Hidden Histories of Science - Couverture souple

Silvers, Robert B

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1862070059 ISBN 13 : 9781862070059

Editeur : Granta Books, 1997

Synopsis

This volume examines the ways in which science is influenced by culture. It highlights the misleading images that have distorted people's view of the history of life. It explores areas of darkness and forgetting in scientific research, and the use of inappropriate mechanistic metaphors in the understanding of biological systems. It also considers the neglect of useful research that does not fit the current intellectual fashion in science. Stephen Jay Gould gives a summary of his critique of conventional "progressive" pictures of evolutionary change, using trees, ladders and cones. Richard Lewontin rejects the attempt to reduce the complexity of living things to the simplicity of physics. Oliver Sacks offers tour of scientific roads not taken, or taken too late. The history of science, Daniel Kevles recounts the the strange story of resistance to the idea that viruses can cause cancer. Jonathan Miller, with typical wit and insight, shows how the discredited panacea of hypnotism could have helped to reveal a non-Freudian view of the unconscious - an unconscious that is not simply the dark underside of the mind, but a powerfully enabling form of knowledge.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

We often think of science as continuously advancing. In this collection of essays, five world-renowned writers explore obscure and neglected episodes in the history of science which suggest instead that the process of understanding the significance of scientific discoveries can be erratic, contradictory, even irrational. Jonathan Miller, Oliver Sacks, and Daniel Kevles show how promising new ideas may at first fail to be noticed or accepted, and then, years after they have been dismissed or forgotten, are recognized in a different form as important. R.C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould discuss the ways that words and images used by scientists and popularizers alike, from the murals on the walls of natural history museums to such ubiquitous terms as "adaptation" and "environment," reflect serious and often unacknowledged distortions in the way we conceive of both individual organisms and the natural history of the world.

These essays demonstrate that science is, in the words of Oliver Sacks, "a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past, but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhood."

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Granta Books
• Date d'édition: 1997
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1862070059
• ISBN 13: 9781862070059
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 208
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible