Science (14)

• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• Information Technology and Computer Science
• Media Studies and Journalism
• Philosophy
• Science

Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies: An Introduction

• Ibo van de Poel
• Lily Eva Frank
• Julia Hermann
• Jeroen Hopster
• Dominic Lenzi
• Sven Nyholm
• Behnam Taebi
• Elena Ziliotti

Technologies shape who we are, how we organize our societies and how we relate to nature. For example, social media challenges democracy; artificial intelligence raises the question of what is unique to humans; and the possibility to create artificial wombs may affect notions of motherhood and birth. Some have suggested that we address global warming by engineering the climate, but how does this impact our responsibility to future generations and our relation to nature? This book shows how technologies can be socially and conceptually disruptive and investigates how to come to terms with this disruptive potential.

• Science
• Textbooks and Learning Guides

Introduction to Systems Biology: Workbook for Flipped-classroom Teaching

• Thomas Sauter
• Marco Albrecht

This book is an introduction to the language of systems biology, which is spoken among many disciplines, from biology to engineering. Authors Thomas Sauter and Marco Albrecht draw on a multidisciplinary background and evidence-based learning to facilitate the understanding of biochemical networks, metabolic modeling and system dynamics.

• Performing Arts
• Philosophy
• Science

Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music

• Steven Jan

Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music by Steven Jan is a comprehensive account of the relationships between evolutionary theory and music. Examining the ‘evolutionary algorithm’ that drives biological and musical-cultural evolution, the book provides a distinctive commentary on how musicality and music can shed light on our understanding of Darwin’s famous theory -- and vice-versa.

• Literature
• Science

Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance

• Liliane Campos
• Pierre-Louis Patoine

This edited volume explores new engagements with the life sciences in contemporary fiction, poetry, comics and performance. The gathered case studies investigate how recent creative work reframes the human within microscopic or macroscopic scales, from cellular biology to systems ecology, and engages with the ethical, philosophical, and political issues raised by the twenty-first century’s shifting views of life. The collection thus examines literature and performance as spaces that shape our contemporary biological imagination.

• Information Technology and Computer Science
• Science
• Science: History of Science
• Textbooks and Learning Guides

B C, Before Computers: On Information Technology from Writing to the Age of Digital Data

• Stephen Robertson

Treading the line between philosophy and technical history, Robertson draws on his extensive technical knowledge to produce a text which is both thought-provoking and accessible to a wide range of readers.

• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• Science
• Science: History of Science

Hanging on to the Edges: Essays on Science, Society and the Academic Life

• Daniel Nettle

Pragmatically arguing from the intersection between social and biological sciences, Nettle reappraises the virtues of policy initiatives such as Universal Basic Income and income redistribution, highlighting the traps researchers and politicians are liable to encounter. This provocative, intelligent and self-critical volume is a testament to the possibilities of interdisciplinary study—whose virtues Nettle stridently defends—drawing from and having implications for a wide cross-section of academic inquiry. This will appeal to anybody curious about the implications of social and biological sciences for increasingly topical political concerns. It comes particularly recommended to Sciences and Social Sciences students and to scholars seeking to extend the scope of their field in collaboration with other disciplines.

• Science
• Science: History of Science

With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia

• Nikolai Krementsov

In 1865, British polymath Francis Galton published his initial thoughts about the scientific field that would become ‘eugenics.’ The same year, Russian physician Vasilii Florinskii addressed similar issues in a sizeable treatise, entitled Human Perfection and Degeneration. Initially unheralded, Florinskii’s book would go on to have a remarkable afterlife in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russia. In this lucid and insightful work, Nikolai Krementsov argues that the concept of eugenics brings together ideas, values, practices, and fears energised by a focus on the future.

• Philosophy
• Science
• Science: Applied Science

Human and Machine Consciousness

• David Gamez

Human and Machine Consciousness presents a new foundation for the scientific study of consciousness. It sets out a bold interpretation of consciousness that neutralizes the philosophical problems and explains how we can make scientific predictions about the consciousness of animals, brain-damaged patients and machines.

• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• Philosophy
• Science
• Science: History of Science

Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

• Jeff Kochan

In this bold and original study, Jeff Kochan constructively combines the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) with Martin Heidegger’s early existential conception of science. Kochan shows convincingly that these apparently quite different approaches to science are, in fact, largely compatible, even mutually reinforcing.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• Science
• Science: Applied Science

Behaviour, Development and Evolution

• Patrick Bateson

The role of parents in shaping the characters of their children, the causes of violence and crime, and the roots of personal unhappiness are central to humanity. Like so many fundamental questions about human existence, these issues all relate to behavioural development. In this lucid and accessible book, eminent biologist Professor Sir Patrick Bateson suggests that the nature/nurture dichotomy we often use to think about questions of development in both humans and animals is misleading. Instead, he argues that we should pay attention to whole systems, rather than to simple causes, when trying to understand the complexity of development.

• Philosophy
• Science
• Science: History of Science

Knowledge and the Norm of Assertion: An Essay in Philosophical Science

• John Turri

Concise, comprehensive, non-technical, and thoroughly accessible, this volume quickly brings readers to the cutting edge of a major research program at the intersection of philosophy and science. It presupposes no philosophical or scientific training. It will be of interest to philosophers and scientists, is suitable for use in graduate and undergraduate courses, and will appeal to general readers interested in human nature, social cognition, and communication.

• Science
• Science: History of Science

Animals and Medicine: The Contribution of Animal Experiments to the Control of Disease

• Jack Botting
• Regina Botting

This volume presents the articles Jack Botting wrote for the Research Defence Society News from 1991 to 1996. Collected, they can now reach a wider readership interested in understanding the part of animal experiments in the history of medicine—from the discovery of key vaccines to the advancement of research on a range of diseases, among them hypertension, kidney failure and cancer.

• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• Science
• Science: History of Science

The Scientific Revolution Revisited

• Mikuláš Teich

With a narrative that moves from pre-classical thought to the European institutionalisation of science – and a scope that embraces figures both lionised and neglected, such as Nicole Oresme, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thaddeus Hagecius, Johann Joachim Becher – The Scientific Revolution Revisited illuminates the social and intellectual sea changes that shaped the modern world.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• European Studies
• European Studies: Eastern European Studies
• History
• Science
• Science: History of Science

Measuring the Master Race: Physical Anthropology in Norway 1890-1945

• Jon Røyne Kyllingstad

This book investigates the role played by Scandinavian scholars in inventing this so-called superior race, and discusses how this concept put its stamp on Norwegian physical anthropology, prehistory, national identity, and on the Norwegian eugenics movement. It also explores the decline and scientific disputation of these ideas in the 1930s as they came to be associated with the ‘genetic cleansing’ of Nazi Germany. This is the first comprehensive study on Norwegian physical anthropology, and its findings shed new light on current political and scientific debates about race across the globe.