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The mystery of inheritance has captivated thinkers since antiquity, and the unlocking of this mystery—the development of classical genetics—is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. This great scientific and human drama is the story told fully and for the first time in this book. Acclaimed science writer James Schwartz presents the history of genetics through the eyes of a dozen or so central players, beginning with Charles Darwin and ending with Nobel laureate Hermann J. Muller. In tracing the emerging idea of the gene, Schwartz deconstructs many often-told stories that were meant to reflect glory on the participants and finds that the “official” version of discovery often hides...
In this pioneering study of the first major challenges to Darwinism, Peter J. Bowler examines the competing theories of evolution, identifies their intellectual origins, and describes the process by which the modern concept of evolution emerged. Describing the variety of influences that drove scientists to challenge Darwin's conclusions, Bowler reevaluates the influence of social forces on the scientific community and explores the broad philosophical, ideological, and social implications of scientific theories.
This acclaimed biography of 19th century scientist Gregor Mendel is “a fascinating tale of the strange twists and ironies of scientific progress” (Publishers Weekly). A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist In The Monk in the Garden, award-winning author Robin Marantz Henig vividly chronicles the birth of genetics, a field that continues to challenge the way we think about life itself. Tending to his pea plants in a monastery garden, the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel discovered the foundational principles of genetic inheritance. But Mendel’s work was ignored during his lifetime, even though it answered the most pressing questions raised by Charles Darwin's revolutionary book, On th...
No scientific traveler was more influenced by the Pacific than Charles Darwin, and his legacy in the region remains unparalleled. Yet the extent of the Pacific's impact on the thought of Darwin and those who followed him has not been sufficiently grasped. In this volume of essays, sixteen scholars explore the many dimensions - biological, geological, anthropological, social, and political - of Darwinism in the Pacific. Fired by Darwinian ideas, nineteenth-century naturalists within and around the Pacific rim worked to further Darwin's programs in their own research: in Seattle, conchologist P. Brooks Randolph; in Honolulu, evolutionist John Thomas Gulick; in Adelaide, botanist Richard Schomb...
Neither minimizing the difficulty of the choices that modern genetics has created for us nor fearing them, Cowan argues that we can improve the quality of our own lives and the lives of our children by using the modern science and technology of genetic screening responsibly.
Traces the rhetorical work of the gene in scientific and nonscientific discourse throughout the twentieth century.
In 1901 William Bateson, Professor of Biology at Cambridge, published a renewed version of a lecture which he had delivered the year before to the Royal Horticultural Society in London (reprinted in the book as an appendix). In this lecture he recognized the importance of the work completed by Gregor Mendel in 1865, and brought it to the notice of
Born by mistake, or connivance, to struggling parents in a small Lancashire cotton town in 1903, an uninspired Darlington inadvertently escaped the obscurity of farming life and rose instead, against all odds, to become within a few short years the world's greatest expert on chromosomes, and one of the most penetrating biological thinkers of the twentieth century. Harman follows Darlington's path from bleak prospects to world fame, showing how, within the most miniscule of worlds, he sought answers to the biggest questions--how species originate, how variation occurs, how Nature, both blind and foreboding, random and insightful, makes her way from deep past to unknown future. But Darlington ...
Eugenics, to quote the definition of the man who coined the word, Francis Galton, is 'the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either 1 physically or mentally'. Eugenists believe that the knowledge so acquired can be applied to the practical task of raising the level of fitness in the human race. Man, Prometheus-like, is at last acquiring the power to control his own genetic future. To carry on the eugenical work pioneered by Galton, a Eugenics Society is in existence at the present day. Its members, predominantly academics and scientists, hope collectively to influence government policies through normal pressure-group a...