Tries to combine the biblical and scientific views of the universe's creation, and looks at how perception of the world has changed from biblical times to the present.

In this timely work, Russell, philosopher, agnostic, mathematician, and renowned peace advocate, offers a brief yet insightful study of the conflicts between science and traditional religion during the last four centuries. Examining accounts in which scientific advances clashed with Christian doctrine or biblical interpretations of the day, from Galileo and the Copernican Revolution, to the medical breakthroughs of anesthesia and inoculation, Russell points to the constant upheaval and reevaluation of our systems of belief throughout history. In turn, he identifies where similar debates between modern science and the Church still exist today. Michael Ruse's new introduction brings these conflicts between science and theology up to date, focusing on issues arising after World War II.

This classic is sure to interest all readers of philosophy and religion, as well as those interested in Russell's thought and writings.

Global environmental change, argues Michel Serres, has forced us to reconsider our relationship to nature. In this translation of his influential 1990 book Le Contrat Naturel, Serres calls for a natural contract to be negotiated between Earth and its inhabitants. World history is often referred to as the story of human conflict. Those struggles that are seen as our history must now include the uncontrolled violence that humanity perpetrates upon the earth, and the uncontrollable menace to human life posed by the earth in reaction to this violence. Just as a social contract once brought order to human relations, Serres believes that we must now sign a "natural contract" with the earth to bring balance and reciprocity to our relations with the planet that gives us life. Our survival depends on the extent to which humans join together and act globally, on an earth now conceived as an entity. Tracing the ancient beginnings of modernity, Serres examines the origins and possibilities of a natural contract through an extended meditation on the contractual foundations of law and science. By invoking a nonhuman, physical world, Serres asserts, science frees us from the oppressive confines of a purely social existence, but threatens to become a totalitarian order in its own right. The new legislator of the natural contract must bring science and law into balance. Serres ends his meditation by retelling the story of the natural contract as a series of parables. He sees humanity as a spacecraft that with the help of science and technology has cast off from familiar moorings. In place of the ties that modernity and analytic reason have severed, we find a network of relations both stranger and stronger than any we once knew, binding us to one another and to the world. The philosopher's harrowing and joyous task, Serres tells us, is that of comprehending and experiencing the bonds of violence and love that unite us in our spacewalk to the spaceship Mother Earth.

In 1500 few Europeans considered nature an object worthy of study, yet within fifty years the first museums of natural history had appeared, chiefly in Italy. Vast collections of natural curiosities - including living human dwarves, "toad-stones", and unicorn horns - were gathered by Italian patricians as a means of knowing their world. The museums built around these collections became the center of a scientific culture that over the next century and a half served as a microcosm of Italian society and as the crossroads where the old and new sciences met. In Possessing Nature, Paula Findlen vividly recreates the lost world of late Renaissance and Baroque Italian museums and demonstrates its significance in the history of science and culture. Based on exhaustive research into natural histories, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Findlen describes collections and collectors great and small, beginning with Ulisse Aldrovandi, professor of natural history at the University of Bologna. Aldrovandi, whose museum was known as the "eighth wonder" of the world, was a great popularizer of collecting among the upper classes. From the universities, Findlen traces the spread of natural history in the seventeenth century to other learned sectors of society: religious orders, scientific societies, and princely courts. There was, as Findlen shows, no separation between scientific culture and general political culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The community of these early naturalists was, in many ways, a mirror of the humanist "republic of letters". Archival documents point to the currying of patrons and the hierarchical nature of the scientific professions, characteristicscommon to the larger world around them. Examining anew the society and accomplishments of the first collectors of nature, Findlen argues that the accepted distinction between the "old" Aristotelian, text-based science and the "new" empirical science during the period is false. Rather, natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and collecting in order to develop new scholarship. In this way, as in others, the Scientific Revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old form of knowledge and the new. Possessing Nature is a unique cross-disciplinary study. Not only does its detailed description of the earliest natural history collections make an important contribution to museum studies and cultural history, but by placing these museums in a continuum of scientific inquiry, it also adds to our understanding of the history of science.

The works from Daniel Bernoulli's youth contained in this first volume of his Collected Works bear witness above all of his versatility; they deal with subjects as different as physiology, formal logic, mathematical analysis, hydrodynamics and positional astronomy. Daniel Bernoulli's contacts with Italian scientists gave rise to several controversies. The present volume documents both sides in each of these debates, which culminated with the publication of Bernoulli's first book Exercitationes mathe- maticae in 1724. The discussions with the renowned mathematician Jacopo Riccati on second-order differential equations and on the Newtonian theory of the out-flow of fluids from vessels deserve particular interest. A third group of texts goes back to the time Bernoulli spent at the newly- founded Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, where he had been appointed in 1725. There he worked out two more contributions to physiological research - on muscle movement and on the blind spot in the human eye - as well as his only paper in positional astronomy. This last work - suggested by a prize question of the Paris Academie des Sciences - became the occasion for a vehement conflict; the present volume documents these "Zankereien" (squabbles) and also reproduces three competing treatises. To complete the documentation of Daniel Bernoulli's work on physiology, the volume also includes his academic ceremonial speech De Vita of 1737, where he sketches for the first time the circulation of the work done by the human heart, and its elaboration by Bernoulli's student Daniel Passavant.

Early modern Germany saw the dissemination of vast quantities of information at unprecedented speed. Popular knowledge, scientific inquiry, and scholarship influenced the political order, poetic expression, public opinion, and mechanisms of social control. This collection presents twelve essays by distinguished scholars on newly emerging epistemologies regarding the transcendent nature of the Divine, the natural world, the body, sexuality, intellectual property, aesthetics, demons, and witches. The contributors are Thomas Cramer, Walter Haug, C. Stephen Jaeger, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Jan-Dirk Maller, James A. Parente, Jr., Stephan K. Schindler, Gerhard F. Strasser, Lynne Tatlock, Elaine Tennant, Horst Wenzel, and Gerhild Scholz Williams.

Convergence-based research approaches are critical in solving many scientific challenges, which frequently draw on large teams of collaborators from multiple disciplines. The 2014 report Convergence: Facilitating Transdisciplinary Integration of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Beyond describes the term "convergence" as a multidisciplinary approach that melds divergent areas of expertise to form conclusions that are inaccessible otherwise. However, a convergence-based approach involves hybrid systems of people, buildings, and instruments, which pose complex structural and managerial challenges. In October 23?24, 2018, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop to explore efforts to promote cultures that support convergence-based approaches to research. The 2014 report served as a foundation for this workshop, allowing participants to further explore convergence as a valuable and adaptable approach to organizing research. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop. Table of Contents Front Matter 1 Introduction 2 Convergence in Practice: Opportunities and Challenges 3 Workshop Themes and Looking Ahead References Appendix A: Workshop Agenda Appendix B: Participant List Appendix C: Statement of Task Appendix D: Advisory Group on Convergence Biographies

Surveys are the principal source of data not only for social science, but for consumer research, political polling, and federal statistics. In response to social and technological trends, rates of survey nonresponse have risen markedly in recent years, prompting observers to worry about the continued validity of surveys as a tool for data gathering. Newspaper stories, magazine articles, radio programs, television broadcasts, and Internet blogs are filled with data derived from surveys of one sort or another. Reputable media outlets generally indicate whether a survey is representative, but much of the data routinely bandied about in the media and on the Internet are not based on representative samples and are of dubious use in making accurate statements about the populations they purport to represent. Surveys are social interactions, and like all interactions between people, they are embedded within social structures and guided by shared cultural understandings. This issue of The ANNALS examines the difficulties with finding willing respondents to these surveys and how the changing structure of society, whether it be the changing family structure, mass immigration, rising inequality, or the rise of technology, has presented new issues to conducting surveys. This volume will be of interest to faculty and students who specialize in sociological movements as well as economic and immigration movements and its effect on surveying. "

Surveys are the principal source of data not only for social science, but for consumer research, political polling, and federal statistics. In response to social and technological trends, rates of survey nonresponse have risen markedly in recent years, prompting observers to worry about the continued validity of surveys as a tool for data gathering. Newspaper stories, magazine articles, radio programs, television broadcasts, and Internet blogs are filled with data derived from surveys of one sort or another. Reputable media outlets generally indicate whether a survey is representative, but much of the data routinely bandied about in the media and on the Internet are not based on representative samples and are of dubious use in making accurate statements about the populations they purport to represent. Surveys are social interactions, and like all interactions between people, they are embedded within social structures and guided by shared cultural understandings. This issue of The ANNALS examines the difficulties with finding willing respondents to these surveys and how the changing structure of society, whether it be the changing family structure, mass immigration, rising inequality, or the rise of technology, has presented new issues to conducting surveys. This volume will be of interest to faculty and students who specialize in sociological movements as well as economic and immigration movements and its effect on surveying. "

How do federal statistics strengthen our nation's science as well as its policy? From demographers requiring vital statistics to economists relying on national accounts, from political scientists using voting data to sociologists requiring race/ethnicity statistics, from public health researchers needing epidemiology data to those working on the history of the United States and drawing on statistical records, the need for official statistics is great. And yet it is not widely recognized that federal statistics provide a vital contribution to the nation's scientific infrastructure, as well as serving as an information provider to the policy process. What is the role of the federal statistical system in our scientific knowledge of American society? Would the social knowledge relevant to public policies have reached current levels of maturity in the absence of public statistics? Except by the scientific community that actually uses them, federal statistical programs are typically not thought of in scientific terms but as adjuncts to important government functions. In this latest volume of The ANNALS, leading academics, along with key federal officials, including the president's science advisor, the chief statistician of the U.S., the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the presidents of the National Academies, and the director of the Census Bureau address the argument that the statistics that the federal statistical system produces should be understood as constituting a scientific infrastructure for the empirical social sciences. Further, they see the current federal statistical system as "the best hope for bringing strong science to bear on new data sources" and "the best place to navigate unforeseen challenges in preserving the independence of statistical information from political interference." This unique collection of essays conceptualizes the U.S. Federal Statistical System-its role, reach, achievements, and vulnerabilities. The authors explore challenging issues such as privacy and confidentiality protections, data quality, and maintaining representativeness. Their intriguing discussion also takes up: * the move from a census and survey data system to a system that increasingly incorporates administrative and digital data; * the nation's scientific leadership's role as advocates for statistical programs; * the problems with the scientific methodology-sample surveys-on which these statistics rest; and * strengthening the network of statistical agencies and programs. Recommendations are offered, ranging from how to better organize the system, how to protect statistics from political interference, how to strengthen their role in science and in the policy process, and how to prepare for the challenges of a "new information order." If federal statistics are the knowledge base from which policy problems and solutions emerge, it is imperative that we pay attention to the lessons they offer. Never before has this topic received this level of attention from such an array of contributors. A must read for all social scientists and policy-makers.

In a fast-moving world, the necessity of making decisions, and preferably good ones, has become even more difficult. One reason is the variety and number of choices perhaps available which often are not presented or understood. Alternatives are often unclear and complex paths to them confusing and misleading. Thus the process of decision making itself requires analysis on an ongoing basis. Decision making is often made based on cultural factors whereas the best alternative might be quite different. The subject touches ethical aspects as well as psychological considerations. This book presents important research on the psychology of decision making related to law and law enforcement, health care and science.