Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution

Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution
Rebecca Stott (Author)
(69)

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A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

“[An] extraordinarily wide-ranging and engaging book [about] the men who shaped the work of Charles Darwin . . . a book that enriches our understanding of how the struggle to think new thoughts is shared across time and space and people.”—The Sunday Telegraph (London)
 
Soon after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received an unsettling letter that accused him of taking credit for a theory that had already been discovered by others. Realizing his error of omission, Darwin tried to trace all of the natural philosophers who had laid the groundwork for his theory, but he found that history had already forgotten many of them.
 
Rebecca Stott goes in search of these ghosts, telling the epic story of the discovery of evolution and natural selection from Aristotle to the ninth-century Arab writer Al-Jahiz to Leonardo da Vinci to the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin des Plantes to Alfred Wallace and Erasmus Darwin, and finally to Charles Darwin himself. Evolution was not discovered single-handedly. It was an idea that was advanced over centuries by daring individuals across the globe who had the imagination to speculate on nature’s extraordinary ways—and the courage to articulate such speculations at a time when to do so was often considered heresy.
 
Praise for Darwin’s Ghosts

“Absorbing . . . Stott captures the breathless excitement of an investigation on the cusp of the unknown. . . . A lively, original book.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Stott’s research is broad and unerring; her book is wonderful. . . . An exhilarating romp through 2,000 years of fascinating scientific history.”—Nature
 
“Stott brings Darwin himself to life. . . . [She] writes with a novelist’s flair. . . . Darwin and the ‘ghosts’ so richly described in Ms. Stott’s enjoyable book are the descendants of Aristotle and Bacon and the ancestors of today’s scientists.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
“Riveting . . . Stott has done a wonderful job in showing just how many extraordinary people had speculated on where we came from before the great theorist dispelled all doubts.”—The Guardian (U.K.)

• Rank: #133743 in Books
• Published on: 2013-03-19
• Released on: 2013-03-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.22" h x .87" w x 5.44" l, .75 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
Michael J. Behe (Author)
(663)

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Darwins Black Box helped to launch the Intelligent Design movement: the argument that nature exhibits evidence of design, beyond Darwinian randomness. Today, with the movement stronger than ever, Michael J. Behe updates the book with an important new Afterword on the state of the debate.

Time

Naming Darwins Black Box to the National Reviews list of the 100 most important nonfiction works of the twentieth century, George Gilder wrote that it overthrows Darwin at the end of the twentieth century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning. Discussing the book in The New Yorker in May 2005, H. Allen Orr said of Behe, he is the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and his arguments are by far the best known. From one end of the spectrum to the other, Darwins Black Box has established itself as the key text in the Intelligent Design movementthe one argument that must be addressed in order to determine whether Darwinian evolution is sufficient to explain life as we know it, or not.

For this edition, Behe has written a major new Afterword tracing the state of the debate in the decade since it began. It is his first major new statement on the subject and will be welcomed by the thousands who wish to continue this intense debate.

• Rank: #13962 in Books
• Brand: Simon & Schuster
• Published on: 2006-03-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.50" h x .83" w x 5.31" l, .73 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time

The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
Jonathan Weiner (Author)
(101)

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

On a desert island in the heart of the Galapagos archipelago, where Darwin received his first inklings of the theory of evolution, two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, have spent twenty years proving that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory.  For among the finches of Daphne Major, natural selection is neither rare nor slow: it is taking place by the hour, and we can watch.

In this dramatic story of groundbreaking scientific research, Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself.  The Beak of the Finch is an elegantly written and compelling masterpiece of theory and explication in the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould.

• Rank: #5498 in Books
• Brand: PBS
• Published on: 1995-05-30
• Released on: 1995-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 7.97" h x .68" w x 5.56" l, .73 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 332 pages

The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life

The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life
Charles Darwin (Author), Robin Field (Reader)
(58)

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Note: ***This is the edition with Introduction by Julian Huxley***

The Origin of Species sold out on the first day of its publication in 1859. It is the major book of the nineteenth century and one of the most readable and accessible of the great revolutionary works of the scientific imagination. Though, in fact, little read, most people know what it says--at least they think they do.

The Origin of Species was the first mature and persuasive work to explain how species change through the process of natural selection. Upon its publication, the book began to transform attitudes about society and religion and was soon used to justify the philosophies of communists, socialists, capitalists, and even Germany's National Socialists. But the most quoted response came from Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's friend and also a renowned naturalist, who exclaimed, ''How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!''

• Rank: #705837 in Books
• Published on: 2011-10-01
• Formats: Audiobook, Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 19
• Dimensions: 2.00" h x 5.40" w x 5.80" l, 1.00 pounds
• Binding: Audio CD

The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)

The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)
Robert J. Richards (Author)

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Did Darwin see evolution as progressive, directed toward producing ever more advanced forms of life? Most contemporary scholars say no. In this challenge to prevailing views, Robert J. Richards says yes—and argues that current perspectives on Darwin and his theory are both ideologically motivated and scientifically unsound.

This provocative new reading of Darwin goes directly to the origins of evolutionary theory. Unlike most contemporary biologists or historians and philosophers of science, Richards holds that Darwin did concern himself with the idea of progress, or telos, as he constructed his theory. Richards maintains that Darwin drew on the traditional embryological meanings of the terms "evolution" and "descent with modification." In the 1600s and 1700s, "evolution" referred to the embryological theory of preformation, the idea that the embryo exists as a miniature adult of its own species that simply grows, or evolves, during gestation. By the early 1800s, however, the idea of preformation had become the concept of evolutionary recapitulation, the idea that during its development an embryo passes through a series of stages, each the adult form of an ancestor species.

Richards demonstrates that, for Darwin, embryological recapitulation provided a graphic model of how species evolve. If an embryo could be seen as successively taking the structures and forms of its ancestral species, then one could see the evolution of life itself as a succession of species, each transformed from its ancestor. Richards works with the Origin and other published and archival material to show that these embryological models were much on Darwin's mind as he considered the evidence for descent with modification.

Why do so many modern researchers find these embryological roots of Darwin's theory so problematic? Richards argues that the current tendency to see evolution as a process that is not progressive and not teleological imposes perspectives on Darwin that incorrectly deny the clearly progressive heart of his embryological models and his evolutionary theory.

• Rank: #859950 in Books
• Published on: 1992-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 222 pages