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The field of human development focuses on the growth and development of the human being including physical, social, psychological, and emotional development. Under the broad umbrella of the term human development you find countless topics that range from charting the emotional attachment of an infant to his or her parents and its long-term effects on well-being, media violence and adolescents' behavior, or factors moderating the natural decline in...
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"For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all our inventions--our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations--we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society. In Blueprint, Nicholas...
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Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of...
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"Where did we come from? What makes us human? NOVA's...investigation explores how new discoveries are transforming views of our earliest ancestors. Featuring interviews with world-renowned scientists, footage shot "in the trenches" as fossils were unearthed, and...computer-generated animation, [these programs] bring early hominids to life, examining how we became the creative and adaptable modern humans of today...In the first episode...encounter..."Selam,...
9) Human
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Our early ancestors lived in small groups and worked actively to preserve social equality. As they created larger societies, however, inequality rose, and by 2500 BCE truly egalitarian societies were on the wane. In The Creation of Inequality, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus demonstrate that this development was not simply the result of population increase, food surplus, or the accumulation of valuables. Instead, inequality resulted from conscious...
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An epic detective story that offers a gripping expose on why the world is so unequal. Professor Jared Diamond traveled the globe for over 30 years trying to answer this question. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? Diamond dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible...
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Take an epic adventure with intimate insight into the big, bold, and tenacious country of Australia. In the vast interior, a man transforms the struggle to survive into a game of pathos and humor; on the coast, a naval cadet dreams of a place in the sophisticated navy of the world's largest island; in the tropical North, a couple preserves a storehouse of culture over 40,000 years old; along the Gold Coast, a woman competes to win against nature's...
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"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009" Marten Scheffer is professor of environmental sciences at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He is the author of Ecology of Shallow Lakes.
How do we explain the remarkably abrupt changes that sometimes occur in nature and society--and can we predict why and when they happen? This book offers a comprehensive introduction to critical transitions in complex systems--the radical changes that...
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Robert Boyd is Origins Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. His books include How Humans Evolved, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, and The Origin and Evolution of Cultures. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
How our ability to learn from each other has been the essential ingredient to our remarkable success as a species
Human beings are a very different kind of animal....
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Social Darwinism in American Thought portrays the overall influence of Darwin on American social theory and the notable battle waged among thinkers over the implications of evolutionary theory for social thought and political action. Theorists such as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner adopted the idea of the struggle for existence as justification for the evils as well as the benefits of laissez-faire modern industrial society. Others...