Science and its conceptual foundations

This provocative reading of Darwin goes directly to the origins of evolutionary theory. Unlike most contemporary biologists or historians and philosophers of science, Richards holds that Darwin did concern himself with the idea of progress, or telos, as he constructed his theory. Richards maintains that Darwin drew on the traditional embryological meanings of the terms 'evolution' and 'descent with modification'.

In 1928, paleontologist William Diller Matthew wrote, "The story of life on earth is a splendid drama." This story has captivated generations of biologists, including those working in the years immediately following publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Yet histories of the Darwinian revolution have ignored the main nineteenth-century application of evolution: the attempt to reconstruct the history of life on earth. Now Peter J. Bowler seeks to recover some of this lost history in Life's Splendid Drama, the definitive account of evolutionary morphology and its relationships with paleontology and biogeography. As Bowler tracks major scientific debates over the emergence of the vertebrates, the origins of the main types of living animals, and the rise and extinction of groups such as the dinosaurs, his richly detailed accounts bring to light complex interactions among specialists in various fields of biology. Charting the role of Darwin's ideas and the degree and direction of their influence, Bowler shows how these interactions constituted an interdisciplinary program with a focus on reconstructing the past rather than on mechanisms of evolutionary change. Bowler also examines the socially laden metaphors used by early biologists to describe the history of life, and argues that such usage influenced the development of modern evolutionism by exploiting Darwinian principles outside the context of the genetical theory of natural selection. Much of the rhetoric of "social Darwinism" may thus have been derived not directly from natural selection theory but from the application of Darwinian principles to the rise and fall of different animal groups over time. Bowler's magisterial work will appeal to historians of science and ideas and also to biologists - particularly those working in evolutionary biology, paleontology, and systematicsinterested in the roots of their disciplines, as well as to the many readers fascinated by Darwin and his influence.

Acclaimed everywhere as a masterpiece in the history of science, The Great Devonian Controversy recreates a scientific debate of the 1830s and 1840s about a dating of certain puzzling rock strata and fossils. -- from back cover.

Paul E. Griffiths argues that most research on the emotions has been as misguided as Aristotelian efforts to study "superlunary objects" - objects outside the moon's orbit. Such subjects exist, of course, but studying them as a group produces no useful results because they share no traits other than an arbitrarily defined location. Similarly, Griffiths show that "emotion", as currently defined, groups together psychological states of very different, and thus not comparable, kinds. According to Griffiths, theoretical research on emotions took a wrong turn by not fully exploring the relevant empirical evidence. Griffiths provides a detailed overview of this material, drawing on ethology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and anthropology of the emotions. He identifies and assesses the relative merits of three main theoretical approaches - affect program theory, evolutionary psychology, and social constructionism.