Dreamers Visionaries And Revolutionaries In The Life Sciences

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Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences

Author : Oren Harman,Michael R. Dietrich
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2018-07-20
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780226570075

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Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences by Oren Harman,Michael R. Dietrich Pdf

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

Author : Snait B. Gissis,Ehud Lamm,Ayelet Shavit
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 433 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2018-01-12
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780262036856

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Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences by Snait B. Gissis,Ehud Lamm,Ayelet Shavit Pdf

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

The Incentivised University

Author : Seán Mfundza Muller
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2022-01-24
Category : Education
ISBN : 9783030844479

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The Incentivised University by Seán Mfundza Muller Pdf

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

Author : Bruce Clarke,Sébastien Dutreuil
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 511 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2022-08-18
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781108833097

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Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis by Bruce Clarke,Sébastien Dutreuil Pdf

A full and annotated collection of the correspondence between two extraordinary scientific individuals, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.

Handbook for the Historiography of Science

Author : Mauro L. Condé,Marlon Salomon
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 628 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2023-11-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9783031275104

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Handbook for the Historiography of Science by Mauro L. Condé,Marlon Salomon Pdf

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

Author : Bruce Clarke
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 397 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2020-09-29
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781452963303

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Gaian Systems by Bruce Clarke Pdf

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

Author : Rolf Hughes,Rachel Armstrong
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2020-12-20
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9781351065498

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The Art of Experiment by Rolf Hughes,Rachel Armstrong Pdf

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

Author : Richard G. Delisle
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 474 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2021-02-27
Category : Science
ISBN : 9783030655365

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Natural Selection by Richard G. Delisle Pdf

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's Laboratory

Author : Elizabeth Grennan Browning
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2022-11-15
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781421445212

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Nature's Laboratory by Elizabeth Grennan Browning Pdf

"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"--

Nature Remade

Author : Luis A. Campos,Michael R. Dietrich,Tiago Saraiva,Christian C. Young
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2021-07-16
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780226783437

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Nature Remade by Luis A. Campos,Michael R. Dietrich,Tiago Saraiva,Christian C. Young Pdf

"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.""--

Can Microbial Communities Regenerate?

Author : S. Andrew Inkpen,W. Ford Doolittle
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2022-07-20
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780226820354

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Can Microbial Communities Regenerate? by S. Andrew Inkpen,W. Ford Doolittle Pdf

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

Author : Ingrid Hoelzl,Rémi Marie
Publisher : transcript Verlag
Page : 157 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2021-11-30
Category : Art
ISBN : 9783839459393

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Common Image by Ingrid Hoelzl,Rémi Marie Pdf

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

Author : Eva Šlesingerová
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2021-12-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000483406

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We, Other Utopians by Eva Šlesingerová Pdf

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

Author : Elof Axel Carlson
Publisher : World Scientific
Page : 349 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2020-08-27
Category : Science
ISBN : 9789811215841

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

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.

(Un)doing Diabetes: Representation, Disability, Culture

Author : Bianca C. Frazer,Heather R. Walker
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2022-01-21
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9783030831103

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(Un)doing Diabetes: Representation, Disability, Culture by Bianca C. Frazer,Heather R. Walker Pdf

While the 21st century insulin crisis provokes protest and political dialogue, public conception of diabetes remain firmly unchanged. Popular media representations portray diabetes as a condition couched in lifestyle choices. In the groundbreaking volume (Un)doing Diabetes, authors destabilize depictions so powerful, so subtle, and so unquestioned, that readers may find assertions counterintuitive. (Un)doing Diabetes is the first collection of essays to use disability studies to explore representations of diabetes across a wide range of mediums- from Twitter to TV and film, to theater, fiction, fanfiction, fashion and more. This disability studies approach to diabetes locates individual experiences of diabetes within historical and contemporary social conditions. In undoing diabetes, authors deconstruct assumptions the public commonly holds about diabetes, while writers doing diabetes present counter-narratives community members create to represent themselves. This collection will be of interest to scholars, activists, caregivers, and those living with diabetes.