Overview

"Decoding the BodyA Zen master and butcher by profession once said that until he understood the body he had repeatedly to sharpen his knives. After his illumination over the import of joint spaces, he never had to sharpen his implements again. Carving Nature at Its Joints surveys a variety of mammals from the mole to the rhinoceros. It offers fresh perspectives on anatomy, behavior, development, and evolution and explores Dr. Theodore Grand's methods for getting beyond-beneath, below, behind, and past-conventional top-down reductionist approaches. You will discover: why language is the primary wrinkle in the fabric of science; why traditional disciplines are self-limiting; why ""parts and wholes"" are less problematic for physical than for biological and social sciences; why the buck stopped at Aristotle's laws of formal logic; why we are wedged between opposed cognitive systems."

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No one writes about science like Ted Grand. An Eclectic by his own declaration, his iconoclastic, pluralistic, and scholarly argument emphasizes wholes over parts, the concrete over the abstract, the qualitative over the quantitative, and the complexity of life over the simplicity of the symbolic. In doing so, he takes organismal, comparative, and integrative biology to places where most Reductionists fear to tread. Grand's musings, grounded in the realm of the senses and buoyed by Carol Underwood's beautiful illustrations, teach us new ways to think about the complexities of mammals and the cognitive limits and traps of the humans studying them. Behavioral differences of individuals in the wild are linked to developmental changes in body composition. Behavior and development, in turn, become players in the historical analysis of evolution. Holism, history, and open-ended pluralism, Grand argues, are the approaches that let us escape reductionism's race to the explanatory bottom, as differing perspectives when taken together preserve the complexity that would otherwise be lost. Swimming against such a large cultural tide takes a rebellious attitude and a voracious expertise. With Grand, we get both. The result is a gift for anyone who's got a sneaking suspicion that something's fishy with the way that most of us are taught to do science. -John H. Long, Jr., Professor of Biology and Cognitive Science on the John Guy Vassar Chair of Natural History, Vassar College

Author Information

DR. THEODORE GRAND received his undergraduate degree in biology from Brown University and his doctorate in anthropology from UC Berkeley. He was staff primatologist at the Oregon Primate Center and worked with the departments of research and pathology at the National Zoo.Dr. Grand has travelled to Madagascar, Panama, Costa Rica, French Guyana, Venezuela, and Sri Lanka to study hundreds of metatherian and eutherian mammals. He has taught human anatomy in medical school and evolutionary biology at several universities. He has been a featured speaker for Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society on themes of human evolution, science and film technology, and the biological bases of sport. His work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed scientific journals, and in 1991, his model for neuromuscular development in eutherians won a national research award from the Zoological Society of San Diego. CAROL UNDERWOOD is an artist and physical anthropologist with a background in primate anatomy. Her research in locomotor mechanics, the form and function of structures of the musculo-skeletal system, and observations of animals provide the basis for her insight into animal movement. An understanding of species evolution and adaptation inform her study of the unique and specialized characteristics of the individual organism. She employs schematic illustrations to create visual engagement with data. She is co-author and illustrator of Ape Anatomy and Evolution.

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