Georgia Curiosities

by William Schemmel

2011 · Simon and Schuster

The definitive collection of Georgia's odd, wacky, and most offbeat people, places, and things, for Georgia residents and anyone else who enjoys local humor and trivia with a twist.

A Family Practice

by William D. Lindsey, William L. Russell, Mary L. Ryan

2020 · University of Arkansas Press

A Family Practice is the sweeping saga of four generations of doctors, Russell men seeking innovative ways to sustain themselves as medical practitioners in the American South from the early nineteenth to the latter half of the twentieth century. The thread that binds the stories in this saga is one of blood, of medical vocations passed from fathers to sons and nephews. This study of four generations of Russell doctors is an historical study with a biographical thread running through it. The authors take a wide-ranging look at the meaning of intergenerational vocations and the role of family, the economy, and social issues on the evolution of medical education and practice in the United States.

The Sentient Cell

by Arthur S. Reber, Frantisek Baluska, William Miller

2023 · Oxford University Press

All species, extant and extinct, from the simplest unicellular prokaryotes to humans, have an existential consciousness. Without sentience, the first cells that emerged some 4 billion years ago would have been evolutionary dead-ends, unable to survive in the chaotic, dangerous environment in which life first appeared and evolved. In this book, Arthur Reber's theory, the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), is outlined and distinguished from those models that argue that minds could be instantiated on artificial entities and those that maintain consciousness requires a nervous system. The CBC framework takes a novel approach to classic topics such as the origin-of-life, philosophy of mind, the role of genes, the impact of cognition, and how biological information is processed by all species. It also calls for a rethinking of a variety of issues including the moral implications of the sentient capacities of all species, how welfare concerns need to be expanded beyond where they currently are, and critically, how all life is intertwined in a coordinated cognitive ecology. The Sentient Cell explores this revolutionary model, which updates the standard neo-Darwinian framework within which current approaches operate and examines the underlying biomolecular features that are the likely candidates for the "invention" of consciousness and outline their role in cellular life.