompasses and systematizes all main types of mathematical models of algorithms

* Highlights how super-recursive algorithms pave the way for more advanced design, utilization, and maintenance of computers

* Examines and restructures the existing variety of mathematical models of complexity of algorithms and computation, introducing new models

* Possesses a comprehensive bibliography and index

This clear exposition, motivated by numerous examples and illustrations, serves to develop a new paradigm for complex, high-performance computing based on both partial recursive functions and more inclusive recursive algorithms. Researchers and advanced students interested in theory of computation and algorithms will find the book an essential resource for an important new class of algorithms.

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Super Recursive Algorithms
Mark Burgin
Manufacturer: SPRINGER @ NY INC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000N749OS

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Super-Recursive Algorithms.
Mark Burgin
Manufacturer: see notes for publisher info
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000M4P05E

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A good Attempt

Lucia Redux

Lucia Triumphant: Based on the Characters Created by E.F. Benson
Tom Holt , and E. F. Benson
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | British | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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Mapp & Lucia

ASIN: 0060961961

Book Description

In·Tom Holt's second continuation of E. F. Benson's classic Mapp and Lucia novels, Tilling is hurled into fierce social warfare as Lucia contends with Elizabeth's latest ruse — a game of Monopoly — to win over the hearts and minds of the town's populace. Is Lucia haunted by ghosts? Will she triumph in the face of a royal visit? Is Mapp of noble blood — or of criminal heritage? “The period is caught with remarkable skill. Equally well captured is the spirit of Benson's six Lucia novels.” — Oxford Mail

Customer Reviews:

A good Attempt.......2007-03-14

Mr Holt did a fair job at crafting this book. At least he got the basics right, but He didn't quite capture the whole spirit of the lucia series. With the original series, Benson managed to tell the story that was going on "on stage" but there was a great deal more that was going on behind the scenes that you would only pick up on by reading between the lines. There were lots of little things that didn't quite ring true, and it felt a little hollow. It was just a little too over the top at times. One of the things I noticed right away was the fact that Mr Wyse never seemed to take any of his usually to frequent bows.

Still, it was a pleasant enough read, and I doubt anyone could ever really hold a candle to benson

Lucia Redux.......2000-07-08

Those of us who are Lucia fans (of the origianl E.F. Benson six books) can never get enough of her upper middle class, early 20th century English scheming. The original novels are some of the funniest ever written--perhaps more-so because we cannot help but see a little bit of ourselves and our friends through our laughter.

Holt's Lucia Triumphant is not a send up, but one of two lovingly crafted continuations of the series. In the originals nothing ever happens of much import except in that it sets up comedic bits that one can read and read over again a laugh everytime. In Holt's novels, the situations are just a little more ridiculous, and the characters drawn with just a little more characature. That is my only complaint, this is not quite up to E.F. Benson's writing in the--one might say--subtlety of the broadness. Otherwise, this is a fine comedic novel, indeed. If you are a Luciafile, or you like Evelyn Waugh and that ilk, you will enjoy this book immensely.

It is an enjoyable homage to Benson's characters well worth your time.

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