[lit-ideas] 'Would you like anything to read?'
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 19:44:15 -0800
The New York Review of Books is having its Winter sale. There are some
good titles here, cheap. If you don't have Iona and Peter Opie's The
Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, can you pick up a copy for under nine
bucks. Worth it. The collection of Richard Lewontin's essays that
appeared in TNYRB would be a good bet too. He's great at puncturing
the inflated claims of scientific popularizers.
'In these nine essays covering the history of modern biology from
Darwin to Dolly the sheep... Lewontin combines sharp criticisms of
overreaching scientific claims with lucid expositions of the exact
state of current scientific knowledge?not only what we do know, but
what we don't and maybe won't anytime soon. Among the subjects he
discusses are heredity and natural selection, evolutionary psychology
and altruism, nineteenth-century naturalist novels, sex surveys,
cloning, and the Human Genome Project. In each case he casts an
ever-vigilant and deflationary eye on the temptation to look to
biology for explanations of everything we want to know about our
physical, mental, and social lives.'
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/wintersale
Robert Paul
reed.edu
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