The Nature of Consciousness

Piero Scaruffi

(Copyright © 2013 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions )
Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

 

12. The Evolution of Life: Of designers and designs

  1. Origins: What Was Life?
  2. Life As Maintenance
  3. The Dynamics of Life
  4. The Laws Of Nature Revisited
  5. Design Without a Designer
  6. The Logic Of Replication
  7. The Logic Of Evolution
  8. Universal Selectionism
  9. Genes
  10. The Matter of Life
  11. Genetic Fossils
  12. Differentiation
  13. Epigenesis
  14. The Cell
  15. Mutation as Destiny
  16. The Origin of Evolution
  17. The Steps Of Life
  18. The Origin of Life
  19. Autocatalysis
  20. Panspermia
  21. Thermosynthesis
  22. Life Before Life
  23. Life And Heat
  24. The Origin of Replication
  25. Viruses
  26. The Origin of Proteins
  27. Chance
  28. Necessity
  29. The Inevitability of Life
  30. A History of Life
  31. Carbon Chauvinism
  32. The Origin of Adaptation
  33. The Origin of Speciation
  34. Design Without Progress
  35. Evolutionary Crises
  36. The Evolution of Evolution
  37. Design With a Designer
  38. Post-Darwinian Evolution
  39. Beyond Selection
  40. Design as the Designer
  41. The Origin of Variation
  42. Teleological Evolution
  43. The Emergence of the Body
  44. The Emergence of the Brain
  45. Life and Mind
  46. Life and Mind

Further Reading (Click here for reviews of these books)

Bateson, Gregory: MIND AND NATURE (Dutton, 1979)

Behe, Michael: DARWIN'S BLACK BOX (Free Press, 1996)

Berg, Lev: NOMOGENESIS (1922)

Butler, Samuel: EVOLUTION OLD AND NEW (1879)

Cairns-Smith, Graham: GENETIC TAKEOVER (Cambridge University Press, 1982)

Calvin, Melvin: CHEMICAL EVOLUTION (Clarendon, 1969)

Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi: GENES, PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES (North Point, 2000)

Crick, Francis: LIFE ITSELF (Simon & Schuster, 1981)

Crick, Francis: ASTONISHING HYPOTHESIS (MacMillan, 1993)

Cziko, Gary: WITHOUT MIRACLES (MIT Press, 1995)

Darwin, Charles: ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION (1859)

Davies, Paul: THE FIFTH MIRACLE (Simon & Schuster, 1998)

Dawkins, Richard: THE BLIND WATCHMAKER (Norton, 1987)

Dawkins, Richard: RIVER OUT OF EDEN (Basic, 1995)

Dawkins, Richard: CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE (Norton, 1996)

Delsemme, Armand & DeDuve Christian: OUR COSMIC ORIGINS (2001)

Dennett, Daniel: DARWIN'S DANGEROUS IDEA (Simon & Schuster, 1995)

DeDuve, Christian: VITAL DUST (Basic, 1995)

Depew, David & Weber Bruce: DARWINISM EVOLVING (MIT Press, 1994)

Deutsch David: THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY (Viking, 2011)

Dobzhansky, Theodosius: GENETICS AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (1937)

Dyson, Freeman: ORIGINS OF LIFE (Cambridge Univ Press, 1985)

Edelman, Gerald: TOPOBIOLOGY (Basic, 1988)

Eigen, Manfred: STEPS TOWARDS LIFE (Oxford University Press, 1992)

Fisher, Ronald Aylmer: THE GENETICAL THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION (Dover, 1929)

Goldschmidt, Richard: THE MATERIAL BASIS OF EVOLUTION (1940)

Gould, Stephen Jay: ONTOGENY AND PHYLOGENY (Harvard University Press, 1977)

Gould, Stephen Jay: EVER SINCE DARWIN (Deutsch, 1978)

Gould, Stephen Jay: WONDERFUL LIFE (Norton, 1989)

Gould, Stephen Jay: FULL HOUSE (Random House, 1996)

Gould, Stephen Jay: THE STRUCTURES OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY (Harvard Univ Press, 2002)

Jones, Steven: LANGUAGE OF GENES (Harper Collins, 1993)

Kauffman, Stuart: THE ORIGINS OF ORDER (Oxford University Press, 1993)

Kirschner, Marc and Gerhart, John: “The Plausibility of Life” (2005)

Kuppers, Bernd-Olaf: INFORMATION AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE (MIT Press, 1990)

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste: PHILOSOPHIE ZOOLOGIQUE (1809)

Lane, Nick: THE VITAL QUESTION (Profile, 2015)

Lieberman, Daniel: "The Story of the Human Body" (2013)

Lieberman, Philip: UNIQUELY HUMAN (Harvard Univ Press, 1992)

Lorenz, Konrad: "Evolution and Modification of Behavior" (1965)

Mason, Stephen: CHEMICAL EVOLUTION (Clarendon Press, 1991)

Maynard-Smith, John: THEORY OF EVOLUTION (Cambridge University Press, 1975)

Maynard-Smith, John & Szathmary Eors: THE ORIGINS OF LIFE (Oxford University Press, 1999)

Maynard-Smith, John & Szathmary Eors: THE MAJOR TRANSITIONS IN EVOLUTION (W. H. Freeman, 1995)

Mayr, Ernst: ANIMAL SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (Harvard Univ Press, 1963)

Mayr, Ernst: SYSTEMATICS AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (Columbia Univ Press, 1942)

Mayr, Ernst: POPULATION, SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (Harvard Univ Press, 1970)

Mayr, Ernst: THE GROWTH OF BIOLOGICAL THOUGHT (Harvard Univ Press, 1982)

Monod, Jacques: LE HASARD ET LA NECESSITE' (1971)

Morowitz, Harold: BEGINNINGS OF CELLULAR LIFE (Yale University Press, 1992)

Shubin, Neil: "Your Inner Fish" (2009)

Waddington, Conrad: THE STRATEGY OF GENES (1957)