New Books in Science

The prologue to The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 2018) begins by provocatively invoking a question American physiologist Walter Cannon first asked in 1926: “Why don’t we die daily?” In the erudite chapters that follow, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers explore how practitioners and theorists working during and after World War I tried to answer that very thorny problem in light of the challenges of wound shock. This functional disorder demanded that doctors, surgeons, and physiologists account for two medical realities: first, that wound shock was a whole-body, multi-systemic response to trauma; and second, that a fairly homogenous group—namely the young, male soldier-patient—responded to wound shock in highly variable and individuals ways. Whereas the historiography of World War I and trauma has largely focused on psychopathological models, Geroulanos and Meyers illuminate how the work of Henry Head, Réné Leriche, Kurt Goldstein and others enacted a wholesale transformation of the concept of the individual, one that would define medico-physiological individuality as an integrated and indivisible body, but one constantly on “the verge of collapse.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

If the universe was even slightly different in some of its fundamental physical properties, life could not exist – such is the claim of ‘fine tuning’ of the universe for life. The topic of fine tuning has received attention from physicists, philosophers and the popular press. In A Fortunate Universe:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Human beings have long seen themselves as the center of the universe, as specially-created creatures who are anointed as above and beyond the natural world. Professor and noted scientist David P. Barash calls this viewpoint a persistent paradigm of our own unique self-importance and argues that it is as dangerous... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Andrew C. A. Elliott‘s Is That a Big Number? (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a book that those of us who feast on numbers will absolutely adore, but will also tease the palates of those for whom numbers have previously been somewhat distasteful. This book helps us not only to realize... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Our world today is full of algorithms and metrics designed to help us keep up, to keep track, to keep going. New devices, such as the smartwatch, now make it possible to quantify and standardize every conceivable human activity, from keeping track of personal bests at the gym to getting... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

In Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton University Press, 2018), Theodore Porter uncovers the unfamiliar origins of human genetics in the asylums of Europe and North America. Rather than beginning his story with Gregor Mendel or 1909, the date when Wilhelm Johannsen coined the term “gene,”... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a strong argument in support of the history of psychiatry “from below.” Using vast archival resources and ample patient files, Hervé Guillemain demonstrates convincingly how schizophrenia in France was a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

The work of polymath Gregory Bateson has long been the road to cybernetics travelled by those approaching this trans-disciplinary field from the direction of the social sciences and even the humanities. Fortunately for devotees of Bateson’s expansive vision, Peter Harries-Jones has continued the expert analysis that gave us 1995’s A Recursive Vision:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

In his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and CEO of Gigaom, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history: 100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Evolution science and behavioral science both have strong theories that can help us understand humans in context, and yet, until now, the two fields have been mostly separate. In this episode, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Steven Hayes and Dr. David Sloan Wilson share how they... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

A scientific ontology is a view about what a scientific theory says exists. Longstanding philosophical debate on this issue divides into two broad camps: anti-realists, who think scientific theories are committed to the existence only of those things that can be observed, and realists, who hold that these theories are... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes the subtle argument that a process described by scholars of biomedicine as “molecularization” took place gradually and unevenly as genetic tools became applied to prenatal diagnosis.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Between his retirement from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne in 1975 and his death in 2002, many cyberneticians made the pilgrimage to Pescadero, California to unravel the oft-elusive subtleties of second-order cybernetics with the master himself, Heinz von Foerster. Fortunately, for all of those not blessed to have had... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

The history of mankind is interlinked with microbes. As humans evolved and became more advanced, microbes evolved right along with us. Through infection, disease, and pandemic they have helped shape human culture and civilization. In her book Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History (Oxford University Press, 2018), Dorothy H. Crawford... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

In her new book, Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2018), Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist and writer from the University of Melbourne, explores the long history of Australia’s climate, centuries before official weather records began. As the world’s climate continues to change, Australians will... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening back to the aspirations of Enlightenment empiricists, who sought to establish for the collection of sense data what astronomers had done for the movements of heavenly bodies, they... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of wit and curiosity, medical journalist Randi Hutter Epstein takes us on a journey through the unusual history of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperature (given current trends) of 1.5- 4.5 degrees Celsius (2.7-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). But how do climate scientists reach these conclusions?... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

In The Disappearing Spoon, bestselling author Sam Kean unlocked the mysteries of the periodic table. In The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code (Bay Back Books, 2013), he explores the wonders of the magical building block of life: DNA. There are... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is perhaps most well known today from the images of his “hysterical” female patients featured in Bourneville’s Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. While not diminishing the epistemological and aesthetic importance of “the image” to Charcot, Jonathan W. Marshall argues in Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Space Science and the Arab World, Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2018) a recently published history of Arab exploration of space, offers a fascinating insight into fundamental issues shaping the contemporary Middle East, including efforts to turn Arab societies into twenty first-century knowledge-based economies... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Early studies of the functions of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike—strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, lobotomies, horrendous accidents-and see how the victim coped. In many cases survival was miraculous, and observers could only marvel at the transformations that took place afterward, altering victims’ personalities.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

“What is needed now is not liberal reform or withdrawal, but a radical attack, a strategy of opposition. Scientific workers must develop ways to put their skills at the service of the people and against the oppressors.” (Zimmerman, et al. 1972). Following the 2014 conference, “Science for the People: The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Susan M. Squier’s book, Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (Duke University Press, 2017) is about development— biological and ecological. It explores how the media (paintings, films, graphics) that experts have created to understand development and to communicate without verbal language has shaped—and continues to affect—the worlds in which we live. Squier’s... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

In their volume, New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics (World Scientific, 2017), editors Alexander Riegler, Karl H. Muller and Stuart A. Umpelby have assembled almost 60 articles, including their own analyses, in order to test what they have dubbed the Klein-Martin-Hypothesis that: “As a research program, second-order cybernetics was a) insufficiently... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the late nineteenth century, medics began going where no one had dared go before. The following decades saw the mysteries... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Eugenic sterilization is usually associated with Nazi horrors before and during World War II. But, as Dr. Molly Ladd-Taylor reminds us, it was also practiced in the United States. In her new book Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017),... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Thomas Kuhn upset both scientists and philosophers of science when he argued that transitions from one scientific framework (or “paradigm”) to another were irrational: the change was like a religious conversion experience rather than a reasoned shift from one theory to another based on the best evidence. But even if... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment (Notting Hill Editions, 2017) is a fascinating account by one of the world’s leading and most decorated neurologists of the profound influence of William Burroughs on his medical career. Dr. Andrew Lees relates how Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and troubled drug... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

For many of the 40 million Americans who undergo anesthesia each year, it is the source of great fear and fascination. From the famous first demonstration of anesthesia in the Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846 to today’s routine procedures that controls anxiety, memory formation, pain relief, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to report what it is really like—or that it even exists—today science and technology are being used to try to make it happen in our lifetime. In... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

With all of its entailed engagements with epistemology, emergence, and self-organization, cybernetics began (and arguably still is) the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine as it was coined in the subtitle of Norbert Wiener’s field defining book of 1948. While the reflexive turn of second-order... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

In the early twentieth century, Robert Hertz, a French anthropologist, and Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist, debated the causes and consequences of left-handedness. According to Lombroso, left-handed individuals were more likely to be criminals. Hertz disagreed. For him, to restrict left-handedness was to suppress individual expression. In his book, On... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Some people can’t help but be ‘awkward’ despite their lifelong efforts to blend in. They feel ashamed of their social ineptitude and end up shying away from social situations, yet research offers insights that could help. In his new book, Awkward: The Science of Why We’re Socially Awkward and Why... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Embracing a multi-perspectival authorial voice, Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2017), tells the story of the “last and largest” asylum in the British Commonwealth. From its founding in the 1920s until the age of deinstitutionalization, Weyburn Mental Hospital... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided the first effective defense against it. In Jonas Salk: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2015), Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs chronicles the medical researcher whose success in developing... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Wile E. Coyote has a family tree with many roots and branches, argues University of Montana A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus Dan Flores in his recent book, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (Basic Books, 2016). Coyotes as a species predate humans in North America, and people have been, by... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Have you ever asked yourself why humans have an appendix that will sometimes explode and kill us? Why do men’s testicles hang outside the body where theyre arguably awkward and vulnerable? And if there is an Intelligent Designer, who does it like better anyway—us or squid? These and other related... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

How does corporate misinformation and partisan skepticism effect what we know about climate change? Lawrence Torcello is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Philosophy. His research focuses on social and political philosophy, democratic theory, and climate justice. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Scott Bembenek‘s The Cosmic Machine: The Science That Runs Our Universe and the Story Behind It (Zoari Press, 2017) is a wonderful way to introduce an intellectually curious person to how physics and chemistry have evolved and how they contribute to our understanding of the Universe. This book focuses on... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

If you are an enthusiast of The Cheese and the Worms (1976), The Great Cat Massacre (1984), or The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), then Michael Wintroub‘s The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a must read. Simply put, this is a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives (Icon Books, 2017), by Brian Clegg, is a relatively short book about a subject that has emerged only recently, but is rapidly becoming a significant force in the evolution of society. Most of us have heard the term “big data,”... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

In the 1960’s Thomas Kuhn argued, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that scientists’ choices between competing theories could not be determined by the empirical evidence. Ever since, philosophers of science have debated the role of non-epistemic values and interests in science, generally agreeing that such influences are undesirable even... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

What is science? A seemingly profound, yet totally ridiculous question to try and answer. Yet, when Oxford University Press reached out to the brilliant scholar of Victorian science, Iwan Rhys Morris, they were tapping the right man for the job on the shoulder. He designed, contributed, and edited The Oxford... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

As I was reading Ron Edward’s fascinating and far-reaching new book, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau (Oxford University Press, 2016), I had a flashback. I must have been about seven. I was watching a film adaptation of H.G. Well’s classic work of science fiction, The Island... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

All “true believers” believe their beliefs are true. This is particularly true of true religious believers: for Christians, Christianity is the true religion, for Jews, Judaism is the true religion, for for Muslims, Islam is the true religion. Few true believer, however, would make the claim that their religion is... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a number of different, often incompatible, elaborations. In Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account (Oxford University Press, 2016), Gualtiero Piccinini integrates... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Brian Clegg is one of England’s most prolific and popular writers on science. His latest work, The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe (Icon Books, 2017), covers Einstein’s Theories of Relativity and a whole lot more. Simply as an exposition of Einstein’s theories, the book is excellent... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Sometimes we have to depend on philosophy to explain to us why something apparently simple is in fact extremely complicated. The way we use referring expressions – things that pick out the entities we want to talk about, such as “Mary”, or “that guy over there” – falls into this... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

In the summer of 1969, two seminal events of the sixties happened within a few weeks of each other: the first man walked on the moon and the Woodstock music festival was held in upstate New York. At first glance, these two events might appear to have little to do... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science