Search Results

“... Lynne Segal, who opens and closes the collection by confronting Thatcherism head-on. ‘No amount of pressure to strengthen traditional ideas on women’s place in the family,’ she argues, ‘can really succeed today. Women will not retire from waged work.’ Perhaps more important even than work is the general climate within which women now ...”

“... many curious discoveries made, earlier this century, by ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen was that fighting in animals is restrained and, as they called it, ‘ritualised’. Animal contests, over such valuable resources as food, territory or mates, almost resemble tournaments, which pass through a regular series of harmless stages, before ...”

“... the book will not be so much use to anyone who wants details about particular species. There is no section that deals with the whole life of each type of bird or other animal. But one can learn about the idiosyncrasies, say, of cuckoos, homing pigeons, owls or bower-birds. Of course, the book is not all about birds. The ethologists who have written it ...”

“... to a letter to the Guardian from Godwin’s disenchanted but uniquely well-informed exwife, no such conspiracy ever existed. But then, neither did the Tony Godwin Morpurgo portrays. ‘Whenever there was friction at Harmondsworth (and there was much more friction [after his arrival] than ever there had been in the past) there was Godwin as catalyst or ...”

“... of molecular biology, and the apparent generality of its conclusions, natural history is no more than a collection of particular facts of little theoretical or practical import. There are two reasons why one should dissent from this judgment. The first is that the task of biology is to explain the living world, and that world is irreduciby ...”

“... ended with a succinct answer: humankind ‘can neither be understood nor saved alone’. No philosophy can hope to understand ‘human nature’, Midgley argued, without acknowledging our integration into incomparably larger and older natural systems. Unfortunately, the philosophy and science of animal behaviour, as she found it, was not up to the ...”

“... Desert, and the inhabitants of California’s Sacramento Valley, around 40 per cent of women leave no surviving descendants at their death. Our pre-human foremothers probably had an even lower rate of reproductive success. Perhaps only half the females, in an average generation, left grandchildren. Those who became our ancestresses in each generation were ...”