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From Inside cover of the book:
| In this collection of original essays, five renowned writers explore forgotten and neglected aspects of the history of science. Jonathan Miller, Oliver Sacks, and Daniel Kevles show how some scientific ideas emerge with great promise, only to be dismissed or forgotten, and then, in different form, become accepted as important years later. Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould discuss the way words and images used by scientists and populizers alike, from the murals on the walls of natural history museums to such ubiquitous terms as "adaptation" and "environment," reflect deep and largely unacknowledged distortions in the way we conceive both individual organisms and the natural history of the world. Together, these five essays show that science is, in the words of Oliver Sacks, "a human enterprise through and through, and organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past, but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhood. |