You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Although Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) is often cited as the founding text of the U.S. environmental movement, in The Malthusian Moment Thomas Robertson locates the origins of modern American environmentalism in twentieth-century adaptations of Thomas Malthus’s concerns about population growth. For many environmentalists, managing population growth became the key to unlocking the most intractable problems facing Americans after World War II—everything from war and the spread of communism overseas to poverty, race riots, and suburban sprawl at home. Weaving together the international and the domestic in creative new ways, The Malthusian Moment charts the explosion of Malthusian t...
"Provine's thorough and thoroughly admirable examination of Wright's life and influence, which is accompanied by a very useful collection of Wright's papers on evolution, is the best we have for any recent figure in evolutionary biology."—Joe Felsenstein, Nature "In Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology . . . Provine has produced an intellectual biography which serves to chart in considerable detail both the life and work of one man and the history of evolutionary theory in the middle half of this century. Provine is admirably suited to his task. . . . The resulting book is clearly a labour of love which will be of great interest to those who have a mature interest in the history of evolutionary theory."-John Durant, ;ITimes Higher Education Supplement;X
Originally published in 2001, this is the second of two volumes published by Cambridge University Press in honour of Richard Lewontin. This second volume of essays honours the philosophical, historical and political dimensions of his work. It is fitting that the volume covers such a wide range of perspectives on modern biology, given the range of Lewontin's own contributions. He is not just a very successful practitioner of evolutionary genetics, but a rigorous critic of the practices of genetics and evolutionary biology and an articulate analyst of the social, political and economic contexts and consequences of genetic and evolutionary research. The volume begins with an essay by Lewontin on Natural History and Formalism in Evolutionary Genetics, and includes contributions by former students, post-docs, colleagues and collaborators, which cover issues ranging from the history and conceptual foundations of evolutionary biology and genetics, to the implications of human genetic diversity.
Using the works of Bacon, Hobbes, and Adam Smith as well as historical examples drawn from the last two centuries, Busch shows how the ideas initially proposed by these thinkers became reified as scientism, statism, and marketism-- systems of belief that a single mode of ordering could solve the riddle of society, and thereby supplant moral responsibility. Busch contrasts this approach with concrete examples of successful attempts to extend democracy into these areas--to create multiple orderings-- so that moral responsibility is neither crushingly heavy on individuals nor unbearably light on society.
This book provides the biographies, and a related summary, of geneticists and breeders of maize who have contributed to the major discoveries in the 20th century. Their relationships to one another, as well as the general developments in maize genetics and breeding growth, are included. Photographs of events and related personnel, all part of the biographic presentation, portray the maize community and its growth. Most of the geneticists and breeders have a common origin in their training, and their sucessors are among the current contributors to maize development.
A pioneering and influential examination of how social institutions and values shaped American scientific practice and thought. In its original edition, No Other Gods offered a pioneering and influential examination of the ways in which social institutions and values shaped American scientific practice and thought. In this revised and expanded edition, Rosenberg directs our attention to the dilemma posed by the social study of science: How can we reconcile the scientist's understanding of science as a quest for truth and knowledge with the historian's conviction that all knowledge bears the marks of the culture which gave it birth?
'Building the Population Bomb' carefully examines how the rise of the world's human population came to be understood as problematic by scientists and governments across the globe. It challenges our assumption of population growth as inherently problematic by demonstrating how it is our anxieties over population growth - and not population growth itself - that have detracted from the pursuit of economic, environmental, and reproductive justice.
None
Written by 30 authors from all over the world, this book provides a unique overview of exciting discoveries and surprising developments in human genetics over the last 50 years. The individual contributions, based on seven international workshops on the history of human genetics, cover a diverse range of topics, including the early years of the discipline, gene mapping and diagnostics. Further, they discuss the status quo of human genetics in different countries and highlight the value of genetic counseling as an important subfield of medical genetics.