Results by title

4127 books match the query 'Science' and 129 start with h

Sort by

High Plains Horticulture

John F. Freeman

University Press of Colorado, 2008

High Plains Horticulture explores the significant, civilizing role that horticulture has played in the development of farmsteads and rural and urban communities on the High Plains portions of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming, drawing on both the science and the application of science practiced since 1840. Freeman explores early efforts to supplement native and imported foodstuffs, state and local encouragement to plant trees, the practice of horticulture at the Union Colony of Greeley, the pioneering activities of economic botanists Charles Bessey (in Nebraska) and Aven Nelson (in Wyoming), and the shift from food production to community beautification as the High Plains were permanently settled and became more urbanized. In approaching the history of horticulture from the perspective of local and unofficial history, Freeman pays tribute to the tempered idealism, learned pragmatism, and perseverance of individuals from all walks of life seeking to create livable places out of the vast, seemingly inhospitable High Plains. He also suggests that, slowly but surely, those that inhabit them have been learning to adjust to the limits of that fragile land. High Plains Horticulture will appeal to not only scientists and professionals but also gardening enthusiasts interested in the history of their hobby on the High Plains.

[more]

High-Energy Radiation from Magnetized Neutron Stars

Peter Mészáros

University of Chicago Press, 1992

Neutron stars, the most extreme state of matter yet confirmed, are responsible for much of the high-energy radiation detected in the universe. Mèszàros provides a general overview of the physics of magnetized neutron stars, discusses in detail the radiation processes and transport properties relevant to the production and propagation of high-energy radiation in the outer layers of these objects, and reviews the observational properties and theoretical models of various types of neutron star sources.

[more]

Higher and Colder

A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration

Vanessa Heggie

University of Chicago Press, 2019

During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalaya to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking.

Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to laboratory-dominated accounts of the history of modern life sciences. Though centered on male-dominated practices—science and exploration—it recovers the stories of women’s contributions that were sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately, erased. Engaging and provocative, this book is a history of the scientists and physiologists who face challenges that are physically demanding, frequently dangerous, and sometimes fatal, in the interest of advancing modern science and pushing the boundaries of human ability.

[more]

Highland Sanctuary

Environmental History in Tanzania’s Usambara Mountains

Christopher A. Conte

Ohio University Press, 2004

For more than a century, the world has recognized the extraordinary biological diversity of the forests of Tanzania’s Usambara Mountains. As international attention has focused on forest conservation, farmers, foresters, biologists, and the Tanzanian state have realized that only complex negotiations will save these treasured, but rapidly disappearing, landscapes. Highland Sanctuary unravels the complex interactions among agriculture, herding, forestry, the colonial state, and the landscape itself. In his examination of the region’s history of ecological transformation, Christopher Conte demonstrates how these forces have combined to create an ever-changing mosaic of forest and field. His study illuminates the debate over conservation, arguing that contingency and chance, the stuff of human history, have shaped forests in ways that rival the power of nature. In Highland Sanctuary, the forest becomes part of human history, rather than something outside of it. Highland Sanctuary cuts through a legacy of contention and ill will to inform contemporary conservation initiatives. Professor Conte explains how ecological changes take divergent paths in similar environments, in this case on mountains that harbor unique flora and fauna, and how these mountain environments achieve international importance as centers of biodiversity.

[more]

Hijacked Brains

The Experience and Science of Chronic Addiction

Henrietta Robin Barnes

Dartmouth College Press, 2015

This book, written from the perspective of a practicing primary care physician, interweaves patients’ stories with fascinating new brain research to show how addictive drugs overtake basic brain functions and transform them to create a chronic illness that is very difficult to treat. The idea that drug and alcohol addiction are chronic illnesses and not character flaws is not news—this notion has been around for many years. What Hijacked Brains offers is context and personal stories that demonstrate this point in a very accessible package. Dr. Barnes explores how the healthy brain works, how addictive drugs flood basic reward pathways, and what it feels like to grapple with addiction. She discusses how, for individuals, the combination of genetic and environmental factors determines both vulnerability for addiction and the resilience necessary for recovery. Finally, she shows how American culture, with its emphasis on freewill and individualism, tends to blame the addict for bad choices and personal weakness, thereby impeding political and/or health-related efforts to get the addict what she needs to recover.

[more]

Historic Illinois from the Air

David Buisseret

University of Chicago Press, 1990

"A distinctive and skillful effort to bring facets of Illinois history to a popular as well as an academic audience."—John Hoffman, Illinois Historical Survey, University of Illinois Library

[more]

Historical Atlases

The First Three Hundred Years, 1570-1870

Walter Goffart

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Today we can walk into any well-stocked bookstore or library and find an array of historical atlases. The first thorough review of the source material, Historical Atlases traces how these collections of "maps for history"—maps whose sole purpose was to illustrate some historical moment or scene—came into being.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, and continuing down to the late nineteenth, Walter Goffart discusses milestones in the origins of historical atlases as well as individual maps illustrating historical events in alternating, paired chapters. He focuses on maps of the medieval period because the development of maps for history hinged particularly on portrayals of this segment of the postclassical, "modern" past. Goffart concludes the book with a detailed catalogue of more than 700 historical maps and atlases produced from 1570 to 1870.

Historical Atlases will immediately take its place as the single most important reference on its subject. Historians of cartography, medievalists, and anyone seriously interested in the role of maps in portraying history will find it invaluable.

[more]

Historical and Philosophical Perspectives of Science

Roger H. Stuewer, Editor

University of Minnesota Press, 1970

Historical and Philosophical Perspectives of Science was first published in 1970. 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.

The series of essays published in this book, which is Volume V of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, are (with the exception of two essays) based on papers presented or discussed at a conference devoted to exploring the relationships between the history and the philosophy of science, held at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1969. In a forward Peter Caws notes that the conference grew out of the deliberations of subcommittee of the U.S. National Committee for the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science.

The contributors are Herbert Feigl, Ernan McMullin, Wesley C. Salmon, Peter Archinstein, Arnold Thackray, Mary Hesse, Edward Rosen, Paul K. Feyerabend, Erwin N. Hiebert, Gerd Buchdahl, Roger H. Stuewer, Howard Stein, and Kenneth F. Schaffner. Some of the papers draw philosophical conclusions from examples in the history of science; others point out the significance of philosophical insights for a study of the history of science; still others explore special aspects of the history or philosophy of science.

[more]

Historicity of Nature

Essays on Science and Theology

Wolfhart Pannenberg

Templeton Press, 2008

Known as one of the most outstanding theologians of the twentieth century, Wolfhart Pannenberg is also considered a great interdisciplinary thinker. Now, essays and articles on science and theology that are central to understanding Pannenberg's theories have been collected into one volume.

Niels Henrik Gregersen, a former student of Pannenberg and now professor of systematic theology at Copenhagen University, has compiled the writings in four sections: Methodology, Creation and Nature's Historicity, Religion and Anthropology, and Meaning and Metaphysics. Included in this volume are:

•Translations of Pannenberg's principled argument for the consonance between science and religion, including contingency and laws of nature, field theories and space-time, and divine action
•Translations of Pannenberg's theory of theology as a rational hypothetical science, including his discussions with leading British and American scholars such as A. N. Whitehead, John Cobb, and Langdon Gilkey
•Previously unpublished articles on the problems between science and theology in the course of modern history, explaining why chance may be more important for theology than design
•Translations of seminal articles that articulate Pannenberg's understanding of the role of religion in human nature
•One of the few theological articles on aggression as a psychological and social phenomenon

With this collection, the essays of this important contemporary theologian and his illuminating views are presented in one convenient volume.

[more]

Histories of Scientific Observation

Edited by Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Observation is the most pervasive and fundamental practice of all the modern sciences, both natural and human. Its instruments include not only the naked senses but also tools such as the telescope and microscope, the questionnaire, the photographic plate, the notebook, the glassed-in beehive, and myriad other ingenious inventions designed to make the invisible visible, the evanescent permanent, the abstract concrete. Yet observation has almost never been considered as an object of historical inquiry in itself. This wide-ranging collection offers the first examination of the history of scientific observation in its own right, as both epistemic category and scientific practice.

Histories of Scientific Observation features engaging episodes drawn from across the spectrum of the natural and human sciences, ranging from meteorology, medicine, and natural history to economics, astronomy, and psychology. The contributions spotlight how observers have scrutinized everything—from seaweed to X-ray radiation, household budgets to the emotions—with ingenuity, curiosity, and perseverance verging on obsession. This book makes a compelling case for the significance of the long, surprising, and epistemologically significant history of scientific observation, a history full of innovations that have enlarged the possibilities of perception, judgment, and reason.

[more]

History 4° Celsius

Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene

Ian Baucom

Duke University Press, 2020

In History 4° Celsius Ian Baucom continues his inquiries into the place of the Black Atlantic in the making of the modern and postmodern world. Putting black studies into conversation with climate change, Baucom outlines how the ongoing concerns of critical race, diaspora, and postcolonial studies are crucial to understanding the Anthropocene. He draws on materialist and postmaterialist thought, Sartre, and the science of climate change to trace the ways in which evolving political, cultural, and natural history converge to shape a globally destructive force. Identifying the quest for limitless financial gain as the primary driving force behind both the slave trade and the continuing increase in global greenhouse gas emissions, Baucom demonstrates that climate change and the conditions of the Black Atlantic, colonialism, and the postcolony are fundamentally entwined. In so doing, he argues for the necessity of establishing a method of critical exchange between climate science, black studies, and the surrounding theoretical inquiries of humanism and posthumanism.

[more]

History Within

The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules

Marianne Sommer

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Personal genomics services such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com now offer what once was science fiction: the ability to sequence and analyze an individual’s entire genetic code—promising, in some cases, facts about that individual’s ancestry that may have remained otherwise lost. Such services draw on and contribute to the science of human population genetics that attempts to reconstruct the history of humankind, including the origin and movement of specific populations. Is it true, though, that who we are and where we come from is written into the sequence of our genomes? Are genes better documents for determining our histories and identities than fossils or other historical sources?

Our interpretation of gene sequences, like our interpretation of other historical evidence, inevitably tells a story laden with political and moral values. Focusing on the work of Henry Fairfield Osborn, Julian Sorell Huxley, and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza in paleoanthropology, evolutionary biology, and human population genetics, History Within asks how the sciences of human origins, whether through the museum, the zoo, or the genetics lab, have shaped our idea of what it means to be human. How have these biologically based histories influenced our ideas about nature, society, and culture? As Marianne Sommer shows, the stories we tell about bones, organisms, and molecules often change the world.

[more]

History and the Climate Crisis

Environmental History in the Classroom

Kate Hawkey

University College London, 2023

A case for including an environmental focus in the secondary school history curriculum by locating its arguments within established historiographical and revisionist debates.

History education has a key contribution to make in developing a deeper understanding of the current environmental crisis, but its role is too often overlooked. When embedded in the school curriculum, environmental history adds crucial layers of knowledge to the learning from other subjects and can enable students to make their own informed contributions to one of the most pressing concerns of the twenty-first century.

History and the Climate Crisis provides much-needed environmental knowledge, an area that is new for most history teachers. The author considers the disciplinary and pedagogical challenges and demonstrates how including an environmental focus can strengthen students’ disciplinary knowledge. She also builds her argument through many examples and offers practical strategies for use in classrooms, including developed inquiries suitable for the secondary history curriculum. The book focuses on environmental history within a strong subject-bound curriculum and will be relevant to teachers, academics, and policymakers in the United Kingdom and internationally.

[more]

History as Art and as Science

Twin Vistas on the Past

H. Stuart Hughes

University of Chicago Press, 1975

"Professor Hughes offers an earnest warning: 'Unless there is some emotional tie, some elective affinity linking the student to his subject of study, the results will be pedantic and perfunctory.' In other words, it is only a step from the sublime to the meticulous. Those eager to guard against that sad descent will find History as Art and as Science a guide, a tonic, and an inspiration. Its short, electrifying essays are so magnificently sane and persuasive they should be required reading for every student who contemplates a major in history."—Geoffrey Bruun, Saturday Review

[more]

History of Women in the Sciences

Readings from Isis

Edited by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Why is it that some women have created successful careers in science, when historically there have been so many barriers that exclude women from engaging in scientific work? At last, here is a comparative history that illuminates some of the patterns that have emerged in the history of women in science.

This book features some of the most influential and pioneering studies of women in the sciences, with a special focus on patterns of education, access, barriers, and opportunities for women's work in science. Spanning the 17th through the 20th centuries, the book demonstrates the meaning and power of gender experienced by women in the sciences.

Individual chapters focus on exceptional women whose unusual initiativee and particular circumstance led them to engage in science: Laura Bassi, Nettie Stevens, Maria Winkelmann, and others. Chapters on women's access to science discuss collaboration with family members in the domestic sphere, the impact of primers and popular science writing, and formal education in public schools and advanced research institutions. There are examinations of the reasons for clusters of women working in "female friendly" sciences such as botany and physiology in the 19th century and astronomy in the U.S. during the early 20th century.

This important and useful book provides a thoughtful and detailed overview for scholars and students in the history of science, as well as for feminist historians, scientists, and others who who want a comparative and historical analysis of women in the sciences.

Contributors include Janet Browne, Paula Findlen, Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, Ann Hibner Koblitz, M. Susan Lindee, Carolyn Merchant, Margaret W. Rossiter, Londa Schiebinger, Nancy Leys Stepan, and Deborah Jean Warner.

[more]

History of the Chemical Laboratory of the University of Michigan, 1856-1916

Edward D. Campbell

University of Michigan Press, 1916

Edward D. Campbell had in mind two principal objects when compiling History of the Chemical Laboratory of the University of Michigan 1856–1916. The first was an attempt to give a condensed account of the development of chemistry, both pure and applied, at the University of Michigan, from the time this subject was first taught at the University to 1916. The second object was to preserve a permanent list of all those men who constituted the instructing staff in the Chemical Laboratory, together with the years of their service therein, and a list of the scientific papers and other articles that they published during the years of their official connection with the Laboratory.Chemistry was the first of the experimental sciences to be taught by the laboratory method, and the development of the science at the University of Michigan followed along lines similar to those followed by many of the European as well as American universities, although the lines of development at Michigan were influenced by local conditions and the individuality of the men constituting the teaching staff.

[more]

History of the Hour

Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders

Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum

University of Chicago Press, 1996

In this sweeping study of the organization of time, Dohrn-van Rossum offers fresh insight into the history of the mechanical clock and its influence on European society from the late Middle Ages to the industrial revolution. Detailing the clock's effects on social activity, he presents a vivid picture of a society regulated by the precise measurement of identical hours.

"In tracing the evolution of time consciousness with scholarship and skill . . . Dohrn-van Rossum evokes the many ways that the small moments of life have come to be reckoned with the passage of time."—Dava Sobel, Civilization

"Dohrn-van Rossum paints a highly nuanced picture of time's conquest of modern life."—Steven Lagerfeld, Wilson Quarterly

"This book is definitive in showing the clock's pervasive influence over European society."—Virginia Quarterly Review

"[A] delightful, excellently translated history."—Choice

"Dohrn-van Rossum has produced a persuasive and brilliantly documented new understanding of how modern time-consciousness arose."—Owen Gingerich, Nature

[more]

Hitler's Geographies

The Spatialities of the Third Reich

Edited by Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Lebensraum: the entitlement of “legitimate” Germans to living space. Entfernung: the expulsion of “undesirables” to create empty space for German resettlement. During his thirteen years leading Germany, Hitler developed and made use of a number of powerful geostrategical concepts such as these in order to justify his imperialist expansion, exploitation, and genocide. As his twisted manifestation of spatial theory grew in Nazi ideology, it created a new and violent relationship between people and space in Germany and beyond.

With Hitler’s Geographies, editors Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca examine the variety of ways in which spatial theory evolved and was translated into real-world action under the Third Reich. They have gathered an outstanding collection by leading scholars, presenting key concepts and figures as well exploring the undeniable link between biopolitical power and spatial expansion and exclusion.

[more]

Hitting the Brakes

Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge

Ann Johnson

Duke University Press, 2009

In Hitting the Brakes, Ann Johnson illuminates the complex social, historical, and cultural dynamics of engineering design, in which knowledge communities come together to produce new products and knowledge. Using the development of antilock braking systems for passenger cars as a case study, Johnson shows that the path to invention is neither linear nor top-down, but highly complicated and unpredictable. Individuals, corporations, university research centers, and government organizations informally coalesce around a design problem that is continually refined and redefined as paths of development are proposed and discarded, participants come and go, and information circulates within the knowledge community. Detours, dead ends, and failures feed back into the developmental process, so that the end design represents the convergence of multiple, diverse streams of knowledge.

The development of antilock braking systems (ABS) provides an ideal case study for examining the process of engineering design because it presented an array of common difficulties faced by engineers in research and development. ABS did not develop predictably. Research and development took place in both the public and private sectors and involved individuals working in different disciplines, languages, institutions, and corporations. Johnson traces ABS development from its first patents in the 1930s to the successful 1978 market introduction of integrated ABS by Daimler and Bosch. She examines how a knowledge community first formed around understanding the phenomenon of skidding, before it turned its attention to building instruments to measure, model, and prevent cars’ wheels from locking up. While corporations’ accounts of ABS development often present a simple linear story, Hitting the Brakes describes the full social and cognitive complexity and context of engineering design.

[more]

Holding On to Reality

The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium

Albert Borgmann

University of Chicago Press, 1999

Holding On to Reality is a brilliant history of information, from its inception in the natural world to its role in the transformation of culture to the current Internet mania and is attendant assets and liabilities. Drawing on the history of ideas, the details of information technology, and the boundaries of the human condition, Borgmann illuminates the relationship between things and signs, between reality and information.

"[Borgmann] has offered a stunningly clear definition of information in Holding On to Reality. . . . He leaves room for little argument, unless one wants to pose the now vogue objection: I guess it depends on what you mean by nothing."—Paul Bennett, Wired

"A superb anecdotal analysis of information for a hype-addled age."—New Scientist

"This insightful and poetic reflection on the changing nature of information is a wonderful antidote to much of the current hype about the 'information revolution.' Borgmann reminds us that whatever the reality of our time, we need 'a balance of signs and things' in our lives."—Margaret Wertheim, LA Weekly

[more]

Holistic Darwinism

Synergy, Cybernetics, and the Bioeconomics of Evolution

Peter Corning

University of Chicago Press, 2005

In recent years, evolutionary theorists have come to recognize that the reductionist, individualist, gene-centered approach to evolution cannot sufficiently account for the emergence of complex biological systems over time. Peter A. Corning has been at the forefront of a new generation of complexity theorists who have been working to reshape the foundations of evolutionary theory. Well known for his Synergism Hypothesis—a theory of complexity in evolution that assigns a key causal role to various forms of functional synergy—Corning puts this theory into a much broader framework in Holistic Darwinism, addressing many of the issues and concepts associated with the evolution of complex systems. Corning's paradigm embraces and integrates many related theoretical developments of recent years, from multilevel selection theory to niche construction theory, gene-culture coevolution theory, and theories of self-organization. Offering new approaches to thermodynamics, information theory, and economic analysis, Corning suggests how all of these domains can be brought firmly within what he characterizes as a post–neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis.

[more]

Homesick

Nicholas Shapiro

Duke University Press, 2025

Following Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) distributed over 120,000 trailers for emergency housing. Produced from engineered wood containing toxic amounts of formaldehyde, these shelters were vectors of illness and death. Although they were subsequently banned, FEMA trailers were resold and again used for housing, scattering their harm to other people and areas. In Homesick, Nicholas Shapiro draws on almost fifteen years working with impacted community members to trace how the story of toxic emergency housing units expands into a story of how all of our shelters became a seat of exposure and how we can collectively struggle for cleaner indoor air. Throughout, Shapiro questions the efficacy of the fundamental tools used to cultivate accountability, repair, and change, arguing for their reimagining. Detailing health effects as well as community and individual efforts to achieve better life, health, and justice, Shapiro highlights how homesickness for an otherwise future can herald meaningful change.

[more]

Hope for a Heated Planet

How Americans Are Fighting Global Warming and Building a Better Future

Musil, Robert K

Rutgers University Press, 2009

Rejecting cries of gloom and doom, Hope for a Heated Planet shows how the fight against global warming can be won by the grassroots efforts of individuals. Robert K. Musil, who led the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization Physicians for Social Responsibility, explains that a growing new climate movement can produce unprecedented change-in the economy, public health, and home-while saving the planet.

Musil draws on personal experience and compelling data in this practical and rigorous analysis of the causes and cures for global warming. The book presents all the players in the most pressing challenge facing society today, from the massive fossil fuel lobby to the enlightened corporations that are joining the movement to "go green." Musil thoroughly explains the tremendous potential of renewable energy sources-wind, solar, and biofuel-and the startling conclusions of experts who say society can do away entirely with fossil fuels. He tells readers about the engaged politicians, activists, religious groups, and students who are already working together against climate change.

But the future depends, Musil insists, on what changes ordinary citizens make. Through personal choices and political engagement, he shows how readers can cut carbon emissions and create green communities where they live. With practical and realistic solutions, Hope for a Heated Planet inspires readers to be accountable and enables them to usher in an age of sustainability for future generations.

[more]

Hope on Earth

A Conversation

Paul R. Ehrlich and Michael Charles Tobias

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Hope on Earth is the thought-provoking result of a lively and wide-ranging conversation between two of the world’s leading interdisciplinary environmental scientists: Paul R. Ehrlich, whose book The Population Bomb shook the world in 1968 (and continues to shake it), and Michael Charles Tobias, whose over 40 books and 150 films have been read and/or viewed throughout the world. Hope on Earth offers a rare opportunity to listen in as these deeply knowledgeable and highly creative thinkers offer their takes on the most pressing environmental concerns of the moment.

Both Ehrlich and Tobias argue that we are on the verge of environmental catastrophe, as the human population continues to grow without restraint and without significant attempts to deal with overconsumption and the vast depletion of resources and climate problems it creates. Though their views are sympathetic, they differ in their approach and in some key moral stances, giving rise to a heated and engaging dialogue that opens up dozens of new avenues of exploration. They both believe that the impact of a human society on its environment is the direct result of its population size, and through their dialogue they break down the complex social problems that are wrapped up in this idea and attempts to overcome it, hitting firmly upon many controversial topics such as circumcision, religion, reproduction, abortion, animal rights, diet, and gun control. For Ehrlich and Tobias, ethics involve not only how we treat other people directly, but how we treat them and other organisms indirectly through our effects on the environment. University of California, Berkeley professor John Harte joins the duo for part of the conversation, and his substantial expertise on energy and climate change adds a crucial perspective to the discussion of the impact of population on global warming.

This engaging and timely book invites readers into an intimate conversation with some of the most eminent voices in science as they offer a powerful and approachable argument that the ethical and scientific issues involved in solving our environmental crisis are deeply intertwined, while offering us an optimistic way forward. Hope on Earth is indeed a conversation we should all be having.

[more]

Horizons of Cosmology

Joseph Silk

Templeton Press, 2009

Horizons of Cosmology: Exploring Worlds Seen and Unseen is the fourth title published in the Templeton Science and Religion Series, in which scientists from a wide range of fields distill their experience and knowledge into brief tours of their respective specialties. In this volume, highly esteemed astrophysicist Joseph Silk explores the vast mysteries and speculations of the field of cosmology in a way that balances an accessible style for the general reader and enough technical detail for advanced students and professionals. Indeed, while the physical laws and origins of the universe can be endlessly complex, even Einstein once mused that they could be explained simply enough to be grasped by nonspecialists. To that end Silk begins by introducing the basic story of the major discoveries in cosmology over the past century—wherein we learned that we live in an expanding universe populated with galaxies and stars. The middle chapters examine a number of contemporary puzzles such as dark matter and dark energy. The last third of the book looks at the human side of cosmology and moves to the more philosophical frontiers of the field, such as concepts of multiverses and time travel—areas of exploration where some crossover into speculative territory becomes unavoidable. In the past century alone, our understanding of the universe has expanded exponentially, and it will be fascinating to see what discoveries the next hundred years hold. Few books will provide such a thorough understanding of where we have been and what might lie ahead as Horizons of Cosmology.

[more]

Hormones, Brain, and Behavior

Edited by Carl Gans and David Crews

University of Chicago Press, 1992

This is the first volume to integrate information on ways in which the nervous and endocrine systems interact to mediate crucial aspects of reptile behavior. Although the authors pay particular attention to reproductive behavior, from initial recognition and evaluation of potential partners to decisions about reproduction, they also deal with other survival behaviors.

[more]

Hormones, Heredity, and Race

Spectacular Failure in Interwar Vienna

Cheryl A. Logan

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Early in the twentieth century, arguments about “nature” and “nurture” pitted a rigid genetic determinism against the idea that genes were flexible and open to environmental change. This book tells the story of three Viennese biologists—Paul Kammerer, Julius Tandler, and Eugen Steinach—who sought to show how the environment could shape heredity through the impact of hormones. It also explores the dynamic of failure through both scientific and social lenses. During World War I, the three men were well respected scientists; by 1934, one was dead by his own hand, another was in exile, and the third was subject to ridicule.

Paul Kammerer had spent years gathering zoological evidence on whether environmental change could alter heredity, using his research as the scientific foundation for a new kind of eugenics—one that challenged the racism growing in mainstream eugenics. By 1918, he drew on the pioneering research of two colleagues who studied how secretions shaped sexual attributes to argue that hormones could alter genes. After 1920, Julius Tandler employed a similar concept to restore the health and well-being of Vienna's war-weary citizens. Both men rejected the rigidly acting genes of the new genetics and instead crafted a biology of flexible heredity to justify eugenic reforms that respected human rights. But the interplay of science and personality with the social and political rise of fascism and with antisemitism undermined their ideas, leading to their spectacular failure.

[more]

Hornyheads, Madtoms, and Darters

Narratives on Central Appalachian Fishes

Stuart A. Welsh

Ohio University Press, 2023

A collection of essays on nature, naturalists, and the natural history of fishes in central Appalachia. A nature lover’s paradise, central Appalachia supports a diversity of life in an extensive network of waterways and is home to a dazzling array of fish species. This book focuses not only on the fishes of central Appalachia but also on the fascinating things these fishes do in their natural habitats. An ecological dance unfolds from a species and population perspective, although the influence of the community and the ecosystem also figures in the text. Stuart A. Welsh’s essays link central Appalachian fishes with the complexities of competition and predation, species conservation, parasitic infections, climate change, public attitudes, reproductive and foraging ecology, unique morphology, habitat use, and nonnative species. The book addresses a selection of the families of central Appalachian fishes, including lampreys, gars, freshwater eels, pikes, minnows, suckers, catfishes, trouts, trout-perches, sculpins, sunfishes, and perches. These essays often refer to the works of naturalists who contributed to our knowledge of nature during previous centuries and who recorded their discoveries when science writing was less concise than it is today. Although many of these works are nearly forgotten, these early naturalists built a strong knowledge base that supports much of our current science and thus merits reexamination. Most people are not scientists, but many have an interest in nature and are, in their own way, naturalists. This book is for those people willing to peer beneath the water’s surface.

[more]

Hottest of the Hotspots

The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar

Benjamin Neimark

University of Arizona Press, 2023

Continually recognized as one of the “hottest” of all the world’s biodiversity hotspots, the island of Madagascar has become ground zero for the most intensive market-based conservation interventions on Earth.

This book details the rollout of market conservation programs, including the finding of drugs from nature—or “bioprospecting”—biodiversity offsetting, and the selling of blue carbon credits from mangroves. It documents the tensions that exist at the local level, as many of these programs incorporate populations highly dependent on the same biodiversity now turned into global commodities for purposes of saving it. Proponents of market conservation mobilize groups of ecologically precarious workers, or the local “eco-precariat,” who do the hidden work of collecting and counting species, monitoring and enforcing the vital biodiversity used in everything from drug discovery to carbon sequestration and large mining company offsets.

Providing a voice for those community workers many times left out of environmental policy discussions, this volume proposes critiques that aim to build better conservation interventions with perspectives of the local eco-precariat.

[more]

Houston, We Have a Narrative

Why Science Needs Story

Randy Olson

University of Chicago Press, 2015

An engaging, accessible handbook that teaches scientists how to tell effective stories about their work

Ask a scientist about Hollywood, and you’ll probably get eye rolls. But ask someone in Hollywood about science, and they’ll see dollar signs: moviemakers know that science can be the source of great stories, with all the drama and action that blockbusters require.

That’s a huge mistake, says Randy Olson: Hollywood has a lot to teach scientists about how to tell a story—and, ultimately, how to do science better. With Houston, We Have a Narrative, he lays out a stunningly simple method for turning the dull into the dramatic. Drawing on his unique background, which saw him leave his job as a working scientist to launch a career as a filmmaker, Olson first diagnoses the problem: When scientists tell us about their work, they pile one moment and one detail atop another moment and another detail—a stultifying procession of “and, and, and.” What we need instead is an understanding of the basic elements of story, the narrative structures that our brains are all but hardwired to look for—which Olson boils down, brilliantly, to “And, But, Therefore,” or ABT. At a stroke, the ABT approach introduces momentum (“And”), conflict (“But”), and resolution (“Therefore”)—the fundamental building blocks of story. As Olson has shown by leading countless workshops worldwide, when scientists’ eyes are opened to ABT, the effect is staggering: suddenly, they’re not just talking about their work—they’re telling stories about it. And audiences are captivated.

Written with an uncommon verve and enthusiasm, and built on principles that are applicable to fields far beyond science, Houston, We Have a Narrative has the power to transform the way science is understood and appreciated, and ultimately how it’s done.

[more]

How Animals Grieve

Barbara J. King

University of Chicago Press, 2013

From the time of our earliest childhood encounters with animals, we casually ascribe familiar emotions to them. But scientists have long cautioned against such anthropomorphizing, arguing that it limits our ability to truly comprehend the lives of other creatures. Recently, however, things have begun to shift in the other direction, and anthropologist Barbara J. King is at the forefront of that movement, arguing strenuously that we can—and should—attend to animal emotions. With How Animals Grieve, she draws our attention to the specific case of grief, and relates story after story—from fieldsites, farms, homes, and more—of animals mourning lost companions, mates, or friends.

King tells of elephants surrounding their matriarch as she weakens and dies, and, in the following days, attending to her corpse as if holding a vigil. A housecat loses her sister, from whom she's never before been parted, and spends weeks pacing the apartment, wailing plaintively. A baboon loses her daughter to a predator and sinks into grief. In each case, King uses her anthropological training to interpret and try to explain what we see—to help us understand this animal grief properly, as something neither the same as nor wholly different from the human experience of loss.

The resulting book is both daring and down-to-earth, strikingly ambitious even as it’s careful to acknowledge the limits of our understanding. Through the moving stories she chronicles and analyzes so beautifully, King brings us closer to the animals with whom we share a planet, and helps us see our own experiences, attachments, and emotions as part of a larger web of life, death, love, and loss.

[more]

How Climate Change Comes to Matter

The Communal Life of Facts

Candis Callison

Duke University Press, 2014

During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility.

The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral calls to action. Callison investigates the different vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds, as well as the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in different forms of advocacy. As she demonstrates, climate change offers an opportunity to look deeply at how issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter to wide publics, and to rethink emerging interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise.

[more]

How Does Germline Regenerate?

Kate MacCord

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A concise primer that complicates a convenient truth in biology—the divide between germ and somatic cells—with far-reaching ethical and public policy ramifications.

Scientists have long held that we have two kinds of cells—germ and soma. Make a change to germ cells—say using genome editing—and that change will appear in the cells of future generations. Somatic cells are “safe” after such tampering; modify your skin cells, and your future children’s skin cells will never know. And, while germ cells can give rise to new generations (including all of the somatic cells in a body), somatic cells can never become germ cells. How did scientists discover this relationship and distinction between somatic and germ cells—the so-called Weismann Barrier—and does it actually exist? Can somatic cells become germ cells in the way germ cells become somatic cells? That is, can germ cells regenerate from somatic cells even though conventional wisdom denies this possibility? Covering research from the late nineteenth century to the 2020s, historian and philosopher of science Kate MacCord explores how scientists came to understand and accept the dubious concept of the Weismann Barrier and what profound implications this convenient assumption has for research and policy, from genome editing to stem cell research, and much more.

[more]

How Dogs Work

Raymond Coppinger and Mark Feinstein

University of Chicago Press, 2015

How well do we really know dogs? People may enjoy thinking about them as “man’s best friend,” but what actually drives the things they do? What is going on in their fur-covered heads as they look at us with their big, expressive eyes? Raymond Coppinger and Mark Feinstein know something about these questions, and with How Dogs Work, they’re ready to share; this is their guide to understanding your dog and its behavior.

Approaching dogs as a biological species rather than just as pets, Coppinger and Feinstein accessibly synthesize decades of research and field experiments to explain the evolutionary foundations underlying dog behaviors. They examine the central importance of the shape of dogs: how their physical body (including the genes and the brain) affects behavior, how shape interacts with the environment as animals grow, and how all of this has developed over time. Shape, they tell us, is what makes a champion sled dog or a Border collie that can successfully herd sheep. Other chapters in How Dogs Work explore such mysteries as why dogs play; whether dogs have minds, and if so what kinds of things they might know; why dogs bark; how dogs feed and forage; and the influence of the early relationship between mother and pup. Going far beyond the cozy lap dog, Coppinger and Feinstein are equally fascinated by what we can learn from the adaptations of dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals, dingoes, and even pumas in the wild, as well as the behavior of working animals like guarding and herding dogs.

We cherish dogs as family members and deeply value our lengthy companionship with them. But, isn’t it time we knew more about who Fido and Trixie really are? How Dogs Work will provide some keys to unlocking the origins of many of our dogs' most common, most puzzling, and most endearing behaviors.

[more]

How Experiments End

Peter Galison

University of Chicago Press, 1987

"Galison provides excellent histories of three experimental episodes: the measurement of the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron, the discovery of the mu meson, or muon, and the discovery of weak neutral currents. These studies of actual experiments will provide valuable material for both philosophers and historians of science and Galison's own thoughts on the nature of experiment are extremely important. . . . Galison has given both philosophers and historians much to think about. I strongly urge you to read this book."—Allan Franklin, British Journal of the Philosophy of Science

"Anyone who is seriously concerned with understanding how research is done should read this. There have been many books on one or another part of its subject matter but few giving such insights into how the research is done and how the consensus of discovery is arrived at."—Frank Close, New Scientist

"[Galison] is to be congratulated on producing a masterpiece in the field."—Michael Redhead, Synthese

"How Experiments End is a major historical work on an exciting topic."—Andy Pickering, Isis

[more]

How Fast Can A Falcon Dive?

Fascinating Answers to Questions about Birds of Prey

Capainolo, Peter

Rutgers University Press, 2010

How Fast Can a Falcon Dive? explores the world of raptors in a way that will appeal to bird lovers and biology enthusiasts alike. This colorful volume is complete with more than fifty-five color and black and white images from photographers and artists around the world. In a reader friendly question and answer format, ornithologist Peter Capainolo and science writer Carol A. Butler define and classify raptors, explore the physical attributes of birds of prey, view how their bodies work, and explain the social and physical behaviors of these species-how they communicate, hunt, reproduce, and more. Capainolo, who received one of the first falconry licenses issued in New York state at age eighteen, relates his personal experience in falconry to describe raptor training and husbandry where the human-bird interactions are complex.

From stories of red-tailed hawks making their homes on the ledges of Manhattan skyscrapers to their role in protecting California's vineyards from flocks of grape-loving starlings, How Fast Can a Falcon Dive? explores how these avian predators interact with people and with their environment.

[more]

How Green Became Good

Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens

Hillary Angelo

University of Chicago Press, 2021

As projects like Manhattan’s High Line, Chicago’s 606, China’s eco-cities, and Ethiopia’s tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good, Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement. Turning to Germany’s Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was “greened” with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley's urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts.

[more]

How Humans Learn

The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching

Joshua R. Eyler

West Virginia University Press, 2018

Even on good days, teaching is a challenging profession. One way to make the job of college instructors easier, however, is to know more about the ways students learn. How Humans Learn aims to do just that by peering behind the curtain and surveying research in fields as diverse as developmental psychology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience for insight into the science behind learning.

The result is a story that ranges from investigations of the evolutionary record to studies of infants discovering the world for the first time, and from a look into how our brains respond to fear to a reckoning with the importance of gestures and language. Joshua R. Eyler identifies five broad themes running through recent scientific inquiry—curiosity, sociality, emotion, authenticity, and failure—devoting a chapter to each and providing practical takeaways for busy teachers. He also interviews and observes college instructors across the country, placing theoretical insight in dialogue with classroom experience.

[more]

How Knowledge Moves

Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology

Edited by John Krige

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Knowledge matters, and states have a stake in managing its movement to protect a variety of local and national interests. The view that knowledge circulates by itself in a flat world, unimpeded by national boundaries, is a myth. The transnational movement of knowledge is a social accomplishment, requiring negotiation, accommodation, and adaptation to the specificities of local contexts. This volume of essays by historians of science and technology breaks the national framework in which histories are often written. Instead, How Knowledge Moves takes knowledge as its central object, with the goal of unraveling the relationships among people, ideas, and things that arise when they cross national borders.

This specialized knowledge is located at multiple sites and moves across borders via a dazzling array of channels, embedded in heads and hands, in artifacts, and in texts. In the United States, it shapes policies for visas, export controls, and nuclear weapons proliferation; in Algeria, it enhances the production of oranges by colonial settlers; in Vietnam, it facilitates the exploitation of a river delta. In India it transforms modes of agricultural production. It implants American values in Latin America. By concentrating on the conditions that allow for knowledge movement, these essays explore travel and exchange in face-to-face encounters and show how border-crossings mobilize extensive bureaucratic technologies.

[more]

How Large Is God

The Voices of Scientists and Theologians

John Marks Templeton

Templeton Press, 1998

This new collection of essays reveals how very little we know about God and fundamental spiritual principles. In recent years, scientific research has revealed that the universe is staggering in size and intricacy, and some scientists are now suggesting that our definition of God is much too small. Nine distinguished scholars and scientists present their varied views on the dimensions of God.

Edited by philanthropist John Marks Templeton, this fascinating and challenging book continues the exploration of theological and philosophical implications of the momentous and accelerating scientific discoveries of our times.

[more]

How Life Began

Evolution's Three Geneses

Alexandre Meinesz

University of Chicago Press, 2008

The origin of life is a hotly debated topic. The Christian Bible states that God created the heavens and the Earth, all in about seven days roughly six thousand years ago. This episode in Genesis departs markedly from scientific theories developed over the last two centuries which hold that life appeared on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago in the form of bacteria, followed by unicellular organisms half a millennia later. It is this version of genesis that Alexandre Meinesz explores in this engaging tale of life's origins and evolution.

How Life Began elucidates three origins, or geneses, of life—bacteria, nucleated cells, and multicellular organisms—and shows how evolution has sculpted life to its current biodiversity through four main events—mutation, recombination, natural selection, and geologic cataclysm. As an ecologist who specializes in algae, the first organisms to colonize Earth, Meinesz brings a refreshingly novel voice to the history of biodiversity and emphasizes here the role of unions in organizing life. For example, the ingestion of some bacteria by other bacteria led to mitochondria that characterize animal and plant cells, and the chloroplasts of plant cells.

As Meinesz charmingly recounts, life’s grandeur is a result of an evolutionary tendency toward sociality and solidarity. He suggests that it is our cohesion and collaboration that allows us to solve the environmental problems arising in the decades and centuries to come. Rooted in the science of evolution but enlivened with many illustrations from other disciplines and the arts, How Life Began intertwines the rise of bacteria and multicellular life with Vermeer’s portrait of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the story of Genesis and Noah, Meinesz’s son’s early experiences with Legos, and his own encounters with other scientists. All of this brings a very human and humanistic tone to Meinesz’s charismatic narrative of the three origins of life.

[more]

How Life Works

A User’s Guide to the New Biology

Philip Ball

University of Chicago Press, 2023

“Bold and intriguing.”—Wall Street Journal • “Penetrating. . . . Provocative and profound.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) • “Offers plenty of food for thought.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. . . . I could not put it down.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Song of the Cell and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies

A new, cutting-edge vision of biology that revises our understanding of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers.

Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.

In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).

With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.

Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the life sciences, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.

[more]

How Monkeys See the World

Inside the Mind of Another Species

Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth

University of Chicago Press, 1990

Cheney and Seyfarth enter the minds of vervet monkeys and other primates to explore the nature of primate intelligence and the evolution of cognition.

"This reviewer had to be restrained from stopping people in the street to urge them to read it: They would learn something of the way science is done, something about how monkeys see their world, and something about themselves, the mental models they inhabit."—Roger Lewin, Washington Post Book World

"A fascinating intellectual odyssey and a superb summary of where science stands."—Geoffrey Cowley, Newsweek

"A once-in-the-history-of-science enterprise."—Duane M. Rumbaugh, Quarterly Review of Biology

[more]

How Oceans Become

Histories and Futures of the High Seas and Deep Oceans

Thomas Brandt, Knut Ove Eliassen, Mats Ingulstad, Gard Paulsen

University of Chicago Press, 0

An anthology grounded in the idea that oceans are human realities, shaped by human interests, interactions, and technologies.

Historically and geographically diverse, oceans exist in the plural. Oceans become oceans through how they are represented, what resources they are deemed to hold, and the regulatory governance to which they are subjected. These are the three key components of “ocean making” this volume employs to shed light on the complex issues facing ocean governance today.

The anthology reaches back to the oceans of the early modern European expansion and up to the current concerns of anthropogenic changes and resource depletion. Chapters address activities and regulatory concerns regarding maritime transport, fisheries, deep-sea mining, wave energy, and whaling, and span from the southern oceans around Antarctica to the current shedding of the icy mantle of the Arctic Ocean. By drawing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines—including history, comparative literature, media studies, political science, law, and anthropology—How Oceans Become opens a multi-layered, interdisciplinary approach to studying the oceans’ entanglements with human cultures and societies.

[more]

How Our Days Became Numbered

Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual

Dan Bouk

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Long before the age of "Big Data" or the rise of today's "self-quantifiers," American capitalism embraced "risk"--and proceeded to number our days. Life insurers led the way, developing numerical practices for measuring individuals and groups, predicting their fates, and intervening in their futures. Emanating from the gilded boardrooms of Lower Manhattan and making their way into drawing rooms and tenement apartments across the nation, these practices soon came to change the futures they purported to divine.

How Our Days Became Numbered tells a story of corporate culture remaking American culture--a story of intellectuals and professionals in and around insurance companies who reimagined Americans' lives through numbers and taught ordinary Americans to do the same. Making individuals statistical did not happen easily. Legislative battles raged over the propriety of discriminating by race or of smoothing away the effects of capitalism's fluctuations on individuals. Meanwhile, debates within companies set doctors against actuaries and agents, resulting in elaborate, secretive systems of surveillance and calculation.

Dan Bouk reveals how, in a little over half a century, insurers laid the groundwork for the much-quantified, risk-infused world that we live in today. To understand how the financial world shapes modern bodies, how risk assessments can perpetuate inequalities of race or sex, and how the quantification and claims of risk on each of us continue to grow, we must take seriously the history of those who view our lives as a series of probabilities to be managed.

[more]

How Primates Eat

A Synthesis of Nutritional Ecology across a Mammal Order

Edited by Joanna E. Lambert, Margaret A. H. Bryer, and Jessica M. Rothman

University of Chicago Press, 2024

Exploring everything from nutrients to food acquisition and research methods, a comprehensive synthesis of the study of diet and feeding in nonhuman primates.

What do we mean when we say that a diet is nutritious? Why can some animals get all the energy they need from eating leaves while others would perish on such a diet? Why don’t mountain gorillas eat fruit all day as chimpanzees do? Answers to these questions about food and feeding are among the many tasty morsels that emerge from this authoritative book. Informed by the latest scientific tools and millions of hours of field and laboratory work on species across the primate order and around the globe, this volume is an exhaustive synthesis of our understanding of what, why, and how primates eat. State-of-the-art information presented at physiological, behavioral, ecological, and evolutionary scales will serve as a road map for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners as they work toward a holistic understanding of life as a primate and the urgent conservation consequences of diet and food availability in a changing world.

[more]

How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind

The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality

Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed.

How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.

[more]

How Science Enriches Theology

Benedict M. Ashley

St. Augustine's Press, 2012

In a time when the relation of theology to science is in question, due in part to the unwitting fideism of religious fundamentalists and, conversely, as a result of the equally fundamentalist diatribes of the so-called “New Atheists,” How Science Enriches Theology provides a much-needed demonstration of the possibility and necessity for dialogue and integration between the two perspectives or fields of inquiry. Far from being in the unhappy throes of divorce, theology and science must renew their common commitment to the use of reason! This work is written by two formidable thinkers who have each written extensively on the foundations of natural science and related issues – including the inherently evolutionary nature and development of the cosmos. Now they team up to show the fruitful impact of science on theology as a use of reason in the service of Christian faith.
     In its philosophical or ‘cenoscopic’ foundations, science can support the truths of monotheistic faith and provide a corrective to both materialist and spiritualist forms of monism. Meanwhile, with the advance of science in the modern sense, the special sciences as ‘ideoscopic,’ we can see not only the traces of God’s existence, but of the Trinitarian nature of God, the Divine Persons of the Godhead, as proposed in Christian faith.
     Make no mistake, the authors are sure to uphold the indemonstrability of Christian-specific doctrines, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation; but, with Augustine and Aquinas, they affirm that creation is rife with traces of the divine. The validity of theology does not reduce to the deliverances of the modern sciences, but the latter can undoubtedly aid the person of faith in the “evolution” of his or her theological understanding and embrace of faith as beyond – but not contrary to – reason properly exercised. For example, the immensity and depth of our universe, as indicated alike by relativity theory and quantum theory, along with the biological, chemical, and physical diversity and dynamic stability contained within the universe’s vast limits, enrich our understanding of God the Father. Our universe’s order, uniqueness, and intelligibility suggest how we may better understand the Divine Logos, Jesus Christ. While further the evolution, freedom, and plenitude of the cosmos reveal the character of God the Holy Spirit.
    In How Science Enriches Theology, Ashley and Deely present a veritably “theosemiotic picture” of the universe, and one which avoids the naïve reductionisms of mind to matter, culture to society, biology to physics, and cenoscopic to ideoscopic science. But not only do the authors of this stellar book explore the diverse riches of creation’s many nooks and crannies; they do not balk at concluding with the speculative but inevitable question, Where is creation headed?, while also providing a tentative answer to how we might reconcile the inevitable consequences of the Second Law of Thermodynamics with the Book of Revelation’s eschatological promise of a New Heavens and a New Earth.

[more]