Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves - Couverture souple

Le Fanu, James

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1400030544 ISBN 13 : 9781400030545

Editeur : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010

Synopsis

In this daring treatise on the current state of scientific inquiry, James Le Fanu challenges the common assumption that further progress in genetic research and neuroscience must ultimately explain all there is to know about life and man’s place in the world. On the contrary, he argues, the most recent scientific findings point to an unbridgeable explanatory gap between the genes strung out along the Double Helix and the beauty and diversity of the living world—and between the electrical activity of the brain and the abundant creativity of the human mind. His exploration of these mysteries, and his analysis of where they might lead us in our thinking about the nature and purpose of human existence, form the impassioned and riveting heart of Why Us?

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

James Le Fanu is an international award winning author who for the past twenty years has contributed a twice weekly column on medicine, science and social policy to the Sunday and Daily Telegraph. His articles and reviews have also appeared in the New Statesman, The Spectator, GQ, the British Medical Journal, and the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. He has made original contributions to current controversies over the value of experiments on human embryos, environmentalism, dietary causes of diseases, and the misdiagnosis of non-accidental injury in children. His previous book, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2001. He lives in England.
 
www.jameslefanu.com

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When cosmologists can reliably infer what happened in the first few minutes of the birth of the universe and geologists can measure the movements of vast continents to the nearest centimeter, then the inscrutability of those genetic instructions that should distinguish a human from a fly, or the failure to account for something as elementary as how we recall a telephone number, throws into sharp relief the unfathomability of ourselves. It is as if we, and, indeed, all living things, are in some way different, profounder, and more complex than the physical world to which we belong . . . This is not just a matter of science not yet knowing all the facts; rather, there is the sense that something of immense importance is “missing” that might transform the bare bones of genes into the wondrous diversity of the living world and the monotonous electrical firing of the neurons of the brain into the vast spectrum of sensations and ideas of the human mind.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Date d'édition: 2010
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1400030544
• ISBN 13: 9781400030545
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 337
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible