A long tradition explains technological change as recombination. Within this tradition, this Element develops an innovative combinatorial model of technological change and tests it with 2,000 years of global GDP data and with data from US patents filed between 1835 and 2010. The model explains 1) the pace of technological change for a least the past two millennia, 2) patent citations and 3) the increasing complexity of tools over time. It shows that combining and modifying pre-existing goo...

A New Ecology: Systems Perspective, Second Edition, gives an overview of the commonalities of all ecosystems from a variety of properties, including physical openness, ontic openness, directionality, connectivity, a complex dynamic for growth and development, and a complex dynamic response to disturbances. Each chapter details basic and characteristic properties that help the reader understand how they can be applied to explain a wide spectrum of current ecological research and environment...

A New Ecology presents an ecosystem theory based on the following ecosystem properties: physical openness, ontic openness, directionality, connectivity, a complex dynamic for growth and development, and a complex dynamic response to disturbances. Each of these properties is developed in detail to show that these basic and characteristic properties can be applied to explain a wide spectrum of ecological obsevations and convections. It is also shown that the properties have application for e...

When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought that he had explained every clue, but one. Though his theory could explain many facts, Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. During this event, the “Cambrian explosion,” many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock.In Darwin’s Doubt, Stephen C. Meyer tells the story of the myster...

Over the past thirty years, a new systemic conception of life has emerged at the forefront of science. New emphasis has been given to complexity, networks, and patterns of organisation, leading to a novel kind of 'systemic' thinking. This volume integrates the ideas, models, and theories underlying the systems view of life into a single coherent framework. Taking a broad sweep through history and across scientific disciplines, the authors examine the appearance of key concepts such as auto...

Why would any educated scientist with a PhD advocate a literal interpretation of the six days of creation? Why, indeed, when only one in three Americans believes "the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word" according to a recent Gallup poll.Science can neither prove nor disprove evolution any more than it can creation. Certainly there are no human eyewitness accounts of either. However, certain factors are present today which are capable of sway...

This book provides an introduction to the role of diversity in complex adaptive systems. A complex system--such as an economy or a tropical ecosystem--consists of interacting adaptive entities that produce dynamic patterns and structures. Diversity plays a different role in a complex system than it does in an equilibrium system, where it often merely produces variation around the mean for performance measures. In complex adaptive systems, diversity makes fundamental contributions to system...

The Princeton Guide to Ecology is a concise, authoritative one-volume reference to the field's major subjects and key concepts. Edited by eminent ecologist Simon Levin, with contributions from an international team of leading ecologists, the book contains more than ninety clear, accurate, and up-to-date articles on the most important topics within seven major areas: autecology, population ecology, communities and ecosystems, landscapes and the biosphere, conservation biology, ecos...

How does life on our planet respond to--and shape--climate? This question has never been more urgent than it is today, when humans are faced with the daunting task of guiding adaptation to an inexorably changing climate. This concise, accessible, and authoritative book provides an unmatched introduction to the most reliable current knowledge about the complex relationship between living things and climate.Using an Earth System framework, David Schimel describes how organisms, commu...

A critical examination of James Lovelock's controversial Gaia hypothesisOne of the enduring questions about our planet is how it has remained continuously habitable over vast stretches of geological time despite the fact that its atmosphere and climate are potentially unstable. James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis posits that life itself has intervened in the regulation of the planetary environment in order to keep it stable and favorable for life. First proposed in th...

In the emotional debate surrounding evolution, it is often difficult to cut through the competing agendas to gain an unbiased understanding of the scientific issues involved. The Evolution Controversy provides a resource for doing so. The authors leave aside the profound philosophical and religious issues involved in the controversy in favor of a balanced and critical examination of the four major schools of thought involved: Neo-Darwinism, Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Met...

Physical Geography: The Key Concepts is a thought-provoking and up-to-date introduction to the central ideas and debates within the field. It provides extended definitions of terms that are fundamental to physical geography and its many branches, covering topics such as:biogeographyecologyclimatologymeteorologygeomorphologyhydrologypedolog...