"Quammen brilliantly and powerfully re-creates the 19th century naturalist's intellectual and spiritual journey."-- Los Angeles Times Book Review Twenty-one years passed between Charles Darwin's epiphany that "natural selection" formed the basis of evolution and the scientist's publication of On th...(展开全部)

A fresh look at Darwin's most radical idea, and the mysteriously slow process by which he revealed it. Evolution, during the early nineteenth century, was an idea in the air. Other thinkers had suggested it, but no one had proposed a cogent explanation for how evolution occurs. Then, in September 1838, a young Englishman named Charles Darwin hit upon the idea that "natural sel...(展开全部)

Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Here is a fascinating, detailed look at the life of Charles Darwin: naturalist, geologist, and independent thinker. In his author's note, Caldecott Honor illustrator Peter Sis (Starry Messenger, Tibet: Through the Red Box) writes that Darwin always regretted not learning how to draw. However, he could and did take "dense and vivid" written notes...(展开全部)

As timely now as it was when it was first published in 1997, "Darwin Among the Machines" tells the story of humankind's long journey into the digital age. Historian of technology George Dyson traces the course of the information revolution, illuminating the lives and work of visionaries--from Thomas Hobbes to John von Neumann--who foresaw the development of artificial intellige...(展开全部)

George Dyson grew up at the Institute for Advanced Study, where such scientists as his father, Freeman Dyson, and John von Neumann laid the foundations for the Information Age. From this vantage point, and with an unprecedented cast of characters, Dyson traces the course of the information revolution, illuminating the lives, work and ideas of visionaries who foresaw the develo...(展开全部)

In this astonishing prediction of the World Wide Web's ultimate challenge to human civilization--a globally networked, electronic, sentient being--Dyson traces the course of the information revolution, illuminating the lives, work, and ideas of visionaries who foresaw the development of artificial intelligence, artificial life, and the global mind.

The surprising history of the scientific method—from an evolutionary account of thinking to a simple set of steps—and the rise of psychology in the nineteenth century. The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gath...(展开全部)

Professor John Maynard Smith has written an account of a new way of thinking about evolution which has been developed in the last ten years. The theory of games, first developed to analyse economic behaviour, is modified so that it can be applied to evolving populations. John Maynard Smith's concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy is relevant whenever the best thing for an...(展开全部)

Evolutionary theory ranks as one of the most powerful concepts of modern civilization. Its effects on our view of life have been wide and deep. One of the most world-shaking books ever published, Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," first appeared in print over 130 years ago, and it touched off a debate that rages to this day. Every modern evolutionist turns to Darwin'...(展开全部)

Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests, and schoolgirls. The world began to change in the 1830s, while Darwin was exploring the Pacific aboard the Beagle and Dickinson was a student in Amherst, Massachusetts. Poetry and science started to grow apart, and ...(展开全部)