Biology Under the Influence

Author: Richard Lewontin
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 158367392X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
How do we understand the world? While some look to the heavens for intelligent design, others argue that it is determined by information encoded in DNA. Science serves as an important activity for uncovering the processes and operations of nature, but it is also immersed in a social context where ideology influences the questions we ask and how we approach the material world. Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society breaks from the confirms of determinism, offering a dialectical analysis for comprehending a dynamic social and natural world. In Biology Under the Influence, Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins provide a devastating critique of genetic determinism and reductionism within science while exploring a broad range of issues including the nature of science, biology, evolution, the environment, pubic health, and dialectics, They dismantle the ideology that attempts to naturalize social inequalities, unveil the alienation of science and nature, and illustrate how a dialectical position serves as a basis for grappling with historical developments and a world characterized by change. Biology Under the Influence brings together the illuminating essays of two prominent scientists who work to demystify and empower the public's understanding of science and nature.

Biology Under the Influence

Author: Richard Lewontin
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583671587
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 403

Biology As Ideology

Author: Richard Lewontin
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 0887848478
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description
R. C. Lewontin is a prominent scientist -- a geneticist who teaches at Harvard -- yet he believes that we have placed science on a pedestal, treating it as an objective body of knowledge that transcends all other ways of knowing and all other endeavours. Lewontin writes in this collection of essays, which began their life as CBC Radio's Massey Lectures Series for 1990: "Scientists do not begin life as scientists, after all, but as social beings immersed in a family, a state, a productive structure, and they view nature through a lens that has been molded by their social experience... . Science, like the Church before it, is a supremely social institution, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant values and vices of society at each historical epoch." In Biology as Ideology Lewontin examines the false paths down which modern scientific ideology has led us. By admitting science's limitations, he helps us rediscover the richness of nature -- and appreciate the real value of science.

The Influence of Cooperative Bacteria on Animal Host Biology

Author: Margaret J. McFall Ngai
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521834650
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
Broad-ranging and cross-disciplinary overview of the evolution and mechanisms of beneficial host-pathogen interactions.

Evolution and Learning

Author: Bruce H. Weber
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262232296
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
Essays on the contributions to historical and contemporary evolutionary theory of the Baldwin effect, which postulates the effects of learned behaviors on evolutionary change.

Not in Our Genes

Author: Richard Lewontin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781608467273
Category : Behavior genetics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Three eminent scientists analyze the scientific, social, and political roots of biological determinism.

The Influence of Genetics on Contemporary Thinking

Author: Anne Fagot-Largeault
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402056648
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume reflects on the effects of recent discoveries in genetics on a broad range of scientific fields. It shows the way in which those discoveries influence genetics itself and many other fields, and explains the impact of genetics on contemporary culture. The volume contains the most recent views of the Nobel Laureate François Jacob on genetics and the nature of living things.

Activist Biology

Author: Regina Horta Duarte
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 081653201X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Activist Biology is the story of a group of biologists at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro who joined the drive to renew the Brazilian nation, claiming as their weapon the voice of their fledgling field. It offers a portrait of science as a creative and transformative pathway. This book will intrigue anyone fascinated by environmental history and Latin American political and social life in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Impact of Biology on Modern Psychiatry

Author: Elliot Gershon
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1468407783
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
viii beginning to understand-their action, as will be brought out in this symposium. During this same period another development took place in psychiatry, namely, social and community psychiatry, interpreted by some, incorrectly, in my opinion, as the antitheses of the biological approach. The whole area of the delivery of mental health services, which quickly became more of a political and social issue than a medical one, led to confusion, disillusionment, despair, and also soul-searching by psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. The remarkable Pablo Picasso said, "the development of photography freed the artist to express his own creativity. " I have paraphrased Picasso's insightful remark, namely, "the development of biology and social and community psychiatry should free the psychiatrist to express his own creati vity as a physician. " It should allow him to regain his basic medi cal identity. As his medical identity becomes paramount, then the pejorative classification of psychiatrists into those "organically oriented" and those "dynamically-oriented" will no longer be valid. The psychiatrist, like his medical colleague, must be concerned with the psychological, psychosocial, biological, and technical aspects of psychiatry. The strengthening and development of the medical identity of the psychiatrist imposes increased responsibilities on him and on psychiatry as a medical discipline. On the one hand, he will have to become more of a neuro-bi_ gist and, on the other, more of a behavioral scientist.

Above the Gene, Beyond Biology

Author: Jan Baedke
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822983400
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
Epigenetics is currently one of the fastest-growing fields in the sciences. Epigenetic information not only controls DNA expression but links genetic factors with the environmental experiences that influence the traits and characteristics of an individual. What we eat, where we work, and how we live affects not only the activity of our genes but that of our offspring as well. This discovery has imposed a revolutionary theoretical shift on modern biology, especially on evolutionary theory. It has helped to uncover the developmental processes leading to cancer, obesity, schizophrenia, alcoholism, and aging, and to facilitate associated medial applications such as stem cell therapy and cloning. Above the Gene, Beyond Biology explores how biologists in this booming field investigate and explain living systems. Jan Baedke offers the first comprehensive philosophical discussion of epigenetic concepts, explanations, and methodologies so that we can better understand this “epigenetic turn” in the life sciences from a philosophical perspective.