Since emerging as a discipline in the middle of the eighteenth
century, natural history has been at the heart of the life
sciences. It gave rise to the major organizing theory of
life--evolution--and continues to be a vital science with
impressive practical value. Central to advanced work in ecology,
agriculture, medicine, and environmental science, natural history
also attracts enormous popular interest.
In "Finding Order in Nature" Paul Farber traces the development
of the naturalist tradition since the Enlightenment and considers
its relationship to other research areas in the life sciences.
Written for the general reader and student alike, the volume
explores the adventures of early naturalists, the ideas that lay
behind classification systems, the development of museums and zoos,
and the range of motives that led collectors to collect. Farber
also explores the importance of sociocultural contexts,
institutional settings, and government funding in the story of this
durable discipline.
"The quest for insight into the order of nature leads
naturalists beyond classification to the creation of general
theories that explain the living world. Those naturalists who focus
on the order of nature inquire about the ecological relationships
among organisms and also among organisms and their surrounding
environments. They ask fundamental questions of evolution, about
how change actually occurs over short and long periods of time.
Many naturalists are drawn, consequently, to deeper philosophical
and ethical issues: What is the extent of our ability to understand
nature? And, understanding nature, will we be able to preserve it?
Naturalists question the meaning of the order they discover and
ponder our moral responsibility for it."--from the Introduction
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