Based on three years of study in the Serengeti National Park, George B. Schaller’s The Serengeti Lion describes the vast impact of the lion and other predators on the vast herds of wildebeest, zebra, and gazelle for which the area is famous. The most comprehensive book available on the lion, this classic work includes the author’s findings on all aspects of lion behavior, including its social system, population dynamics, hunting behavior, and predation patterns.
“If you have only enough time to read one book about field biology, this is the one I recommend.”—Edward O. Wilson, Science
“This book conveys not only the fascination of its particular study of lion behavior but the drama and wonder and beauty of the intimate interdependence of all living things.”—Saturday Review
“This is an important book, not just for its valuable information on lions, but for its broad, open, and intelligent approach to problems that cut across the fields of behavior, populations, ecology, wildlife management, evolution, anthropology, and comparative biology.”—Richard G. Van Gelder, Bioscience
When viewed from a quiet beach, the ocean, with its rolling waves and vast expanse, can seem calm, even serene. But hidden beneath the sea’s waves are a staggering abundance and variety of active creatures, engaged in the never-ending struggles of life—to reproduce, to eat, and to avoid being eaten.
With Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime, marine scientist Ellen Prager takes us deep into the sea to introduce an astonishing cast of fascinating and bizarre creatures that make the salty depths their home. From the tiny but voracious arrow worms whose rapacious ways may lead to death by overeating, to the lobsters that battle rivals or seduce mates with their urine, to the sea’s masters of disguise, the octopuses, Prager not only brings to life the ocean’s strange creatures, but also reveals the ways they interact as predators, prey, or potential mates. And while these animals make for some jaw-dropping stories—witness the sea cucumber, which ejects its own intestines to confuse predators, or the hagfish that ties itself into a knot to keep from suffocating in its own slime—there’s far more to Prager’s account than her ever-entertaining anecdotes: again and again, she illustrates the crucial connections between life in the ocean and humankind, in everything from our food supply to our economy, and in drug discovery, biomedical research, and popular culture.
Written with a diver’s love of the ocean, a novelist’s skill at storytelling, and a scientist’s deep knowledge, Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime enchants as it educates, enthralling us with the wealth of life in the sea—and reminding us of the need to protect it.
Sex in Development combines the cultural analysis of sexuality, critiques of global development, and science and technology studies. Whether considering the resistance encountered by representatives of an American pharmaceutical company attempting to teach Russian doctors a “value free” way to offer patients birth control or the tension between Tibetan Buddhist ideas of fertility and the modernization schemes of the Chinese government, these essays show that attempts to make sex a universal moral object to be managed and controlled leave a host of moral ambiguities in their wake as they are engaged, resisted, and reinvented in different ways throughout the world.
Contributors. Vincanne Adams, Leslie Butt, Lawrence Cohen, Heather Dell, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Shanti Parikh, Heather Paxson, Stacy Leigh Pigg, Michele Rivkin-Fish
Conflict between males and females over reproduction is ubiquitous in nature due to fundamental differences between the sexes in reproductive rates and investment in offspring. In only a few species, however, do males strategically employ violence to control female sexuality. Why are so many of these primates? Why are females routinely abused in some species, but never in others? And can the study of such unpleasant behavior by our closest relatives help us to understand the evolution of men’s violence against women?
In the first systematic attempt to assess and understand primate male aggression as an expression of sexual conflict, the contributors to this volume consider coercion in direct and indirect forms: direct, in overcoming female resistance to mating; indirect, in decreasing the chance the female will mate with other males. The book presents extensive field research and analysis to evaluate the form of sexual coercion in a range of species—including all of the great apes and humans—and to clarify its role in shaping social relationships among males, among females, and between the sexes.
As Darwin first pointed out, two distinct evolutionary processes have contributed to the diversity of form and function in plants and animals: natural selection and sexual selection. In this book William Eberhard presents a new theory that explains male genitalic evolution as a result of sexual selection. From flatworms to fish, from moths to rodents, animal genitalia display an extraordinary variety of baroque morphologies. Not only are the forms varied, they have diverged rapidly in the course of evolution.
Why such strange forms and such rapid divergence? These questions have puzzled evolutionary biologists and animal taxonomists for over a century, and several hypotheses have been proposed. Eberhard shows that none of the explanations is adequate and proposes a new hypothesis. He views genitalia as courtship devices that function in the competition for mates by influencing the females' choices of fathers for their offspring. To the extent that male genitalic structures affect female choices, male genitalia are subject to the same type of runaway selection as that on structures, such as the peacock's tail, used in precopulatory courtship.
Eberhard's hypothesis can explain the fact that in a vast range of animals, from nematodes to mammals, male genitalia tend to be more complex than female genitalia, are often more elaborate than would be required for simply introducing sperm into the female's body, and have diverged rapidly and are thus highly species-specific in form. Although the emphasis is on theoretical explanations, many examples are presented of the vast diversity of animal genitalia: squids with arms whose tips break off and swim around inside the female after introducing an explosive, grenade-like sperm packet into her; flatworms that have rows of penes despite the presence of only a single female aperture; damselflies that give their mates contraceptive douches prior to inseminating them; and female seahorses with penes.
Vampire bats that regurgitate blood for roosting buddies. Mosquitoes that filch honeydew droplets from ants. Reptiles that enforce chastity on their lovers with copulatory plugs. Capuchin monkeys that use millipede secretions as mosquito repellent. The natural world is full of unusual relationships, and negotiation between life-forms striving to survive is evolution at its most diverse, entertaining, and awe-inspiring.
Picking up where her highly popular Headless Males Make Great Lovers left off, tropical field biologist Marty Crump takes us on another voyage of discovery into the world of unusual natural histories, this time focusing on extraordinary interactions involving animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria. Sexy Orchids Make Lousy Lovers& Other Unusual Relationships illuminates the ceaseless give-and-take between species. Occasionally, both interacting parties benefit, like when hornbills and dwarf mongooses hunt together for food. Other times, like when mites ride in hummingbirds’ nostrils to reach their next meal of nectar, one individual benefits and the other is neither helped nor harmed. But sometimes one individual benefits at the expense of the other; you need only recall your last sinus infection to understand how that works.
Throughout, Crump brings her trademark spunk and zest to these stories of intimate exchange. She introduces readers to penguins that babysit, pseudoscorpions that ride and mate under the wings of giant harlequin beetles, and parasitic fungi that bend insects to their will. A lively companion to Crump’s earlier work, Sexy Orchids Make Lousy Lovers& Other Unusual Relationships captures the bizarre and befuddling aspects of the behavior of animals, plants, and microbes. After this entertaining romp through the world of natural relationships, you’ll never look at an orchid the same way again.
A physician with thirty-five years of experience treating people with brain injuries shares the latest research on concussions and best practices for care.
The explosion of attention to sports concussions has many of us thinking about the addled brains of our football and hockey heroes. But concussions happen to everyone, not just elite athletes. Children fall from high chairs, drivers and cyclists get into accidents, and workers encounter unexpected obstacles on the job. Concussions are prevalent, occurring even during everyday activities. In fact, in less time than it takes to read this sentence, three Americans will experience a concussion. The global statistics are no less staggering.
Shaken Brain offers expert advice and urgently needed answers. Elizabeth Sandel, MD, is a board-certified physician who has spent more than three decades treating patients with traumatic brain injuries, training clinicians, and conducting research. Here she explains the scientific evidence for what happens to the brain and body after a concussion. And she shares stories from a diverse group of patients, educating readers on prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Few people understand that what they do in the aftermath of their injury will make a dramatic difference to their future well-being; patient experiences testify to the best practices for concussion sufferers and their caregivers. Dr. Sandel also shows how to evaluate risks before participating in activities and how to use proven safety strategies to mitigate these risks.
Today concussions aren’t just injuries—they’re big news. And, like anything in the news, they’re the subject of much misinformation. Shaken Brain is the resource patients and their families, friends, and caregivers need to understand how concussions occur, what to expect from healthcare providers, and what the long-term consequences may be.
Numerous popular and scholarly accounts have exposed the deep impact of patrons on the production of scientific knowledge and its applications. Shaky Foundations provides the first extensive examination of a new patronage system for the social sciences that emerged in the early Cold War years and took more definite shape during the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of enormous expansion in American social science.
By focusing on the military, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, Mark Solovey shows how this patronage system presented social scientists and other interested parties, including natural scientists and politicians, with new opportunities to work out the scientific identity, social implications, and public policy uses of academic social research. Solovey also examines significant criticisms of the new patronage system, which contributed to widespread efforts to rethink and reshape the politics-patronage-social science nexus starting in the mid-1960s.
Based on extensive archival research, Shaky Foundations addresses fundamental questions about the intellectual foundations of the social sciences, their relationships with the natural sciences and the humanities, and the political and ideological import of academic social inquiry.
Although a technique for hydraulic fracturing—more commonly known as fracking—was developed and implemented in the 1970s in Texas, fracking of the Marcellus Shale formation that stretches from West Virginia through Pennsylvania to New York did not begin in earnest until the twenty-first century. Unconventional natural gas production via fracking has ignited debate, challenged regulators, and added to the complexity of twenty-first-century natural resource management. Through a longitudinal study taken from 2000 to 2015, Jonathan M. Fisk, Soren Jordan, and A. J. Good examine how the management of natural resources functions relative to specific regulatory actions including inspections, identifying violations, and the use of specific regulatory tools. Ultimately, they find that factors as disparate as state policy goals, elected officials, the availability of data, inspectors, front-line staff, and the use of technology form a context that, in turn, shapes the use of specific regulatory tools and decisions.
With scientific progress occurring at a breathtaking pace, science and technology policy has never been more important than it is today. Yet there is a very real lack of public discourse about policy-making, and government involvement in science remains shrouded in both mystery and misunderstanding. Who is making choices about technology policy, and who stands to win or lose from these choices? What criteria are being used to make decisions and why? Does government involvement help or hinder scientific research?
Shaping Science and Technology Policy brings together an exciting and diverse group of emerging scholars, both practitioners and academic experts, to investigate current issues in science and technology policy. Essays explore such topics as globalization, the shifting boundary between public and private, informed consent in human participation in scientific research, intellectual property and university science, and the distribution of the costs and benefits of research.
Contributors: Charlotte Augst, Grant Black, Mark Brown, Kevin Elliott, Patrick Feng, Pamela M. Franklin, Carolyn Gideon, Tené N. Hamilton, Brian A. Jackson, Shobita Parthasarathy, Jason W. Patton, A. Abigail Payne, Bhaven Sampat, Christian Sandvig, Sheryl Winston Smith, Michael Whong-Barr
Shen Gua (1031−1095) is a household name in China, known as a distinguished renaissance man and the author of Brush Talks from Dream Brook, an old text whose remarkable “scientific” discoveries make it appear curiously ahead of its time. In this first book-length study of Shen in English, Ya Zuo reveals the connection between Shen’s life as an active statesman and his ideas, specifically the empirical stance manifested through his wide-ranging inquiries. She places Shen on the broad horizon of premodern Chinese thought, and presents his empiricism within an extensive narrative of Chinese epistemology.
Relying on Shen as a searchlight, Zuo focuses in on how an individual thinker summoned conditions and concepts from the vast Chinese intellectual tradition to build a singular way of knowing. Moreover, her study of Shen provides insights into the complex dynamics in play at the dawn of the age of Neo-Confucianism and compels readers to achieve a deeper appreciation of the diversity in Chinese thinking.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, computers, the Internet, and nanotechnology were central to modern American life. Yet the advances in physics underlying these applications are poorly understood and widely underappreciated by U.S. citizens today. In this concise overview, David C. Cassidy sharpens our perspective on modern physics by viewing this foundational science through the lens of America's engagement with the political events of a tumultuous century.
American physics first stirred in the 1890s-around the time x-rays and radioactivity were discovered in Germany-with the founding of graduate schools on the German model. Yet American research lagged behind the great European laboratories until highly effective domestic policies, together with the exodus of physicists from fascist countries, brought the nation into the first ranks of world research in the 1930s. The creation of the atomic bomb and radar during World War II ensured lavish government support for particle physics, along with computation, solid-state physics, and military communication. These advances facilitated space exploration and led to the global expansion of the Internet.
Well into the 1960s, physicists bolstered the United States' international status, and the nation repaid the favor through massive outlays of federal, military, and philanthropic funding. But gradually America relinquished its postwar commitment to scientific leadership, and the nation found itself struggling to maintain a competitive edge in science education and research. Today, American physicists, relying primarily on industrial funding, must compete with smaller, scrappier nations intent on writing their own brief history of physics in the twenty-first century.
The Silent Deep tells the story of the exploration and discovery of the deep sea, the ecology of its diverse environments, and the impact of humans, highlighting the importance of global stewardship in keeping this delicate ecosystem alive and well. Written by world renowned deep-sea ecologist Tony Koslow, this book is a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the state of the deep sea today, accessible to anyone interested in ocean science, the story of scientific discovery, and conservation of the earth’s most threatened ecosystems.
“Koslow deals a decisive blow to the notion that the deep sea can ever be immune from unregulated human activities. . . . The historical review of deep-sea biology is the most comprehensive I have ever read.”—Adrian Glover, Times Literary Supplement
“Deeply informed by history and rendered in straightforward, careful prose.”—Anthony Doerr, Boston Globe
“This beautifully produced book tells an urgent story with clarity and grace.”—Choice
“Stands apart from other books about life in the abyss due to Tony Koslow’s thoughtful accounts. . . . [He] succeeds in painting a picture of the deep sea as an environment with inherent and threatened value.”—Science
“Textbook depth on all aspects of deep-sea science and conservation. . . . [An] exhaustively researched and referenced volume with a historical review stretching back to Socrates.”—Mark Schrope, Nature
“An important textbook and viewpoint that is highly recommended for anyone with a professional or personal interest in deep-sea ecosystems.”—Quarterly Review of Biology
“If it were necessary, for some curious legal reason, to draw a clear line between human and nonhuman—for example, if a group of Australopithecines were to appear and one had to decide if they were to be protected by Fair Employment Laws or by the ASPCA—I would welcome them as humans if I knew that they were seriously concerned about how to bury their dead.” In this witty and wise way, Lawrence Slobodkin takes us on a spirited quest for the multiple meanings of simplicity in all facets of life.
Slobodkin begins at the beginning, with a consideration of how simplicity came into play in the development of religious doctrines. He nimbly moves on to the arts—where he ranges freely from dining to painting—and then focuses more sharply on the role of simplicity in science. Here we witness the historical beginnings of modern science as a search for the fewest number of terms, the smallest number of assumptions, or the lowest exponents, while still meeting criteria for descriptive accuracy. The result may be an elegant hypothetical system that generates the apparent world from less apparent assumptions, as with the Newtonian revolution; or it may mean deducing non-obvious processes from everyday facts, as with the Darwinian revolution.
Slobodkin proposes that the best intellectual work is done as if it were a game on a simplified playing field. He supplies serious arguments for considering the role of simplification and playfulness in all of our activities. The immediate effect of his unfailingly captivating essay is to throw open a new window on the world and to refresh our perspectives on matters of the heart and mind.
One of the world's oldest crossroads, the Sinai joins the great continental land masses of Africa and Eurasia. Its physical geography of rugged mountain peaks, desert plains, and sea coasts was formed by the collision of the two continental plates, while the human tides that have swept across the region over millennia have left an intricate web of cultures and ethnicities.
In this book, Ned Greenwood offers a complete, up-to-date physical geography of Sinai. After an introductory chapter that situates Sinai within world history and geography, he focuses in detail on the following areas: plate tectonics and geology, geomorphology and drainage, weather and climate, soils, and biogeography.
In the concluding chapter, Greenwood considers the human geography of Sinai, including the pressures currently posed by population growth, political extremism, and environmental constrictions on development. He offers a fully rounded picture of the physical environment of Sinai that will be vital reading for everyone concerned about the future of this strategic yet fragile land.
The propensity to make music is the most mysterious, wonderful, and neglected feature of humankind: this is where Steven Mithen began, drawing together strands from archaeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience--and, of course, musicology--to explain why we are so compelled to make and hear music. But music could not be explained without addressing language, and could not be accounted for without understanding the evolution of the human body and mind. Thus Mithen arrived at the wildly ambitious project that unfolds in this book: an exploration of music as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species.
Music is the language of emotion, common wisdom tells us. In The Singing Neanderthals, Mithen introduces us to the science that might support such popular notions. With equal parts scientific rigor and charm, he marshals current evidence about social organization, tool and weapon technologies, hunting and scavenging strategies, habits and brain capacity of all our hominid ancestors, from australopithecines to Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals to Homo sapiens--and comes up with a scenario for a shared musical and linguistic heritage. Along the way he weaves a tapestry of cognitive and expressive worlds--alive with vocalized sound, communal mimicry, sexual display, and rhythmic movement--of various species.
The result is a fascinating work--and a succinct riposte to those, like Steven Pinker, who have dismissed music as a functionless evolutionary byproduct.
Gerald Jacob views the history of public policy regarding nuclear waste, culminating in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy act and its aftermath. The 1982 act promised a solution, but Jacob believes it deferred to the interests of the nuclear utilities and the U.S. Department of Energy. He describes how the nuclear establishment used science and geography to protect its interests and dominate nuclear waste policy making. He examines the federal promotion of nuclear power, and asserts that federal policies strong-armed public opposition, and locked the country into a single, but flawed waste disposal solution.
An eminent pioneer of modern protein chemistry looks back on six decades in biochemical research and education to advance stimulating thoughts about science—how it is practiced, how it is explained, and how its history is written. Taking the title of his book from Robert Boyle’s classic, The Sceptical Chymist (1661), and Joseph Needham’s The Sceptical Biologist (1929), Joseph Fruton brings his own skeptical vision to bear on how chemistry and biology interact to describe living systems.
Scientists, philosophers, historians, and sociologists will seize upon the questions Fruton raises: What is the nature of the tension between the chemical and the biological sciences? What are the roots and future direction of molecular biology? What is the proper place of expert scientists in the historiography of science? How does the “scientific method” really work in practice? These and many other topics are fair game for this author’s wise critiques. In a stimulating final chapter, Fruton analyzes the evolution of key terms and symbols—the conceptual underpinnings used in the biochemical literature.
When Philadelphia naturalist Samuel George Morton died in 1851, no one cut off his head, boiled away its flesh, and added his grinning skull to a collection of crania. It would have been strange, but perhaps fitting, had Morton’s skull wound up in a collector’s cabinet, for Morton himself had collected hundreds of skulls over the course of a long career. Friends, diplomats, doctors, soldiers, and fellow naturalists sent him skulls they gathered from battlefields and burial grounds across America and around the world.
With The Skull Collectors, eminent historian Ann Fabian resurrects that popular and scientific movement, telling the strange—and at times gruesome—story of Morton, his contemporaries, and their search for a scientific foundation for racial difference. From cranial measurements and museum shelves to heads on stakes, bloody battlefields, and the “rascally pleasure” of grave robbing, Fabian paints a lively picture of scientific inquiry in service of an agenda of racial superiority, and of a society coming to grips with both the deadly implications of manifest destiny and the mass slaughter of the Civil War. Even as she vividly recreates the past, Fabian also deftly traces the continuing implications of this history, from lingering traces of scientific racism to debates over the return of the remains of Native Americans that are held by museums to this day.
Full of anecdotes, oddities, and insights, The Skull Collectors takes readers on a darkly fascinating trip down a little-visited but surprisingly important byway of American history.
Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico helped establish the field of archaeoastronomy, and it remains the standard introduction to this subject. Combining basic astronomy with archaeological and ethnological data, it presented a readable and entertaining synthesis of all that was known of ancient astronomy in the western hemisphere as of 1980.
In this revised edition, Anthony Aveni draws on his own and others' discoveries of the past twenty years to bring the Skywatchers story up to the present. He offers new data and interpretations in many areas, including:
With this updated information, Skywatchers will serve a new generation of general and scholarly readers and will be useful in courses on archaeoastronomy, astronomy, history of astronomy, history of science, anthropology, archaeology, and world religions.
From Scott and Shackleton to sled dogs and penguins, stories of Antarctica seize our imagination. In December 2002, environmental historian Tom Griffiths set sail with the Australian Antarctic Division to deliver the new team of winterers. In this beautifully written book, Griffiths reflects on the history of human experiences in Antarctica, taking the reader on a journey of discovery, exploration, and adventure in an unforgettable land.
He weaves together meditations on shipboard life during his three-week voyage with fascinating forays into the history and nature of Antarctica. He brings alive the great age of sail in the initiation of travelers to the great winds of the “roaring forties.” No continent is more ruled by wind, and Griffiths explains why Antarctica is a barometer of global climatic health. He charts the race to the South Pole, from its inception as part of the drive to map Earth’s magnetism, to the reasons for Robert Scott’s tragic death. He also offers vivid descriptions of life in Antarctica, such as the experience of a polar night, the importance of food for morale, and coping with solitude.
A charming narrative and an informative history, Slicing the Silence is an intimate portrait of the last true wilderness.
An NRC Handelsblad Book of the Year
“Offers rich discussions of olfactory perception, the conscious and subconscious impacts of smell on behavior and emotion.”
—Science
Decades of cognition research have shown that external stimuli “spark” neural patterns in particular regions of the brain. We think of the brain as a space we can map: here it responds to faces, there it perceives a sensation. But the sense of smell—only recently attracting broader attention in neuroscience—doesn’t work this way. So what does the nose tell the brain, and how does the brain understand it?
A. S. Barwich turned to experts in neuroscience, psychology, chemistry, and perfumery in an effort to understand the mechanics and meaning of odors. She discovered that scents are often fickle, and do not line up with well-defined neural regions. Upending existing theories of perception, Smellosophy offers a new model for understanding how the brain senses and processes odors.
“A beguiling analysis of olfactory experience that is fast becoming a core reference work in the field.”
—Irish Times
“Lively, authoritative…Aims to rehabilitate smell’s neglected and marginalized status.”
—Wall Street Journal
“This is a special book…It teaches readers a lot about olfaction. It teaches us even more about what philosophy can be.”
—Times Literary Supplement
So Shall You Reap is a broad-gauged exploration of the intersections of farming and history. Beginning with the prehistorical era, Otto and Dorothy Solbrig describe the evolution of farming. When and how did people learn to irrigate, to fertilize, to rotate their crops -- and why?
Along with its fundamental importance to history, farming has radically altered the physical world. Natural landscapes have been completely transformed to provide room for growth on a large scale of a few species of plants and even fewer species of domesticated animals. Agriculture has altered the earth's biosphere and changed its geosphere: The soil has been modified, forests have been felled, swamps have been drained, rivers have been dammed and diverted.
So Shall You Reap presents a fresh and informed perspective on how farming and the crops we grow have changed us and our environment. By understanding the nature of the origins and evolution of agriculture, we will be better prepared to anticipate what the future may hold in store, and what must be done to increase food production while minimizing environmental problems.
Although the honeybee is without doubt man's favorite social insect, and the most studied by him, there are twenty thousand other species of bees, many of which are social. This book is the first to offer a systematic account of social behavior in the entire super family Apoidea. Of all the social insects, the various species of bees exhibit perhaps the broadest spectrum of social behavior, including intermediate stages which are scarce or totally extinct in other groups; in this respect the bees are particularly appropriate subjects for evolutionary study.
With the aid of more than 200 illustrations, Charles Michener characterizes and describes all levels of social organization in the bees—from simple aggregations of solitary nests to elaborate, eusocial colonies. He reviews the entire repertoire of social behavior in bees and gives detailed attention to mechanisms of communication, division of labor, determination of sex and caste, maintenance and control of nest conditions, and organization of defense. In a major chapter the evolutionary context of the bee societies is extensively explored; the author examines the selective advantages and disadvantages entailed in evolving nonreproductive castes, the problem of multiple, independent origins of eusociaI behavior, and the question of “direction” in the evolution of social behavior. The final section is an account of the life history and behavioral attributes of each of the groups of social bees.
In this book, the biologist Raghavendra Gadagkar focuses on the single species he has worked on throughout his career. Found throughout southern India, Ropalidia marginata is a primitively eusocial wasp--a species in which queens and workers do not differ morphologically and even the latter retain the ability to reproduce. New colonies may be founded by a single fertile female or by several, which then share reproductive and worker duties.
R. marginata has provided Gadagkar with a unique opportunity to study the evolution of eusociality; its long-lived dynasties can continue almost indefinitely, as old or weakened queens are replaced by young and healthy ones and new colonies are founded throughout the year. Understanding such primitively eusocial species is crucial, Gadagkar argues, if we are to understand the evolution of the greater degrees of sociality found in other wasp species and in ants, termites, and bees. His years of study have led him to believe that ecological, physiological, and demographic factors can be more important than genetic relatedness in the selection for or against social traits.
Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us. His book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality.
Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict between biological and social approaches to mental illness to vying accounts of current research in sedimentary geology. He looks at the issue of child abuse—very much a reality, though the idea of child abuse is a social product. He also cautiously examines the ways in which advanced research on new weapons influences not the content but the form of science. In conclusion, Hacking comments on the “culture wars” in anthropology, in particular a spat between leading ethnographers over Hawaii and Captain Cook. Written with generosity and gentle wit by one of our most distinguished philosophers of science, this wise book brings a much needed measure of clarity to current arguments about the nature of knowledge.
What happens when the allegedly value-free social sciences enter the national political arena? In The Social Sciences Go to Washington, scholars examine the effects of the massive influx of sociologists, demographers, economists, educators, and others to the federal advisory process in the postwar period. Essays look at how these social scientists sought to change existing policies in welfare, public health, urban policy, national defense, environmental policy, and science and technology policy, and the ways they tried to influence future policies.
Policymakers have been troubled that followers of postmodernism have questioned the legitimacy of scientific and political authority to speak for the desires of social groups. As the social sciences increasingly become expressions of individual preferences, the contributors ask, how can they continue to be used to set public policy for us all?
This collection is a useful resource for anyone studying the relationship between science and the government in the postwar years.
Nearly four decades ago Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, famously reducing humans to “survival machines” whose sole purpose was to preserve “the selfish molecules known as genes.” How these selfish genes work together to construct the organism, however, remained a mystery. Standing atop a wealth of new research, The Society of Genes now provides a vision of how genes cooperate and compete in the struggle for life.
Pioneers in the nascent field of systems biology, Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher present a compelling new framework to understand how the human genome evolved and why understanding the interactions among our genes shifts the basic paradigm of modern biology. Contrary to what Dawkins’s popular metaphor seems to imply, the genome is not made of individual genes that focus solely on their own survival. Instead, our genomes comprise a society of genes which, like human societies, is composed of members that form alliances and rivalries.
In language accessible to lay readers, The Society of Genes uncovers genetic strategies of cooperation and competition at biological scales ranging from individual cells to entire species. It captures the way the genome works in cancer cells and Neanderthals, in sexual reproduction and the origin of life, always underscoring one critical point: that only by putting the interactions among genes at center stage can we appreciate the logic of life.
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