Robert J. Richards Book order

Everyone is talking about agility and praising it as THE approach for successful project management. However, many approaches offer hardly any methods for external steering, budgeting, reporting, controlling. Many only cover the development process and leave it to the users to add further parts as needed. This repeatedly leads to the desire for hybrid project management, which combines agile development with project control and planning. However, most hybrid approaches are patchwork. Different philosophies are cobbled together, some of which contradict each other. DSDM® is different here. The method is completely based on agile approaches, but not only covers production, but also offers project planning, project steering and controlling, risk management and reporting with a goal-oriented role and responsibility management. In this booklet, the book author, himself an expert in DSDM® for many years, offers the reader a good overview of the method and shows why many more companies should get to grips with it.

"Examining key disagreements about Darwin that continue to confound even committed Darwinists, Richards and Ruse offer surprisingly divergent views on the origins and nature of Darwin and his ideas. Ruse argues that Darwin was quintessentially British and that the roots of his thought can be traced back to the eighteenth century, particularly to the Industrial Revolution and thinkers such as Adam Smith and Thomas Robert Malthus. Ruse argues that when these influences are appreciated, we can see how Darwin's work in biology is an extension of their theories. In contrast, Richards presents Darwin as a more cosmopolitan, self-educated man, influenced as much by French and particularly German thinkers. Above all, argues Richards, it was Alexander von Humboldt who both inspired Darwin and gave him the conceptual tools that he needed to find and formulate his evolutionary hypotheses. Together, the authors show how the reverberations of the contrasting views on Darwin's influences can be felt in theories about the nature of natural selection, the role of metaphor in science, and the place of God in Darwin's thought."--Provided by publisher

In tracing the history of Darwin’s accomplishment and the trajectory of evolutionary theory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most scholars agree that Darwin introduced blind mechanism into biology, thus banishing moral values from the understanding of nature. According to the standard interpretation, the principle of survival of the fittest has rendered human behavior, including moral behavior, ultimately selfish. Few doubt that Darwinian theory, especially as construed by the master’s German disciple, Ernst Haeckel, inspired Hitler and led to Nazi atrocities. In this collection of essays, Robert J. Richards argues that this orthodox view is wrongheaded. A close historical examination reveals that Darwin, in more traditional fashion, constructed nature with a moral spine and provided it with a goal: man as a moral creature. The book takes up many other topics—including the character of Darwin’s chief principles of natural selection and divergence, his dispute with Alfred Russel Wallace over man’s big brain, the role of language in human development, his relationship to Herbert Spencer, how much his views had in common with Haeckel’s, and the general problem of progress in evolution. Moreover, Richards takes a forceful stand on the timely issue of whether Darwin is to blame for Hitler’s atrocities. Was Hitler a Darwinian? is intellectual history at its boldest.

Prior to the First World War, more people learned of evolutionary theory from the voluminous writings of Charles Darwin’s foremost champion in Germany, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), than from any other source, including the writings of Darwin himself. But, with detractors ranging from paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to modern-day creationists and advocates of intelligent design, Haeckel is better known as a divisive figure than as a pioneering biologist. Robert J. Richards’s intellectual biography rehabilitates Haeckel, providing the most accurate measure of his science and art yet written, as well as a moving account of Haeckel’s eventful life.

"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." This sentiment encapsulates the German Romantics' belief that art and literature could unveil meanings in nature that rational philosophy and science could not. In this comprehensive exploration, Robert J. Richards illustrates how the Romantic worldview influenced and was shaped by the lives of key figures and the evolution of nineteenth-century science. By weaving together Romantic literature, science, and philosophy, Richards provides insight into the lives of individuals such as Goethe, the Schlegel brothers, Humboldt, and the Schellings, showing how their personal experiences profoundly impacted their ideas, alongside their cultural heritage. He particularly examines how Romantic notions of the self, along with aesthetic and moral considerations, influenced scientific representations of nature. While historians have often viewed Romanticism as a minor influence on scientific thought, Richards positions it at the forefront of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the ideas that informed Darwin's evolutionary theory. By merging the personal and poetic dimensions of philosophy and science, Richards reshapes our understanding of both Romanticism and the development of biology in that era.

This short and highly accessible volume opens up the subject of the philosophy of biology to professionals and to students in both disciplines. The text covers briefly and clearly all of the pertinent topics in the subject, dealing with both human and non-human issues, and quite uniquely surveying not only scholars in the English-speaking world but others elsewhere, including the Eastern block. As molecular biologists peer ever more deeply into life's mysteries, there are those who fear that such 'reductionism' conceals more than it reveals, and there are those who complain that the new techniques threaten the physical safety of us all. As students of evolution apply their new-found understanding to our own species, some people think that this is merely an excuse for racist and sexist propaganda, and others worry that the whole exercise blatantly violates the religious beliefs many of us hold dear. These controversies are the joint concern of biologists and philosophers--of those whose task it is to study the theoretical and moral foundations of knowledge. The comprehensive and fully up-to-date bibliography makes this an invaluable and indispensable guide.