Book picks similar to
Making Prehistory by Derek Turner


geology
history-of-science
science-mathematics-ecology-biology
philosophy-of-science

The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor


Colin Tudge - 2009
    Now, with an astonishing new discovery, everything we thought we knew about primate origins could change. Lying inside a high-security vault, deep within the heart of one of the world's leading natural history museums, is the scientific find of a lifetime - a perfectly fossilized early primate, older than the previously most famous primate fossil, Lucy, by forty-four million years.  A secret until now, the fossil - "Ida" to the researchers who have painstakingly verified her provenance - is the most complete primate fossil ever found. Forty-seven million years old, Ida rewrites what we've assumed about the earliest primate origins. Her completeness is unparalleled - so much of what we understand about evolution comes from partial fossils and even single bones, but Ida's fossilization offers much more than that, from a haunting "skin shadow" to her stomach contents. And, remarkably, knowledge of her discovery and existence almost never saw the light of day. With exclusive access to the first scientists to study her, the award-winning science writer Colin Tudge tells the history of Ida and her place in the world. A magnificent, cutting-edge scientific detective story followed her discovery, and The Link offers a wide-ranging investigation into Ida and our earliest origins. At the same time, it opens a stunningly evocative window into our past and changes what we know about primate evolution and, ultimately, our own.

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World


Andrea Wulf - 2015
    Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. In North America, his name still graces four counties, thirteen towns, a river, parks, bays, lakes, and mountains. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether he was climbing the highest volcanoes in the world or racing through anthrax-infected Siberia or translating his research into bestselling publications that changed science and thinking. Among Humboldt's most revolutionary ideas was a radical vision of nature, that it is a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone. Now Andrea Wulf brings the man and his achievements back into focus: his daring expeditions and investigation of wild environments around the world and his discoveries of similarities between climate and vegetation zones on different continents. She also discusses his prediction of human-induced climate change, his remarkable ability to fashion poetic narrative out of scientific observation, and his relationships with iconic figures such as Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson. Wulf examines how Humboldt's writings inspired other naturalists and poets such as Darwin, Wordsworth, and Goethe, and she makes the compelling case that it was Humboldt's influence that led John Muir to his ideas of natural preservation and that shaped Thoreau's Walden.With this brilliantly researched and compellingly written book, Andrea Wulf shows the myriad fundamental ways in which Humboldt created our understanding of the natural world, and she champions a renewed interest in this vital and lost player in environmental history and science.

Hormones, Health, and Happiness: A Natural Medical Formula for Rediscovering Youth


Steven F. Hotze - 2005
    Unlike the prevailing medical approach of treating individual symptoms with the familiar 'anti' drugs - such as antibiotics, antihistamines, and antidepressants - Dr Hotze addresses the underlying causes of poor health. Built around a regimen of biologically identical hormones and other natural treatments, Dr Hotze's model will help you obtain and maintain health and wellness naturally so that you can enjoy a better quality of life. In this book you are shown how to reach and maintain optimal cell, tissue, and organ functioning so that you will feel at your peak physically, mentally, and emotionally. After your twenties, your hormone levels have already peaked and begun a slow, inexorable decline that may cause you to lose energy and gain weight. You may experience mood problems or have difficulty with thinking, concentration, and short-term memory. Your immune system is likely to become less efficient, leaving you vulnerable to infectious diseases. Dr Hotze reveals how you can restore hormones to their optimal levels using natural, biologically identical hormones in a safe, effective way that preserves vitality as you mature. In his eight-point treatment program, Dr Hotze addresses the entirety of your wellness: airborne allergies, food allergies, yeast overgrowth, low thyroid function, natural hormone replacement, treatment of adrenal fatigue, nutritionally balanced eating, and vitamin and mineral supplementation. He reveals how most illnesses are due to poor dietary habits and nutrition, lack of exercise, allergic disorders that weaken the immune system and make it more prone to infection, yeast overgrowth due to overuse of antibiotics, an imbalance and decline in the body's production of thyroid and sex hormones, and stressed adrenal glands. All of these factors can be addressed safely, effectively, and naturally without drugs.

Attaining Your Desires


Geneviève Behrend - 2008
    Attaining Your Desires is a simple guide to using the Law of Attraction in your everyday life. Chapters include How to Get What You Want, How to Overcome Adverse Condition, Strengthening Your Will, and making Your Subjective Mind Work for You. Long out of print, this landmark book is now once again available in its original, intended form. PS. For maximal benefit, this book should be read together with Dr Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, and Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich

The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discovered a New History of the Earth


Alan Cutler - 2003
     It was an ancient puzzle that stymied history's greatest minds: How did the fossils of seashells find their way far inland, sometimes high up into the mountains? Fossils only made sense in a world old enough to form them, and in the seventeenth century, few people could imagine such a thing. Texts no less authoritative than the Old Testament laid out very clearly the timescale of Earth's past; in fact one Anglican archbishop went so far as to calculate the exact date of Creation...October 23, 4004, B.C. A revolution was in the making, however, and it was started by the brilliant and enigmatic Nicholas Steno, the man whom Stephen Jay Gould called "the founder of geology." Steno explored beyond the pages of the Bible, looking directly at the clues left in the layers of the Earth. With his groundbreaking answer to the fossil question, Steno would not only confound the religious and scientific thinking of his own time, he would set the stage for the modern science that came after him. He would open the door to the concept of "deep time," which imagined a world with a history of millions or billions of years. And at the very moment his expansive new ideas began to unravel the Bible's authoritative claim as to the age of the Earth, Steno would enter the priesthood and rise to become a bishop, ultimately becoming venerated as a saint and beatified by the Catholic Church in 1988. Combining a thrilling scientific investigation with world-altering history and the portrait of an extraordinary genius, "The Seashell on the Mountaintop" gives us new insight into the very old planet on which we live, revealing how we learned to read the story told to us by the Earth itself, written in rock and stone.

Why Don't We Learn from History?


B.H. Liddell Hart - 1944
    A book for all times to come. His understanding & explanation of where the real power lies is outstanding. What s breathtaking is how relevent his arguments are today & how strikingly similar the working of all governments turn out to be (as generalized by Hart). He deals with issues such as 'patterns & psychology of dictatorship', 'power politics in a democracy' & lastly the the 'desire for power' & 'War'."--Ali S. Burki.Summary:Preface Foreword Part 1: History & truth Part 2: Government & freedom Part 3: War & peace Conclusions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions


Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962
    The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. Fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn challenged long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don’t arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of “normal science,” as he called it. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age. This new edition of Kuhn’s essential work in the history of science includes an insightful introduction by Ian Hacking, which clarifies terms popularized by Kuhn, including paradigm and incommensurability, and applies Kuhn’s ideas to the science of today. Usefully keyed to the separate sections of the book, Hacking’s introduction provides important background information as well as a contemporary context.  Newly designed, with an expanded index, this edition will be eagerly welcomed by the next generation of readers seeking to understand the history of our perspectives on science.

Encounters with the Archdruid


John McPhee - 1971
    The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, sometimes with reserve, sometimes with friendliness, sometimes fighting hard across a philosophical divide.

Dinosaur Lives


Jack Horner - 1997
    Line drawings and black-and-white photographs.

The Heretic's Handbook (Kindle Single)


Jonathan Black - 2017
    An acclaimed author and public speaker, Black shows how this body of knowledge has been declared ‘heretical’ both by the established church and by today’s atheistic intellectual elite.Finally, he outlines in the clearest terms possible the supernatural laws that govern our universe, and describes rules for living that take us beyond consensual thought, rules that may at first seem crazy, even dangerous, but which contain the secrets for achieving success, happiness and a higher state of being.

Go Tell it on the Mountain / Giovanni's Room / The Fire Next Time


James Baldwin - 1988
    

The Story of Psychology


Morton Hunt - 1993
    Each of these thinkers recognized that human beings could examine, comprehend, and eventually guide or influence their own thought processes, emotions, and resulting behavior. The lives and accomplishments of these pillars of psychology, expertly assembled by Morton Hunt, are set against the times in which the subjects lived. Hunt skillfully presents dramatic and lucid accounts of the techniques and validity of centuries of psychological research, and of the methods and effectiveness of major forms of psychotherapy. Fully revised, and incorporating the dramatic developments of the last fifteen years, The Story of Psychology is a graceful and absorbing chronicle of one of the great human inquiries—the search for the true causes of our behavior.

New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers: Tales of Parasites and People


Robert S. Desowitz - 1982
    The mosquito has become resistant to DDT; malaria is on the rise; although tapeworms rarely turn up any longer in the most lovingly prepared New York City gefilte fish, a worm may inhabit your sashimi; some strains of gonorrhea actually thrive on penicillin; there is even a parasite for the higher tax brackets—the "nymph of Nantucket"; and there are new ailments—legionnaire's disease, Lassa fever, and new strains of influenza.In the long run, one might bet on the insects and the germs. Meanwhile Dr. Robert Desowitz has written a delightful and instructive book.

Time Traveler: In Search of Dinosaurs and Other Fossils from Montana to Mongolia


Michael Novacek - 2002
    WilsonMichael Novacek, a renowned paleontologist who has discovered important fossils on virtually every continent, is an authority on patterns of evolution and on the relationships among extinct and extant organisms. Time Traveler is his captivating account of how his boyhood enthusiasm for dinosaurs became a lifelong commitment to vanguard science. Novacek writes of the alluring perils of fieldwork with affection and discernment, and he illuminates the most exciting issues in paleontology today.

Objectivity


Lorraine Daston - 2007
    In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences -- and show how the concept differs from alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images.From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences -- from anatomy to crystallography -- are those featured in scientific atlases: the compendia that teach practitioners of a discipline what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Atlas images define the working objects of the sciences of the eye: snowflakes, galaxies, skeletons, even elementary particles.Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology.As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity -- or truth-to-nature or trained judgment -- is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to any one interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity -- and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.