We often think of science as continuously advancing. In this
collection of essays, five world-renowned writers explore obscure
and neglected episodes in the history of science which suggest
instead that the process of understanding the significance of
scientific discoveries can be erratic, contradictory, even
irrational. Jonathan Miller, Oliver Sacks, and Daniel Kevles show
how promising new ideas may at first fail to be noticed or
accepted, and then, years after they have been dismissed or
forgotten, are recognized in a different form as important. R.C.
Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould discuss the ways that words and
images used by scientists and popularizers alike, from the murals
on the walls of natural history museums to such ubiquitous terms as
"adaptation" and "environment," reflect serious and often
unacknowledged distortions in the way we conceive of both
individual organisms and the natural history of the world.
These essays demonstrate that science is, in the words of Oliver
Sacks, "a human enterprise through and through, an 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."
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