Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Philosophy & Social Aspects

Standards are the means by which we construct realities. There are established standards for professional accreditation, the environment, consumer products, animal welfare, the acceptable stress for highway bridges, healthcare, education -- for almost everything. We are surrounded by a vast array of standards, many of which we take for granted but each of which has been and continues to be the subject of intense negotiation. In this book, Lawrence Busch investigates standards as "recipes for reality." Standards, he argues, shape not only the physical world around us but also our social...

Are humans unwitting partners in evolution with psychedelic plants? Darwin's Pharmacy shows they are by weaving the evolutionary theory of sexual selection and the study of rhetoric together with the science and literature of psychedelic drugs. Long suppressed as components of the human tool kit, psychedelic plants can be usefully modeled as "eloquence adjuncts" that intensify a crucial component of sexual selection in humans: discourse.

Psychedelic plants seduce us to interact with them, building an ongoing interdependence: rhetoric as evolutionary mechanism. In doing so, they...

John Polkinghorne brings unique qualifications to his exploration of the possibilities of believing in God in an age of science: he is internationally known as a theoretical physicist and as a theologian. In this thought-provoking book, Polkinghorne focuses on the collegiality between science and theology, contending that the inquiries of these "intellectual cousins" are parallel.
"Polkinghorne presents] a polished and logically coherent argument."--Freeman J. Dyson, New York Review of Books
"Short, accessible, and authoritative."--Carlin Romano, Philadelphia...

Science, according to the received wisdom of the day, can answer any question we choose to put to it - even the most fundamental about ourselves, our behaviour and our cultures. But for Mary Midgley it can never be the whole story, as it cannot truly explain what it means to be human.

In this typically crusading work, universally acclaimed as a classic on first publication, she powerfully asserts her corrective view that without poetry (or literature, or music, or history, or even theology) we cannot hope to understand our humanity. In this remarkable book, the reader is struck by...

Any serious student attempting to better understand the nature, methods and justification of science will value Alex Rosenberg's updated and substantially revised Third Edition of Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction. Weaving together lucid explanations and clear analyses, the volume is a much-used, thematically oriented introduction to the field.

New features of the Third Edition include more coverage of the history of the philosophy of science, more fully developed material on the metaphysics of causal and physical necessity, more...

The first authoritative yet accessible guide to this controversial topic

Stem Cell Research For Dummies offers a balanced, plain-English look at this politically charged topic, cutting away the hype and presenting the facts clearly for you, free from debate. It explains what stem cells are and what they do, the legalities of harvesting them and using them in research, the latest research findings from the U.S. and abroad, and the prospects for medical stem cell therapies in the short and long term.

• Explains the differences between adult stem cells and...