The Human Odyssey
Travel back in time to the Miocene epoch, when Earth was truly a planet of the apes. Explore the intense debate surrounding the emergence of the first hominids in Africa. Discover when our kind started walking upright. Learn how spectacular fossils from the Republic of Georgia have toppled old ideas about when, how and why humans fi nally left the African motherland to colonize the rest of the world. And get inside the minds of our ancestors as they started thinking like us, much earlier than expected, it turns out.
It is much more than a dictionary of the official "Nomina Anatomica", for it is also a most valuable working pocket book for anyone in the field of anatomy and medicine. It is its illustrations which make it so useful and, indeed, unique.
The terms are not only defined but also shown in clear, simple pictures.
Human Evolution
The story of human evolution stretches back over six million years. It is not the story of one species but of several diverse species, some of whom walked the Earth at the same time. From the earliest hominids to the early Homo sapiens, there was nothing inevitable about the course of human evolution.
But what conditions created the opportunity for diverse human species to thrive? What environmental factors led to the survival of one human species, but contributed to the extinction of so many others? What can the fossil record and the science of genetics tell us about our ancestors? How does the brain make modern man so unique in the natural world?
Any lover of Shakespeare, or of the Romantic poets, can concede that poetry is pleasurable. But is it good for us, and can it teach us anything?
These questions may seem odd, but they have beguiled and engaged eminent critics for millennia. What we call literary criticism is really a debate over a few key questions: What is poetry's wellspring? God? Nature? The human self? Is poetry superfluous to human progress? Are the literary arts a vehicle to higher truths or a pack of lies? Is the author a divinely inspired rhapsode or a mere artisan, "manufacturing" meaning?
The Age of Spiritual Machines:
When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
by Ray Kurzweil - Narrator Alan Sklar
Amid the recent spate of books anticipating our possible technological futures, Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines stands out both for its enthusiasm and for its odd and unsettling vision of the future. If Kurzweil is right, when we finally take to the stars, we will more closely resemble the Borg Collective than the United Federation of Planets ? and we will have embraced this fate of “assimilation” simply in the course of trying to keep up with our own technology.
Where Michio Kaku’s Visions predicts fairly extensive human augmentation through medical technologies, biotechnologies, and the still nascent nanotechnologies, Kurzweil foresees a total, final merging of human and machine. This merger, according to Kurzweil, will take place at the intersection of two inexorable evolutionary trends: increased human augmentation and increasingly intelligent computers. Eventually, there will be no discernible difference between our own downloaded, digital selves and our intelligent, emotional, artistic, and even spiritual computers.
The Age of Spiritual Machines:
