Mark Blumberg – författare

The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Behavioral Neuroscience is a seminal reference work in the burgeoning field of developmental behavioral neuroscience, which has emerged in recent years as an important sister discipline to developmental psychobiology. This handbook, part of the Oxford Library of Neuroscience, provides an introduction to recent advances in research at the intersection of developmental science and behavioral neuroscience, while emphasizing the central research perspectives of developmental psychobiology. Contributors to the Oxford Handbook of Developmental Behavioral Neuroscience are drawn from a variety of fields, including developmental psychobiology, neuroscience, comparative psychology, and evolutionary biology, demonstrating the opportunities to advance our understanding of behavioral and neural development through enhanced interactions among parallel disciplines. In a field ripe for collaboration and integration, the Oxford Handbook of Developmental Behavioral Neuroscience provides an unprecedented overview of conceptual and methodological issues pertaining to comparative and developmental neuroscience that can serve as a roadmap for researchers and a textbook for educators. Its broad reach will spur new insights and compel new collaborations in this rapidly growing field.

In most respects, Abigail and Brittany Hensel are normal American twins. Born and raised in a small town, they enjoy a close relationship, though each has her own tastes and personality. But the Hensels also share a body. Their two heads sit side-by-side on a single torso, with two arms and two legs. They have not only survived, but have developed into athletic, graceful young women. And that, writes Mark S. Blumberg, opens an extraordinary window onto human development and evolution.In Freaks of Nature, Blumberg turns a scientist's eye on the oddities of nature, showing how a subject once relegated to the sideshow can help explain some of the deepest complexities of biology. Why, for example, does a two-headed human so resemble a two-headed minnow? What we need to understand, Blumberg argues, is that anomalies are the natural products of development, and it is through developmental mechanisms that evolution works. Freaks of Nature induces a kind of intellectual vertigo as it upends our intuitive understanding of biology. What really is an anomaly? Why is a limbless human a "freak" but a limbless reptile-a snake-a successful variation? What we see as deformities, Blumberg writes, are merely alternative paths for development, which challenge both the creature itself and our ability to fit it into our familiar categories. Rather than mere dead-ends, many anomalies prove surprisingly survivable-as in the case of the goat without forelimbs that learned to walk upright. Blumberg explains how such variations occur, and points to the success of the Hensel sisters and the goat as examples of the extraordinary flexibility inherent in individual development.In taking seriously a subject that has often been shunned as discomfiting and embarrassing, Mark Blumberg sheds new light on how individuals-and entire species-develop, survive, and evolve.

This volume proposes an interdependent relationship between progress and obstacles in architecture and the built environment. It challenges the positive notion of progress, and the conception of progress and obstacle as a dichotomy.For shapers of the world, finding ‘the solution’ is often a mark of progress that becomes embedded in culture, society, and history. Progress is ever-present. Through the exploration of diverse positions in history, theory, and practice, this book explores the potential utility of the progressively problematic rather than the natural tendency towards the progressively solved. Chapters draw on historic spaces, technological advancement, incorporation of the natural world, alterative production, and the consideration of human experience both sensory and psychological. Challenging the positive connotation of ‘progress’, the writings also explore reversing the notion of obstacle from disruptive anti-tool to obstacle of utilitarian method, a useful tool, pressing approach, and overarching value system.This will be interesting reading for upper-level students and scholars of Architecture, Urban Design, Philosophy, and Sociology.