Kategoria BISAC: Science >> History

In the only book to date to explore the period between the 1859 publication of Darwin's Origin of Species and the discovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel's experiments in genetics, John S. Haller, Jr., shows the relationship between scientific "conviction" and public policy. He focuses on the numerous liberally educated American scientists who were caught up in the triumph of evolutionary ideas and who sought to apply those ideas to comparative morality, health, and the physiognomy of nonwhite races.

During this period, the natural and social scientists of the day not only accepted...

The scientists of the twelfth century were daring, original, inventive, and above all determined to discover purely rational explanations of natural phenomena. Their intense interest in the natural world for its own sake, their habits of precise observation, and the high value they place on man as a rational being portend a new age in the history of scientific thought. This book offers a comprehensive sampling of medieval scientific thought in the context of an historical narrative.

Dr. Martin's study of Pierre Duhem's work is the fruit of many years of painstaking research. The author's approach is cautious, yet his conclusions are surprising, and refute many prevailing legends abut Duhem. The real Duhem, however, is even more fascinating than...

After research geneticists discovered that synthetic chemicals were capable of changing the genetic structure of living organisms, scientists began to explore how these chemicals affected gene structure and function. In the late 1960s, a small group of biologists became concerned that chemical mutagens represented a serious and possibly global environmental threat.

Genetic toxicology is...

Eighteenth-century natural historians created a peculiar, and peculiarly durable, vision of nature--one that embodied the sexual and racial tensions of that era. When plants were found to reproduce sexually, eighteenth-century botanists ascribed to them passionate relations, polyandrous marriages, and suicidal incest, and accounts of steamy plant sex began to infiltrate the botanical literature of the day. Naturalists also turned their attention to the great apes just becoming known to eighteenth-century...

Host to a large and diverse bird population as well as a long human history, Virginia is arguably the birthplace of ornithology in North America. David W. Johnston's History of Ornithology in Virginia, the result of over a decade of research, is the first book to address this fascinating element of the state's natural history.

Tertiary-era fossils show that birds inhabited Virginia as early as 65 million years ago. Their first human observers were the region's many Indian tribes and, later, colonists on Roanoke Island and in Jamestown. Explorers pushing westward contributed...

This Encyclopedia examines all aspects of the history of science in the United States, with a special emphasis placed on the historiography of science in America. It can be used by students, general readers, scientists, or anyone interested in the facts relating to the development of science in the United States. Special emphasis is placed in the history of medicine and technology and on the relationship between science and technology and science and medicine.

With its colorful landscape and wonderful diversity of plant and animal communities, the southwestern borderlands have attracted naturalists for centuries. As Col. Thomas Henry noted in 1853, there "are to be found many curious birds, peculiar to the country." This book identifies more than 100 early ornithologists and explorers who entered the Southwest from 1528 to 1900, all of whom have contributed in significant ways to our understanding of the region's avian life.

Dan Fischer identifies those individuals who documented the natural history of the Southwest and summarizes...

Mattelart plates contemporary global communication networks into historical context and shows that the networking of the world began much earlier than many assume, in the late eighteenth century. He...