Product Description: Early life attempts to tell the stories of primitive life. The text conveys some of the excitement in the current attempts to reconstruct the opening chapters of life on the planet Earth, long before the appearance of the simplest animal or plant.

Product Description: An all-inclusive catalogue of the world's living diversity, Five Kingdoms defines and describes the major divisions of nature's five great kingdoms—bacteria, protoctists, animals, fungi, and plants—using a modern classification scheme that is consistent with both the fossil record and molecular data...read more

Explores the world of microorganisms by way of drawings and photographs, providing a framework for viewing life in the microcosm

Essays discuss sex in plants, sex and disease, evolutionary theory, the origins of human sexuality, and the theological aspects of sex

Describes the earth biosphere as a closed ecological system and tells how humans are developing small-scale biospheres to allow them to live in space

Product Description: Public awareness and concern over environmental degradation has reached an all time high, as the effect of man's activities on the global environment grows to greater and greater proportions. To understand the consequences of these activities, it is necessary to understand the fundamental nature of the system that supports life on a planetary scale...read more

Product Description: A fascinating and detailed examination of the evolution-and occasional devolution-of sexuality in microorganisms and more complex forms of life. Margulis and Sagan trace sex from its inauspicious beginnings in bacteria threatened by ultraviolet radiation to its intimate relation with the origin of mitotic division of nucleated cells...read more

Product Description: A departure from mainstream biology, the idea of symbiosis - as in the genetic and metabolic interactions of the bacterial communities that became the earliest eukaryotes and eventually evolved into plants and animals - has attracted the attention of a growing number of scientists...read more

Explores the complex factors and long line of 'ancestors' that have contributed to human sexuality and human sexual behavior

Product Description: BACK IN PRINT WITH A REVISED PREFACEMicrocosmos brings together the remarkable discoveries of microbiology of the past two decades and the pioneering research of Dr. Margulis to create a vivid new picture of the world that is crucial to our understanding of the future of the planet...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this book fifteen distinguished scientists discuss the effects of life--past and present--on planet Earth. Unlike other earth science and biology books, Environmental Evolution describes the impact of life on the Earth's rocky surfaces presenting an integrated view of how our planet evolved...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This revised edition introduces evidence that symbiogenesis is a major source of evolutionary innovation leading to the origins of new species. The author offers insights into the genetic and metabolic interactions of the bacterial comunities that became protocists...read more

Describes how scientists classify living organisms into groups known as kingdoms, and the characteristics of each

Product Description: "Symbiogenesis", a term first coined by the Russian botanist K.S. Merezhkovsky in the late 19th century, is the evolution of new life forms, from the physical union of different, once-independent partners. In this book Liya Khakhina traces the development of the concept in Russian and Soviety scientific literature, reviewing the contributions of Merezhkovsky, A...read more

Product Description: Biological, Physical, & Social Sciences

Product Description: This electronic reference guide provides an expert overview of our planet's biodiversity: the kingdoms of bacteria, protoctista, fungi, plants and animals. Browse or search through hyperlinked descriptions of all the 96 phyla living today...read more

Product Description: Half a century ago, before the discovery of DNA, the Austrian physicist and philosopher Erwin Schrödinger inspired a generation of scientists by rephrasing the fascinating philosophical question: What is life? Using their expansive understanding of recent science to wonderful effect, acclaimed authors Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan revisit this timeless question in a fast-moving, wide-ranging narrative that combines rigorous science with philosophy, history, and poetry...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Lynn Margulis, one of the most provocative scientific thinkers of our time, and her son, the writer Dorion Sagan, here present a selection from their many essays published in the last decade and a half. Margulis's scientific contributions are legendary. Her proposal that eukaryotic cells (the cells of all multicellular animals and plants) are made up of symbiotic unions of more primitive cells was at first widely derided but is now mainstream science. She has described the previously unrecognized role microbial life plays in the maintenance of all life on earth. And she is, with James Lovelock, one of the founders of Gaia theory. In these essays, perhaps better than in any of her other books, one can see how these apparently unrelated interests combine into a single, coherent scientific world-view about the natural tendency of living systems to form complex interactive communities. This is Margulis and Sagan's fourth book.

Product Description: This reference provides an overview of life on earth, bridging the gap between zoology and botany. The book demonstrates the amazing diversity of all living things in a manner that should be accessible.