front cover of Safe Passages
Safe Passages
Highways, Wildlife, and Habitat Connectivity
Edited by Jon P. Beckmann, Anthony P. Clevenger, Marcel P. Huijser, Jodi A. Hilty
Island Press, 2010
Safe Passages brings together in a single volume the latest information on the emerging science of road ecology as it relates to mitigating interactions between roads and wildlife. This practical handbook of tools and examples is designed to assist individuals and organizations thinking about or working toward reducing road-wildlife impacts. The book provides:
  • an overview of the importance of habitat connectivity with regard to roads
  • current planning approaches and technologies for mitigating the impacts of highways on both terrestrial and aquatic species
  • different facets of public participation in highway-wildlife connectivity mitigation projects
  • case studies from partnerships across North America that highlight successful on-the-ground implementation of ecological and engineering solutions
  • recent innovative highway-wildlife mitigation developments
Detailed case studies span a range of scales, from site-specific wildlife crossing structures, to statewide planning for habitat connectivity, to national legislation. Contributors explore the cooperative efforts that are emerging as a result of diverse organizations—including transportation agencies, land and wildlife management agencies, and nongovernmental organizations—finding common ground to tackle important road ecology issues and problems.
 
Safe Passages is an important new resource for local-, state-, and national-level managers and policymakers working on road-wildlife issues, and will appeal to a broad audience including scientists, agency personnel, planners, land managers, transportation consultants, students, conservation organizations, policymakers, and citizens engaged in road-wildlife mitigation projects.
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The Saguaro Cactus
A Natural History
David Yetman, Alberto Búrquez, Kevin Hultine, and Michael Sanderson, with Frank S. Crosswhite
University of Arizona Press, 2020
The saguaro, with its great size and characteristic shape—its arms stretching heavenward, its silhouette often resembling a human—has become the emblem of the Sonoran Desert of southwestern Arizona and northwestern Mexico. The largest and tallest cactus in the United States, it is both familiar and an object of fascination and curiosity.

This book offers a complete natural history of this enduring and iconic desert plant. Gathering everything from the saguaro’s role in Sonoran Desert ecology to its adaptations to the desert climate and its sacred place in Indigenous culture, this book shares precolonial through current scientific findings.

The saguaro is charismatic and readily accessible but also decidedly different from other desert flora. The essays in this book bear witness to our ongoing fascination with the great cactus and the plant’s unusual characteristics, covering the saguaro’s: history of discovery, place in the cactus family, ecology, anatomy and physiology, genetics, and ethnobotany. The Saguaro Cactus offers testimony to the cactus’s prominence as a symbol, the perceptions it inspires, its role in human society, and its importance in desert ecology.
 
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Saharan Winds
Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara
Joanna Allan
West Virginia University Press, 2024

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Sailing with Noah
Stories from the World of Zoos
Jeffrey P. Bonner
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Written by the president of the nation’s number-one zoo, Sailing with Noah is an intensely personal, behind-the-scenes look at modern zoos. Jeffrey P. Bonner, who was trained as an anthropologist and came to the zoo world quite by accident, shares some of the most compelling stories ever told about contemporary zoos. The stories jump between zoos in different cities and between countries on different continents. Some are fun and funny. Others are sad, even tragic. Pete Hoskins, the director of the Philadelphia Zoo, is in bed, sound asleep, when his phone rings. . . . “There’s been a fire in the World of Primates,” he is told. “You’ve got to get over here.” Whatever he has been dreaming, it is nothing like the nightmare he will find now that he is awake. . . . “They’re all gone. They’re all gone.” All of the animals in the building—the gorillas, the lemurs, the orangutans, and the gibbons—all twenty-three of them are dead.
Written in a lively, accessible style, Sailing with Noah explores the role of zoos in today’s society and their future as institutions of education, conservation, and research. Along the way, Bonner relates a variety of true stories about animals and those who care for them (or abuse them), offering his perspective on heavily publicized incidents and describing less-well-known events with compassion and humor in turn. By bringing the stories of the animals’ lives before us, Bonner gives them a voice. He strongly believes that zoos must act for living things, and he argues that conservation is a shared responsibility of all mankind. This book helps us to understand why biodiversity is important and what it means to be a steward of life on earth.
            From the day-to-day aspects of caring for some of the world’s most exotic creatures to the role of zoos as field conservation organizations, saving wild things in wild places, this book takes the reader on an incredible journey—a journey that begins within the zoo and continues around the globe.  Everyone—from zoo visitors to animal lovers to professional conservationists, the young and old alike—will be fascinated by this extraordinary book.
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Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People
Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action
Kari Marie Norgaard
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Finalist for the 2020 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems

Since time before memory, large numbers of salmon have made their way up and down the Klamath River. Indigenous management enabled the ecological abundance that formed the basis of capitalist wealth across North America. These activities on the landscape continue today, although they are often the site of intense political struggle. Not only has the magnitude of Native American genocide been of remarkable little sociological focus, the fact that this genocide has been coupled with a reorganization of the natural world represents a substantial theoretical void. Whereas much attention has (rightfully) focused on the structuring of capitalism, racism and patriarchy, few sociologists have attended to the ongoing process of North American colonialism. Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People draws upon nearly two decades of examples and insight from Karuk experiences on the Klamath River to illustrate how the ecological dynamics of settler-colonialism are essential for theorizing gender, race and social power today. 
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Salmon, People, and Place
A Biologist's Search for Salmon Recovery
Jim Lichatowich
Oregon State University Press, 2013
Each year wild Pacific salmon leave their oceanic feeding grounds and swim hundreds of miles back to their home rivers. The salmon’s annual return is a place-defining event in the Pacific Northwest, with immense ecological, economic, and social significance. However, despite massive spending, efforts to significantly alter the endangered status of salmon have failed.

In Salmon, People, and Place, acclaimed fisheries biologist Jim Lichatowich eloquently exposes the misconceptions underlying salmon management and recovery programs that have fueled the catastrophic decline in Northwest salmon populations for more than a century. These programs will continue to fail, he suggests, so long as they regard salmon as products and ignore their essential relationship with their habitat.

But Lichatowich offers hope. In Salmon, People, and Place he presents a concrete plan for salmon recovery, one based on the myriad lessons learned from past mistakes. What is needed to successfully restore salmon, Lichatowich states, is an acute commitment to healing the relationships among salmon, people, and place.

A significant contribution to the literature on Pacific salmon, Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist’s Search for Salmon Recovery is an essential read for anyone concerned about the fate of this Pacific Northwest icon.
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Salmon Without Rivers
A History Of The Pacific Salmon Crisis
Jim Lichatowich
Island Press, 1999

"Fundamentally, the salmon's decline has been the consequence of a vision based on flawed assumptions and unchallenged myths.... We assumed we could control the biological productivity of salmon and 'improve' upon natural processes that we didn't even try to understand. We assumed we could have salmon without rivers." --from the introduction

From a mountain top where an eagle carries a salmon carcass to feed its young to the distant oceanic waters of the California current and the Alaskan Gyre, salmon have penetrated the Northwest to an extent unmatched by any other animal. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the natural productivity of salmon in Oregon, Washington, California, and Idaho has declined by eighty percent. The decline of Pacific salmon to the brink of extinction is a clear sign of serious problems in the region.

In Salmon Without Rivers, fisheries biologist Jim Lichatowich offers an eye-opening look at the roots and evolution of the salmon crisis in the Pacific Northwest. He describes the multitude of factors over the past century and a half that have led to the salmon's decline, and examines in depth the abject failure of restoration efforts that have focused almost exclusively on hatcheries to return salmon stocks to healthy levels without addressing the underlying causes of the decline. The book:

  • describes the evolutionary history of the salmon along with the geologic history of the Pacific Northwest over the past 40 million years
  • considers the indigenous cultures of the region, and the emergence of salmon-based economies that survived for thousands of years
  • examines the rapid transformation of the region following the arrival of Europeans
  • presents the history of efforts to protect and restore the salmon
  • offers a critical assessment of why restoration efforts have failed

Throughout, Lichatowich argues that the dominant worldview of our society -- a worldview that denies connections between humans and the natural world -- has created the conflict and controversy that characterize the recent history of salmon; unless that worldview is challenged and changed, there is little hope for recovery. Salmon Without Rivers exposes the myths that have guided recent human-salmon interactions. It clearly explains the difficult choices facing the citizens of the region, and provides unique insight into one of the most tragic chapters in our nation's environmental history.

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Salvage Logging and Its Ecological Consequences
David B. Lindenmayer, Philip J. Burton, and Jerry F. Franklin
Island Press, 2008
Salvage logging—removing trees from a forested area in the wake of a catastrophic event such as a wildfire or hurricane—is highly controversial. Policymakers and those with an economic interest in harvesting trees typically argue that damaged areas should be logged so as to avoid “wasting” resources, while many forest ecologists contend that removing trees following a disturbance is harmful to a variety of forest species and can interfere with the natural process of ecosystem recovery.
 
Salvage Logging and Its Ecological Consequences brings together three leading experts on forest ecology to explore a wide range of issues surrounding the practice of salvage logging. They gather and synthesize the latest research and information about its economic and ecological costs and benefits, and consider the impacts of salvage logging on ecosystem processes and biodiversity. The book examines
 
• what salvage logging is and why it is controversial
• natural and human disturbance regimes in forested ecosystems
• differences between salvage harvesting and traditional timber harvesting
• scientifically documented ecological impacts of salvage operations
• the importance of land management objectives in determining appropriate post-disturbance interventions
 
Brief case studies from around the world highlight a variety of projects, including operations that have followed wildfires, storms, volcanic eruptions, and insect infestations. In the final chapter, the authors discuss policy management implications and offer prescriptions for mitigating the impacts of future salvage harvesting efforts.
  
Salvage Logging and Its Ecological Consequences is a “must-read” volume for policymakers, students, academics, practitioners, and professionals involved in all aspects of forest management, natural resource planning, and forest conservation.
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Sampling Rare or Elusive Species
Concepts, Designs, and Techniques for Estimating Population Parameters
Edited by William L. Thompson
Island Press, 2005

Information regarding population status and abundance of rare species plays a key role in resource management decisions. Ideally, data should be collected using statistically sound sampling methods, but by their very nature, rare or elusive species pose a difficult sampling challenge.

Sampling Rare or Elusive Species describes the latest sampling designs and survey methods for reliably estimating occupancy, abundance, and other population parameters of rare, elusive, or otherwise hard-to-detect plants and animals. It offers a mixture of theory and application, with actual examples from terrestrial, aquatic, and marine habitats around the world.

Sampling Rare or Elusive Species is the first volume devoted entirely to this topic and provides natural resource professionals with a suite of innovative approaches to gathering population status and trend data. It represents an invaluable reference for natural resource professionals around the world, including fish and wildlife biologists, ecologists, biometricians, natural resource managers, and all others whose work or research involves rare or elusive species.

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The Sand Wasps
Natural History and Behavior
Howard E. Evans and Kevin M. O'Neill
Harvard University Press, 2007

Howard Ensign Evans was a brilliant ethologist and systematist for whom the joy of science included lying on his belly in some remote location, digging out and diagramming a wasp’s nest. During his career, Evans described over 900 species and authored more than a dozen books, both technical and popular, on a wide range of entomological and natural history subjects. Upon his death in 2002, he left behind an unfinished manuscript, intended as an update (though not a revision) of his classic 1966 work, The Comparative Ethology and Evolution of the Sand Wasps. Kevin O’Neill, Evans’s former student and coauthor, has completed and enlarged Evans’s manuscript to provide coverage of all sand-wasp tribes in Evan’s earlier book. The result is a tribe-by-tribe, species-by-species review of studies of the Bembicinae that have appeared over the last four decades.

The Sand Wasps: Natural History and Behavior already has been hailed by specialists as a new bible for those working on solitary wasps and an essential reference for scientists more broadly interested in insect behavioral evolution.

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The Sanitary City
Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present
Martin V. Melosi
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008

Immersed in their on-demand, highly consumptive, and disposable lifestyles, most urban Americans take for granted the technologies that provide them with potable water, remove their trash, and process their wastewater. These vital services, however, are the byproduct of many decades of development by engineers, sanitarians, and civic planners. 

In The Sanitary City, Martin V. Melosi assembles a comprehensive, thoroughly researched and referenced history of sanitary services in urban America. He examines the evolution of water supply, sewage systems, and solid waste disposal during three distinct eras: The Age of Miasmas (pre-1880); The Bacteriological Revolution (1880-1945); and The New Ecology (1945 to present-day). 

Originally published in 2000, this abridged edition includes updated text and bibliographic materials. The Sanitary City is an essential resource for those interested in environmental history, environmental engineering, science and technology, urban studies, and public health.

Winner of:
George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History Urban History Association Prize for the best book in North American Urban History
Abel Wolman Prize from the Public Works Historical Society
Sidney Edelstein Prize from the Society for the History of Technology

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Sardine
Trevor Day
Reaktion Books, 2018
The sardine is a paradoxical fish. Seemingly insignificant, it has made fortunes for some, and, when stocks have collapsed, caused hardship for many, its status shifting from utilitarian food to gourmand’s delight. And in this book, Trevor Day—diver, fish-watcher, and marine conservationist—travels across four continents to meet the sardine in both its natural and cultural environment. Tracing the fish’s journey from minuscule egg to dinner plate, Day interweaves the story of the sardine with the rise and fall of entire fisheries.

A wide-ranging look at the cluster of fish species called sardines, Day’s book explores their relationship both with other marine creatures and with us. Elite predators feast on sardines, yet these silvery slivers are fast-breeding and opportunistic enough to likely survive their hunters for many millennia to come. Whether swimming free as a shoaling fish at the mercy of predators, packed in tins (and as a metaphor for overcrowding), or grilled on the streets of Lisbon as part of the Feast of St. Anthony, sardines have come to represent conformity, vulnerability, and tradition. And as Day’s biography of this familiar but under-appreciated fish reveals, the sardine is a barometer for the health of our oceans, a fish with lessons for us all about our stewardship of the seas.
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Sarton on the History of Science
George Sarton
Harvard University Press

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Satellite
Innovation in Orbit
Doug Millard
Reaktion Books, 2017
Right now, above our heads—nearly imperceptible to us but hugely important to how we live—are thousands of man-made objects that we have sent into space. Ubiquitous but mysterious, satellites are the technological infrastructure of our globally connected world, helping us do everything from orient ourselves on a map to watch our favorite television shows. Yet we rarely ever think about them. In this book, Doug Millard pays overdue tribute to the stoic existence of the satellite, tracing its simultaneous pathways through the cold silence of space and the noisy turbulence of the past century. 
            How satellites ever came to be is, in itself, a remarkable story. Telling an astonishing history of engineering experimentation and ingenuity, Millard shows how the Cold War space race made the earliest satellites—ones like Sputnik, Telstar, and Early Bird—household names. He describes how they evolved into cultural signifiers that represented not only our scientific capabilities but our capacity for imagination, our ability to broaden the scope of our vision to the farthest reaches. From there he follows the proliferation of satellites in the second half of the twentieth century, examining their many different forms, how they evolved, all the things they do, what they have enabled, and how they have influenced our popular culture. Ultimately, Millard asks what we can still expect, what sort of space age the satellite has initiated that is yet to be fully realized.
            Published in association with the Science Museum, London, this beautifully illustrated book will appeal to any fan of space exploration and technology.
 
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Satellites
Edited by Joseph A. Burns and Mildred Shapley Mathews
University of Arizona Press, 1986
"This is the 12th book in the University of Arizona Space Science Series, a burgeoning library destined to stand as the consummate literary legacy of our era's revolution in Solar System exploration. . . . Satellite science has matured rapidly since its rebirth in March 1979, and its vitality radiates from the pages of this fine volume."—Icarus
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Satellites in the High Country
Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man
Jason Mark
Island Press, 2015
In New Mexico's Gila Wilderness, 106 Mexican gray wolves may be some of the most monitored wildlife on the planet. Collared, microchipped, and transported by helicopter, the wolves are protected and confined in an attempt to appease ranchers and conservationists alike. Once a symbol of the wild, these wolves have come to illustrate the demise of wilderness in this Human Age, where man's efforts shape life in even the most remote corners of the earth. And yet, the howl of an unregistered wolf—half of a rogue pair—splits the night. If you know where to look, you'll find that much remains untamed, and even today, wildness can remain a touchstone for our relationship with the rest of nature. 

In Satellites in the High Country, journalist and adventurer Jason Mark travels beyond the bright lights and certainties of our cities to seek wildness wherever it survives. In California's Point Reyes National Seashore, a battle over oyster farming and designated wilderness pits former allies against one another, as locals wonder whether wilderness should be untouched, farmed, or something in between. In Washington's Cascade Mountains, a modern-day wild woman and her students learn to tan hides and start fires without matches, attempting to connect with a primal past out of reach for the rest of society. And in Colorado's High Country, dark skies and clear air reveal a breathtaking expanse of stars, flawed only by the arc of a satellite passing—beauty interrupted by the traffic of a million conversations. These expeditions to the edges of civilization's grid show us that, although our notions of pristine nature may be shattering, the mystery of the wild still exists — and in fact, it is more crucial than ever.

But wildness is wily as a coyote: you have to be willing to track it to understand the least thing about it. Satellites in the High Country is an epic journey on the trail of the wild, a poetic and incisive exploration of its meaning and enduring power in our Human Age.
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Satellites of Jupiter
David Morrison
University of Arizona Press, 1982
The findings of Voyager have brought Jupiter's moons out from the shadows. Now as much of interest to geologists as to astronomers, these satellites are brought under closer scrutiny by more than 50 international authorities in this volume. Included is research on thermal evolution, surface composition, cratering time scales, and other subjects; but also key chapters focusing on the satellite Io's volcanic eruptions, thermodynamics, phase composition and more. These 24 contributions constitute a reference that will stand as the decade's definitive work on Jupiter's satellites—and a springboard to further hypotheses.
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Saturation
An Elemental Politics
Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz, editors
Duke University Press, 2021
Bringing together media studies and environmental humanities, the contributors to Saturation develop saturation as a heuristic to analyze phenomena in which the elements involved are difficult or impossible to separate. In ordinary language, saturation describes the condition of being thoroughly soaked, while in chemistry it is the threshold at which something can be maximally dissolved or absorbed in a solution. Contributors to this collection expand notions of saturation beyond water to consider saturation in sound, infrastructure, media, Big Data, capitalism, and visual culture. Essays include analyses of the thresholds of HIV detectability in bloodwork, militarism's saturation of oceans, and the deleterious effects of the saturation of cellphone and wi-fi signals into the human body. By channeling saturation to explore the relationship between media, the environment, technology, capital, and the legacies of settler colonialism, Saturation illuminates how elements, the natural world, and anthropogenic infrastructures, politics, and processes exist in and through each other.

Contributors. Marija Cetinić, Jeff Diamanti, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Lisa Yin Han, Stefan Helmreich, Mél Hogan, Melody Jue, Rahul Mukherjee, Max Ritts, Rafico Ruiz, Bhaskar Sarkar, John Shiga, Avery Slater, Janet Walker, Joanna Zylinska
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Saturn
William Sheehan
Reaktion Books, 2019
Saturn is the showpiece planet of our solar system. It may not be the largest, nor the smallest, nor even the only planet with rings. But it is among the most stunning objects in the sky and is always breathtaking when seen in a telescope.

This is a beautifully illustrated, authoritative overview of the entire history of humankind’s fascination with the ringed planet, from the first low-resolution views by Galileo, Huygens, and other early observers with telescopes to the most recent discoveries by the spacecraft Cassini, which studied the planet at close range between 2004 and 2017. Saturn describes the planet from inside out, detailing the complicated system of rings and their interaction with Saturn’s bevy of satellites, and it considers how Saturn formed and the role it played in the early history of the solar system. Featuring the latest research and a spectacular array of images, this book will appeal to anyone who has ever gazed with wonder upon the sixth planet from the sun.
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Saturn
Tom Gehrels
University of Arizona Press, 1984

Originally published in 1984

From the original publication:
The Saturn system is the most complex in the solar system, and this book is to summarize it all: the planet, rings, satellites, the magnetospheres, and the interaction with the interplanetary medium. The effective date of the material is approximately November 1983.

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Savage Ecology
War and Geopolitics at the End of the World
Jairus Victor Grove
Duke University Press, 2019
Jairus Victor Grove contends that we live in a world made by war. In Savage Ecology he offers an ecological theory of geopolitics that argues that contemporary global crises are better understood when considered within the larger history of international politics. Infusing international relations with the theoretical interventions of fields ranging from new materialism to political theory, Grove shows how political violence is the principal force behind climate change, mass extinction, slavery, genocide, extractive capitalism, and other catastrophes. Grove analyzes a variety of subjects—from improvised explosive devices and drones to artificial intelligence and brain science—to outline how geopolitics is the violent pursuit of a way of living that comes at the expense of others. Pointing out that much of the damage being done to the earth and its inhabitants stems from colonialism, Grove suggests that the Anthropocene may be better described by the term Eurocene. The key to changing the planet's trajectory, Grove proposes, begins by acknowledging both the earth-shaping force of geopolitical violence and the demands apocalypses make for fashioning new ways of living.
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Saving a Million Species
Extinction Risk from Climate Change
Edited by Lee Hannah
Island Press, 2010

The research paper "Extinction Risk from Climate Change" published in the journal Nature in January 2004 created front-page headlines around the world. The notion that climate change could drive more than a million species to extinction captured both the popular imagination and the attention of policy-makers, and provoked an unprecedented round of scientific critique.
 
Saving a Million Species reconsiders the central question of that paper: How many species may perish as a result of climate change and associated threats? Leaders from a range of disciplines synthesize the literature, refine the original estimates, and elaborate the conservation and policy implications.
The book:

  • examines the initial extinction risk estimates of the original paper, subsequent critiques, and the media and policy impact of this unique study
  • presents evidence of extinctions from climate change from different time frames in the past
  • explores extinctions documented in the contemporary record
  • sets forth new risk estimates for future climate change
  • considers the conservation and policy implications of the estimates.

Saving a Million Species offers a clear explanation of the science behind the headline-grabbing estimates for conservationists, researchers, teachers, students, and policy-makers. It is a critical resource for helping those working to conserve biodiversity take on the rapidly advancing and evolving global stressor of climate change-the most important issue in conservation biology today, and the one for which we are least prepared.

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Saving All the Parts
Reconciling Economics And The Endangered Species Act
Rocky Barker
Island Press, 1993

Saving All the Parts is a journalist's exploration of the intertwining of endangered species protection and the economic future of resource dependent communities -- those with local economies based on fishing, logging, ranching, mining, and other resource intensive industries. Rocky Barker presents an insightful overview of current endangered species controversies and a comprehensive look at the wide-ranging implications of human activities.

The book analyzes trends in natural resource management, land use planning, and economic development that can lead to a future where economic activity can be sustained without the loss of essential natural values. Throughout, Barker provides a thorough and balanced analysis of both the ecological and economic forces that affect the lives and livelihoods of the nation's inhabitants -- both human and animal.

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Saving Nature's Legacy
Protecting And Restoring Biodiversity
Reed F. Noss and Allen Y. Cooperrider; Foreword by Rodger Schlickeisen; Defenders of Wildlife
Island Press, 1994

Written by two leading conservation biologists, Saving Nature's Legacy is a thorough and readable introduction to issues of land management and conservation biology. It presents a broad, land-based approach to biodiversity conservation in the United States, with the authors succinctly translating principles, techniques, and findings of the ecological sciences into an accessible and practical plan for action.

After laying the groundwork for biodiversity conservation -- what biodiversity is, why it is important, its status in North America -- Noss and Cooperrider consider the strengths and limitations of past and current approaches to land management. They then present the framework for a bold new strategy, with explicit guidelines on:

  • inventorying biodiversity
  • selecting areas for protection
  • designing regional and continental reserve networks
  • establishing monitoring programs
  • setting priorities for getting the job done
Throughout the volume, the authors provide in-depth assessments of what must be done to protect and restore the full spectrum of native biodiversity to the North American continent.
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Saving the Tropical Forests
Judith Gradwohl and Russell Greenberg
Island Press, 1988
Saving the Tropical Forests is a source book on the causes and effects of tropical deforestation.
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Saving the World
How Forests Inspired Global Efforts to Stop Climate Change
Brett M. Bennett and Gregory A. Barton
Reaktion Books
An illuminating history of the forgotten concept of climatic botany that underscores how vital forests are to our future.
 
Saving the World tells the forgotten history of climatic botany, the idea that forests are essential for creating and recycling rain. Long before the specter of global warming, societies recognized that deforestation caused drastic climate shifts—as early as 1770, concerns over deforestation spurred legislation to combat human-induced climate change. Across the twentieth century, climatic botany experienced fluctuating fortunes, influenced by technological advancements and evolving meteorological theories. Remarkably, contemporary scientists are rediscovering the crucial role of forests in rainfall recycling, unaware of the long history of climatic botany. This enlightening book is essential reading for anyone passionate about conserving the world’s forests and preserving our climate for future generations.
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Scale Theory
A Nondisciplinary Inquiry
Joshua DiCaglio
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A pioneering call for a new understanding of scale across the humanities

How is it possible that you are—simultaneously—cells, atoms, a body, quarks, a component in an ecological network, a moment in the thermodynamic dispersal of the sun, and an element in the gravitational whirl of galaxies? In this way, we routinely transform reality into things already outside of direct human experience, things we hardly comprehend even as we speak of DNA, climate effects, toxic molecules, and viruses. How do we find ourselves with these disorienting layers of scale? Enter Scale Theory, which provides a foundational theory of scale that explains how scale works, the parameters of scalar thinking, and how scale refigures reality—that teaches us how to think in terms of scale, no matter where our interests may lie. 

Joshua DiCaglio takes us on a fascinating journey through six thought experiments that provide clarifying yet provocative definitions for scale and new ways of thinking about classic concepts ranging from unity to identity. Because our worldviews and philosophies are largely built on nonscalar experience, he then takes us slowly through the ways scale challenges and reconfigures objects, subjects, and relations. 

Scale Theory is, in a sense, nondisciplinary—weaving together a dizzying array of sciences (from nanoscience to ecology) with discussions from the humanities (from philosophy to rhetoric). In the process, a curious pattern emerges: attempts to face the significance of scale inevitably enter terrain closer to mysticism than science. Rather than dismiss this connection, DiCaglio examines the reasons for it, redefining mysticism in terms of scale and integrating contemplative philosophies into the discussion. The result is a powerful account of the implications and challenges of scale, attuned to the way scale transforms both reality and ourselves.

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Scandalous Knowledge
Science, Truth, and the Human
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Duke University Press, 2006
Throughout the recent culture and science “wars,” the radically new conceptions of knowledge and science emerging from such fields as the history and sociology of science have been denounced by various journalists, scientists, and academics as irresponsible attacks on science, absurd denials of objective reality, or a cynical abandonment of truth itself. In Scandalous Knowledge, Barbara Herrnstein Smith explores and illuminates the intellectual contexts of these crude denunciations. A preeminent scholar, theorist, and analyst of intellectual history, Smith begins by looking closely at the epistemological developments at issue. She presents a clear, historically informed, and philosophically sophisticated overview of important twentieth-century critiques of traditional—rationalist, realist, positivist—accounts of human knowledge and scientific truth, and discusses in detail the alternative accounts produced by Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, and others.

With keen wit, Smith demonstrates that the familiar charges involved in these scandals—including the recurrent invocation of “postmodern relativism”—protect intellectual orthodoxy by falsely associating important intellectual developments with logically absurd and morally or politically disabling positions. She goes on to offer bold, original, and insightful perspectives on the currently strained relations between the natural sciences and the humanities; on the grandiose but dubious claims of evolutionary psychology to explain human behavior, cognition, and culture; and on contemporary controversies over the psychology, biology, and ethics of animal-human relations. Scandalous Knowledge is a provocative and compelling intervention into controversies that continue to roil through journalism, pulpits, laboratories, and classrooms throughout the United States and Europe.

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Scarcity
A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind
Harvard University Press, 2023

A sweeping intellectual history of the concept of economic scarcity—its development across five hundred years of European thought and its decisive role in fostering the climate crisis.

Modern economics presumes a particular view of scarcity, in which human beings are innately possessed of infinite desires and society must therefore facilitate endless growth and consumption irrespective of nature’s limits. Yet as Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind show, this vision of scarcity is historically novel and was not inevitable even in the age of capitalism. Rather, it reflects the costly triumph of infinite-growth ideologies across centuries of European economic thought—at the expense of traditions that sought to live within nature’s constraints.

The dominant conception of scarcity today holds that, rather than master our desires, humans must master nature to meet those desires. Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind argue that this idea was developed by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Samuel Hartlib, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson, who laid the groundwork for today’s hegemonic politics of growth. Yet proponents of infinite growth have long faced resistance from agrarian radicals, romantic poets, revolutionary socialists, ecofeminists, and others. These critics—including the likes of Gerrard Winstanley, Dorothy Wordsworth, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt—embraced conceptions of scarcity in which our desires, rather than nature, must be mastered to achieve the social good. In so doing, they dramatically reenvisioned how humans might interact with both nature and the economy.

Following these conflicts into the twenty-first century, Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind insist that we need new, sustainable models of economic thinking to address the climate crisis. Scarcity is not only a critique of infinite growth, but also a timely invitation to imagine alternative ways of flourishing on Earth.

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The Scarith of Scornello
A Tale of Renaissance Forgery
Ingrid D. Rowland
University of Chicago Press, 2004
A precocious teenager, bored with life at his family's Tuscan villa Scornello, Curzio Inghirami staged perhaps the most outlandish prank of the seventeenth century. Born in the age of Galileo to an illustrious family with ties to the Medici, and thus an educated and privileged young man, Curzio concocted a wild scheme that would in the end catch the attention of the Vatican and scandalize all of Rome.

As recounted here with relish by Ingrid D. Rowland, Curzio preyed on the Italian fixation with ancestry to forge an array of ancient Latin and Etruscan documents. For authenticity's sake, he stashed the counterfeit treasure in scarith (capsules made of hair and mud) near Scornello. To the seventeenth-century Tuscans who were so eager to establish proof of their heritage and history, the scarith symbolized a link to the prestigious culture of their past. But because none of these proud Italians could actually read the ancient Etruscan language, they couldn't know for certain that the documents were frauds. The Scarith of Scornello traces the career of this young scam artist whose "discoveries" reached the Vatican shortly after Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition, inspiring participants on both sides of the affair to clash again—this time over Etruscan history.

An expert on the Italian Renaissance and one of only a few people in the world to work with the Etruscan language, Rowland writes a tale so enchanting it seems it could only be fiction. In her investigation of this seventeenth-century caper, Rowland will captivate readers with her sense of humor and obvious delight in Curzio's far-reaching prank. And even long after the inauthenticity of Curzio's creation had been established, this practical joke endured: the scarith were stolen in the 1980s by a thief who mistook them for the real thing.
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Scenes from Deep Time
Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World
Martin J. S. Rudwick
University of Chicago Press, 1992
How did the earth look in prehistoric times? Scientists and artists collaborated during the half-century prior to the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species to produce the first images of dinosaurs and the world they inhabited. Their interpretations, informed by recent fossil discoveries, were the first efforts to represent the prehistoric world based on sources other than the Bible. Martin J. S. Rudwick presents more than a hundred rare illustrations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the implications of reconstructing a past no one has ever seen.
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Schizophrenia
Science and Practice
John C. Shershow
Harvard University Press, 1978

Schizophrenia: Science and Practice brings together the work of many of today's most distinguished authorities in psychiatry. From diverse perspectives, these specialists review what is presently known—and unknown—about schizophrenia. The conceptual underpinnings of the diagnosis of schizophrenic illness, recent elaborations of psychosocial and developmental theories, current genetic and biochemical research, and traditional as well as newer treatment approaches are among the topics discussed in this unusually clear and lively account.

How effective are contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches to schizophrenia? What drug therapies are being used or proposed, and why? What about the treatment milieu and the difficult strategic questions surrounding the recent movement toward the “deinstitutionalization” of schizophrenic patients? Ultimately, should schizophrenia be defined as a toxic illness or as a way of life? In attempting to answer these and other questions, Dr. Shershow is joined by contributors Irwin Savodnik, Seymour Kety, Theodore Udz, Gerald Klerman, Ian Creese, Solomon Snyder, Leo Hollister, Jonathan Borus, Daniel Schwartz, and Loren Mosher, among others.

All the issues confronting psychiatry as a self-conscious discipline within contemporary medicine converge on the problem of schizophrenia. The important hope Schizophrenia: Science and Practice raises is that a fruitful pluralism among the variety of approaches to schizophrehia, and to psychiatric problems in general, can be sustained.

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Science
Steve Fuller
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

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Science 3.0
Real Science, Real Knowledge
Frank Miedema
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
When people think of a scientist, they often think of someone who has his or her head in the clouds, motivated by an entirely untainted desire for the pursuit of knowledge and truth. In Science 3.0, Frank Miedema casts aside these beliefs about scientists as needlessly naïve, and instead suggests that we rebuild our idea of the sciences, particularly the life sciences, with today’s economic reality in mind.
This book is a frank discussion of the impact of external forces on the sciences, dealing with topics as diverse as social media for the scientist, the role of academic independence, and the tension between university and business. Miedema also shows the way science shapes both economic and social progress in modern society, and how increasing pressure to solve real-world problems has forced scientists out of the ivory tower and into the corporate world. Sharply observed and exceptionally well-researched, Science 3.0 provides scientists with a powerful overview of their field that is singular in its candor and breadth.  

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Science among the Ottomans
The Cultural Creation and Exchange of Knowledge
By Miri Shefer-Mossensohn
University of Texas Press, 2015

Scholars have long thought that, following the Muslim Golden Age of the medieval era, the Ottoman Empire grew culturally and technologically isolated, losing interest in innovation and placing the empire on a path toward stagnation and decline. Science among the Ottomans challenges this widely accepted Western image of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottomans as backward and impoverished.

In the first book on this topic in English in over sixty years, Miri Shefer-Mossensohn contends that Ottoman society and culture created a fertile environment that fostered diverse scientific activity. She demonstrates that the Ottomans excelled in adapting the inventions of others to their own needs and improving them. For example, in 1877, the Ottoman Empire boasted the seventh-longest electric telegraph system in the world; indeed, the Ottomans were among the era’s most advanced nations with regard to modern communication infrastructure. To substantiate her claims about science in the empire, Shefer-Mossensohn studies patterns of learning; state involvement in technological activities; and Turkish- and Arabic-speaking Ottomans who produced, consumed, and altered scientific practices. The results reveal Ottoman participation in science to have been a dynamic force that helped sustain the six-hundred-year empire.

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Science and an African Logic
Helen Verran
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Does 2 + 2 = 4? Ask almost anyone and they will unequivocally answer yes. A basic equation such as this seems the very definition of certainty, but is it?

In this captivating book, Helen Verran addresses precisely that question by looking at how science, mathematics, and logic come to life in Yoruba primary schools. Drawing on her experience as a teacher in Nigeria, Verran describes how she went from the radical conclusion that logic and math are culturally relative, to determining what Westerners find so disconcerting about Yoruba logic, to a new understanding of all generalizing logic. She reveals that in contrast to the one-to-many model found in Western number systems, Yoruba thinking operates by figuring things as wholes and their parts. Quantity is not absolute but always relational. Certainty is derived not from abstract logic, but from cultural practices and associations.

A powerful story of how one woman's investigation in this everday situation led to extraordinary conclusions about the nature of numbers, generalization, and certainty, this book will be a signal contribution to philosophy, anthropology of science, and education.
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Science and Anti-Science
Gerald Holton
Harvard University Press, 1993

What is good science? What goal--if any--is the proper end of scientific activity? Is there a legitimating authority that scientists mayclaim? Howserious athreat are the anti-science movements? These questions have long been debated but, as Gerald Holton points out, every era must offer its own responses. This book examines these questions not in the abstract but shows their historic roots and the answers emerging from the scientific and political controversies of this century.

Employing the case-study method and the concept of scientific thematathat he has pioneered, Holton displays the broad scope of his insight into the workings of science: from the influence of Ernst Mach on twentiethcentury physicists, biologists, psychologists, and other thinkers to the rhetorical strategies used in the work of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and others; from the bickering between Thomas Jefferson and the U.S. Congress over the proper form of federal sponsorship of scientific research to philosophical debates since Oswald Spengier over whether our scientific knowledge will ever be "complete." In a masterful final chapter, Holton scrutinizes the "anti-science phenomenon," the increasingly common opposition to science as practiced today. He approaches this contentious issue by examining the world views and political ambitions of the proponents of science as well as those of its opponents-the critics of "establishment science" (including even those who fear that science threatens to overwhelm the individual in the postmodern world) and the adherents of "alternative science" (Creationists, New Age "healers," astrologers). Through it all runs the thread of the author's deep historical knowledge and his humanistic understanding of science in modern culture.

Science and Anti-Science will be of great interest not only to scientists and scholars in the field of science studies but also to educators, policymalcers, and all those who wish to gain a fuller understanding of challenges to and doubts about the role of science in our lives today.

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Science and Ceremony
The Institutional Economics of C. E. Ayres
Edited by William Breit and William Patton Culbertson, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 1976

Clarence Edwin Ayres was the leading American institutionalist economist in the post–World War II era. His innovative theories concerning the causes and significance of technological change provided the philosophical framework for that school of economics called institutionalism. In his recognition that the critical economic issues of the future would be the realization of the full economic potential of industrial society and the development of the third world, he was at least twenty years ahead of his time. In addition, Ayres's influence as an economics teacher at the University of Texas at Austin went well beyond the discipline of economics to students of anthropology, psychology, philosophy, education, and even music and art.

This book constitutes the first major appraisal of the work and influence of C. E. Ayres. The essays are written from a transatlantic as well as a national viewpoint and do not evince anyone ideological bias. As John Kenneth Galbraith says in his Foreword, the essays are not meant as a monument to Ayres; instead, they critique what he thought and did, showing "his range of interests, his diligence, his originality of mind and method."

Contributions to the volume are "Clarence Edwin Ayres: An Intellectual's Portrait" by editors William Breit and William Patton Culbertson, Jr.; "Clarence Ayres's Place in the History of American Economics: An Interim Assessment" by A. W. Coats; "C. E. Ayres on the Industrial Revolution" by R. M. Hartwell; "Clarence Ayres and the Roots of Economic Progress" by S. Herbert Frankel; "Technology and the Price System" by W. W. Rostow; "Limits to Growth: Biospheric or Institutional?" by Joseph J. Spengler; "Science's Feet of Clay" by Gordon Tullock; "Ayres's Views on Moral Relativism" by Alfred F. Chalk; "Methods and Morals in Economics: The Ayres-Knight Discussion" by James M. Buchanan; " Clarence Ayres's Economics and Sociology" by Talcott Parsons; and "Clarence E. Ayres as a University Teacher" by Marion J. Levy, Jr.

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Science and Creation
The Search for Understanding
John C. Polkinghorne
Templeton Press, 2006

John C. Polkinghorne, internationally renowned priest-scientist, addresses fundamental questions about how scientific and theological worldviews relate to each other in this, the second volume (originally published in 1988) of his trilogy, which also included Science and Providence and One World.

Dr. Polkinghorne illustrates how a scientifically minded person approaches the task of theological inquiry, postulating that there exists a close analogy between theory and experiment in science and belief and understanding in theology. He offers a fresh perspective on such questions as: Are we witnessing today a revival a natural theology—the search for God through the exercise of reason and the study of nature? How do the insights of modern physics into the interlacing of order and disorder relate to the Christian doctrine of Creation? What is the relationship between mind and matter?

Polkinghorne states that the "remarkable insights that science affords us into the intelligible workings of the world cry out for an explanation more profound than that which it itself can provide. Religion, if it is to take seriously its claim that the world is the creation of God, must be humble enough to learn from science what that world is actually like.The dialogue between them can only be mutually enriching."

 

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Science and Culture for Members Only
The Amsterdam Zoo Artis in the Nineteenth Century
Donna C. Mehos
Amsterdam University Press, 2005
The Amsterdam zoo Artis was recognized as the preeminent cultural center of the city for much of the nineteenth century. Donna Mehos here examines the exclusive nature of Artis and how the Amsterdam middle class utilized it to cultivate a culture of science that would reflect well on the nation and its capital. This volume offers a fascinating study of the role of science in the development of Dutch national and class identities during a period of national and colonial expansion.
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Science and Culture
Popular and Philosophical Essays
Hermann von Helmholtz
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Hermann von Helmholtz was a leading figure of nineteenth-century European intellectual life, remarkable even among the many scientists of the period for the range and depth of his interests. A pioneer of physiology and physics, he was also deeply concerned with the implications of science for philosophy and culture.

From the 1850s to the 1890s, Helmholtz delivered more than two dozen popular lectures, seeking to educate the public and to enlighten the leaders of European society and governments about the potential benefits of science and technology to a developing modern society. David Cahan has selected fifteen of these lectures, which reflect the wide range of topics of crucial importance to Helmholtz and his audiences. Among the subjects discussed are the origins of the planetary system, the relation of natural science to science in general, the aims and progress of the physical sciences, the problems of perception, and academic freedom in German universities. This collection also includes Helmholtz's fascinating lectures on the relation of optics to painting and the physiological causes of harmony in music, which provide insight into the relations between science and aesthetics.

Science and Culture makes available again Helmholtz's eloquent arguments on the usefulness, benefits, and, intellectual pleasures of understanding the natural world. With Cahan's Introduction to set these essays in their broader context, this collection makes an important contribution to the philosophical and intellectual history of Europe at a time when science played an increasingly significant role in social, economic, and cultural life.
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Science and Eccentricity
Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences
Victoria Carroll
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
The concept of eccentricity was central to how people in the nineteenth century understood their world. This monograph is the first scholarly history of eccentricity. Carroll explores how discourses of eccentricity were established to make sense of individuals who did not seem to fit within an increasingly organized social and economic order. She focuses on the self-taught natural philosopher William Martin, the fossilist Thomas Hawkins and the taxidermist Charles Waterton.
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Science and Ecosystem Management in the National Parks
Edited by William L. Halvorson and Gary E. Davis
University of Arizona Press, 1996
Our national parks are more than mere recreational destinations. They are repositories of the nation's biological diversity and contain some of the last ecosystem remnants needed as standards to set reasonable goals for sustainable development throughout the land. Nevertheless, public pressure for recreation has largely precluded adequate research and resource monitoring in national parks, and ignorance of ecosystem structure and function in parks has led to costly mistakes--such as predator control and fire suppression--that continue to threaten parks today. This volume demonstrates the value of ecological knowledge in protecting parks and shows how modest investments in knowledge of park ecosystems can pay handsome dividends.

Science and Ecosystem Management in the National Parks presents twelve case studies of long-term research conducted in and around national parks that address major natural resource issues. These cases demonstrate how the use of longer time scales strongly influence our understanding of ecosystems and how interpretations of short-term patterns in nature often change when viewed in the context of long-term data sets. Most importantly, they show conclusively that scientific research significantly reduces uncertainty and improves resource management decisions. Chosen by scientists and senior park managers, the cases offer a broad range of topics, including: air quality at Grand Canyon; interaction between moose and wolf populations on Isle Royale; control of exotic species in Hawaiian parks; simulation of natural fire in the parks of the Sierra Nevada; and the impact of urban expansion on Saguaro National Monument.

Because national parks are increasingly beset with conflicting views of their management, the need for knowledge of park ecosystems becomes even more critical--not only for the parks themselves, but for what they can tell us about survival in the rest of our world. This book demonstrates to policymakers and managers that decisions based on knowledge of ecosystems are more enduring and cost effective than decisions derived from uninformed consensus. It also provides scientists with models for designing research to meet threats to our most precious natural resources. "If we can learn to save the parks," observe Halvorson and Davis, "perhaps we can learn to save the world."
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Science and Emotions after 1945
A Transatlantic Perspective
Edited by Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Through the first half of the twentieth century, emotions were a legitimate object of scientific study across a variety of disciplines. After 1945, however, in the wake of Nazi irrationalism, emotions became increasingly marginalized and postwar rationalism took central stage. Emotion remained on the scene of scientific and popular study but largely at the fringes as a behavioral reflex, or as a concern of the private sphere. So why, by the 1960s, had the study of emotions returned to the forefront of academic investigation?

In Science and Emotions after 1945, Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross chronicle the curious resurgence of emotion studies and show that it was fueled by two very different sources: social movements of the 1960s and brain science. A central claim of the book is that the relatively recent neuroscientific study of emotion did not initiate – but instead consolidated – the emotional turn by clearing the ground for multidisciplinary work on the emotions. Science and Emotions after 1945 tells the story of this shift by looking closely at scientific disciplines in which the study of emotions has featured prominently, including medicine, psychiatry, neuroscience, and the social sciences, viewed in each case from a humanities perspective.
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Science and Engineering Careers in the United States
An Analysis of Markets and Employment
Edited by Richard B. Freeman and Daniel L. Goroff
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Beginning in the early 2000s, there was an upsurge of national concern over the state of the science and engineering job market that sparked a plethora of studies, commission reports, and a presidential initiative, all stressing the importance of maintaining American competitiveness in these fields. Science and Engineering Careers in the United States is the first major academic study to probe the issues that underlie these concerns.

This volume provides new information on the economics of the postgraduate science and engineering job market, addressing such topics as the factors that determine the supply of PhDs, the career paths they follow after graduation, and the creation and use of knowledge as it is reflected by the amount of papers and patents produced. A distinguished team of contributors also explores the tensions between industry and academe in recruiting graduates, the influx of foreign-born doctorates, and the success of female doctorates. Science and Engineering Careers in the United States will raise new questions about stimulating innovation and growth in the American economy.

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The Science and Fiction of Autism
Laura Schreibman
Harvard University Press, 2007

Autism is a complex and incurable constellation of bizarre behaviors, impaired cognition, limited language, and most distressingly, a lack of responsiveness to other people, and it has been the center of impassioned debates for decades. What is it? What causes it? How can it be treated?

In The Science and Fiction of Autism, one of the country's leading experts in behavioral treatments approaches autism through the context of its controversies, showing where extraordinary and unfounded claims have falsely raised hopes, stirred fears, and ruined lives. Arguing that autism is an entirely biological disorder, however complex its neurological origins, Laura Schreibman lays waste to the beliefs that it is caused by "refrigerator mothers" or the MMR vaccine, as well as to the simplistic claims that it can be cured by a variety of unsubstantiated treatments.

Drawing from her own long clinical experience with autistic children and their parents, Schreibman arms her readers--students, educators, psychologists, and parents alike--with information and arguments to deal with the onslaught of good, bad, deficient, and irrelevant ideas about autism.

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Science and Government
C. P. Snow
Harvard University Press, 2013

Science and Government is a gripping account of one of the great scientific rivalries of the twentieth century. The antagonists are Sir Henry Tizard, a chemist from Imperial College, and Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), a physicist from the University of Oxford. The scientist-turned-novelist Charles Percy Snow tells a story of hatred and ambition at the top of British science, exposing how vital decisions were made in secret and sometimes with little regard to truth or the prevailing scientific consensus.

Tizard, an adviser to a Labor government, believed the air war against Nazi Germany would be won by investing in the new science of radar. Lindemann favored bombing the homes of German citizens. Each man produced data to support his case, but in the end what mattered was politics. When Labor was in power, Tizard’s view prevailed. When the Conservatives returned, Lindemann, who was Winston Churchill’s personal adviser, became untouchable.

Snow’s 1959 “Two Cultures” Rede Lecture propelled him to worldwide fame. Science and Government, originally the 1960 Godkin Lectures at Harvard, has been largely forgotten. Today the space occupied by scientists and politicians is much more contested than it was in Snow’s time, but there remains no better guide to it than Snow’s dramatic narrative.

C. P. Snow (1905–1980) held several positions in the British Civil Service and was the author of many fiction and nonfiction books, most notably The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.

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Science and Government
C. P. Snow
Harvard University Press

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Science and Medicine in France
The Emergence of Experimental Physiology, 1790–1855
John E. Lesch
Harvard University Press, 1984

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Science and Medicine in Twentieth-Century China
Research and Education
John Z. Bowers, J. William Hess, and Nathan Sivin, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1988
The first part of this volume is devoted is devoted to synoptical and analytical examinations by historians of attempts to root modern science in China during the Republican period. The second contains reports by scientists who have been involved in China’s recent efforts to modernize. Topics include genetic research, taxonomy, contraception, food policy, and schistosomiasis. With an introduction by Nathan Sivin.
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Science and Moral Imagination
A New Ideal for Values in Science
Matthew J. Brown
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
The idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew J. Brown argues that science and values mutually influence and implicate one another, that the influence of values on science is pervasive and must be responsibly managed, and that science can and should have an influence on our values. This interplay, he explains, must be guided by accounts of scientific inquiry and value judgment that are sensitive to the complexities of their interactions. Brown presents scientific inquiry and value judgment as types of problem-solving practices and provides a new framework for thinking about how we might ethically evaluate episodes and decisions in science, while offering guidance for scientific practitioners and institutions about how they can incorporate value judgments into their work. His framework, dubbed “the ideal of moral imagination,” emphasizes the role of imagination in value judgment and the positive role that value judgment plays in science.
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The Science and Politics of Racial Research
William H. Tucker
University of Illinois Press, 1994

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Science and Providence
God's Interaction with the World
John C. Polkinghorne
Templeton Press, 2005

Internationally renowned priest-scientist Dr. John C. Polkinghorne examines whether a personal, interacting God is a credible concept in today's scientific age. Encouraging the belief that there is a compatibility between the insights of science and the insights of religion, this book, previously published in the United Kingdom, focuses on the viewpoint that the world is one in which both human beings and God have the freedom to act.

A modern understanding of the physical world is applied to questions of prayer and providence, such as: Do miracles happen? Can prayer change anything? Why does evil exist? Why does God allow suffering? Why does God need us to ask him?

God's involvement in time is considered, from both a temporal and an eternal perspective. The roles of incarnation and sacrament are discussed in terms of whether or not they have a credible place in today's worldview. And the Final Anthropic Principle (FAP) is presented, with its attempt at a physical eschatology, showing it to be an inadequate basis for hope. Real hope can reside only with God, Polkinghorne concludes.

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Science and Relativism
Some Key Controversies in the Philosophy of Science
Larry Laudan
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In recent years, many members of the intellectual community have embraced a radical relativism regarding knowledge in general and scientific knowledge in particular, holding that Kuhn, Quine, and Feyerabend have knocked the traditional picture of scientific knowledge into a cocked hat. Is philosophy of science, or mistaken impressions of it, responsible for the rise of relativism? In this book, Laudan offers a trenchant, wide-ranging critique of cognitive relativism and a thorough introduction to major issues in the philosophy of knowledge.
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Science and Religion
A Critical Survey
Holmes Rolston
Templeton Press, 2006
This landmark book, first published in 1987, is now back in print, with a new introduction by its award-winning author. An interdisciplinary approach to the central themes of scientific and religious thought, this book was widely heralded upon its publication for the richness and depth of its contribution to the science and religion dialogue.
 
“notable for its breadth and depth . . . filled with admirably argued and powerfully presented treatments of critical issues.”—Joseph Pickle, Colorado College, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science
 
“a superb and subtle book.”—David Foxgrover, Christian Century
 
“a monumental work . . . [T]he book is truly outstanding.”—John H. Wright, Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, Theological Studies
 
“Rolston’s presentation of the methods of science, along with up-to-date summaries of the main achievements of the various sciences, is commendable for its clarity and critical acumen.”—Choice
 
According to Holmes Rolston III, there are fundamental questions that science alone cannot answer; these questions are the central religious questions. He uses the scientific method of inquiry to distill key issues from science, and then he integrates them in a study that begins with matter and moves through life, mind, culture, history, and spirit. Incorporating religious and scientific worldviews, he begins with an examination of two natural sciences: physics and biology. He then extrapolates examples from two human sciences: psychology and sociology. Next, he moves to the storied universe and world history, raising and addressing religious questions. “Never in the histories of science and religion have the

opportunities been greater for fertile interaction between these fields, with mutual benefits to both,” states Rolston. The re-publication of this book provides current researchers and students in the field an invaluable, timeless methodological resource.The new introduction offers updated insights based on new scientific research. 

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Science and Religion
Christian and Muslim Perspectives
David Marshall, Editor. Afterword by Archbishop Rowan Williams
Georgetown University Press, 2015

Science and Religion is a record of the 2009 Building Bridges seminar, a dialogue between leading Christian and Muslim scholars convened annually by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The essays in this volume explore how both faith traditions have approached the interface between science and religion and throw light on the ongoing challenges posed by this issue today. The volume includes a selection of relevant texts together with commentary that illuminates the scriptures, the ideas of key religious thinkers, and also the legacy of Charles Darwin.

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Science and Religion in Search of Cosmic Purpose
John F. Haught, Editor
Georgetown University Press

Many scientists today think of the universe as essentially purposeless. Likewise, modern and postmodern philosophers have often been suspicious of any religious claims that the natural world embodies and eternal meaning or teleology. Not all scientific thinkers subscribe to this cosmic pessimism, however, and some would even argue that contemporary knowledge is consistent with a religious sense of cosmic purpose.

This stimulating book offers candid reflections on the question of cosmic purpose written both by prominent scientists and by scholars representing the world's religious traditions. Examining the issue from a wide variety of perspectives, this is the only current book to deal with cosmic purpose from an interreligious and interdisciplinary perspective.

Here scientists such as physicist Andrei Linde and biologist Francisco Ayala come face to face with Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Hindu philosopher Anindita Niyogi Balslev, and others. They examine such perplexing issues as the possible existence of multiple universes and the implications of seemingly purposive features in life. The contributions address the question of whether a religiously-based notion of a purposeful cosmos is consistent with the latest scientific understanding of nature, and whether theology can affirm the presence of divine action without contradicting science.

These essays will challenge readers to ponder their own place in the cosmos as they seek to interpret the visions of the world's great spiritual traditions in the light of natural science.

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Science and Salvation
Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain
Aileen Fyfe
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Threatened by the proliferation of cheap, mass-produced publications, the Religious Tract Society issued a series of publications on popular science during the 1840s. The books were intended to counter the developing notion that science and faith were mutually exclusive, and the Society's authors employed a full repertoire of evangelical techniques—low prices, simple language, carefully structured narratives—to convert their readers. The application of such techniques to popular science resulted in one of the most widely available sources of information on the sciences in the Victorian era.

A fascinating study of the tenuous relationship between science and religion in evangelical publishing, Science and Salvation examines questions of practice and faith from a fresh perspective. Rather than highlighting works by expert men of science, Aileen Fyfe instead considers a group of relatively undistinguished authors who used thinly veiled Christian rhetoric to educate first, but to convert as well. This important volume is destined to become essential reading for historians of science, religion, and publishing alike.
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Science and Social Inequality
Feminist and Postcolonial Issues
Sandra Harding
University of Illinois Press, 2006

In Science and Social Inequality, Sandra Harding makes the provocative argument that the philosophy and practices of today's Western science, contrary to its Enlightenment mission, work to insure that more science will only worsen existing gaps between the best and worst off around the world. She defends this claim by exposing the ways that hierarchical social formations in modern Western sciences encode antidemocratic principles and practices, particularly in terms of their services to militarism, the impoverishment and alienation of labor, Western expansion, and environmental destruction. The essays in this collection--drawing on feminist, multicultural, and postcolonial studies--propose ways to reconceptualize the sciences in the global social order. 

At issue here are not only social justice and environmental issues but also the accuracy and comprehensiveness of our understandings of natural and social worlds. The inadvertent complicity of the sciences with antidemocratic projects obscures natural and social realities and thus blocks the growth of scientific knowledge. Scientists, policy makers, social justice movements and the consumers of scientific products (that is, the rest of us) can work together and separately to improve this situation.

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Science and Societies in Frankfurt am Main
Ayako Sakurai
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
The nineteenth century saw science move from being the preserve of a small learned elite to a dominant force which influenced society as a whole. Sakurai presents a study of how scientific societies affected the social and political life of a city. As it did not have a university or a centralized government, Frankfurt am Main is an ideal case study of how scientific associations—funded by private patronage for the good of the local populace—became an important centre for natural history.
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Science and Technology Encyclopedia
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Up-to-date, concise, and easy to use, the Science and Technology Encyclopedia is a reliable resource for a wide general readership-from high school students to undergraduates to all those with an interest in the comprehensive array of scientific fields it covers.

It includes:
*More than 6,500 authoritative A-Z entries covering earth and life sciences (including natural history, physics, chemistry, medicine, information technology, and other disciplines)

*Biographical entries for more than 850 famous scientists, detailing their careers and achievements

*Over 20,000 cross-references

*More than 250 detailed illustrations, including schematic diagrams, representational natural history artwork, and technical cutaway diagrams
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Science and Technology in Post-Mao China
Denis Fred Simon
Harvard University Press, 1989

Along with the political and economic reforms that have characterized the post-Mao era in China there has been a potentially revolutionary change in Chinese science and technology. Here sixteen scholars examine various facets of the current science and technology scene, comparing it with the past and speculating about future trends.

Two chapters dealing with science under the Nationalists and under Mao are followed by a section of extensive analysis of reforms under Deng Xiaoping, focusing on the organizational system, the use of human resources, and the emerging response to market forces. Chapters dealing with changes in medical care, agriculture, and military research and development demonstrate how these reforms have affected specific areas during the Chinese shift away from Party orthodoxy and Maoist populism toward professional expertise as the guiding principle in science and technology. Three further chapters deal with China’s interface with the world at large in the process of technology transfer.

Both the introductory and concluding chapters describe the tension between the Chinese Communist Party structure, with its inclinations toward strict vertical control, and the scientific and technological community’s need for a free flow of information across organizational, disciplinary, and national boundaries.

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Science and Technology Policy in the United States
Open Systems in Action
Kraemer, Sylvia
Rutgers University Press, 2006

During the latter half of the twentieth century, federal funding in the United States for scientific research and development increased dramatically. Yet despite the infusion of public funds into research centers, the relationship between public policy and research and development remains poorly understood.

How does the federal government attempt to harness scientific knowledge and resources for the nation's economic welfare and competitiveness in the global marketplace? Who makes decisions about controversial scientific experiments, such as genetic engineering and space exploration? Who is held accountable when things go wrong?

In this lucidly-written introduction to the topic, Sylvia Kraemer draws upon her extensive experience in government to develop a useful and powerful framework for thinking about the American approach to shaping and managing scientific innovation. Kraemer suggests that the history of science, technology, and politics is best understood as a negotiation of ongoing tensions between open and closed systems. Open systems depend on universal access to information that is complete, verifiable, and appropriately used. Closed systems, in contrast, are composed of unique and often proprietary features, which are designed to control usage.

From the Constitution's patent clause to current debates over intellectual property, stem cells, and internet regulation, Kraemer shows the promise-as well as the limits-of open systems in advancing scientific progress as well as the nation's economic vitality.

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Science and the American Century
Readings from "Isis"
Edited and with an Introduction by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and David Kaiser
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The twentieth century was one of astonishing change in science, especially as pursued in the United States. Against a backdrop of dramatic political and economic shifts brought by world wars, intermittent depressions, sporadic and occasionally massive increases in funding, and expanding private patronage, this scientific work fundamentally reshaped everyday life. Science and the American Century offers some of the most significant contributions to the study of the history of science, technology, and medicine during the twentieth century, all drawn from the pages of the journal Isis.
 
Fourteen essays from leading scholars are grouped into three sections, each presented in roughly chronological order. The first section charts several ways in which our knowledge of nature was cultivated, revealing how scientific practitioners and the public alike grappled with definitions of the “natural” as they absorbed and refracted global information. The essays in the second section investigate the changing attitudes and fortunes of scientists during and after World War II. The final section documents the intricate ways that science, as it advanced, became intertwined with social policies and the law.
 
This important and useful book provides a thoughtful and detailed overview for scholars and students of American history and the history of science, as well as for scientists and others who want to better understand modern science and science in America.
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Science and the Bible
Evidence-Based Christian Belief
Ted Burge
Templeton Press, 2005

Does scientific evidence give credence to religious belief? Ted Burge, a highly respected physicist in the United Kingdom, draws on his background in the fields of science and theology to address the issue.

The book begins with an analysis of evidence found in the text of the Bible in different translations, proceeds to an examination of interpretations of the Old and New Testaments, and then looks at evidence from the sciences, including archeological findings, geological mappings, and carbon-dating, alongside data from the arts, hymns, literature, and historians' testimonies.

Evidence is presented on:

•Physical, geological, and biological evolution, and their relation to the Genesis story of creation
•Original sin, the origin of death, and the immortality of the soul, as described in Babylonian and other stories, including the Flood and the Tower of Babel
•The Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, Incarnation and Atonement
•Free will and the nature of love
•Miracles as described in the Bible
•The evolution of belief
•Meditation and prayer as a "conscious interchange of thoughts with God"

Knowledge of science is knowledge of God's creation and often helps to identify some of the things we can say about God, the author points out.

 

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Science and the Creative Imagination in Latin America
Edited by Evelyn Fishburn and Eduardo L. Ortiz
University of London Press, 2004

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Science and the Humanities
Moody E. Prior
Northwestern University Press, 1962
Science and the Humanities contains five lectures concerning the discussion of the relation of science and the humanities, focusing on the work of thinkers such as James B. Conant and C. P. Snow. 
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Science and the Renewal Of Belief
Russell Stannard
Templeton Press, 2004

Originally published in Great Britain and now updated and available for the first time in a U.S. edition, this book is a critically acclaimed work by a renowned theologian-scientist.

Russell Stannard is known for cutting through highly technical data and presenting it clearly and simply. In Science and the Renewal of Belief he sheds light on ways in which science and religion influence each other and can help each other. Science and logic cannot establish belief, he says, but belief can be confirmed and renewed with the changed perspective of modern science.

The many reviews of the U.K. edition of his book cite his lucid presentation of relativity and quantum theory, and the way he uses relativity to explore time and eternity, and indeterminacy to comment on free will. He is also praised for offering fresh insight into original sin, the trials experienced by Galileo, the problem of pain, the possibility of miracles, the evidence for the resurrection, the credibility of incarnation, and the power of steadfast prayer. By introducing simple analogies, Stannard clears up misunderstandings that have muddied the connections between science and religion, and suggests contributions that the pursuit of physical science can make to theology.

 

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Science and the Search for Meaning
Perspectives from International Scientists
Jean Staune
Templeton Press, 2006

As the organizer of some of the most important meetings in science and religion in Europe, Jean Staune is in a core position to report on the dialogue between science and religion, primarily from the views of scientists. In this book, the translation of a recent French edition, he presents "audacious and rigorous" articles by fifteen renowned leaders in the field, of whom four are Nobel Prize winners. They represent nine countries and seven religions.

Each of the authors in this volume responds in a different way, addressing naturalism, materialism, the nature of consciousness, reductionism, and the quest for meaning.Two paradigms emerge, with those who say that God (or direction) can exist in the universe because we can understand certain things, while others say that God exists because we cannot understand the universe altogether. Their reflections on the accessibility and the mystery of the world show the extraordinary abstract revolution that took place in science during the twentieth century and the way this establishes a bridge between science and religion.

Contributors are Nobel Prize winners Christian de Duve, Charles Townes, Ahmed Zewail, and William D. Phillips; as well as Paul Davies, Bernard d'Espagnat, Thomas Odhiambo, Ramanath Cowsik, Jean Kovalevsky, Thierry Magnin, Bruno Guiderdoni, Trinh Xuan Thuan, Khalil Chamcham, Michael Heller, and Philip Clayton.

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Science and the Soviet Social Order
Loren Graham
Harvard University Press, 1990

Within two generations the Soviet Union has made the transition from a peasant society to an industrialized superpower. Today it has the world's largest scientific and technical establishment, surpassing that of the United States by almost one third. Nevertheless, the modernization of the Soviet Union is uneven. Indeed, in many aspects of rural and urban life the Soviet Union displays characteristics of an underdeveloped nation, which suggests that science and technology are less significant social forces there than in the modernized West. This book is the first to attest that science and technology have in fact been integral to the development of Soviet culture.

Close scrutiny is given both to the unique mechanisms that have given science and technology their prominence and to the distinctive, and recently liberalizing, effects they have had on intellectual and political developments in the Soviet Union. Included are the perceptive views of a dozen leading scholars who take on an unusually wide spectrum of topics—from communications technology to environmental issues, to science fiction and art, to bioethics and technocracy—while maintaining a consistent concern with the humanistic dimensions of the gargantuan enterprise of science. Loren Graham's discerning introduction provides a broad context for examining the active role of science and technology in Soviet culture and politics.

This splendid volume will appeal to anyone searching for a deeper understanding of a superpower in ferment. It will be of special interest not only to historians of science and technology but also to psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers.

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Science and the University
Edited by Paula E. Stephan and Ronald G. Ehrenberg
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
Science and the University investigates the tremendous changes that have taken place in university research over the past several decades, gauging the current state of research in higher education and examining issues and challenges crucial to its future. Scientific research increasingly dominates the aims and agendas of many American universities, and this proliferation—and changes in the way research is conducted—has given rise to important questions about the interrelations of higher education, funding for scientific research, and government policy. The cost of doing science, the commercialization of university research, the changing composition and number of Ph.D. students, the effect of scientific research on other university programs—these are just a few of the many issues explored in this volume from the vantage points of scholars in such diverse fields as economics, biochemistry, genetics, and labor studies.
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Science as a Carreer Choice
Theoretical and Empirical Studies
Bernice T. Ediuson
Russell Sage Foundation, 1974
How can we identify the young men and women who, as social and behavioral scientists of tomorrow, will do the needed research to resolve our burgeoning social problems? How can the most promising be attracted to an investigatory career? How can they become identified with the behaviors, attitudes and values that persons in science share? A provocative body of literature about the psychology of the scientist and his career emerged in the post-Sputnik era. Drs. Eiduson and Beckman bring together more than seventy of the most significant and representative studies. These range over childhood and family influences, academic experiences, motivations, interests, and intellectual and personality strengths that have been examined as precursors for choosing science as adult work. The psychological mechanisms involved in socializing a young person toward a scientific career are suggested in readings from the outstanding theoreticians in the field. Selections on scientific career lines, decisions and options at various stages of work, and factors influencing goals and career development contribute to the understanding of the psychological life of the highly endowed and well-functioning professional adult. Through showing the certain completeness of effort of what has been learned about the psychology of scientists to date, the authors anticipate a resurgence of interest in the creative individual, a renewed enthusiasm for application, and a refocusing of research on the issues unique to the social and behavioral research scientist.
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Science as a Process
An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science
David L. Hull
University of Chicago Press, 1988
"Legend is overdue for replacement, and an adequate replacement must attend to the process of science as carefully as Hull has done. I share his vision of a serious account of the social and intellectual dynamics of science that will avoid both the rosy blur of Legend and the facile charms of relativism. . . . Because of [Hull's] deep concern with the ways in which research is actually done, Science as a Process begins an important project in the study of science. It is one of a distinguished series of books, which Hull himself edits."—Philip Kitcher, Nature

"In Science as a Process, [David Hull] argues that the tension between cooperation and competition is exactly what makes science so successful. . . . Hull takes an unusual approach to his subject. He applies the rules of evolution in nature to the evolution of science, arguing that the same kinds of forces responsible for shaping the rise and demise of species also act on the development of scientific ideas."—Natalie Angier, New York Times Book Review

"By far the most professional and thorough case in favour of an evolutionary philosophy of science ever to have been made. It contains excellent short histories of evolutionary biology and of systematics (the science of classifying living things); an important and original account of modern systematic controversy; a counter-attack against the philosophical critics of evolutionary philosophy; social-psychological evidence, collected by Hull himself, to show that science does have the character demanded by his philosophy; and a philosophical analysis of evolution which is general enough to apply to both biological and historical change."—Mark Ridley, Times Literary Supplement

"Hull is primarily interested in how social interactions within the scientific community can help or hinder the process by which new theories and techniques get accepted. . . . The claim that science is a process for selecting out the best new ideas is not a new one, but Hull tells us exactly how scientists go about it, and he is prepared to accept that at least to some extent, the social activities of the scientists promoting a new idea can affect its chances of being accepted."—Peter J. Bowler, Archives of Natural History

"I have been doing philosophy of science now for twenty-five years, and whilst I would never have claimed that I knew everything, I felt that I had a really good handle on the nature of science, Again and again, Hull was able to show me just how incomplete my understanding was. . . . Moreover, [Science as a Process] is one of the most compulsively readable books that I have ever encountered."—Michael Ruse, Biology and Philosophy

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Science as a Way of Knowing
The Foundations of Modern Biology
John A. Moore
Harvard University Press, 1993
For the past twenty-five years John Moore has taught biology instructors how to teach biology--by emphasizing the questions people have asked about life through the ages and the ways natural philosophers and scientists have sought the answers. This book makes Moore's uncommon wisdom available to students in a lively and richly illustrated account of the history and workings of life. Employing a breadth of rhetoric strategies--including vividly written case histories, hypotheses and deductions, and chronological narrative--Science as a Way of Knowing provides not only a cultural history of biology but also a splendid introduction to the procedures and values of science.
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Science as a Way of Knowing
The Foundations of Modern Biology
John A. Moore
Harvard University Press
For the past twenty-five years John Moore has taught biology instructors how to teach biology--by emphasizing the questions people have asked about life through the ages and the ways natural philosophers and scientists have sought the answers. This book makes Moore's uncommon wisdom available to students in a lively and richly illustrated account of the history and workings of life. Employing a breadth of rhetoric strategies--including vividly written case histories, hypotheses and deductions, and chronological narrative--Science as a Way of Knowing provides not only a cultural history of biology but also a splendid introduction to the procedures and values of science.
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Science as It Could Have Been
Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem
Lena Soler
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015
Could all or part of our taken-as-established scientific conclusions, theories, experimental data, ontological commitments, and so forth have been significantly different? Science as It Could Have Been focuses on a crucial issue that contemporary science studies have often neglected: the issue of contingency within science. It considers a number of case studies, past and present, from a wide range of scientific disciplines—physics, biology, geology, mathematics, and psychology—to explore whether components of human science are inevitable, or if we could have developed an alternative successful science based on essentially different notions, conceptions, and results. Bringing together a group of distinguished contributors in philosophy, sociology, and history of science, this edited volume offers a comprehensive analysis of the contingency/inevitability problem and a lively and up-to-date portrait of current debates in science studies.
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Science as Power
Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society
Stanley Aronowitz
University of Minnesota Press, 1988

Science as Power was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Science has established itself as not merely the dominant but the only legitimate form of human knowledge. By tying its truth claims to methodology, science has claimed independence from the influence of social and historical conditions. Here, Aronowitz asserts that the norms of science are by no means self-evident and that science is best seen as a socially constructed discourse that legitimates its power by presenting itself as truth.

Stanley Aronowitz is professor of sociology in the graduate school of City University of New York. His books include Working Class Hero: A New Strategy for Labor and, with Henry Giroux, Education Under Siege.

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Science as Practice and Culture
Edited by Andrew Pickering
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Science as Practice and Culture explores one of the newest and most controversial developments within the rapidly changing field of science studies: the move toward studying scientific practice—the work of doing science—and the associated move toward studying scientific culture, understood as the field of resources that practice operates in and on.

Andrew Pickering has invited leading historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists of science to prepare original essays for this volume. The essays range over the physical and biological sciences and mathematics, and are divided into two parts. In part I, the contributors map out a coherent set of perspectives on scientific practice and culture, and relate their analyses to central topics in the philosophy of science such as realism, relativism, and incommensurability. The essays in part II seek to delineate the study of science as practice in arguments across its borders with the sociology of scientific knowledge, social epistemology, and reflexive ethnography.

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Science as Service
Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865–1930
Edited by Alan I Marcus
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Science as Service: Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865–1930 is the first of a two-volume study that traces the foundation and evolution of America’s land-grant institutions. In this expertly curated collection of essays, Alan I Marcus has assembled a tough-minded account of the successes and set-backs of these institutions during the first sixty-five years of their existence. In myriad scenes, vignettes, and episodes from the history of land-grant colleges, these essays demonstrate the defining characteristic of these institutions: their willingness to proclaim and pursue science in the service of the publics and students they serve.
 
The Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 created a series of institutions—at least one in every state and territory—with now familiar names: Michigan State University, Ohio State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University, the University of Arizona, and the University of California, to name a few. These schools opened educational opportunities and pathways to a significant segment of the American public and gave the United States a global edge in science, technical innovation, and agriculture.
 
Science as Service provides an essential body of literature for understanding the transformations of the land-grant colleges established by the Morrill Act in 1862 as well as the considerable impact they had on the history of the United States. Historians of science, technology, and agriculture, along with rural sociologists, public decision and policy makers, educators, and higher education administrators will find this an essential addition to their book collections.
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Science At Century's End
Philosophical Questions on the Progress and Limits of Science
Martin Carrier
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004
To most laypersons and scientists, science and progress appear to go hand in hand, yet philosophers and historians of science have long questioned the inevitability of this pairing. As we take leave of a century acclaimed for scientific advances and progress, Science at Century's End, the eighth volume of the Pittsburgh-Konstanz Series in the Philosophy and History of Science, takes the reader to the heart of this important matter. Subtitled Philosophical Questions on the Progress and Limits of Science, this timely volume contains twenty penetrating essays by prominent philosophers and historians who explore and debate the limits of scientific inquiry and their presumed consequences for science in the 21st century.
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Science at the Bar
Law, Science, and Technology in America
Sheila Jasanoff
Harvard University Press, 1995

Issues spawned by the headlong pace of developments in science and technology fill the courts. How should we deal with frozen embryos and leaky implants, dangerous chemicals, DNA fingerprints, and genetically engineered animals? The realm of the law, to which beleaguered people look for answers, is sometimes at a loss—constrained by its own assumptions and practices, Sheila Jasanoff suggests. This book exposes American law’s long-standing involvement in constructing, propagating, and perpetuating a variety of myths about science and technology.

Science at the Bar is the first book to examine in detail how two powerful American institutions—both seekers after truth—interact with each other. Looking at cases involving product liability, medical malpractice, toxic torts, genetic engineering, and life and death, Jasanoff argues that the courts do not simply depend on scientific findings for guidance—they actually influence the production of science and technology at many different levels. Research is conducted and interpreted to answer legal questions. Experts are selected to be credible on the witness stand. Products are redesigned to reduce the risk of lawsuits. At the same time the courts emerge here as democratizing agents in disputes over the control and deployment of new technologies, advancing and sustaining a public dialogue about the limits of expertise. Jasanoff shows how positivistic views of science and the law often prevent courts from realizing their full potential as centers for a progressive critique of science and technology.

With its lucid analysis of both scientific and legal modes of reasoning, and its recommendations for scholars and policymakers, this book will be an indispensable resource for anyone who hopes to understand the changing configurations of science, technology, and the law in our litigious society.

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Science Be Dammed
How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River
Eric Kuhn and John Fleck
University of Arizona Press, 2019
Science Be Dammed is an alarming reminder of the high stakes in the management—and perils in the mismanagement—of water in the western United States.  It seems deceptively simple: even when clear evidence was available that the Colorado River could not sustain ambitious dreaming and planning by decision-makers throughout the twentieth century, river planners and political operatives irresponsibly made the least sustainable and most dangerous long-term decisions.

Arguing that the science of the early twentieth century can shed new light on the mistakes at the heart of the over-allocation of the Colorado River, authors Eric Kuhn and John Fleck delve into rarely reported early studies, showing that scientists warned as early as the 1920s that there was not enough water for the farms and cities boosters wanted to build. Contrary to a common myth that the authors of the Colorado River Compact did the best they could with limited information, Kuhn and Fleck show that development boosters selectively chose the information needed to support their dreams, ignoring inconvenient science that suggested a more cautious approach.

Today water managers are struggling to come to terms with the mistakes of the past. Focused on both science and policy, Kuhn and Fleck unravel the tangled web that has constructed the current crisis. With key decisions being made now, including negotiations for rules governing how the Colorado River water will be used after 2026, Science Be Dammed offers a clear-eyed path forward by looking back.

Understanding how mistakes were made is crucial to understanding our contemporary problems. Science Be Dammed offers important lessons in the age of climate change about the necessity of seeking out the best science to support the decisions we make.
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Science Bought and Sold
Essays in the Economics of Science
Edited by Philip Mirowski and Esther-Mirjam Sent
University of Chicago Press, 2001
"A serious reconsideration of the 'economics of science' is long overdue," say Philip Mirowski and Esther-Mirjam Sent in the introduction to Science Bought and Sold. Indeed, it is only recently that one could speak of a field of economics of science at all. Although it has long been accepted that economics can provide useful tools with which to understand science, economics has only lately shifted its focus to the economic agent as information processor, making it more broadly applicable to science.
Bringing together central themes in this emerging discipline, the editors have assembled important articles that provide a wider context and background against which the economics of science can be evaluated. Roughly one-third of the essays presented here are original papers, and the rest are critical articles previously published in the field. From essays examining economic welfare to the idea of scientists as agents to the digital aspects of higher education,Science Bought and Sold presents a comprehensive overview of the new directions of this expanding area.


Contributors:
Kenneth J. Arrow
Mario Biagioli
William A. Brock
Michel Callon
Partha Dasgupta
Paul A. David
Steven N. Durlauf
Paul Forman
Steve Fuller
D. Wade Hands
Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap
Philip Kitcher
Sharon G. Levin
Richard R. Nelson
David F. Noble
Michael Polanyi
Gary Rhoades
Charles Sanders Peirce
Sheila Slaughter
Paula E. Stephan
Stephen Turner
James R. Wible
John Ziman
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Science, Bread, and Circuses
Folkloristic Essays on Science for the Masses
Gregory Schrempp
Utah State University Press, 2014

In Science, Bread, and Circuses, Gregory Schrempp brings a folkloristic viewpoint to the topic of popular science, calling attention to the persistence of folkloric form, idiom, and worldview within the increasingly important dimension of popular consciousness defined by the impact of science.

Schrempp considers specific examples of texts in which science interpreters employ folkloric tropes—myths, legends, epics, proverbs, spectacles, and a variety of gestures from religious traditions—to lend credibility and appeal to their messages. In each essay he explores an instance of science popularization rooted in the quotidian round: variations of proverb formulas in monumental measurements, invocations of science heroes like saints or other inspirational figures, the battle of mythos and logos in parenting and academe, the meme's involvement in quasi-religious treatments of the problem of evil, and a range of other tropes of folklore drafted to serve the exposition of science.

Science, Bread, and Circuses places the relationship of science and folklore at the very center of folkloristic inquiry by exploring a range of attempts to rephrase and thus domesticate scientific findings and claims in folklorically imbued popular forms.


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Science by the People
Participation, Power, and the Politics of Environmental Knowledge
Aya H. Kimura
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Longlisted for the Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)

Citizen science—research involving nonprofessionals in the research process—has attracted both strong enthusiasts and detractors. Many environmental professionals, activists, and scholars consider citizen science part of their toolkit for addressing environmental challenges. Critics, however, contend that it represents a corporate takeover of scientific priorities. In this timely book, two sociologists move beyond this binary debate by analyzing the tensions and dilemmas that citizen science projects commonly face. Key lessons are drawn from case studies where citizen scientists have investigated the impact of shale oil and gas, nuclear power, and genetically engineered crops. These studies show that diverse citizen science projects face shared dilemmas relating to austerity pressures, presumed boundaries between science and activism, and difficulties moving between scales of environmental problems. By unpacking the politics of citizen science, this book aims to help people negotiate a complex political landscape and choose paths moving toward social change and environmental sustainability.
 
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Science Communication Online
Engaging Experts and Publics on the Internet
Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Uncloistered by the web, science is finding its way into previously unimagined audiences. Whether collecting data in one’s backyard to help wildlife experts manage wolf populations or even funding research out of one’s own pocket, nonexperts can engage science at an unprecedented scale. As science communication has moved online, a range of important new genres have emerged that put professionals and the public into conversation with each other. In Science Communication Online: Engaging Experts and Publics on the Internet, Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher takes up these “trans-scientific” genres to explore how scientists are adapting their communications, how publics are increasingly involved in science, and how boundaries between experts and nonexperts continue to shift.
Bringing together genre studies and the rhetoric of science, Mehlenbacher examines a range of new forms of science communication that challenge traditional presumptions about experts and nonexperts—including Twitter and Reddit AMAs, crowdfunding proposals such as Kickstarter and Experiment.com, civic-minded databases such as Safecast, and the PLOS blogging network. Science Communication Online illustrates the unique features of these genres and connects them to their rhetorical functions and the larger context leading to their emergence and evolution—from the democratization of science, challenges to expertise and expert status, and new political economies. Science Communication Online captures the important moment we find ourselves in now—one not defined by science and society but science in society.
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Science, Community, and the Transformation of American Philosophy, 1860-1930
Daniel J. Wilson
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In the first book-length study of American philosophy at the turn of the century, Daniel J. Wilson traces the formation of philosophy as an academic discipline. Wilson shows how the rise of the natural and physical sciences at the end of the nineteenth century precipitated a "crisis of confidence" among philosophers as to the role of their discipline. Deftly tracing the ways in which philosophers sought to incorporate scientific values and methods into their outlook and to redefine philosophy itself, Wilson moves between close analysis of philosophical texts and consideration of professional careers of illustrative philosophers, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce.

The author situates the emergence of professional philosophy in the context of the professionalization of American higher education and articulates, in the case of philosophy, the structures and values of a professional discipline. One of the most important consequences of this transformation was a new emphasis on communal theories of truth. Peirce, Dewey, and Royce all developed sophisticated and important theories of community as they were engaged in reshaping and redefining the limits of philosophy. This book will be of great importance for those interested in the history of philosophy, the rise of professions, and American intellectual and educational history, and to all those seeking to understand the contemporary revival of pragmatic thought and theories of community.
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Science, Conservation, and National Parks
Edited by Steven R. Beissinger, David D. Ackerly, Holly Doremus, and Gary E. Machlis
University of Chicago Press, 2016
As the US National Park Service marks its centennial in 2016, parks and protected areas worldwide are under increasing threat from a variety of factors, including storms and fires of greater severity, plant and animal extinctions, the changing attitudes of a public that has become more urbanized, and the political pressures of narrow special interest groups. In the face of such rapid environmental and cultural changes, Science, Conservation, and National Parks gathers a group of renowned scholars—including Edward O. Wilson, Jane Lubchenco, Thomas Dietz, and Monica Turner, among many otherswho seek to address these problems and, in so doing, to secure a future for protected areas that will push forward the frontiers of biological, physical, and social science in and for parks.

Examining the major challenges of parks and protected areas throughout the world, contributors provide answers to a number of key conservation questions, such as: How should stewardship address climate change, urban encroachment and pollution, and invasive species? How can society, especially youth, become more engaged with nature and parks, and are there models to guide interactions between parks and their neighbors? What are appropriate conservation objectives for parks in the Anthropocene? Charting a course for the parks of the next century, Science, Conservation, and National Parks is certain not only to catalyze the continued evolution of US park conservation policy, but also to be an inspiration for parks, conservation, and management worldwide.
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Science, Curriculum, and Liberal Education
Selected Essays
Joseph J. Schwab
University of Chicago Press, 1978
What is a liberal education and what part can science play in it? How should we think about the task of developing a curriculum? How should educational research conceive of its goals? Joseph Schwab's essays on these questions have influenced education internationally for more than twenty-five years.

Schwab participated in what Daniel Bell has described as the "most thoroughgoing experiment in general education in any college in the United States," the College of the University of Chicago during the thirties, forties, and fifties. He played a central role in the curriculum reform movement of the sixties, and his extraordinary command of science, the philosophy of science, and traditional and modern views of liberal education found expression in these exceptionally thoughtful essays.
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Science, Faith and Society
Michael Polanyi
University of Chicago Press, 1964
In its concern with science as an essentially human enterprise, Science, Faith and Society makes an original and challenging contribution to the philosophy of science. On its appearance in 1946 the book quickly became the focus of controversy.

Polanyi aims to show that science must be understood as a community of inquirers held together by a common faith; science, he argues, is not the use of "scientific method" but rather consists in a discipline imposed by scientists on themselves in the interests of discovering an objective, impersonal truth. That such truth exists and can be found is part of the scientists' faith. Polanyi maintains that both authoritarianism and scepticism, attacking this faith, are attacking science itself.
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Science for All
The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain
Peter J. Bowler
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Recent scholarship has revealed that pioneering Victorian scientists endeavored through voluminous writing to raise public interest in science and its implications. But it has generally been assumed that once science became a profession around the turn of the century, this new generation of scientists turned its collective back on public outreach. Science for All debunks this apocryphal notion.

Peter J. Bowler surveys the books, serial works, magazines, and newspapers published between 1900 and the outbreak of World War II to show that practicing scientists were very active in writing about their work for a general readership. Science for All argues that the social environment of early twentieth-century Britain created a substantial market for science books and magazines aimed at those who had benefited from better secondary education but could not access higher learning. Scientists found it easy and profitable to write for this audience, Bowler reveals, and because their work was seen as educational, they faced no hostility from their peers. But when admission to colleges and universities became more accessible in the 1960s, this market diminished and professional scientists began to lose interest in writing at the nonspecialist level.

Eagerly anticipated by scholars of scientific engagement throughout the ages, Science for All sheds light on our own era and the continuing tension between science and public understanding.

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Science for Sale
The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism
Daniel S. Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2007
In recent years the news media have been awash in stories about increasingly close ties between college campuses and multimillion-dollar corporations. Our nation’s universities, the story goes, reap enormous windfalls patenting products of scientific research that have been primarily funded by taxpayers. Meanwhile, hoping for new streams of revenue from their innovations, the same universities are allowing their research—and their very principles—to become compromised by quests for profit. But is that really the case? Is money really hopelessly corrupting science?

With Science for Sale, acclaimed journalist Daniel S. Greenberg reveals that campus capitalism is more complicated—and less profitable—than media reports would suggest. While universities seek out corporate funding, news stories rarely note that those industry dollars are dwarfed by government support and other funds. Also, while many universities have set up technology transfer offices to pursue profits through patents, many of those offices have been financial busts. Meanwhile, science is showing signs of providing its own solutions, as highly publicized misdeeds in pursuit of profits have provoked promising countermeasures within the field.

But just because the threat is overhyped, Greenberg argues, doesn’t mean that there’s no danger. From research that has shifted overseas so corporations can avoid regulations to conflicts of interest in scientific publishing, the temptations of money will always be a threat, and they can only be countered through the vigilance of scientists, the press, and the public. 

Based on extensive, candid interviews with scientists and administrators, Science for Sale will be indispensable to anyone who cares about the future of scientific research.
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Science for the People
Documents from America's Movement of Radical Scientists
Sigrid Schmalzer
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
For the first time, this book compiles original documents from Science for the People, the most important radical science movement in U.S. history. Between 1969 and 1989, Science for the People mobilized American scientists, teachers, and students to practice a socially and economically just science, rather than one that served militarism and corporate profits. Through research, writing, protest, and organizing, members sought to demystify scientific knowledge and embolden "the people" to take science and technology into their own hands. The movement's numerous publications were crucial to the formation of science and technology studies, challenging mainstream understandings of science as "neutral" and instead showing it as inherently political. Its members, some at prominent universities, became models for politically engaged science and scholarship by using their knowledge to challenge, rather than uphold, the social, political, and economic status quo.

Highlighting Science for the People's activism and intellectual interventions in a range of areas—including militarism, race, gender, medicine, agriculture, energy, and global affairs—this volume offers vital contributions to today's debates on science, justice, democracy, sustainability, and political power.
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Science from Sight to Insight
How Scientists Illustrate Meaning
Alan G. Gross and Joseph E. Harmon
University of Chicago Press, 2013
John Dalton’s molecular structures. Scatter plots and geometric diagrams. Watson and Crick’s double helix. The way in which scientists understand the world—and the key concepts that explain it—is undeniably bound up in not only words, but images. Moreover, from PowerPoint presentations to articles in academic journals, scientific communication routinely relies on the relationship between words and pictures. In Science from Sight to Insight, Alan G. Gross  and Joseph E. Harmon present a short history of the scientific visual, and then formulate a theory about the interaction between the visual and textual. With great insight and admirable rigor, the authors argue that scientific meaning itself comes from the complex interplay between the verbal and the visual in the form of graphs, diagrams, maps, drawings, and photographs. The authors use a variety of tools to probe the nature of scientific images, from Heidegger’s philosophy of science to Peirce’s semiotics of visual communication. Their synthesis of these elements offers readers an examination of scientific visuals at a much deeper and more meaningful level than ever before.  
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Science in Action
How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society
Bruno Latour
Harvard University Press, 1987

Science and technology have immense authority and influence in our society, yet their working remains little understood. The conventional perception of science in Western societies has been modified in recent years by the work of philosophers, sociologists and historians of science. In this book Bruno Latour brings together these different approaches to provide a lively and challenging analysis of science, demonstrating how social context and technical content are both essential to a proper understanding of scientific activity. Emphasizing that science can only be understood through its practice, the author examines science and technology in action: the role of scientific literature, the activities of laboratories, the institutional context of science in the modern world, and the means by which inventions and discoveries become accepted. From the study of scientific practice he develops an analysis of science as the building of networks. Throughout, Bruno Latour shows how a lively and realistic picture of science in action alters our conception of not only the natural sciences but also the social sciences and the sociology of knowledge in general.

This stimulating book, drawing on a wealth of examples from a wide range of scientific activities, will interest all philosophers, sociologists and historians of science, scientists and engineers, and students of the philosophy of social science and the sociology of knowledge.

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Science in America
A Documentary History, 1900-1939
Edited by Nathan Reingold and Ida H. Reingold
University of Chicago Press, 1981
From this unique collection of documents emerges a fresh, intimate, often striking picture of the life of science in the United States in the era when American investigators became central to scientific advances in many fields. Written in the course of the events described, these letters, memoranda, and other records—for the most part previously unpublished—convey personalities and issues with an immediacy hard to capture in conventional historical narratives.
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Science in an Extreme Environment
The 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition
Philip W. Clements
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
On February 20, 1963, a team of nineteen Americans embarked on the first expedition that would combine high-altitude climbing with scientific research. The primary objective of the six scientists on the team—who procured funding by appealing to the military and political applications of their work—was to study how severe stress at high altitudes affected human behavior. The expedition would land the first American on the summit of Mount Everest nearly three years after a successful (though widely disputed) Chinese ascent. At the height of the Cold War, this struggle for the Himalaya turned Everest into both a contested political space and a remote, unpredictable laboratory. The US expedition promised to resurrect American heroism, embodied in a show of physical strength and skill that, when combined with scientific expertise, would dominate international rivals on the frontiers of territorial exploration. It propelled mountaineers, scientists, and their test subjects 29,029 feet above sea level, the highest point of Chinese-occupied Tibet. There they faced hostile conditions that challenged and ultimately compromised standard research protocols, yielding results that were too exceptional to be generalized to other environments. With this book, Philip W. Clements offers a nuanced exploration of the impact of extremity on the production of scientific knowledge and the role of masculinity and nationalism in scientific inquiry.
 
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Science in Latin America
A History
Edited by Juan José Saldaña
University of Texas Press, 2006

Science in Latin America has roots that reach back to the information gathering and recording practices of the Maya, Aztec, and Inca civilizations. Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and colonists introduced European scientific practices to the continent, where they hybridized with local traditions to form the beginnings of a truly Latin American science. As countries achieved their independence in the nineteenth century, they turned to science as a vehicle for modernizing education and forwarding "progress." In the twentieth century, science and technology became as omnipresent in Latin America as in the United States and Europe. Yet despite a history that stretches across five centuries, science in Latin America has traditionally been viewed as derivative of and peripheral to Euro-American science.

To correct that mistaken view, this book provides the first comprehensive overview of the history of science in Latin America from the sixteenth century to the present. Eleven leading Latin American historians assess the part that science played in Latin American society during the colonial, independence, national, and modern eras, investigating science's role in such areas as natural history, medicine and public health, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, politics and nation-building, educational reform, and contemporary academic research. The comparative approach of the essays creates a continent-spanning picture of Latin American science that clearly establishes its autonomous history and its right to be studied within a Latin American context.

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Science in Medieval Islam
An Illustrated Introduction
By Howard R. Turner
University of Texas Press, 1997

During the Golden Age of Islam (seventh through seventeenth centuries A.D.), Muslim philosophers and poets, artists and scientists, princes and laborers created a unique culture that has influenced societies on every continent. This book offers a fully illustrated, highly accessible introduction to an important aspect of that culture—the scientific achievements of medieval Islam.

Howard Turner opens with a historical overview of the spread of Islamic civilization from the Arabian peninsula eastward to India and westward across northern Africa into Spain. He describes how a passion for knowledge led the Muslims during their centuries of empire-building to assimilate and expand the scientific knowledge of older cultures, including those of Greece, India, and China. He explores medieval Islamic accomplishments in cosmology, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, geography, medicine, natural sciences, alchemy, and optics. He also indicates the ways in which Muslim scientific achievement influenced the advance of science in the Western world from the Renaissance to the modern era. This survey of historic Muslim scientific achievements offers students and general readers a window into one of the world's great cultures, one which is experiencing a remarkable resurgence as a religious, political, and social force in our own time.

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Science in Nineteenth-Century America
A Documentary History
Edited by Nathan Reingold
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Combining well-chosen correspondence of scientists with historical commentary, Reingold brings to life the developing American scientific community of the nineteenth century. "The reader catches glimpses of William Maclure mixing science and social reform, of Joseph Henry struggling to make a place for research at the Smithsonian Institution, of Gray and Dana corresponding with Darwin, of Newcomb and Michelson planning experiments on the speed of light."—John C. Greene, Science
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