Reviews for Preoperative Events: Their Effects on Behavior Following Brain Damage

The average rating for Preoperative Events: Their Effects on Behavior Following Brain Damage based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-07-10 00:00:00 David Walsh An interesting if somewhat scattered tour through genes focusing on evolutionary proofs. Preface: Beyond Any Reasonable Doubt was too long & there is an introduction. Redundant; do one or the other. Basically he's going to make a case for evolution that proves it beyond a reasonable doubt just using DNA. No need to convince me & I doubt it will convince anyone who believes in magic, but I like the premise. Introduction: The Bloodless Fish of Bouvet Island is about the ice fish of Antarctica. Very wild adaptation & it's interesting how it came about. The Everyday Math of Evolution: Chance, Selection, and Time is excellent. I've always said that people (like my neighbors) who believe in Creationism are just bad with numbers. (Of course, they're stuck in a 6,000 year time frame, so magic is the only answer.) Anyway, he spends some time with probabilities & statistics that make sense of how changes can multiply. It's not the best explanation I've read, though. He tends to wander around too much. Immortal Genes: Running in Place for Eons were something I'd heard about, but never heard defined before. His definition was foggy, but I got the gist. A few basic processes are necessary & the genes that control them haven't changed because when they do, the life-form dies. Making the New from the Old is about genes changing over time. Really interesting example of our eyesight. We have trichromatic vision now, but many (most?) mammals don't, yet many reptiles, birds, & such do. Our common ancestor did. Apparently when mammals were little hunted things, we lived at night so color wasn't important & we became dichromatic. As we became day-dwellers, we redeveloped color perception, but in different ways. Great examples between the genetics of New & Old World monkeys. Fossil Genes: Broken Pieces of Yesterday's Life Use it or lose it, as with color vision. Genes will mutate. If they don't cause a survival issue, the broken gene just becomes more & more broken until it is a fossil. If the broken gene does cause a survival issue, then natural selection sees that it isn't passed on. Deja Vu: How and Why Evolution Repeats Itself Life adapts or dies off. How it adapts may look very similar but is often done through different mechanisms. Great examples with the specific needs of sight as compared to coloring which can be accomplished in many ways. Our Flesh and Blood: Arms Races, the Human Race, and Natural Selection Arms races between species make for fast evolution & we've seen some in our own race. Several good examples, although the malaria one didn't fully mesh with what I've read before. I was rather disappointed in the uneven description. The Making and Evolution of Complexity is about how complex structures develop out of simple ones. Again, a lot of really good info, but he never really went through the steps in a cohesive manner. Seeing and Believing held some horrific examples of where ideology overshadowed science to the detriment of all. The main example was the denial of genetics by the USSR. Along with collectivism, this led to millions starving. This is the same sort of ignorance held by many fundamentalist Protestants here in the US. Thankfully, the Catholic church has recently (finally!) recognized evolution & then there is the Clergy Letter Project, religious groups & leaders who are willing to write to school boards & such to keep religion out of science. Carroll also provides more examples of why 'intelligent design' isn't science. I had no idea chiropractors were against vaccination & such. I go to one occasionally (every 3 -5 years) to get my back cracked, generally my left sacroiliac. When it goes out, nothing makes in better until a strong chiropractor snaps it back into place. Then I have to be careful & keep a rolled up towel to brace it while sitting for a while. Definitely not a placebo effect, so I don't think they're all completely full of crap, but many scientists & doctors think so, including a couple of very good orthopedic surgeons I knew well who couldn't fix that pain. Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The Palm Trees of Wyoming is a grim ending. He points out the wonderful fossils unearthed in Utah during the building of the transcontinental railroad & the sort of creatures & climate it shows. Fittest is fleeting, even precarious. He then goes on give some horrifying stats on sea life & its degradation. (Also a big horn sheep example.) It's plain scary. Even when we finally get around to protecting a species, we may well have altered the balance too much for the species or even the ecosystem to recover. One of his examples is the Chesapeake Bay. I grew up gathering crabs in a hand net tossing them into a bushel basket in an inner tube tied to my waist with a rope. Even my 7 year old self could get a respectable catch in an hour of wading through the grasses. That area, along with over a third of the bay, is now a dead zone. No crabs, no grass in less than half a century. Horrifying. This last chapter is fantastic & by far the best argument he made for evolution. Without understanding evolutionary & ecological forces, we're doing this to our entire world. It's not just one species that we hunt to extinction, but all the other parts of the ecosystem that depend on them. This book isn't going to convince anyone who doesn't believe in evolution that it does exist. Carroll's arguments were too scattered. He seems like a smart guy & I loved all the neat facts, but he rarely brought them together properly. Still, it was quite interesting especially when put together with other books on evolution & genetics. Unseen Diversity: The World of Bacteria & Venomous: How Earth's Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry also blend well with it.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-11 00:00:00 Kathy Moore I read this book over the course of an entire semester of college, as it was assigned for my Ecology, Evolution & Society Biology class. That being said, I am sad to see it come to an end as this semester winds to a close as well. I had begun to look forward to the new piece of evidence or explanation for natural selection that Carroll provided with each new chapter. He presents a myriad of examples in very simplified way, so as to provide readers with an easier and more comprehensive way of understanding the mechanisms of evolution. He does so by utilizing the newest way in which scientists have begun to understand evolution and shared ancestry: through DNA. With each chapter, Carroll clearly explains the inner-workings of evolution, and presents new and interesting findings and statistics that you might have never heard of before. Upon finishing this book, you will have a new wealth of knowledge regarding the ways in which species interact with one another to foster the grand ecosystem that is the tree of life. Every organism, even the most seemingly insignificant ones, have a purpose in the world, for each organism is but a puzzle piece within the constantly changing web or organisms. The fittest is a conditional phase, and no organism is guaranteed to be at the top of the hierarchy forever. Thus, we are all in an evolutionary arm's race of sorts--I think our status as animals sharing this earth among many others who must run just as fast as us to keep up with nature, is quite beautiful, if you think about it. I recommend this book for anyone who is interested in biology, evolution, Darwinism, etc. Those who are beginners in biology/people who lack a sufficient scientific background will be pleased to find that Carroll makes this understandable and interesting for the average Joe. 10/10