Perspective Books

I am purchasing this book after reading it--I have the libraries copy in front of me, but I need a copy to write in the margins and highlight. As a curious follower of Putnam's work on Social Capital, this book deepens the conversation and ideas surrounding the issue, most importantly asking questions about what do we mean by "social capital."

The book is a gathering of commentary from scholars on social capital and how it relates or may not relate to civil society. It is an academic's book. It is an important book for anyone who wants to consider Social Capital at a deeper level.

As a missionary/linguist working in West Africa for 18 years, I find Jake's attempt to detail the differences between "Western-secular," "traditional/animist," and "Biblical" world views a helpful tool when we are explaining things to the "folks back home." Most Americans miss the fact that becoming a fully-formed Christian out of a materialist background is more of a leap than it is for "animists." I have loaned out and lost this book before--without regret--as long as people who care about the truth God has affirmed in scripture are reading it.

This book is an overview of the truths of the Christian faith as seen from the perspective of the traditional African world view. It is insightfully written from a Western perspective and is extremely helpful in understanding the difficulties of relating Christianity to the African's beliefs -- both modern and indiginous. This is a must-read for anyone going into the mission field in Africa, no matter how much theology you've studied or how much you already know about African religions. Great for general knowledge or to look in-depth at specific issues.

The used copy of the book I bought through you arrived expeditiously, within a few days, was in top used condition, not marked up and thoroughly satisfactory. Thank you for the service. you beat the new retail price by 60%!

Bill Noble

This book provides a much-needed overview of the "biobehavioral" perspective in the study of crime. As the author points out, mainstream criminology relies on sociological theories to "explain" crime, but cannot explain why individuals in identical circumstances nonetheless behave differently. The biobehavioral perspective, compatible with or identical to the biosocial perspective and behavioral ecology, acknowledges the interrelatedness of nature and nurture and gives causal priority to neither. Genes bias, but do not determine, behavior, and the expression of any gene depends upon the environment in which it develops. The biological underpinnings of antisocial behavior, drawn from many recent and sophisticated studies from psychology, behavior genetics, psychobiology, cognitive sciences, and related fields, interact with family, social and other environmental variables to create both psychological and sociological phenomena, including crime and delinquency. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has interactied with children, or tried to change their own behavior while accounting for their own traits. However, much of the biology in this book will be new to readers of mainstream criminology and criminal justice texts, which present the "biological" perspective as an amalgam of Lombroso's discredited claims that criminals are evolutionary throwbacks to more primitive times, and theories such as that involving XYY chromosome mutation that try (and mainly fail) to explain the behavior of a few select offenders. This is an important book for students of crime, as it supplements, but does not supplant, the sociological perspective that dominates criminology. It is short. It can be used in conjunction with a mainstream text or as the basis for a course in the biology or psychology of crime, or can be read on its own by anyone interested in crime or human behavior generally. Two cautions - it is not written in the simple language of many undergraduate textbooks, and is also a bit expensive.

I used this book as a source for a presentation in my undergraduate Spanish class on gold in Central and South America. I am by no means a scientist or expert on chemistry, but as a layperson I found this text to be unique and unsurpassed in breadth of this topic. It is objectively written, and speaks for itself.

This is a very informative scientific review of research on biological invasions - but you are probably going to need a grant to be able to buy yourself a copy!

I have been doing intensive study on pigmentation. This book gave a candid look at melanin and the physiology of the skin. In my profession it has been priceless

In the introduction the complex approach is stressed. When someone is doing a research he should look at the system as a whole one. Some definitions: Biology is the science of life, which in turn requires the definition of science and life. To avoid that the biology is defined as science of living organisms or science of living systems.

1. Theories and hypotheses.

The aim of science. The aim of science is to gain knowledge of the world. Knowledge has many forms. Science concerns only with scientific knowledge, which is expressed in singular and general propositions. Singular proposition is also called facts, whereas general propositions are referred to as hypotheses, models, rules, laws, and theories. Laws are also well-confirmed general propositions, yet they are less comprehensive than theories. Thus any general proposition within the framework of a theory may be called law. There are two kinds of laws: deterministic and probabilistic. Most of the biological laws are probabilistic.

Scientific methodology or how do we gain scientific knowledge.

One of the possible answers to this question is the following: we gain scientific knowledge through the application of the scientific methods, thus assuming that there is one single method that characterise or even defines science. The results obtained are influenced by the methodology employed. It determines the strength and the limitations of the results.

Chapter 2. Laws are defined as a regularity of events or characteristics. Deterministic laws says that whenever F then G. A probabilistic law is a statement that says when F, then probably G. all laws remain open to doubt. L

Explanations. They require explanatory relevance and testability. As these two requirements are satisfied an explanation is possible if the phenomenon to be explained can be derived from laws and particular circumstances. There are two models of explanations: covering law and narrative.

3. Facts Fact is singular proposition. How is the singular proposition is related to reality? Two definitions are discussed:

Chapter 4. Concepts and classification. Science is conceptual. Concepts are abstractions. Abstractions constitute a selection of feature from direct experience. Since there are many ways of selecting features from the richness of experience, many different abstractions, i.e. concepts, can be formed from the same background experience. It is suggested to ask to what extent a concept corresponds with reality.

Chapter 6. Traditional causality refers to the relation of cause and effect in such a way that 1. The effect follows the cause in time 2. The cause produces the effect 3. The relation between the two is constant and necessary

Chapter 7. Introduction. Teleology refers to goals, purposes, and functions, which in turn describe or relate to the most complex biological phenomena such as homeostasis, self-regulation, adaptation, selection, integration, organisation, programs, and feedback.

Chapter 9. What is life? Living organisms can be understood only when they are considered as part of the system within which they function. (Dubos 1981, p37) Present attempts to develop adequate principles of life represent perhaps the greatest conceptual crisis in the history of science. (Davenport 1979)

Chapter 10. Since living systems are integrated with the whole world, world hypotheses referring to the whole are necessary for an understanding of life. Since there are many different ways of thinking, there is a great variety of world hypotheses.

The Birth of Meaning

Meaning begins with Becker's unraveling of the mystery of how the mind evolved. Simply put, the mind is an organism's style of reacting to its environment. The world of meaning is built up out of the range and subtlety of the mind's reactivity. Through "fine-tuning," the animal learns to condition his reactions, and from there, on to making mental associations and higher forms of mental processing and learning. Mind then is just a progressive increase in the freedom and sophistication of an organism's ways of reacting. Freud gave us a map of how this process of reactivity is constituted within the brain's architecture. The "id," a remnant of the instinctive and reptilian brain, is uncontrolled "reactivity; the ego seeks to control and delay the reactivity of the "id." This delaying allowed for the ability to see ahead, plan and decide. The super-ego adds a "top-down" moral dimension to this structure.

From this basic understanding, of reactivity, Becker's story of the development of mind is simply this: That the imperatives of being a "meat-eating mammal" and the complex social requirements of, being around females in constant estrus, caused the turning of a complex evolutionary wheel that ended in an unfolding of all the reactivity of the mind that we have come to recognize as the characteristics we now call human: the ability to plan and reason; the use of language and the invention of social organization and culture.

The developmental sequence that results is clear and straightforward: Meat-eating required hunting; a successful hunt against larger animals of course required cooperation. Cooperation on the hunt, and the avoidance of internecine conflict -- over the continuous sexual stimulation provided by monthly estrus -- mandated, planning, symbolic or abstract thinking, and most of all complex social interactions, which led to social organization and culture. Social organization and symbolic thinking led directly to a culture based on language and then on to its most evolved social expression a "cultural hero system;" a system where the primary sustenance was no longer based just on fighting for sex and meat alone, but also on symbolic rewards such as status and roles based on self-esteem: Pride in ones own ability became a survival tool that was more important than (and in many instances replaced) the familiar animal need to fight over food and sex.

Symbolic rewards resulting from complex social interaction and organization caused the ego to evolve. According to Freud, the ego then became the "guard dog" over the more primitive "id," and the control tower for the body. It organized time; delayed a need for immediate reactivity; protected against disorder, chaos and anxiety; and most importantly introduced a consciousness of (the self), an "I."

As Becker puts it, abstract thinking (and consciousness) itself is basically a "sneak preview" of the thing we intend to experience. Through reflexive and abstract thinking, the ego builds up a symbolic world safe for the body by first "conquering" and then "colonizing" the process of disorder and anxiety manipulation. By developing the ability to preview and "play out in the mind" anxious situations, man was able to attenuate -- if not completely defang -- them of their fear content.

Becker, along with Freud's other protégés, (Adler, Jung, Rogers, Rank, Brown, Perls, in particular) parted-company with Freud's phylogenically-linked instinct interpretation of anxiety and neurosis, and despite giving us a masterful analysis of how conscience is implanted, according to Becker, Freud misunderstood the Oedipus complex and thus failed to explain guilt and the true nature of the conscience. And while empirical evidence still does not support Freud's neatly crafted biological instinct-driven theory of anxiety, the disparate refutations of it, do not, when taken together quite add up to a full-fledge coherent and comprehensive alternative to it.

Acting very much like several blind men trying to discern the correct outlines of an elephant, Freud's disciples, each made individual contributions within the scope of their own limited and often isolated islands of theory. But the final "pulling together" and synthesizing of these pieces, remained undone until Becker's work. Becker is one of the few psychologists who could see the whole elephant, or light at the end of the long dark Freudian tunnel.

The Middle

The middle of the book is the story of what Freud missed: the grand motive of man, the central law of human nature, what existed on the ground floor of the "Grand Existential Hotel:" self-esteem. In retrospect, it is now easy to see that "self-esteem' is just a natural outgrowth of early ego efforts at anxiety-manipulation: We learned to make the world safe for ourselves by doing what those who control our well-being (our trainers) want us to do. We shape ourselves into the kind of people who can take for granted the approval and support of those who control our wellbeing. We are both "reality-adjusted" and "socially-adjusted" throughout life in order to gain the qualitative feeling of "self-value:" the epitome of ego development and the basic predicate for human action.

The child must learn how to switch modes of maintaining self-esteem from the body to the mind. Or put another way, from the biological (ones own body) to symbolic codes of behaviors (coming from the public mind) -- all in an effort to be accepted and supported. Feelings of self-value are thus "artificialized" when they are "mapped" from the body to the mind, and then onto "accepted" and "sanctioned" symbols. Feelings of self-value are turned into a linguistic contrivances. The rest of a person's life is then devoted to the protection, maintenance, and worship of the symbolic edifice of self-esteem that he has built up. Life itself becomes a movie of images of self-worth. The newsreel in our mind is an ongoing test of whether, as Jessie Jackson used to say, "we are somebody." In our own private inner movies, the most subtle and most minor of events, and the finest discernable differences and gradations take on enormous importance: Symbols tend to chop reality into a very fine grid indeed. When the newsreel records a bad deed or negative image, we immediately try to balance it off with a positive one. At this stage we have accomplished complete socialization: We have been thoroughly "reality-adjusted" and thoroughly "socially-adjusted."

The roll of culture in Shaping the Character of Man

Thus, our self-esteem is very much based on our social role in society. The plaudits of the market place are the driving force of mankind. Our whole life is an exchange of "peddling of our resumes" to each other. The process of socialization, the process of humanization is an exchange of "animal worth" for "symbolic worth." It is others who decide who we are and what we are worth. Our character is a social creation, a grand social production. The basic process of character formation results directly from our need to be somebody in the symbolic world, and to, at the same time, try to accommodate to the superior powers of our trainers; and from all of this somehow also be able to salvage our own sense of superiority and confidence.

The Death of Meaning

The crowning achievement of "symbolic man" is to be able to "act in an arena of primary meaning and values." For all of mankind, this arena is the cultural hero system: the axle of the wheel that makes man's self-esteem machine turn. Without it, man is marginalized, left to struggle alone on the outskirts of existence against unknown, sometimes unknowable and insurmountable odds and adversaries. With it, he is (or at least appears) to be "somebody." His meanings, his values, and thus his worth are all tied to something larger than himself: It is connected to the cosmos, to religion (collective immortality project), to society, to and thus ultimately to an arena that can give him the ultimate illusion of appearing to cheat death. But alas, these illusions, the comfort of this community neurosis, comes at the same price as all other illusions: They extract a cost on man's freedom and on his definition of what is to be considered his own sanity: What does it mean to gain a whole symbolic world and still lose ones own soul?

The struggle of man meanings end where they began: alone in denial, with only his illusions to comfort him.

Five stars.