Philosophy & Social Aspects
- Brainstorming
- Solomon Snyder
- In this book Solomon Snyder describes the political maneuverings and scientific sleuthing that led him and Candace Pert, then a graduate student in his lab, to a critical breakthrough in the effort to understand addiction. Their discovery--the so-called opiate receptor--is a structure on the surface of certain nerve cells that attracts opiates. From this very human chronicle of scientific battles in the ongoing war against pain and addiction, we gain an appreciation of the extraordinary intellectual processes of an eminent scientist. But Dr. Snyder's story of scientific brainstorming also affords us rare glimpses into the fruitful, sometimes frustrating, relationships among scientists which enrich and complicate creative work.
- Hardcover 1989
- The Case of the Female Orgasm
- Elisabeth A. Lloyd
- Why women evolved to have orgasms--when most of their primate relatives don't--is a persistent mystery among evolutionary biologists. In pursuing this mystery, Lloyd arrives at another: How could anything as inadequate as the evolutionary explanations of the female orgasm have passed muster as science? A judicious and revealing look at all twenty evolutionary accounts of the trait of human female orgasm, Lloyd's book is at the same time a case study of how certain biases steer science astray.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
- The Delphic Boat
- Antoine Danchin
- Translated by Alison Quayle
- By the end of 2001, almost 500 genome programs were completed or under way. Drawing upon what researchers worldwide are learning from the gene sequences of bacteria, plants, fungi, fruit flies, worms, and humans, Danchin shows us how genomes are far more than mere collections of genes.
- Hardcover 2003
- The Dialectical Biologist
- Richard Levins
- Richard Lewontin
- Scientists act within a social context and from a philosophical perspective that is inherently political. Whether they realize it or not, scientists always choose sides. The Dialectical Biologist explores this political nature of scientific inquiry, advancing its argument within the framework of Marxist dialectic. These essays stress the concepts of continual change and co-determination between organism and environment, part and whole, structure and process, science and politics. Throughout, this book questions our accepted definitions and biases, showing the self-reflective nature of scientific activity within society.
- Paperback 1987
- The Evolution-Creation Struggle
- Michael Ruse
- In his latest book, Ruse uncovers surprising similarities between evolutionist and creationist thinking. Exploring the underlying philosophical commitments of evolutionists, he reveals that those most hostile to religion are just as evangelical as their fundamentalist opponents. But more crucially, and reaching beyond the biblical issues at stake, he demonstrates that these two diametrically opposed ideologies have, since the Enlightenment, engaged in a struggle for the privilege of defining human origins, moral values, and the nature of reality.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
- Genethics
- David Suzuki
- Peter Knudtson
- Genethics is the most lucid and authoritative guide for general readers to modern genetic technology and the myriad ethical issues it raises.
- Hardcover 1989 / Paperback 1990
- How to Win the Nobel Prize
- J. Michael Bishop
- In 1989 Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery that normal genes under certain conditions can cause cancer. In this book, Bishop tells us how he and Varmus made their momentous discovery. More than a lively account of the making of a brilliant scientist, How to Win the Nobel Prize is also a broader narrative combining two major and intertwined strands of medical history: the long and ongoing struggles to control infectious diseases and to find and attack the causes of cancer.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2004
- Imagined Worlds
- Freeman Dyson
- One hundred years after H. G. Wells visited the future in The Time Machine, Freeman Dyson marshals his uncommon gifts as a scientist and storyteller to show us where science and technology, real and imagined, may be taking us. The stories he tells--about "Napoleonic" versus "Tolstoyan" styles of doing science, the coming era of radioneurology and radiotelepathy, the works of writers from Aldous Huxley to Michael Crichton to William Blake--come from science, science fiction, and history.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1998
- Monad to Man
- Michael Ruse
- In interviews with today's major figures in evolutionary biology--including Stephen Jay Gould, E. O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, and John Maynard Smith--Ruse offers an unparalleled account of evolutionary theory, from popular books to museums to the most complex theorizing, at a time when its status as science is under greater scrutiny than ever before.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 2009
- Nuclear Fear
- Spencer R. Weart
- Nuclear Fear is the first work to explore all the symbolism attached to nuclear bombs, and to civilian nuclear energy as well, employing the powerful tools of history as well as findings from psychology, sociology, and even anthropology. Spencer Weart conveys the hopeful message that once we understand how this imagery has secretly influenced history and our own thinking, we can move on to a clearer view of the choices that confront our civilization.
- Hardcover 1988 / Paperback
- One of Us
- Alice Domurat Dreger
- One of Us views conjoined twinning and other "abnormalities" from the point of view of people living with such anatomies, and considers these issues within the larger historical context of anatomical politics. This deeply thought-provoking and compassionate work exposes the extent of the social frame upon which we construct the "normal."
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2005
- Practical Matter
- Margaret C. Jacob
- Larry Stewart
- Jacob and Stewart examine the profound transformation that began in 1687. From the year when Newton published his Principia to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, science gradually became central to Western thought and economic development. The book aims at a general audience and examines how, despite powerful opposition on the Continent, a Newtonian understanding gained acceptance and practical application.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
- Quantum Leaps
- Jeremy Bernstein
- Quantum Leaps is a lively, erudite book on a subject that Bernstein has lived with for most of its history. His experience and deep understanding are apparent on every page. Including recollections of encounters with the theory and the people responsible for it, Jeremy Bernstein’s account ranges from the cross-pollination of quantum mechanics with Marxist ideology and Christian and Buddhist mysticism to its influence on theater, film, and fiction.
- Hardcover 2009
- Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings
- William C. Wimsatt
- Analytic philosophers once pantomimed physics, trying to understand the world by breaking it down. Thinkers from the Darwinian sciences now pose alternatives to this simplistic reductionism. In a tour of essays spanning thirty years, Wimsatt argues that scientists seek to atomize phenomena only when necessary to understand how entities, events, and processes articulate at different levels. This book offers a philosophy for error-prone humans trying to understand messy systems in the real world.
- Hardcover 2007
- Science in Action
- Bruno Latour
- Bruno Latour provides a lively and challenging analysis of science, demonstrating how social context and technical content are both essential to a proper understanding of scientific activity. Emphasizing that science can only be understood through its practice, the author examines science and technology in action: the role of scientific literature, the activities of laboratories, the institutional context of science in the modern world, and the means by which inventions and discoveries become accepted.
- Paperback 1988
- This Is Biology
- Ernst Mayr
- An eyewitness to this century's relentless biological advance and the originator of some of its most important concepts, Ernst Mayr is uniquely qualified to offer a vision of science that places biology firmly at the center, and a vision of biology that restores the primacy of holistic, evolutionary thinking. Both as an overview of the life sciences and as the culmination of a remarkable life in science, This Is Biology will richly reward professionals and general readers alike.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1998
- Time and Chance
- David Z Albert
- This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003
- Toward a New Philosophy of Biology
- Ernst Mayr
- Paperback 1989
- The Trouble with Science
- Robin Dunbar
- Robin Dunbar asks whether science really is unique to Western culture, even to humankind. He suggests that our "trouble with science" may lie in the fact that evolution has left our minds better able to cope with day-to-day social interaction than with the complexities of the external world.
- Paperback 1996