The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003 by Richard Dawkins (English) P

Description: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003 by Richard Dawkins, Tim Folger Bringing together the best and brightest writers on science and nature, this years collection includes essays on such wide-ranging subjects as astronomys new stars, archaeology, the Bible, "terminal" ice, and memory faults. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the countrys finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundred of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003, edited by Richard Dawkins, is another "eloquent, accessible, and even illuminating" collection (Publishers Weekly). Here are the best and brightest writers on science and nature, writing on such wide-ranging subjects as astronomys new stars, archaeology, the Bible, "terminal" ice, and memory faults. Natalie Angier Timothy Ferris Ian Frazier Elizabeth F. Loftus Steven Pinker Oliver Sacks Steven Weinberg Edward O. Wilson Author Biography RICHARD DAWKINS is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and was the University of Oxfords Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. He is the author of 15 books includingUnweaving the Rainbow, A Devils Chaplain, and The God Delusion.Dawkins lives in Oxford.,TIM FOLGER is a contributing editor at Discover and writes about science for several magazines. He lives in New Mexico. Table of Contents Contents Foreword ix Introduction by Richard Dawkins xiii Natalie Angier. Weighing the Grandma Factor 1 from The New York Times Tim Appenzeller. At Home in the Heavens 7 from U.S. News&World Report Alan Burdick. Four Ears to the Ground 11 from Natural History Clark R. Chapman and Alan W. Harris. A Skeptical Look at September 11th 15 from Skeptical Inquirer David Ewing Duncan. DNA as Destiny 25 from Wired Timothy Ferris. Astronomys New Stars 36 from Smithsonian Ian Frazier. Terminal Ice 48 from Outside James Gorman. Finding a Wild, Fearsome World Beneath Every Fallen Leaf 67 from The New York Times Charles Hirshberg. My Mother, the Scientist 72 from Popular Science Brendan I . Koerner. Embryo Police 79 from Wired Elizabeth Kolbert. Ice Memory 91 from The New Yorker Andrew Lawler. Treasure Under Saddams Feet 105 from Discover Daniel Lazare. False Testament 112 from Harpers Magazine Elizabeth F. Loftus. Memory Faults and Fixes 127 from Issues in Science and Technology Charles C. Mann. Homeland Insecurity 145 from The Atlantic Monthly Bill McKibben. Its Easy Being Green 170 from Mother Jones Steve Olson. The Royal We 176 from The Atlantic Monthly Dennis Overbye. A New View of Our Universe 181 from The New York Times Steven Pinker. The Blank Slate 188 from Discover Oliver Sacks. Anybody Out There? 200 from Natural History Steve Silberman. The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks 206 from Wired Adam Summers. Fat Heads Sink Ships 225 from Natural History Gary Taubes. What If Its All Been a Big Fat Lie? 228 from The New York Times Magazine Bruce Watson. Sounding the Alarm 248 from Smithsonian William Speed Weed. The Very Best Telescope 254 from Discover Scott Weidensaul. Raising the Dead 262 from Audubon Steven Weinberg. The Truth About Missile Defense 271 from The New York Review of Books Ted Williams. Maines War on Coyotes 287 from Audubon Edward O. Wilson. The Bottleneck 297 from Scienti.c American Contributors Notes 315 Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2002 321 Review "Eloquent, accessible, and even illuminating." Excerpt from Book Introduction In introducing this anthology of American scientific writing I invoke two recently dead heroes, one a scientist and American, the other a writer, not trained in science and not from America but a lover of both. Carl Sagan gave one of his last books the characteristically memorable subtitle Science as a Candle in the Dark. Douglas Adams chose to study English literature at Cambridge, but he explained to me, in a televised conversation in 1997, that his reading habits have now changed: "I think I read much more science than novels. I think the role of the novel has changed a little bit. In the nineteenth century the novel was where you went to get your serious reflections and questionings about life. Youd go to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Nowadays, of course, you know the scientists actually tell us much, much more about such issues than you would ever get from novelists. So I think for the real solid red meat of what I read I go to science books, and read some novels as light relief." Even while listening to him, I reflected on my frustration, going into bookshops and trying to find scientific books. If there is a science section at all, it is dwarfed not only by fiction, history, biography, "self-help," cookery, and gardening, but also by "new age," "occult," and religion. It has become a commonplace that astrology books outsell astronomy by a large margin. Turning back to Adams, I asked him, "What is it about science that really gets your blood running?" and he replied: "The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strange- ness that is absolutely awesome. I mean, the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity but probably absolutely out of nothing is the most fabulous, extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened -- its just wonderful. And I feel, you know, that the opportunity to spend seventy or eighty years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned!" Carl Sagan obviously shared those sentiments and devoted much of his career to expounding them, but The Demon-Haunted World, whose subtitle I quoted, has a darker theme. The darkness of ignorance breeds fear. In the words of a prayer which I early learned from my Cornish grandmother, From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties And things that go bump in the night Good Lord deliver us. Some say it is Scottish, not Cornish, but the sentiments are anyway worldwide. People are afraid of the dark. Science, as Sagan argued and personally exemplifled, has the power to reduce ignorance and dispel fear. We should all read science and learn to think like scientists, not because science is useful (though it is), but because the light of knowledge is wonderful and banishes the debilitating and time-wasting fear of the dark. That uncompromisingly articulate chemist Peter Atkins has a utopian vision of a scientifically enlightened world which I share: "When we have dealt with the values of the fundamental constants by seeing that they are unavoidably so, and have dismissed them as irrelevant, we shall have arrived at complete understanding. Fundamental science can then rest. We are almost there. Complete knowledge is within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise." Unfortunately, science arouses fears of its own, usually because of a confusion with technology. Even technology is not inherently frightening, but it can, of course, do bad things as well as good. If you want to do good, or if you want to do bad, science will provide the most effective way in either case. The trick is to choose the good rather than the bad, and what I fear is the judgment of those to whom society delegates that choice. Science is the systematic method by which we apprehend what is true about the real world in which we live. If you want consolation, or an ethical guide to the good life, you can look elsewhere (and may be disappointed). But if you want to know what is true about reality, science is the only way. If there were a better way, science would embrace it. Science can be seen as a sophisticated extension of the sense organs nature gave us. Properly used, the worldwide cooperative enterprise of science works like a telescope pointing toward reality; or, turned around, a microscope to dissect details and analyze causes. So understood, science is fundamentally a benign force, even though the technology that it spawns is powerful enough to be dangerous when abused. Ignorance of science can never be a good thing, and scientists have a paramount duty to explain their subject and make it as simple as possible (though no simpler, as Einsteein rightly insisted). Ignorance is usually a passive state, seldom deliberately sought or intrinsically blameworthy. Unfortunately, there do seem to be some people who positively prefer ignorance and resent being told the truth. Michael Shermer, debonair editor and proprietor of Skeptic magazine, tells of the audience reaction when he unmasked a professional charlatan onstage. Far from showing Shermer the gratitude he deserved for exposing a fake who was conning them, the audience was hostile. "One woman glared at me and told me it was inappropriate to destroy these peoples hopes during their time of grief." Admittedly, this particular phonys claim was to communicate with the dead, so the bereaved may have had special reasons for resenting a scientific debunker. But Shermers experience is typical of a more general mood of protective affection for ignorance. Far from being seen as a candle in the dark, or as a wonderful source of poetic inspiration, science is too often decried as poetrys spoilsport. A more snobbish denigration of science can be found in some, but by no means all, literary circles. "Scientism" is as dirty a word as any in todays intellectual lexicon. Scientific explanations that have the virtue of simplicity are derided as "simplistic." Obscurity is often mistaken for profundity; simple clarity can be taken for arrogance. Analytical minds are denigrated as "reductionist" -- as with "sin," we may not know what it means, but we do know that we are against it. The Nobel Prize-winning immunologist and polymath Peter Medawar, not a man to suffer fools gladly, remarked that "reductive analysis is the most successful research stratagem ever devised," and continued: "Some resent the whole idea of elucidating any entity or state of affairs that would otherwise have continued to languish in a familiar and nonthreatening squalor of incomprehension." Nonscientific ways of thinking -- intuitive, sensitive, imaginative (as if science were not imaginative!) -- are thought by some to have a built-in superiority over cold, austere, scientific "reason." Heres Medawar again, this time in his celebrated lecture "Science and Literature": "The official Romantic view is that Reason and the Imagination are antithetical, or at best that they provide alternative pathways leading to the truth, the pathway of Reason being long and winding and stopping short of the summit, so that while Reason is breathing heavily there is Imagination capering lightly up the hill." Medawar goes on to point out that this view was even once supported by scientists themselves. Newton claimed to make no hypotheses, and scientists generally were supposed to employ "a calculus of discovery, a formulary of intellectual behaviour which could be relied upon to conduct the scientist towards the truth, and this new calculus was thought of almost as an antidote to the imagination." Medawars own view, inherited from his "personal guru" Karl Popper and shared by most scientists today, was that imagination is seminal to all science but is tempered by critical testing against the real world. Creative imagination and critical rigor are both to be found in this collection of contemporary American scientific literature. For a non-American to be invited by a leading American publisher to anthologize American writings about science is an honor, the more so because American science is, by almost any index one could conjure, preeminent in the world. Whether we measure the money spent on research or count the numbers of active scientists working, of books and journal articles published, or of major prizes won, the United States leads the rest of the world by a convincing margin. My admiration for American science is so enthusiastic, so downright grateful, that I hope I may not be thought presumptuous if I sound a note of discordant warning. American science leads the world, but so does American anti-science. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in my own field of evolution. Evolution is one of the most securely established facts in all science. The knowledge that we are cousins to apes, kangaroos, and bacteria is beyond all educated doubt: as certain as our (once doubted) knowledge that the planets orbit the sun, and that South America was once joined to Africa, and India distant from Asia. Particularly secure is the fact that lifes evolution began a matter of billions of years ago. And yet, if polls are to be believed, approximately 45 percent of the population of the United States firmly believes, to the contrary, an elementary falsehood: all species separately owe their existence to "intelligent design" less than ten thousand years ago. Worse, the nature of American democratic institutions is such that this perversely ignorant half of the population (which does not, I hasten to add, include leading churchmen or leading scholars in any discipline) is in many districts strongly placed to influence local educational policy. I have met biology te Details ISBN0618178929 Series Best American Science & Nature Writing (Paperback) Language English ISBN-10 0618178929 ISBN-13 9780618178926 Media Book Format Paperback Series Number 2003 Year 2003 Short Title BEST AMER SCIENCE & NATURE WRI Pages 352 DOI 10.1604/9780618178926 Imprint Clarion Books Place of Publication Boston Country of Publication United States Author Tim Folger AU Release Date 2003-10-10 NZ Release Date 2003-10-10 UK Release Date 2003-10-10 Publisher Houghton Mifflin Edition Description 2003 ed. Edition 2003rd Edited by Tim Folger DEWEY 810.8036 Illustrations Illustrations Audience Undergraduate Imprint US Mariner Books Publisher US HarperCollins Publication Date 2003-10-01 US Release Date 2003-10-01 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:8239655;

Price: 61.47 AUD

Location: Melbourne

End Time: 2025-01-29T16:56:29.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 AUD