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Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues > History of science
Contemporary interest in Darwin rises from a general ideal of what
Darwin's books ought to contain: a theory of transformation of
species by natural selection. However, a reader opening Darwin's
masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, today may be struck by the
fact that this "selectionist" view does not deliver the key to many
aspects of the book. Without contesting the importance of natural
selection to Darwinism, much less supposing that a fully-formed
"Darwinism" stepped out of Darwin's head in 1859, this innovative
volume aims to return to the text of the Origin itself. Revisiting
the 'Origin of Species' focuses on Darwin as theorising on the
origin of variations; showing that Darwin himself was never a
pan-selectionist (in contrast to some of his followers) but was
concerned with "other means of modification" (which makes him an
evolutionary pluralist). Furthermore, in contrast to common
textbook presentations of "Darwinism", Hoquet stresses the fact
that On the Origin of Species can lend itself to several
contradictory interpretations. Thus, this volume identifies where
rival interpretations have taken root; to unearth the ambiguities
readers of Darwin have latched onto as they have produced a myriad
of Darwinian legacies, each more or less faithful enough to the
originator's thought. Emphasising the historical features,
complexities and intricacies of Darwin's argument, Revisiting the
'Origin of Species' can be used by any lay readers opening Darwin's
On the Origin of Species. This volume will also appeal to students
and researchers interested in areas such as Evolution, Natural
Selection, Scientific Translations and Origins of Life.
The letters, most of which are published for the first time, include all that have been preserved from Darwin's correspondence with family, undergraduate friends as well as others in Shropshire and Staffordshire. voyage.
Science and faith are often seen as being in opposition. In this
book, award-winning sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund questions
this assumption based on research she has conducted over the past
fifteen years. She highlights the ways these two spheres point to
universal human values, showing readers they don't have to choose
between science and Christianity. Breathing fresh air into debates
that have consisted of more opinions than data, Ecklund offers
insights uncovered by her research and shares her own story of
personal challenges and lessons. In the areas most rife with
conflict--the origins of the universe, evolution, climate change,
and genetic technology--readers will find fascinating points of
convergence in eight virtues of human existence: curiosity, doubt,
humility, creativity, healing, awe, shalom, and gratitude. The book
includes discussion questions for group use and to help pastors,
small group leaders, and congregants broach controversial topics
and bridge the science-faith divide.
Knowledge and Power presents and explores science not as something
specifically for scientists, but as an integral part of human
civilization, and traces the development of science through
different historical settings from the Middle Ages through to the
Cold War. Five case studies are examined within this book: the
creation of modern science by Muslims, Christians and Jews in the
medieval Mediterranean; the global science of the Jesuit order in
the early modern world; the relationship between "modernization"
and "westernization" in Russia and Japan from the late seventeenth
to the mid-nineteenth century; the role of science in the European
colonization of Africa; and the rivalry in "big science" between
the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Each
chapter includes original documents to further the reader's
understanding, and this second edition has been enhanced with a
selection of new images and a new chapter on Big Science and the
Superpowers during the Cold War. Since the Middle Ages, people have
been working in many civilizations and cultures to advance
knowledge of, and power over, the natural world. Through a
combination of narrative and primary sources, Knowledge and Power
provides students with an understanding of how different cultures
throughout time and across the globe approached science. It is
ideal for students of world history and the history of science.
This volume explores the relationship between physics and
metaphysics in Descartes' philosophy. According to the standard
account, Descartes modified the objects of metaphysics and physics
and inverted the order in which these two disciplines were
traditionally studied. This book challenges the standard account in
which Descartes prioritizes metaphysics over physics. It does so by
taking into consideration the historical reception of Descartes and
the ways in which Descartes himself reacted to these receptions in
his own lifetime. The book stresses the diversity of these
receptions by taking into account not only Cartesianisms but also
anti-Cartesianisms, and by showing how they retroactively
highlighted different aspects of Descartes' works and theoretical
choices. The historical aspect of the volume is unique in that it
not only analyzes different constructions of Descartes that emerged
in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, but also reflects on how his
work was first read by philosophers across Europe. Taken together,
the essays in this volume offer a fresh and up-to-date contribution
to this important debate in early modern philosophy.
When originally published in 1952, this book filled a gap in the
history of philosophy and science and remains an important work
today, because it puts the main mathematical and physical
discoveries of Descartes in an accessible form, for the benefit of
English readers. Descartes is acknowledged to be the founder of
modern mathematics, through his invention of analytical geometry
and this volume charts Descartes' role in bringing a unity into
algebra and geometry and the development of mathematics into a
discipline which could be properly analysed. Carefully paraphrasing
the Geometrie, this volume retains much of Descartes' original
notation as well as the original diagrams. The volume also
discusses the considerable contribution that Descartes made to the
physical sciences which involved accurate work in optics, light,
sight and colour.
The deep sea covers more than half the surface of the Earth, but
until the circumnavigation made by the HMS Challenger almost
nothing was known about the animals that live there. Full Fathom
5000 gives an account of the remarkable discoveries that were made
during the voyage and describes the strange and bizarre creatures
that live in perpetual darkness a kilometer or more below the
surface of the sea. Until the early 1870s, very little was known
about the creatures lurking in the depths of our oceans. People had
found a few things trapped in fishing gear or caught on the anchors
of ships, but those who tried to venture to the bottom of the
seafloor often died before they made it there. The first systematic
investigation into life in our oceans was made during the
circumnavigation of the HMS Challenger. Scientists credit this
voyage as the beginning of modern oceanography, and the story of it
is full of twists and turns. It led to the discovery of a whole new
fauna previously unknown, which Full Fathom 5000 describes for the
first time in one place for readers. In this book, Graham Bell
takes readers through the voyage station by station, following the
progress of the expedition and introducing some of the new and
strange animals that were hauled up from the depths of the ocean
and seen by human eyes for the first time. You will meet, among
others, the ugliest fish in the world, flesh-eating clams, dwarf
males, sea devils, and an octopus that wears lipstick. The book
begins with a description of the first attempts scientists made to
explore the deep sea, leading up to the plan for a voyage around
the world on the HMS Challenger. The chapters take readers from
station to station, though all of the world's oceans, visiting
every continent and crossing the Equator five times. Bell details
what was discovered during hundreds of stops to take samples, and
he describes around a hundred stations where remarkable animals
were hauled from the sea. The book ends with a description of what
came after the end of this journey, explaining what they did with
the animals that were collected and what became of the scientists
and sailors who planned the voyage and traveled together around the
world.
The letters, most of which are published for the first time, include all that have been preserved from Darwin's correspondence with family, undergraduate friends as well as others in Shropshire and Staffordshire. voyage.
Population health has recently grown from a series of loosely
connected critiques of twentieth-century public health and medicine
into a theoretical framework with a corresponding field of
research-population health science. Its approach is to promote the
public's health through improving everyday human life: afford-able
nutritious food, clean air, safe places where children can play,
living wages, etc. It recognizes that addressing contemporary
health challenges such as the prevalence of type 2 diabetes will
take much more than good hospitals and public health departments.
Blending philosophy of science/medicine, public health ethics and
history, this book offers a framework that explains, analyses and
largely endorses the features that define this relatively new
field. Presenting a philosophical perspective, Valles helps to
clarify what these features are and why they matter, including:
searching for health's "upstream" causes in social life, embracing
a professional commitment to studying and ameliorating the
staggering health inequities in and between populations; and
reforming scientific practices to foster humility and respect among
the many scientists and non- scientists who must work
collaboratively to promote health. Featuring illustrative case
studies from around the globe at the end of all main chapters, this
radical monograph is written to be accessible to all scholars and
advanced students who have an interest in health-from public health
students to professional philosophers.
First published in 2005, this book represents the first full length
biography of John Phillips, one of the most remarkable and
important scientists of the Victorian period. Adopting a broad
chronological approach, this book not only traces the development
of Phillips' career but clarifies and highlights his role within
Victorian culture, shedding light on many wider themes. It explores
how Phillips' love of science was inseparable from his need to earn
a living and develop a career which could sustain him. Hence
questions of power, authority, reputation and patronage were
central to Phillips' career and scientific work. Drawing on a
wealth of primary sources and a rich body of recent writings on
Victorian science, this biography brings together his personal
story with the scientific theories and developments of the day, and
fixes them firmly within the context of wider society.
The period in Europe known as the Belle Epoque was a time of
vibrant and unsettling modernization in social and political
organization, in artistic and literary life, and in the conduct and
discoveries of the sciences. These trends, and the emphasis on
internationalization that characterized them, necessitated the
development of new structures and processes for discovering,
disseminating, manipulating and managing access to information.
This book analyses the dynamics of the emerging networks of
individuals, organizations, technologies and publications by which
means information was exchanged across and through all kinds of
borders and boundaries in this period. It extends the frame within
which historical discourse about information can take place by
bringing together scholars not only from different disciplines but
also from different national and linguistic backgrounds. As a
result the volume offers new and surprising ways of looking at the
historical period of the Belle Epoque. It will be of interest to
scholars and students of information history and the emergence of
the information society as well as to social and cultural
historians concerned with the late 19th and early 20th century.
The chief argument of this book, first published in 1990, is that
Ibn al-Haytham's On the Configuration of the World is a
non-technical expose of basic astronomical teachings: it was
written in particular for those whose main interests were in the
areas of philosophy and natural science and who, accordingly, had
an interest in relating the mathematical devices employed by
professional astronomers to the heavenly bodies mentioned in the
philosophical literature. However, the primary reason for this
publication is not the advancement of this thesis, but rather the
presentation of the medieval texts themselves, normally so
inaccessible to scholars and students alike.
The Medicine Cabinet is a beautifully curated and expertly written
compendium of over 100 astonishing objects related to the story of
medicine. Each object is cared for by London's Science Museum,
which houses one of the largest and most significant collections of
medical artefacts in the world - including a Bronze Age trepanned
skull, healing water from an Ancient Greek well, a
seventeenth-century barber's pole, a pharmacist's ceramic leech
jar, a gold memento mori ring, First World War blood transfusion
apparatus and a prototype MRI scanner. Each object is a profound
reminder of the fragility of human existence, but also of the
extraordinary lengths gone to by scientists, medical professionals
and ordinary people in the attempt to conquer mortality. Published
in association with the Science Museum, The Medicine Cabinet is a
rich visual exploration of life, death and everything in between.
Theory of Conics, Geometrical Constructions and Practical Geometry:
A History of Arabic Sciences and Mathematics Volume 3, provides a
unique primary source on the history and philosophy of mathematics
and science from the mediaeval Arab world. The present text is
complemented by two preceding volumes of A History of Arabic
Sciences and Mathematics, which focused on founding figures and
commentators in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the historical
and epistemological development of 'infinitesimal mathematics' as
it became clearly articulated in the oeuvre of Ibn al-Haytham. This
volume examines the increasing tendency, after the ninth century,
to explain mathematical problems inherited from Greek times using
the theory of conics. Roshdi Rashed argues that Ibn al-Haytham
completes the transformation of this 'area of activity,' into a
part of geometry concerned with geometrical constructions, dealing
not only with the metrical properties of conic sections but with
ways of drawing them and properties of their position and shape.
Including extensive commentary from one of world's foremost
authorities on the subject, this book contributes a more informed
and balanced understanding of the internal currents of the history
of mathematics and the exact sciences in Islam, and of its adaptive
interpretation and assimilation in the European context. This
fundamental text will appeal to historians of ideas,
epistemologists and mathematicians at the most advanced levels of
research.
This is a study of science in Muslim society. The first volume
starts at the rise of science in the eighth century and explores
the efforts of nineteenth century Muslim thinkers and reformers to
regain the lost ethos that had given birth to the rich scientific
heritage of earlier Muslim civilization. The second volume reveals
the undermining effect of European imperialism on western-oriented
religious reformers and secular intellectuals, for whom science and
political reform went together, and concludes with a chapter on the
state of science in contemporary Muslim societies and the efforts
to institutionalize science today.
Written over several decades and collected together for the first
time, these richly detailed contextual studies by a leading
historian of science examine the diverse ways in which cultural
values and political and professional considerations impinged upon
the construction, acceptance and applications of nineteenth century
evolutionary theory. They include a number of interrelated analyses
of the highly politicised roles of embryos and monsters in pre- and
post- Darwinian evolutionary theorizing, including Darwin's;
several studies of the intersection of Darwinian science and its
practitioners with issues of gender, race and sexuality, featuring
a pioneering contextual analysis of Darwin's theory of sexual
selection; and explorations of responses to Darwinian science by
notable Victorian women intellectuals, including the crusading
anti-feminist and ardent Darwinian, Eliza Lynn Linton, the feminist
and leading anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe, and Annie
Besant, the bible-bashing, birth-control advocate who confronted
Darwin's opposition to contraception at the notorious Knowlton
Trial.
The discourse and practice of science are deeply connected to
explicit and implicit narratives of nature. However, nature has
been understood in diverse ways by cultures across the world. Could
these different views of nature generate the possibility of
alternate views on science? Part of the innovative series Science
and Technology Studies, this volume looks at different
conceptualizations of nature and the manner in which they structure
the practice of the sciences. The essays draw upon philosophy,
history, sociology, religion, feminism, mathematics and cultural
studies, and establish a dialogue between cultures through a
multi-disciplinary exploration of science. With contributions from
major scholars in the field, this volume will deeply interest
scholars and students of science and technology studies; sociology,
history and philosophy of science; as also environmental studies.
This volume provides a unique primary source on the history and
philosophy of mathematics and science from the mediaeval Arab
world. The fourth volume of A History of Arabic Sciences and
Mathematics is complemented by three preceding volumes which
focused on infinitesimal determinations and other chapters of
classical mathematics. This book includes five main works of the
polymath Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) on astronomy, spherical geometry
and trigonometry, plane trigonometry and studies of astronomical
instruments on hour lines, horizontal sundials and compasses for
great circles. In particular, volume four examines: the increasing
tendency to mathematize the inherited astronomy from Greek sources,
namely Ptolemy's Almagest; the development of celestial kinematics;
new research in spherical geometry and trigonometry required by the
new kinematical theory; the study on astronomical instruments and
its impact on mathematical research. These new historical materials
and their mathematical and historical commentaries contribute to
rewriting the history of mathematical astronomy and mathematics
from the 11th century on. Including extensive commentary from one
of the world's foremost authorities on the subject, this
fundamental text is essential reading for historians and
mathematicians at the most advanced levels of research.
This presents the previously unpublished journal of the principal
naturalist on Cook's second voyage. The main pagination of this
volume and the three previous volumes in the set (Second series
152-154) is continuous. Overshadowed for nearly two hundred years
in European scholarship by the achievements and reputation of his
eldest son George Forster, J. R. Forster - principal naturalist on
James Cook's second voyage - was nevertheless recognised by many
contemporaries as one of the 'universal geniuses' of the late 18th
century. His journal of the voyage offers many new insights,
expressed at times in quite unrestrained language, into the
day-to-day relationships, life and thinking and theory-testing on
the second, and the most scientific and the most epic of Cook's
voyages. However, the circumstances of Forster's career and
personality were such that his work was dogged by debilitating
disputes and vendettas. Consequently, important works such as this
journal, which would have established him as the leading
comparative anthropologist, linguist, geographer and zoologist of
the Pacific, have thus far remained obscure and seldom-used
manuscripts. Anthropologists, ethnolinguists, geographers,
botanists, zoologists and medical and literary historians will find
here much new observation and theory; for the two Forsters
fashioned forces to influence Alexander von Humboldt and foretell
Charles Darwin. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of
the volume first published in 1981.
Published in 1971: This book represents the Posthumous works of the
author, as well as lectures on Philosophy, Astronomy, and Science.
The gender gap in science, technology, engineering and mathematics
(STEM) varies greatly from country to country, and the number of
Japanese women in these fields remains relatively few. This prompts
us to ask why the proportion of female scientists in Japan is still
remarkably low and what measures the government, universities and
research institutes are taking to address this issue. This book
sheds light on historical developments and the current gender
equality situation in Japan, through the lens of women in STEM. It
shows how a policy of gender equality in science and engineering
has been introduced through the coordinated efforts of academia,
scientific societies and the government, and how this has led to a
slow but steady increase in female representation. The book draws
on extensive data including interviews with government officials,
scientists and educators in Japan to provide a revealing case study
on how the underrepresentation of women in the fields of science,
technology and engineering has been approached and dealt with by a
national government. It heralds a new era for female scientists, by
showcasing several programmes undertaken by government,
universities and national research institutions to support multiple
career paths for and the progression of female scientists in Japan.
Tracing the historical development of Japan's policies towards
women in science and education, this book will be welcomed by
students and scholars interested in Japanese studies, comparative
social policy, gender studies, employment and the history of
science and technology.
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