Robert A. Norman - The Last Natural Man: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?
Here you can read online Robert A. Norman - The Last Natural Man: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going? full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2017, genre: Romance novel. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:The Last Natural Man: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?
- Author:
- Genre:
- Year:2017
- Rating:5 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
The Last Natural Man: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Last Natural Man: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
This book explores cultural evolution and the meaning of the word natural. We are at the crossroads of a major transformation. Why is our current time so important in the history of man? We are at a point where we may be the last generation that is not partially or fully bionic. The last natural man: natural in what way? What is natural? Is it a catch phrase like integrative or holistic that transmits a certain magical warm glow? If the word natural was a plant, it would be beautiful, green, luxuriant, and edible.Does it mean we are the last to not replace or modify our parts? What about laser surgery? Knee or hip replacement? Botox and fillers? Chemical therapy? Or a directional chip in the brain?Do we really mean the very last natural man? Cultural evolution has been the major driving force over the last several thousand years and enormous in its influence compared to almost invisible changes in our physical adaptations. If cultural and religious evolution was the driver for human history, are we now entering the phase of physical transformation where humanity refuses to accept mortality and seeks to make changes to defeat nature. In this book the authors are describing a paradigm shift of all of humanityjust as hunter-gatherers had their stellar features, the future man will have many attractive qualities, even if many artificial. We are often balancing on the precipice between science and science fiction, now ready to tip the scales and slide comfortably into the future of great discoveries and wonderful changes. But are these changes all for the good? What will being human mean?A lively, superbly informed, compassionate conversation between two accomplished physician-writers about the human past and the human future, carefully grounded in the sciences of medicine and evolution. If you care about who we are and what may save us from ourselves, read this enormously informative and entertaining book. Melvin Konner, MD, PhD, author of The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit and Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy
Robert A. Norman: author's other books
Who wrote The Last Natural Man: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Robert A. Norman
Robert A. Norman
Robert A. Norman
Robert A. Norman
Arcadia Page
BowTie Inc.
Norman Robert A.
Marley Natural.
Thor Hanson
The Last Natural Man: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going? — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Last Natural Man: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017
Robert A. Norman and Sharad P. Paul The Last Natural Man 10.1007/978-3-319-42217-6_11. A History of Disease and Human Invention
Robert A. Norman 1 and Sharad P. Paul 2, 3
(1)
Department of Dermatology, Nova Southeastern Medical School, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA
(2)
Faculty of Surgery, School of Medicine, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
(3)
AUT, Auckland, New Zealand
Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them. Aldous Huxley
The history of disease is as old as mankind itself. William McNeill, in his book Plagues and People , researched and described the effects of disease on the human race over the entire sweep of human history, from prehistory to the present, and the enormous role and impact disease played in shaping the history of all humanity.
How have we attempted to survive the medical problems and diseases of our past using our natural inventiveness? We often find invention most amazing, and often the pinnacle of human creativity. Many of us have grown up reading the creative stories of Isaac Asimov and HG Wells and benefiting from the discoveries of Edison and Einstein, and we are now seeing how their inventiveness has shaped our world and is now coming to greater fruition.
We are an inventive and creative species and need lots of activities to keep us busy.
We develop many games for pleasure after having tested them out at work. Paint ball started by tagging the cows, zip lining by wanting to explore the treetops.
Invention has been a way of life since the first of our species. Perhaps we can be best classified as a race that rides the ebb and flow of invention from one generation to the next. From the wheel to genetic intervention, we have shaped our culture via invention.
The Chinese wanted to vanquish the Mongols that had taken over their land. By inventing gunpowder and the guns to use it, they took their land back. And then they invented block printing to announce their victory to the world.
What happened next? In 1440, Gutenberg wanted to help get the Bible out to as many people as he could. How could he make that happen? The block printing was too cumbersome, and each book was done one at a time. Gutenbergs invention of moveable type set the world into a whole new direction. Over 50 million books were printed in the first 10 years of the invention.
From Archimedes first design of a rudimentary rope and pulley system in ancient Greece over 2000 years ago, to Otis elevator in 1853 that had a maximum lift capacity of four tons, we now have the worlds strongest elevator on board the Ronald Reagan supercarrier. The elevator can lift two F8 fighter planes and moreup to 200,000 poundsfrom the hanger bay to the flight deck up three stories in height in ten seconds and back using massive load centers that convert nuclear power to electro-hydraulic force.
The list goes on and on. The telephone, the car, the telegraph, the use of atomic and solar energy, the personal computer, the new cell phones.
Right now we are in the most advanced age of computers and rapid communication. How do we process all the information, filter out what is most important for our future, and determine how we can direct the course of our futures? We now acquire information at a head-spinning rate. Since the dawn of civilization until 2003 we had accumulated five exabites; an exabite is 1 billion gigabytes, roughly equivalent to the capacity of 5.1 million computer hard drives. By 2010 we were generating five times more than all of civilization prior to 2003five exabites--every 2 days. In 2013, the speed is now blistering along at five exabites every 5 min.
In our book, we also step back in time to use it as a springboard for our exploration. Although Leeuwenhoek discovered bacteria, it was two centuries later when Pasteur tied in their existence to disease in Homo sapiens. Incidentally, following his discovery Pasteur suffered from a morbid fear of dirt and infections; he avoided shaking hands for fear of a contamination. Pasteur also helped to create the world in which cleanliness was next to godliness, which has evolved into a religious zeal, displayed incessantly on our television screens, how the death of germs and their byproducts by disinfectants, deodorants, sprays, and cleaning chemicals germs became a religion, proselytized nightly on the television at enormous costs.
In order to find out where we want to go we have to look at what we are made of and what we want to achieve, and then find the best road we will travel to get there. Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote in his New Yorker article Altered States, To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.
Progress pushed along by invention rarely moves forward in a straight line, and is often one step forward, two steps back. However, it does progress, if only at a glacial pace, and sometimes imperceptibly, painfully, and often with a social and moral lag. The American psychiatrist Karl A. Menninger, in his book Man Against Himself , attempts to make this point: When we remember that in the calendar of time civilized human beings are only a few seconds removed from the cannibal and a few minutes removed from the beasts, it will not be surprising to discover that in the unconscious, cannibalism is not yet extinct.
And part of all this angst is based on our nature as humans. When Robert Sapolsky, in his article Super Humanity in Scientific American reflects on the fact that 99 % of human history was spent on the open savanna in small hunter-gatherer bands, he adds, Indeed, those millions of ancestral years produced many of our hallmark traits-upright walking and big brains, for instance. Of course, those wildly useful evolutionary innovations came at a price: achy backs from our bipedal stance; existential despair from our large, self-contemplative cerebral cortex. As is so often the case with evolution, there is no free lunch. He adds, And when it comes to humans becoming, on average, smarter, taller, and better at athletics, there is a problem: Who cares about the average? As individuals, we want to individually be better than other individuals. Our brain is invidious, comparative, more interested in contrasts than absolutes.
The world of disease has shifted from the acute to the chronic. We have hundreds of millions of people with chronic disease worldwide, and countless maladies than we can ever uncover. Aging and longevity has never taken center stage like it does now, and will be explored here in detail.
Roy Porter, in his book Blood and Guts , wrote, The dread of disease, potential and actual, the pains of acute complaints and long-term ailments, and the terror of mortality number among our most universal and formidable experiences. Religion and philosophy are arguably the products of mankinds efforts to cope, in mind and heart, individually and collectively, with afflictions and death.
We live in a time of a great technological rise, yet our bodies remain fairly similar to 500 or 5000 years ago. However, we now face a myriad of new endocrine disrupters and other antigens that can interfere with our lives. We have an enormous need to understand our natural environment and discover what we can mimic in nature for success, while simultaneously investigating and defending ourselves from the exotics that interfere with a full life,
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «The Last Natural Man: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?»
Look at similar books to The Last Natural Man: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Arcadia Page
BowTie Inc.
Norman Robert A.
Marley Natural.
Thor Hanson
Reviews about «The Last Natural Man: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?»
Discussion, reviews of the book The Last Natural Man: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going? and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.