Sandwalk: "Understanding Life" books from Cambridge University Press

Thursday, November 28, 2024

"Understanding Life" books from Cambridge University Press

Cambridge University Press is publishing a series of inexpensive books on biology topics. The books all have similar titles beginning with the word "Understanding." The "Understanding Life" series is edited by Kostas Kampourakis.

I have three of these books: Understanding Genes (2022) by Kostas Kampourakis, Understanding Evolution (2020) also by Kostas Kampourakis, and Understanding Species (2023) by John Wilkins. Others are:

Understanding Evo-Devo, by Wallace Arthur.
Understanding Coronavirus (2020) by Raul Rabadan.
Understanding Development (2021) by Allessandro Minelli.
Understanding Forensic DNA (2022) by Suzanne Bell and John M. Butler.
Understanding DNA Ancestry (2022) by Sheldon Krimsky.
Understanding Intelligence (2022) by Ken Richardson.
Understanding Metaphors in the Life Sciences (2022) by Andrew S. Reynolds.
Understanding Creationism (2024) by Glenn Branch.
Understanding the Nature-Nurture Debate (2024) by Eric Turkeimer.
Understanding How Science Explains the World (2022) by Kevin McCain.
Understanding Cancer (2022) by Robin Hesketh.
Understanding Race (2022) by Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall.
Understanding Human Diversity (2024) by Jonathan Marks.
Understanding Fertility (2022) by Gab Kovacs.
Understanding Living Systems (2023) by Raymond Noble and Denis Noble.
Understanding the Christianity-Evolution Relationship (2023) by Michael Ruse.
Understanding Human Evolution (2022) by Ian Tatersall.
Understanding Natural Selection (2022) by Michael Ruse.
Understanding Reproduction (2023) by Guiseppe Fusco and Alessandro Mineli.

You can see that this is a rather eclectic list that covers a wide range of topics. It looks like it's tilted toward philosophy since I recognize some of the names (Michael Ruse, John Wilkins). The presence of some other authors suggest that the books may be tilted somewhere else (Denis Noble). I'm not surprised to see a book by Denis Noble since I know that Kostas Kampourakis shares some of the same views.

I was surprised to see a book by Glenn Branch, the deputy director of the National Center for Science Education.

I don't know much about species but the book by John Wilkins seems to be very good. My friend John is an expert on the topic and I am confident that what he writes is accurate and informative. I especially like the way he explains his goal because I think it applies to most of the books in the series.

What we have been considering in this book is our understanding, not of a particular species like Felis catus, but of the meaning, use, importance and philosophical issues of a concept: the concept of species. Understanding cats is important too, of course, but species is a load-bearing structure in science, and it carries an enormous weight. What philosophers raise is not science but the issues that science relies on and rests upon. Hence, I have tried to clear up misunderstandings, not by giving definitive answers, but by making clearer the problems and the questions we must ask. I hope you are more precisely confused than you were. (pp. 133-134)

The other two books that I have are not so good. The one on genes suffers from the same problem as the earlier book by the same author. [Making Sense of Genes by Kostas Kampourakis]

Understanding Evolution raises some interesting questions about how to teach evolution. It is based on Kostas Kampourakis' earlier book, also called Understanding Evolution (2014). This earlier book received enthusiastic endorsements from philosophers, biologists, and science educators, according to Katrina Halliday, Executive Publisher, Life Sciences at Cambridge University Press. When it came time to revise that earlier book, she and Kampourakis decided to write a shorter book that would also serve the general public and that's when the Understanding Life series was born.

There are several different ways of teaching and understanding evolution. I'm going to discuss those different ways in another post where I contrast the view expressed by Kampourakis and my own view on how to teach/understand evolution.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)

Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)

Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Peter Atkins

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake. Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory. Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change. Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance. Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change. Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat. Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is True

I once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000

It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma

One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick

There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins

Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod

The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.

Richard Lewontin

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Thursday, November 28, 2024

"Understanding Life" books from Cambridge University Press

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