Ebook Inquiry Into Life

Ebook: Inquiry into Life

G Mrs. T. Peterson 5/2008.

Biology Inquiries offers educators a handbook for teaching middle and high school students engaging lessons in the life sciences. Inspired by the National Science Education Standards, the book bridges the gap between theory and practice. With exciting twists on standard biology instruction the author emphasizes active inquiry instead of rote memorization. Biology Inquiries contains many innovative ideas developed by biology teacher Martin Shields. This dynamic resource helps teachers introduce standards-based inquiry and constructivist lessons into their classrooms. Some of the book's classroom-tested lessons are inquiry modifications of traditional "cookbook" labs that biology teachers will recognize. Biology Inquiries provides a pool of active learning lessons to choose from with valuable tips on how to implement them.

Why are living things alive? As a theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen saw this as the most fundamental of all questions-and yet it had never been answered satisfactorily by science. The answers to this question would allow humanity to make an enormous leap forward in our understanding of the principles at work in our world. For centuries, it was believed that the only scientific approach to the question "What is life?" must proceed from the Cartesian metaphor (organism as machine). Classical approaches in science, which also borrow heavily from Newtonian mechanics, are based on a process called "reductionism." The thinking was that we can better learn about an intricate, complicated system (like an organism) if we take it apart, study the components, and then reconstruct the system-thereby gaining an understanding of the whole. However, Rosen argues that reductionism does not work in biology and ignores the complexity of organisms. Life Itself, a landmark work, represents the scientific and intellectual journey that led Rosen to question reductionism and develop new scientific approaches to understanding the nature of life. Ultimately, Rosen proposes an answer to the original question about the causal basis of life in organisms. He asserts that renouncing the mechanistic and reductionistic paradigm does not mean abandoning science. Instead, Rosen offers an alternate paradigm for science that takes into account the relational impacts of organization in natural systems and is based on organized matter rather than on particulate matter alone. Central to Rosen's work is the idea of a "complex system," defined as any system that cannot be fully understood by reducing it to its parts. In this sense, complexity refers to the causal impact of organization on the system as a whole. Since both the atom and the organism can be seen to fit that description, Rosen asserts that complex organization is a general feature not just of the biosphere on Earth-but of the universe itself.

Madness as Methodology begins with the following quotation from Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough.’ This quotation firmly expresses the book’s intention to provide readers with radical and innovative approaches to methodology and research in the arts, humanities and education practices. It conceptualises madness, not as a condition of an individual or particular being, but rather as a process that does things differently in terms of creativity and world making. Through a posthuman theorising as practice, the book emphasises forms of becoming and differentiation that sees all bodies, human and nonhuman, as acting in constant, fluid, relational play. The book offers a means of breaking through and challenging the constraints and limitations of Positivist approaches to established research practice. Therefore, experimentation, concept making as event and a going off the rails are offered as necessary means of inquiry into worlds that are considered to be always not yet known. Rather than using a linear chapter structure, the book is constructed around Deleuze and Guattari’s use of an assemblage of plateaus, providing the reader with a freedom of movement via multiple entry and exit points to the text. These plateaus are processually interconnected providing a focal emphasis upon topics apposite to this madness as methodology. Therefore, as well as offering a challenge to the constraining rigours of conventional research practices, these plateaus engage with topics to do with posthuman thinking, relationality, affect theory, collaboration, subjectivity, friendship, performance and the use of writing as a method of inquiry.

Inquiry into Life was originally developed to reach out to science-shy students. The text now represents one of the cornerstones of introductory biology education and was founded on the belief that teaching science from a human perspective, coupled with human applications, makes the material more relevant to the student. As scientists and educators, the authors are aware that scientific discovery is a dynamic process and the advances in digital publishing are allowing authors to update content on a regular basis.