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'Daring, learned and humane ... A revelatory restoration of wonder'
Stephen Greenblatt. We no longer think, like the ancient Chinese
did, that the world was hatched from an egg, or, like the Maori,
that it came from the tearing-apart of a love embrace. The Greeks
told of a tempestuous Hera and a cunning Zeus, but we now use genes
and natural selection to explain fear and desire, and physics to
demystify the workings of the universe. Science is an astounding
achievement, but are we really any wiser than the ancients? Has
science revealed the secrets of fate and immortality? Has it
provided protection from jealousy or love? There are those who
believe that science has replaced faith, but must it also be a
death knell for mythology? Evolutions brings to life the latest
scientific thinking on the birth of the universe and the solar
system, the journey from a single cell all the way to our human
minds. Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world
around us and within us, Oren Harman uses modern science to create
new and original mythologies. Here are the Earth and the Moon
presenting a cosmological view of motherhood, a panicking
Mitochondrion introducing sex and death to the world, the
loneliness of consciousness emerging from the memory of an octopus,
and the birth of language in evolution summoning humankind's
struggle with truth. Science may not solve our existential puzzles,
but like the age-old legends, its magical discoveries can help us
continue the never-ending search.
What are the conditions that foster true novelty and allow
visionaries to set their eyes on unknown horizons? What have been
the challenges that have spawned new innovations, and how have they
shaped modern biology? In Dreamers, Visionaries, and
Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences, editors Oren Harman and
Michael R. Dietrich explore these questions through the lives of
eighteen exemplary biologists who had grand and often radical ideas
that went far beyond the run-of-the-mill science of their peers.
From the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who coined the word
"biology" in the early nineteenth century, to the American James
Lovelock, for whom the Earth is a living, breathing organism, these
dreamers innovated in ways that forced their contemporaries to
reexamine comfortable truths. With this collection readers will
follow Jane Goodall into the hidden world of apes in African
jungles and Francis Crick as he attacks the problem of
consciousness. Join Mary Lasker on her campaign to conquer cancer
and follow geneticist George Church as he dreams of bringing back
woolly mammoths and Neanderthals. In these lives and the many
others featured in these pages, we discover visions that were
sometimes fantastical, quixotic, and even threatening and
destabilizing, but always a challenge to the status quo.
What are the conditions that foster true novelty and allow
visionaries to set their eyes on unknown horizons? What have been
the challenges that have spawned new innovations, and how have they
shaped modern biology? In Dreamers, Visionaries, and
Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences, editors Oren Harman and
Michael R. Dietrich explore these questions through the lives of
eighteen exemplary biologists who had grand and often radical ideas
that went far beyond the run-of-the-mill science of their peers.
From the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who coined the word
“biology” in the early nineteenth century, to the American
James Lovelock, for whom the Earth is a living, breathing organism,
these dreamers innovated in ways that forced their contemporaries
to reexamine comfortable truths. With this collection readers will
follow Jane Goodall into the hidden world of apes in African
jungles and Francis Crick as he attacks the problem of
consciousness. Join Mary Lasker on her campaign to conquer cancer
and follow geneticist George Church as he dreams of bringing back
woolly mammoths and Neanderthals. In these lives and the many
others featured in these pages, we discover visions that were
sometimes fantastical, quixotic, and even threatening and
destabilizing, but always a challenge to the status quo.
Outsider Scientists describes the transformative role played by
"outsiders" in the growth of the modern life sciences. Biology,
which occupies a special place between the exact and human
sciences, has historically attracted many thinkers whose primary
training was in other fields: mathematics, physics, chemistry,
linguistics, philosophy, history, anthropology, engineering, and
even literature. These outsiders brought with them ideas and tools
that were foreign to biology, but which, when applied to biological
problems, helped to bring about dramatic, and often surprising,
breakthroughs. This volume brings together eighteen
thought-provoking biographical essays of some of the most
remarkable outsiders of the modern era, each written by an
authority in the respective field. From Noam Chomsky using
linguistics to answer questions about brain architecture, to Erwin
Schrodinger contemplating DNA as a physicist would, to Drew Endy
tinkering with Biobricks to create new forms of synthetic life, the
outsiders featured here make clear just how much there is to gain
from disrespecting conventional boundaries. Innovation, it turns
out, often relies on importing new ideas from other fields. Without
its outsiders, modern biology would hardly be recognizable.
This handbook offers original, critical perspectives on different
approaches to the history of biology. This collection is intended
to start a new conversation among historians of biology regarding
their work, its history, and its future. Historical scholarship
does not take place in isolation: As historians create their
narratives describing the past, they are in dialogue not only with
their sources but with other historians and other narratives. One
important task for the historian is to place her narrative in a
historiographic lineage. Each author in this collection offers
their particular perspective on the historiography of a range of
topics from Model Organisms to Eugenics, Molecular Biology to
Biotechnology, Women, Race, Scientific Biography, Genetics, Darwin
and more. Rather than comprehensive literature reviews, the essays
critically reflect upon important historiographic trends, offering
pointed appraisals of the field by leading scholars. Other authors
will surely have different perspectives, and this is the beauty and
challenge of history-making. The Handbook of the Historiography of
Biology presents an opportunity to engage with each other about how
the history of biology has been and will be written.
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