Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences

Download Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022656990X
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences by : Oren Harman

Download or read book Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences written by Oren Harman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the conditions that foster true novelty and allow visionaries to set their eyes on unknown horizons? What have been the challenges that have spawned new innovations, and how have they shaped modern biology? In Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences, editors Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich explore these questions through the lives of eighteen exemplary biologists who had grand and often radical ideas that went far beyond the run-of-the-mill science of their peers. From the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who coined the word “biology” in the early nineteenth century, to the American James Lovelock, for whom the Earth is a living, breathing organism, these dreamers innovated in ways that forced their contemporaries to reexamine comfortable truths. With this collection readers will follow Jane Goodall into the hidden world of apes in African jungles and Francis Crick as he attacks the problem of consciousness. Join Mary Lasker on her campaign to conquer cancer and follow geneticist George Church as he dreams of bringing back woolly mammoths and Neanderthals. In these lives and the many others featured in these pages, we discover visions that were sometimes fantastical, quixotic, and even threatening and destabilizing, but always a challenge to the status quo.

Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences

Download Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022657007X
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences by : Oren Harman

Download or read book Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences written by Oren Harman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the conditions that foster true novelty and allow visionaries to set their eyes on unknown horizons? What have been the challenges that have spawned new innovations, and how have they shaped modern biology? In Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences, editors Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich explore these questions through the lives of eighteen exemplary biologists who had grand and often radical ideas that went far beyond the run-of-the-mill science of their peers. From the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who coined the word “biology” in the early nineteenth century, to the American James Lovelock, for whom the Earth is a living, breathing organism, these dreamers innovated in ways that forced their contemporaries to reexamine comfortable truths. With this collection readers will follow Jane Goodall into the hidden world of apes in African jungles and Francis Crick as he attacks the problem of consciousness. Join Mary Lasker on her campaign to conquer cancer and follow geneticist George Church as he dreams of bringing back woolly mammoths and Neanderthals. In these lives and the many others featured in these pages, we discover visions that were sometimes fantastical, quixotic, and even threatening and destabilizing, but always a challenge to the status quo.

Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences

Download Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262036851
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences by : Snait B. Gissis

Download or read book Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences written by Snait B. Gissis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-01-12 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Broad perspective on collectivity in the life sciences, from microorganisms to human consensus, and the theoretical and empirical opportunities and challenges. Many researchers and scholars in the life sciences have become increasingly critical of the traditional methodological focus on the individual. This volume counters such methodological individualism by exploring recent and influential work in the life sciences that utilizes notions of collectivity, sociality, rich interactions, and emergent phenomena as essential explanatory tools to handle numerous persistent scientific questions in the life sciences. The contributors consider case studies of collectivity that range from microorganisms to human consensus, discussing theoretical and empirical challenges and the innovative methods and solutions scientists have devised. The contributors offer historical, philosophical, and biological perspectives on collectivity, and describe collective phenomena seen in insects, the immune system, communication, and human collectivity, with examples ranging from cooperative transport in the longhorn crazy ant to the evolution of autobiographical memory. They examine ways of explaining collectivity, including case studies and modeling approaches, and explore collectivity's explanatory power. They present a comprehensive look at a specific case of collectivity: the Holobiont notion (the idea of a multi-species collective, a host and diverse microorganisms) and the hologenome theory (which posits that the holobiont and its hologenome are a unit of adaption). The volume concludes with reflections on the work of the late physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob, pioneer in the study of collective phenomena in living systems. Contributors Oren Bader, John Beatty, Dinah R. Davison, Daniel Dor, Ofer Feinerman, Raghavendra Gadagkar, Scott F. Gilbert, Snait B. Gissis, Deborah M. Gordon, James Griesemer, Zachariah I. Grochau-Wright, Erik R. Hanschen, Eva Jablonka, Mohit Kumar Jolly, Anat Kolumbus, Ehud Lamm, Herbert Levine, Arnon Levy, Xue-Fei Li, Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Yael Lubin, Eva Maria Luef, Ehud Meron, Richard E. Michod, Samir Okasha, Simone Pika, Joan Roughgarden, Eugene Rosenberg, Ayelet Shavit, Yael Silver, Alfred I. Tauber, Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg

Outsider Scientists

Download Outsider Scientists PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022607854X
Total Pages : 387 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (26 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Outsider Scientists by : Oren Harman

Download or read book Outsider Scientists written by Oren Harman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-12-11 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outsider Scientists describes the transformative role played by “outsiders” in the growth of the modern life sciences. Biology, which occupies a special place between the exact and human sciences, has historically attracted many thinkers whose primary training was in other fields: mathematics, physics, chemistry, linguistics, philosophy, history, anthropology, engineering, and even literature. These outsiders brought with them ideas and tools that were foreign to biology, but which, when applied to biological problems, helped to bring about dramatic, and often surprising, breakthroughs. This volume brings together eighteen thought-provoking biographical essays of some of the most remarkable outsiders of the modern era, each written by an authority in the respective field. From Noam Chomsky using linguistics to answer questions about brain architecture, to Erwin Schrödinger contemplating DNA as a physicist would, to Drew Endy tinkering with Biobricks to create new forms of synthetic life, the outsiders featured here make clear just how much there is to gain from disrespecting conventional boundaries. Innovation, it turns out, often relies on importing new ideas from other fields. Without its outsiders, modern biology would hardly be recognizable.

The Incentivised University

Download The Incentivised University PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030844471
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (38 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Incentivised University by : Seán Mfundza Muller

Download or read book The Incentivised University written by Seán Mfundza Muller and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-24 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The core thesis of this book is that to understand the implications of incentive structures in modern higher education, we require a deeper understanding of associated issues in the philosophy of science. Significant public and philanthropic resources are directed towards various forms of research in the hope of addressing key societal problems. That view, and the associated allocation of resources, relies on the assumption that academic research will tend towards finding truth – or at least selecting the best approximations of it. The present book builds on, and extends, contributions in philosophy and higher education to argue that this assumption is misplaced: with serious implications for modern higher education and its role in informing societal decisions and government policy. The book develops a philosophical foundation for the analysis of the connection between higher education incentives, scientific progress and societal outcomes. That in turn is used to demonstrate how the current approach to incentivising intellectual and scientific progress is likely not only to fail, but in fact to cause harm on the very dimensions it purports to improve. The arguments presented are illustrated with examples from medicine and academic economics, making the book one of the first to examine issues of scientific progress and social consequences across the human and social sciences. In doing so, it develops a novel critique of modern economics that in turn provides a more philosophically substantive foundation for popular critiques of economics than has existed to date.

Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis

Download Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108833098
Total Pages : 511 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (88 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis by : Bruce Clarke

Download or read book Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis written by Bruce Clarke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-18 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A full and annotated collection of the correspondence between two extraordinary scientific individuals, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.

Handbook for the Historiography of Science

Download Handbook for the Historiography of Science PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031275101
Total Pages : 628 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (312 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Handbook for the Historiography of Science by : Mauro L. Condé

Download or read book Handbook for the Historiography of Science written by Mauro L. Condé and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-11-01 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to perform a critical and broad assessment of the historiography of science produced from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It presents its main authors, concepts, ideas, conceptions, and schools. It also analyzes the historical circumstances of the rise of the discipline history of science and the relations of the historiography of science with related areas. These chapters do not understand the historiography of science as a mere description or record of the history of science. Instead, they understand the historiography of science from the epistemological criteria and choices that guided the writing of the history of science in its different contexts. In other words, more than describing the record of the various possibilities of historiographical approaches to science, the chapters carry out an epistemological reflection to assess the bases, possibilities, scope, and limits of different historiographical conceptions, authors, and traditions that have established the writing of the history of science. This book can be conceived as a reference work not only for professional historians and philosophers but also for academics from different backgrounds who are initiating themselves in the universe of history and philosophy of science, be they scientists from different fields or young researchers from different backgrounds who want to start studying the history and philosophy of science.

Gaian Systems

Download Gaian Systems PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452963304
Total Pages : 397 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Gaian Systems by : Bruce Clarke

Download or read book Gaian Systems written by Bruce Clarke and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking look at Gaia theory’s intersections with neocybernetic systems theory Often seen as an outlier in science, Gaia has run a long and varied course since its formulation in the 1970s by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis. Gaian Systems is a pioneering exploration of the dynamic and complex evolution of Gaia’s many variants, with special attention to Margulis’s foundational role in these developments. Bruce Clarke assesses the different dialects of systems theory brought to bear on Gaia discourse. Focusing in particular on Margulis’s work—including multiple pieces of her unpublished Gaia correspondence—he shows how her research and that of Lovelock was concurrent and conceptually parallel with the new discourse of self-referential systems that emerged within neocybernetic systems theory. The recent Gaia writings of Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Bruno Latour contest its cybernetic status. Clarke engages Latour on the issue of Gaia’s systems description and extends his own systems-theoretical synthesis under what he terms “metabiotic Gaia.” This study illuminates current issues in neighboring theoretical conversations—from biopolitics and the immunitary paradigm to NASA astrobiology and the Anthropocene. Along the way, he points to science fiction as a vehicle of Gaian thought. Delving into many issues not previously treated in accounts of Gaia, Gaian Systems describes the history of a theory that has the potential to help us survive an environmental crisis of our own making.

The Art of Experiment

Download The Art of Experiment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351065491
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Art of Experiment by : Rolf Hughes

Download or read book The Art of Experiment written by Rolf Hughes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-20 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A handbook for navigating our troubled and precarious times intended to help readers imagine and make their world anew. In search of new knowledge practices that can help us make the world livable again, this book takes the reader on a journey across time—from the deep past to the unfolding future. The authors search beyond human knowledge to establish negotiated partnerships with forms of knowledge within the planet itself, examining how we have manipulated these historically through an anthropocentric focus. The book explores the many different kinds of knowledge, and the diversity of instruments needed to invoke and actuate the potency of human and nonhuman agencies. Four key phases in our ways of knowing are identified: material, strengthening, reconfiguring and extending, which are exemplified through case studies that take the form of worlding experiments. This pioneering work will inspire architects, artists and designers as well as students, teachers and researchers across arts and design disciplines.

Natural Selection

Download Natural Selection PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030655369
Total Pages : 474 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (36 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Natural Selection by : Richard G. Delisle

Download or read book Natural Selection written by Richard G. Delisle and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-02-27 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contests the general view that natural selection constitutes the explanatory core of evolutionary biology. It invites the reader to consider an alternative view which favors a more complete and multidimensional interpretation. It is common to present the 1930-1960 period as characterized by the rise of the Modern Synthesis, an event structured around two main explanatory commitments: (1) Gradual evolution is explained by small genetic changes (variations) oriented by natural selection, a process leading to adaptation; (2) Evolutionary trends and speciational events are macroevolutionary phenomena that can be accounted for solely in terms of the extension of processes and mechanisms occurring at the previous microevolutionary level. On this view, natural selection holds a central explanatory role in evolutionary theory - one that presumably reaches back to Charles Darwin's Origin of Species - a view also accompanied by the belief that the field of evolutionary biology is organized around a profound divide: theories relying on strong selective factors and those appealing only to weak ones. If one reads the new analyses presented in this volume by biologists, historians and philosophers, this divide seems to be collapsing at a rapid pace, opening an era dedicated to the search for a new paradigm for the development of evolutionary biology. Contrary to popular belief, scholars' position on natural selection is not in itself a significant discriminatory factor between most evolutionists. In fact, the intellectual space is quite limited, if not non-existent, between, on the one hand, "Darwinists", who play down the central role of natural selection in evolutionary explanations, and, on the other hand, "non-Darwinists", who use it in a list of other evolutionary mechanisms. The "mechanism-centered" approach to evolutionary biology is too incomplete to fully make sense of its development. In this book the labels created under the traditional historiography - "Darwinian Revolution", "Eclipse of Darwinism", "Modern Synthesis", "Post-Synthetic Developments" - are thus re-evaluated. This book will not only appeal to researchers working in evolutionary biology, but also to historians and philosophers."

Nature Remade

Download Nature Remade PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022678343X
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Nature Remade by : Luis A. Campos

Download or read book Nature Remade written by Luis A. Campos and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-07-16 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this fourth volume in our Convening Science series with the Marine Biological Laboratory, contributors, including historians, biologists, and philosophers, explore the development of bioengineering. The essays show how engineering is both a means to a functional end and a method of learning about the world. The book is organized around three themes--controlling and reproducing, knowing and making, and envisioning--to chart the increasing sophistication of our engineering of biological systems and to change our sense of the scales at which engineering occurs, to include not just genetics but also ecosystem-level intervention. The volume will attempt to make the case for "the centrality of engineering for understanding and imagining modern life.""--

Nature's Laboratory

Download Nature's Laboratory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421445212
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Nature's Laboratory by : Elizabeth Grennan Browning

Download or read book Nature's Laboratory written by Elizabeth Grennan Browning and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author argues that Chicago--a city of rapid growth and severe labor unrest as well as a gateway to the West--offers the clearest lens for analyzing the history of the intellectual divide between countryside and city in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. She shows that Chicago served as a kind of urban laboratory where numerous public intellectuals experimented with various strains of environmental thinking"--

Can Microbial Communities Regenerate?

Download Can Microbial Communities Regenerate? PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226820351
Total Pages : 191 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (268 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Can Microbial Communities Regenerate? by : S. Andrew Inkpen

Download or read book Can Microbial Communities Regenerate? written by S. Andrew Inkpen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-07-20 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By investigating a simple question, a philosopher of science and a molecular biologist offer an accessible understanding of microbial communities and a motivating theory for future research in community ecology. Microorganisms, such as bacteria, are important determinants of health at the individual, ecosystem, and global levels. And yet many aspects of modern life, from the overuse of antibiotics to chemical spills and climate change, can have devastating, lasting impacts on the communities formed by microorganisms. Drawing on the latest scientific research and real-life examples such as attempts to reengineer these communities through microbial transplantation, the construction of synthetic communities of microorganisms, and the use of probiotics, this book explores how and why communities of microorganisms respond to disturbance, and what might lead to failure. It also unpacks related and interwoven philosophical questions: What is an organism? Can a community evolve by natural selection? How can we make sense of function and purpose in the natural world? How should we think about regeneration as a phenomenon that occurs at multiple biological scales? Provocative and nuanced, this primer offers an accessible conceptual and theoretical understanding of regeneration and evolution at the community level that will be essential across disciplines including philosophy of biology, conservation biology, microbiomics, medicine, evolutionary biology, and ecology.

Common Image

Download Common Image PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : transcript Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3839459397
Total Pages : 157 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (394 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Common Image by : Ingrid Hoelzl

Download or read book Common Image written by Ingrid Hoelzl and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western humanism has established a reifying and predatory relation to the world. While its collateral visual regime, the perspectival image, is still saturating our screens, this relation has reached a dead end. Rather than desperately turning towards transhumanism and geoengineering, we need to readjust our position within community Earth. Facing this predicament, Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie develop the notion of the common image - understood as a multisensory perception across species; and common ethics - a comportment that transcends species-bound ways of living. Highlighting the notion of the common as opposed to the immune, the authors ultimately advocate otherness as a common ground for a larger than human communism.

We, Other Utopians

Download We, Other Utopians PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000483401
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis We, Other Utopians by : Eva Šlesingerová

Download or read book We, Other Utopians written by Eva Šlesingerová and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We, Other Utopians is the first book to analyze the topics of genome editing/recombinant DNA on the basis of ethnographic research in the post-communist context. The book focuses on the topics of human DNA editing and genome repair on two levels. First, inspired by texts analyzing the concept of life and the body in general, it conceptually and analytically works with various approaches to engineered life and embodiments from the perspective of anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies. Second, it presents an analysis of artificial life, and biotechnological embodiments on concrete technologies – genome editing, recombinant DNA, and biological computing. The book explores the theme of genome editing based on ethnographic research conducted at a biochemical laboratory in the Czech Republic. The fieldwork was carried out from 2017 to 2019, mainly in a lab focusing on DNA damages and genomic risk of complex diseases or genetic vulnerabilities like breast cancer, infertility, and ageing. Recombinant DNA is understood here as the exchange of DNA strands to produce and design new nucleotide sequence arrangements to heal or enhance human bodies and health in the future. The book analyzes various economies of hope, hype, expectations, politics, and poetics of false promises and better or worse predictions from the point of view of sociology, anthropology, and science and technology studies.

How To Construct Your Intellectual Pedigree: A History Of Mentoring In Science

Download How To Construct Your Intellectual Pedigree: A History Of Mentoring In Science PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : World Scientific
ISBN 13 : 9811215847
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (112 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis How To Construct Your Intellectual Pedigree: A History Of Mentoring In Science by : Elof Axel Carlson

Download or read book How To Construct Your Intellectual Pedigree: A History Of Mentoring In Science written by Elof Axel Carlson and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2020-08-27 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a handbook that shows the reader how to construct an intellectual pedigree. It is also a history of science monograph because the completed intellectual pedigrees can be used individually or collectively to trace the influences of mentoring in the life sciences. The author uses Hermann Joseph Muller (1890-1967) (which includes his own intellectual pedigree) to show how knowledge was shifted from Italy to Germany and England, to France, and then to the American Colonies. Through Muller, the author goes in two directions, one leading to Huxley, Darwin, and Newton. The second leads to Agassiz, Malpighi, Borelli, and Galileo. The author also shows, from comparing 60 additional intellectual pedigrees, that about one third go to Newton, one third to Galileo and the rest to other icons of the past (e.g., Linnaeus, Lavoisier, Gay-Loussac, Leibniz). It shows how small was the pool of available scientists in the universities before the mid-19th century.This book will stimulate graduate students and faculty to construct their own intellectual pedigrees. It will also be of interest to historians and philosophers of science. The book discusses the role of mentoring, dividing this into inputs of intellectual development as well as outputs of development, using timelines arranged as circles. For each mentor, a brief account is given of that person's work and relation to the subject of the pedigree.

Evolutions

Download Evolutions PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Farrar, Straus & Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374150702
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (741 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Evolutions by : Oren Harman

Download or read book Evolutions written by Oren Harman and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An artful exploration of how the language of science has replaced old mythologies" --