These books were written as consultation books to be used to solve problems. They are essentially analogous to medical books for individuals who decided to manage the concepts and fundamentals of things in order to manage the root causes of problems. The unicist ontology of evolution explains and predicts the evolution of living beings, their produces and their actions in a unified field, ruled by concepts and their natural laws. These natural laws have been named as “Ontogenetic Intelligence”. This evolutionary approach enables the analysis of and influence upon complex realities.

The contributors to this volume are linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, primatologists, and anthropologists who share the assumption that language, just as mind and brain, are products of biological evolution. The rise of human language is not viewed as a serendipitous mutation that gave birth to a unique linguistic organ, but as a gradual, adaptive extension of pre-existing mental capacities and brain structures. The contributors carefully study brain mechanisms, diachronic change, language acquisition, and the parallels between cognitive and linguistic structures to weave a web of hypotheses and suggestive empirical findings on the origins of language and the connections of language to other human capacities. The chapters discuss brain pathways that support linguistic processing; origins of specific linguistic features in temporal and hierarchical structures of the mind; the possible co-evolution of language and the reasoning about mental states; and the aspects of language learning that may serve as models of evolutionary change.

Winner of the William James Book Award Winner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award “A landmark in our understanding of human development.” —Paul Harris, author of Trusting What You’re Told “Magisterial...Makes an impressive argument that most distinctly human traits are established early in childhood and that the general chronology in which these traits appear can...be identified.” —Wall Street Journal Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Becoming Human looks instead to development and reveals how those things that make us unique are constructed during the first seven years of a child’s life. In this groundbreaking work, Michael Tomasello draws from three decades of experimental research with chimpanzees, bonobos, and children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that differentiate humans from their primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities, but the maturation of humans’ evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities into uniquely human cognition and sociality. “How does human psychological growth run in the first seven years, in particular how does it instill ‘culture’ in us? ...Most of all, how does the capacity for shared intentionality and self-regulation evolve in people? This is a very thoughtful and also important book.” —Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution “Theoretically daring and experimentally ingenious, Becoming Human squarely tackles the abiding question of what makes us human.” —Susan Gelman “Destined to become a classic. Anyone who is interested in cognitive science, child development, human evolution, or comparative psychology should read this book.” —Andrew Meltzoff

This book offers a novel defence of a highly contested philosophical position: biological natural kind essentialism. This theory is routinely and explicitly rejected for its purported inability to be explicated in the context of contemporary biological science, and its supposed incompatibility with the process and progress of evolution by natural selection. Christopher J. Austin challenges these objections, and in conjunction with contemporary scientific advancements within the field of evolutionary-developmental biology, the book utilises a contemporary neo-Aristotelian metaphysics of "dispositional properties", or causal powers, to provide a theory of essentialism centred on the developmental architecture of organisms and its role in the evolutionary process. By defending a novel theory of Aristotelian biological natural kind essentialism, Essence in the Age of Evolution represents the fresh and exciting union of cutting-edge philosophical insight and scientific knowledge.

Contemporary research in the field of evolutionary developmental biology, or 'evo-devo', has to date been predominantly devoted to interpreting basic features of animal architecture in molecular genetics terms. Considerably less time has been spent on the exploitation of the wealth of facts and concepts available from traditional disciplines, such as comparative morphology, even though these traditional approaches can continue to offer a fresh insight into evolutionary developmental questions. The Development of Animal Form aims to integrate traditional morphological and contemporary molecular genetic approaches and to deal with post-embryonic development as well. This approach leads to unconventional views on the basic features of animal organization, such as body axes, symmetry, segments, body regions, appendages and related concepts. This book will be of particular interest to graduate students and researchers in evolutionary and developmental biology, as well as to those in related areas of cell biology, genetics and zoology.

This book delves into the many facets of the study of plant development and demonstrates the importance of ontogenetic studies in analyzing the structure, function, and evolution of glands, structures, and organs. The nine chapters that make up this book represent the state of the art of the scientific knowledge on the subject and bring unpublished contributions and important reviews of the most diverse developmental issues of plants compiled for the first time in a single book. Chapter 1 describes an unprecedented way secretory ducts form as the result of cavity coalescence in Malvaceae. Chapter 2 describes a case of homeoheterotopic alteration between nectaries and colleters in Passifloraceae and analyzes the evolution of leaf glands in the family. Chapter 3 emphasizes the importance of anatomical, histochemical and ontogenetic studies in distinguishing colleters and nectaries in leaves of Sapium (Euphorbiaceae) and highlights the importance of ontogenetic studies for the observation of new colleters since many of them are deciduous. Chapter 4 reviews leaf development in vascular plants using traditional morphological and anatomical knowledge combined with the most recent data obtained in molecular studies. Chapter 5 reviews the morphogenesis and evolution of haustoria in mistletoes and evaluates the likely reasons that led to the change from root parasitism to aerial parasitism in Santalales. Chapter 6 demonstrates the importance of the meristematic activity and bud formation for the structure of inflorescences in Acanthaceae, revealing the causes of their architectural diversity in genera such as Lepidagathis. Chapter 7 reveals the ontogenetic causes that resulted in varying degrees of flower reduction, separation of sexes, and their relationship with pollination in urticalean rosids. Chapter 8 uses the ontogenetic study of flowers to analyze the diversity of polyads in Leguminosae and their importance in the taxonomy of the family and the dispersal mode of pollen. Chapter 9 investigates the mode of formation of the pseudomonomerous gynoecia using Anacardiaceae as a model and discusses the evolution of this morphological reduction of gynoecium in other lineages of angiosperms.

This second edition in just two years offers a considerably revised second chapter, in which information behavior replaces analogies to purely physical systems, as well as practical applications of the authors' theory. Attention is also given to a hierarchical theory of ecosystem behavior, taking note of constraints on local ecosystem members resul.