Predation or Prevarication?
927383
Lott neatly dissects the case for predatory pricing in a logical manner that evidences a thorough grounding in the economic literature.  He marshalls convincing empirical evidence through statistical modelling that dovetails nicely with the illustrative examples he provides.  Taking each point in hand, he makes the case against predatory pricing in private enterprise, while developing a clear picture of why it can and does occur in the public sector.  A must read for the policy-maker and anti-trust supporters, his thoughtful critique will stand as an important work for years to come.
538693
Wesley J. Smith is an attorney and author of several books, a fact which explains the lucid writing style, absence of rancor, and superb attention to detail and documentation. A previous review explained Smith's reasoning for rejecting the ideology of animal rights so I will focus on other issues.

The book is divided into three sections. The first addresses the ideology and non-violent aspects of animal rights (AR) activism. Smith explains how the AR movement frequently utilizes propaganda like techniques to sway the public to their cause. Part II reveals the more sinister side of the movement by detailing terroristic activities perpetrated by members of the radical fringe of the AR movement, such as the Animal Liberation Front. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this section is how Smith carefully shows how mainstream AR activists have failed to harshly condemn violence and terror used to further their cause and in some cases even employed those involved in violent activities. The last section explains how animals have benefited humans and how adoption of the AR agenda will diminish humanity. Of particular note, is his careful discussion of the role animal testing has in medical advances which contradicts the repeated claims of many AR activists and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Smith is careful with his wording and avoids painting with broad strokes. He concedes examples of cruelty when he believes the evidence supports it. In my opinion, Smith's greatest contribution consists in his insight into the way AR activists manipulate the media, the public, and assault the judicial system in a take-no-prisoners attempt to implement their agenda. Those who are sympathetic to the AR agenda, should read this book, and carefully consider the implications of AR beliefs, before they convert. Smith's way of turning AR logic on its head will leave readers much to ponder.

Those unsympathetic to AR, should read this book to get the facts needed to learn how to identify AR political strategy in order to counteract it.

Stephen M. Vantassel is an eco-theologian, an expert in wildlife damage management, and author of&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Dominion-over-Wildlife-An-Environmental-Theology-of-Human-wildlife-Relations/dp/1606083430/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Dominion over Wildlife: An Environmental Theology of Human-wildlife Relations</a>&nbsp;(Wipf and Stock, 2009).
182489
It may come as a surprise to many who first encounter this book that the science of ecology might have anything to contribute to philosophy in general -- this, despite the fact that popular notions of ecology are in the forefront of the search for new directions, be they in the guise of  the "Deep Ecology" of Arne Naess, or the "Web of Life" advanced by Frijthof Capra. But scientific perspectives unique to ecology are arising, and making connections between ecological outlooks and how nature generally is perceived is the primary goal of this book -- as stated in its subtitle.
 No dominant ecological perspective has yet emerged, but Keller and Golley do an excellent job of sampling the various issues. For example, Part One includes five papers that take sides on whether one should emphasize the entities in ecosystems (the Eleatic approach) or concentrate on the processes that are occurring (the Milesian stance.) Part Three presents the debate between the rational and the empirical approaches to ecology; Part Four between reductionism and holism; and the final section gives consideration to what ties (if any) should exist between contemporary evolutionary theory and ecosystems science.
 I have used the volume (in early manuscript form) as the primary text for a graduate seminar I taught last year on "Philosophical Issues in Ecology" at the University of Maryland. Most students in the seminar were amazed to discover that philosophical issues have a history within the scientific practice of ecology, and they found the chapters of the book to be well- chosen illustrations of the various attitudes now vying for a permanent place in the evolving philosophy of ecology.
 I was quite impressed by how the editors were able to winnow down the component papers to their most essential elements and by how the publisher was able to put this volume on the street at a price that is affordable to the typical graduate student. I foresee a significant potential for this compendium as a textbook and as a catalyst for initiating productive debate on issues that address not only ancient philosophical abstractions, but affect our attitudes towards urgent contemporary problems as well.
1503382
Was a required text for an evolution course in undergraduate studies.  The book was well-written and examined many behavioral and theoretical concepts about evolution and how species have evolved the ways in which they have.
4479240
The deer seemed to eat everything in our yard (roses, yuccas, loquat, hollies, etc), but Plantskydd seems to slow them down a bit.  Of course, we've heard that the babies are indiscriminate eaters so all bets are off until their taste buds develop!
4276398
So, I randomly decided to read this book about rabiesbecause why not? I mean, theres something inherently fascinating about a virus that has a 100% fatality rate once symptoms are present.

Unfortunately, I didn't find this to be as thrilling and entertaining as the reviews suggested. The first few chapters focused far too much on the cultural history of the dog, which wasn't really what I signed up for. It did finally get interesting when the focus shifted to Louis Pasteur and vaccination, zoonotic diseases in general, theories on how rabies has factored into the evolution of vampires and zombies and stories about victims and survivors.

I found some of Wasiks narrative confusing, and sometimes contradictory. I wound up doing some of my own research to supplement what I was reading. I did learn some interesting things though. Here are two of my favorite takeaways:

- Rabies can cause frequent and involuntary ejaculation in men

- Bat bites are the cause of nearly all human rabies infections in the U.S., accounting for 32 of 33 deaths from domestic exposure since 1990. Why? Because bat bites are so subtle that people can be infected without their being aware of it, especially in the night, when a bat bite is sometimes not even painful enough to wake up a sleeping human. The CDC actually recommends that anyone who awakens with a bat in his or her room seek out vaccination for rabies. Scary, right?

Overall, not as interesting as I wanted it to be. Though, admittedly, I tend to prefer fiction over nonfiction, so it takes a lot for a nonfiction book to truly impress me.
3947486
The author seems to stress warm and cold ocean currents and the land massses sliding on the tectonic plates as the major long term influences on evolution,besides the rotation of the earth and its traveling through the galaxy. As I Iread the book iIbecame more confirmed and aware that we are actually living on a living being with possibly a personality as well,Mother Earth. Prothero also talks about global cooling and warming trends over the last couple hundred million years using his expertise on fossils and earth Geology. He seems to talk a lot about mussels and their evolution to bolster his theories.
  Prothero's handling of the unique species of mammals that inhabited the earth is done in a readable and interesting way. I always wondered how the prehistoric plains animals of the North American Miocene Era became extinct and I believe I understand it tolerably. I had always heard that the rise of the Rocky mountains effected the rainfall patterns and climate of the midwest savannah causing a general cooling pattern. According to Prothero there was also a general cooling during the period, only a few degrees, from the sliding of the continent north in conjunction with some cold water ocean currents. These animals were sensitive to the climate changes as the Great Plains savannah dried up and the animals moved to other more opportune areas or simply became extinct over a period of a couple of million years. There are a lot of graphs and pictures to illustrate the author's points. He goes somewhat into the Great Meteor theory which deals with the extinction of the dinosaurs but downplays it somewhat using geologic core samples. He doesn't say the K/T extinction event never happened but according to my read he implies the event may be somewhat overemphasized and he explores other factors as well. His premise for the climactic changes involve hot and cold water currents and moving land masses. He sums up the book by taking a look at overpopulation and it's effects on global warming which could bring on another devastating Ice Age. According to Prothero we are presently in the Holocene Interglacial period which means thing could begin to cool off any day now! Things could happen real slow or real fast according to Prothero!
909981
First night I got 4 rats in 2 hours. First 2 were a double kill. One rat entered and arced another through its tail. I just used tortilla bits or other left overs for bait.
571613
As all the other reviews are positive, I will add a much needed critical perspective.

The central argument of this book is that:

"The combination of Indian predation and environmental change decimated the bison" (Isenberg, p. 3).

As such, this book contradicts massive amounts of primary historical sources that show, un-arguably, that the destruction and near extinction of the Bison herds was a direct result of Anglo predation in a direct attempt to destroy the resource base of the Plains Tribes in order to force them onto reservations.

As the other reviewers have pointed out, it is true that the Plains Tribes were not nomadic hunters for all of their history. It is true that the Tribes adopted nomadic hunting as a primary subsistence strategy only after being forced to do so by Anglo aggression and encroachment.

But from that truth, Isenberg moves on to a series of unproven theories based on questionable ecological assumptions that are rooted in the "new ecology" - an ecological theory that describes nature as a disordered, chaotic and individualistic struggle for survival (For info on the "new ecology" see my review of "Discordant Harmonies:  A new ecology for the 21st century).

For example, Isenberg bases one of his arguments on the un-proven theory that early Tribal Peoples, thousands of years ago, hunted to extinction many species of large land mammals.

But the story of the Bison is not a pre-historic story.  It is a story of modern history and Isenberg presents no historical proof that the Tribes were responsible for the near extinction of the Bison.

Rather, he makes subjective philosophical arguments against "romanticizing" wilderness and Native American cultures.

From there Iverson uses these arguments as a backdrop to a series of environmental statistical analyses.

Basically, Iverson lays out an exponential statistical model where by he argues that, given the estimated number of Bison deaths necessary to sustain the Plains Tribes, eventually the Bison would have been rendered extinct by the Tribes at some point in the future.

The problem is that this can never be proven because it never happened!

What happened, and it is documented in massive amounts of printed primary historical sources, was that the Bison were deliberately slaughtered by greedy Anglo hunters for their skins and tongues.

The United States Army was in on it as well, as is documented by many sources showing that the Bison herds were decimated in a deliberate attempt to make it impossible for the Tribes to remain living free on the Plains.

Isenberg's book is one that must be extremely comforting to those forces that continue to destroy what wild animals and lands we have left here in North America.
2939951
Lures were as advertised, however I had fallen under the spell created by youtube vids showing them producing constant bites. I have been using them for a couple of weeks now with not a single bite. Could be my technique, I'm not the best fisherman. Lures all look like they should get bitten but no luck yet.
4000471
Vertosick writes:

"....Biologists like to believe that a pristine germline carries all the geneic information we'll ever need from cradle to grave. For individual animals to change genetically during their lifetimes sounds too dangerous. After all, cancers arise because of alterations of our germline DNA, so surely we wouldn't toy with our DNA blueprints intentionally...

...Ah, but indeed we do. In the 1970s, improved DNA analytical techniques allowed immunologists to peer into the DNA of vertebrate immune systems, and they soon learned that we do evolve genetically in response to external threats in the same way that bacteria and flies evolve."

Um, no Frank, we do not.

WE do not 'evolve' during an immune response - if we did, we would all be immune to everything outr parents were immune to.  If a disclaimer was provided indicating that such immunity is not passed on, wonderful.  The fact remains, that was not what was written in the quotes provided.

During an immune response, immune cells that already possess receptors that 'sort of' bind foreign antigens will begin to divide and diversify.  Part of this process involves the rearrangmenet of pre-existing genes and the incorporation of random mutations into these genes as well, with the outcome of this trial and error process being a cell or two whose 'new' receptors bind the antigen even better, and they begin dividing faster than the other cells, which die.

These 'new' genes do not get passed on, and thus, by definition, no evolution takes place.

Readers should be wary of the claims made in this book.  It sounds impressive, but it may be wrong, like his take on this 'evolution' within the body.
2926618
I'm usually against any kind of poison, but I make an exception for the packrats in the Sonoran Desert.  When I ran out of this, my local source had changed brands to something that is supposed to have lower secondary kill. (Contrac Blox had the lowest secondary kill on the market when I first bought it.) Well, that other product may be marginally lower in secondary kill, but it melts right off the posts inside the bait stations.  So, I'll save that for winter, I guess, and go back to using this...I found an active nest just this week.
4475356
A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion, by Matthieu Ricard, is both predictable and engaging.  It is predictable in that many of the examples of animal abuse pulled up by other authors are regurgitated again, and engaging because Richard writes well and discusses animal use and abuse issues with an eye to our evolution, our culture, and our lack of awareness of what really goes on in the animal world.

"This book invites us to face up to something: in spite of the sense of wonder the animal kingdom inspires in us, we are responsible for an ongoing massacre of animals on a scale unequaled in the history of humankind.  Every year, sixty billion land animals and a thousand billion marine animals are killed for our consumption... We maintain a kind of moral schizophrenia ghat has us lavishing pampering our pets and at the same time planting our forks in pigs that have been sent to the slaughter by the millions, even though they are in no way less conscious, less sensative to pain, or less intelligent than our cats and dogs" (p. 3-4).

"Everything is done to keep the consumer in ignorance" (p. 43).  What happens when this veil is lifted?  I recommend reading&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Consuming-Choices-Ethics-in-a-Global-Consumer-Age-Philosophy-and-the-Global-Context/dp/0742548147/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Consuming Choices: Ethics in a Global Consumer Age (Philosophy and the Global Context)</a>.

"You can get used to anything.  We have turned suffering into an acceptable commonplace, we have desensitized ourselves to the suffering of others" (p. 53).  Ricard then continues by investigating various forms of animal exploitation.

What to do?  Ricard makes some suggestions.  I also like the book (and recommendations) from&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/The-Rough-Guide-to-Ethical-Shopping-Rough-Guides-Reference-Titles/dp/1843532654/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">The Rough Guide to Ethical Shopping (Rough Guides Reference Titles)</a>.  Vote with your dollars.  Advocate in the behalf of animals.  Volunteer at animal shelters.  And be wary of your diet.
1374977
I wish I'd done more careful reading. Before I ordered this, I read up on the insecticide, Bifenthrin. What I read indicated that it was highly toxic to aquatic species, but because it's barely water soluble, that's not much of a concern unless you live right near a water source-- it's mostly going to stay put right there in your soil (and not get into groundwater). I also read that it's basically harmless to humans unless you ingest it-- skin contact is no problem. And I have no pets or babies to worry about.

BUT... I wanted to quote from that information for my review, so I searched for it again, and found this section at Toxipedia:

"Bifenthrin disrupts the nervous system and causes paralysis in insects. It has a moderate toxicity to mammals. For rats, the LD50 of females is 54mg/kg, and in males is 70mg/kg. Bifenthrin is also moderately toxic to birds. The LD50 of mallard ducks is 1280ppm, and 4450ppm for bobwhite quail. It has a very high toxicity for fish and other aquatic species. The LD50 is 0.00015 mg/l for rainbow trout, 0.00035 mg/l for bluegill, and 0.0016 mg/l for Daphnia. Bifenthrin is also toxic to non-target bees (#EXTOXNET). . . Although it does not pose a high risk for mammals and birds, bifenthrin may accumulate in the food chain and harm high-level predators."

So... basically, I just became part of the problem in killing off bees, and potentially killed off some birds, too. I'm frustated with myself for not doing further research to begin with-- it sounded like a pretty safe insecticide for my uses, but I should have been more thorough in my reading. Which is why I'm passing along the info to you.

To add insult to injury, bugs have only increased since I used it.
4480901
Quiet sedate plants. Boring, except a handful of the unexpected. This book is about the dangerous plants - carnivorous, poisonous, and spiked - these plants bite back!

Find out about the Venus flytrap and bladderwort tempting insects to their deaths. Discover nettles and poison ivy using oils and injections to irate skin to keep animals away. And nature's daggers, found in hundreds of version of cacti, slice and barb their way through life like dessert gangstas.

"Plants bite back!" has the typical DK Reader colorful photos and informative narrative. A great read for beginning botanists and gardeners.
1734446
The end is near. But just how near? And what will be the cause? In his book The Fate Of The Species Scientific American editor Fred Guterl delves into what may cause our extinction and what we can do about it.
There are many books out there discussing this topic, most of them in a very sensationalist and wildly exaggerating style. Luckily for me, this isn't the case here as the author sets a matter of fact tone which I was immediately taken with. Written in a conversational style and painting both vivid and plausible scenarios of what could happen, he takes the reader from super viruses past climate change straight to what he obviously sees as the most likely culprit of all - scientific and technological progress. Our own inventions as source and cause of our possible extinction might not sound quite as exciting as a meteor striking, but according to this survey it's scarily likely.
Regrettably, it's the minutely detailed examples, highlighting present day research, which create an imbalance, sometimes long-winded enough to break up a chapter, and often reducing the fascinating question of what might happen to a mere afterthought. Another thing I found slightly unfortunate were the thoughts on solutions being pooled into the last chapter instead of complementing the individual chapters. A general conclusion would have been more fitting in my opinion.
In short: Technology as our downfall - an interesting excursion into what may cause the next mass extinction event on our planet!

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the NetGalley book review program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
3099702
This introductory book, by a moral philosopher, focuses on the implications of evolutionary theory for our view of morality. It deals with such issues as the evolution of morality; the moral implications of evolutionary psychology; social darwinism and eugenics; the naturalistic fallacy; and the role of genes in behaviour. The book gives a comprehensive overview of the controversies, reviews the classical examples, and outlines Levy's own view. It is well written. Levy does a better job than most critics of evolutionary psychology in presenting and discussing this position and carefully analyzes and rejects the simple dichotomies (either genes or environment, either nature or nurture etc.) that so often distort the discussion. Yet, the book is not without problems. At places it lacks analytical depth. A discussion of different notions of altruism (genetic, psychological, ethical etc.) would have been very helpful, and a one sentence rejection of the idea that one commits a fallacy if one replaces 'is' by 'ought to be' is too short, really. Another serious problems is Levy's tendency to conflate evolutionary and genetic approaches. In the first chapter, Levy, erroneously, associates eugenics with Darwinism and later in the book he conflates evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics. Levy occasionally succumbs to name calling ('Darwinian fundamentalist') and straw man arguments. The views of scientists should not be extracted from news papers, as Levy does in chapter 5. A more serious distortion is the equation of the evolutionary psychologists' view that the alleged fact that behaviours (such as rape) and social inequalities have a genetic and evolutionary background does not justify those behaviours and inequalities, with the straw men's position that the claims of evolutionary psychology are morally irrelevant. Finally, Levy indicates his own position, but his arguments are, imho, underdeveloped. For those who know the subject these shortcomings are relatively minor, but they might mislead beginners.