The Evolution Of A Building Complex

The first book to explore the entire Salk Institute complex, which is often considered to be Kahn's most important commission. An in-depth examination, focusing on the design development, including the built Laboratory building, the unbuilt Meeting House and Visiting Fellows residences and the overall site planning of the complex, with emphasis on Salk's role in the decision-making process.

Building the Most Complex Structure on Earth provides readers with a basic biological education an easy and understandable introduction into a new epigenetic theory of development and evolution. This is a novel theory that describes the epigenetic mechanisms of the development and evolution of animals and explains the colossal evolution and diversification of animals from a new post-genetic perspective. Modern biology has demonstrated the existence of a common genetic toolkit in the animal kingdom, but neither the number of genes nor the evolution of new genes is responsible for the development and evolution of animals. The failure to understand how the same genetic toolkit is used to produce millions of widely different animal forms remains a perplexing conundrum in modern biology. The novel theory shows that the development and evolution of the animal kingdom are functions of epigenetic mechanisms, which are the competent users of the genetic toolkit. Provides a comprehensive view of the epigenetic aspects of reproduction, development, and evolution. Highly rigorous, but simple enough for readers with only a basic knowledge of biology.

Between 1969 and 1980, Soviet archaeologists conducted excavations of Mesopotamian villages occupied from preagricultural times through the beginnings of early civilization. The results of their work were published primarily in Soviet journals and in the English-language journals Sumer and Iraq. This volume brings together translations of these Russian articles along with newly commissioned work to make the results of this research accessible for the first time to the Western world. In addition to eight articles available here for the first time in English, a concluding chapter by Norman Yoffee offers new insights on cultural interaction based on the research at hand. The research conducted by the Soviets helped transform our knowledge of the early post-Paleolithic prehistory of Mesopotamia.

Why are so many of our urban environments so resistant to change? The author tackles this question in her comprehensive guide for planners, designers, and students concerned with how cities take shape. This book provides a fundamental understanding of how physical environments are created, changed, and transformed through ordinary processes over time. Most of the built environment adheres to a few physical patterns, or types, that occur over and over. Planners and architects, consciously and unconsciously, refer to building types as they work through urban design problems and regulations. Suitable for professional planners, architects, urban designers, and students, This book includes practical examples of how typology is critical to analytical, design, and regulatory situations.

Survival of the fittest” is a tautology, because those that are “fit” are the ones that survive, but to survive, a species must be “fit”. Modern evolutionary theory avoids the problem by defining fitness as reproductive success, but the complexity of life that we see today could not have evolved based on selection that favors only reproductive ability. There is nothing inherent in reproductive success alone that could result in higher forms of life. Evolution from a Thermodynamic Perspective presents a non-circular definition of fitness and a thermodynamic definition of evolution. Fitness means maximization of power output, necessary to survive in a competitive world. Evolution is the “storage of entropy”. “Entropy storage” means that solar energy, instead of dissipating as heat in the Earth, is stored in the structure of living organisms and ecosystems. Part one explains this in terms comprehensible to a scientific audience beyond biophysicists and ecosystem modelers. Part two applies thermodynamic theory in non-esoteric language to sustainability of agriculture, and to conservation of endangered species. While natural systems are stabilized by feedback, agricultural systems remain in a mode of perpetual growth, pressured by balance of trade and by a swelling population. The constraints imposed by thermodynamic laws are being increasingly felt as economic expansion destabilizes resource systems on which expansion depends.

In this monumental volume, one of the most important architects of our time gives us his own life story, and reveals the development of his work in several hundred magnifcent photographs, plans and drawings. When the publisher told Edward Durell Stone that The New York Times called him "one of the most controversial architects in America today," he replied, "I'd rather be universal than controversial." Readers of this book will discover that he is both. The fascinating story of Edward Durell Stone's career spans over sixty years of American life, and he tells it with unforgettable warmth and wit. Beginning with an idyllic childhood in an atmosphere of serenity and affluence, he describes the town of his youth, the "hot bed of tranquility in the Ozarks, and then takes us in rapid scenes to Boston, New York, Washington and Europe. It is on a morning in New York that the visual miracle occurs: We see precisely how the seeds of architecture take root in his imagination, and we witness the flowering of the talent that has created an incredible variety of romantically beautiful structures-houses, churches, hotels, universities, buildings of every description celebrated throughout the world. The story of Edward Stone's career parallels the story of modern architecture. In the early Thirties he designs the famed Mandel and Goodyear houses and the Museum of Modern Art among others. In the Forties, he produces an enormous number of exquisite residences, varying from small houses to large estates - and moves with an incomparable surge of creativity into the Fifties to design some of the most widely discussed buildings in the world: the United States Embassy in India (hailed for its lyrical beauty by Frank Lloyd Wright), the Brussels World's Fair Pavilion, the El Panama hotel (virtually without corridors and doors-a design which has since been imitated in resort hotels allover the world), the Graf House in Dallas, the Yardley building in New Jersey and the Stuart building in Pasadena, the Stanford Medical Center, etc., etc. Now, in the Sixties, the most important creations of Edward Stone's inventive genius are under way around the globe- a series of apartment buildings and hotels in New York, Philadelphia, Palm Beach, Pittsburgh, etc., the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art in New York, a new campus for Beirut, a mosque and a new atomic institute for Pakistan, the National Cultural Center for Washington, a revolutionary skyscraper for New York, a great number of others- among them the largest project of his fantastically productive career, a complex of buildings to form an entirely new campus for ten thousand students at State University of New York in Albany. Mr. Stone's personal life is intertwined as one with his creative career and so we discover many revealing passages of friendship and family life: delightful sketches of his parents, his formidably relaxed uncles, his imaginative architect brother; there are wonderful recollections of Frank Lloyd Wright; and, above all, the moving account of his meeting with the fascinating girl, Maria, who was to become his wife and the inspiring force in his life- a life which may be said to be in itself an American work of art. -- from dust jacket.

"Explaining how evolution can account for the complexity of life is a significant question in biology. Whether or not complexity increases, what the mechanisms are that fuel this growth, and indeed even how we define complexity are difficult questions. In this book Christoph Adami draws on two strands of research - experimental evolution and information theory - to forward a mathematical theory that accounts for the evolution of complexity. While accounting for complexity is his primary goal, Adami also argues that information theory can do more for biology than just provide for a measure of complexity. As he argues, everything in biology uses information in one form or another, be it for communication (between cells, or organisms) or for prediction (via molecular as well as neural circuits). As a consequence, we can think of information theory as the unifying framework that allows us to understand complex systems, with biological life being only the prime example"--

Evolutionary thinking has expanded in the last decades, spreading from its traditional stronghold – the explanation of speciation and adaptation in biology - to new domains. Fascinating pieces of work, the essays in this collection attest to the illuminating power of evolutionary thinking when applied to the understanding of the human mind. The contributors to Cognition, Evolution and Rationality use an evolutionary standpoint to approach the nature of the human mind, including both cognitive and behavioural functions. Cognitive science is by its nature an interdisciplinary subject and the essays in this collection investigate the workings of the mind through a variety of disciplines including the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, game theory, robotics and computational neuroanatomy. Topics covered range from general methodological issues to long-standing philosophical problems such as how rational human beings actually are. With contributions from leading experts in the areas involved, this book will be of interest across a number of fields, including philosophy, evolutionary theory and cognitive science.