Here are 100 books that Biology as Ideology fans have personally recommended if you like
Biology as Ideology.
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Studying anthropology and biology in the 1970s, I was in the perfect position to understand why race was not genetic. From that time on, I wanted everyone to know what race was and was not. But here we a half century later and most individuals in the US – and the world – still believe that race is a valid way to divide individuals into biological groups, and worse, that race, rather than racism, explains differences in life circumstances. As a professor and president of the American Anthropological Association I have taught courses and helped with documentaries, museum exhibits, websites, articles, and books to dispel consequential myth about race and genetics.
Superior by science journalist Angela Saini is based on source materials. In addition, it is animated by interviews with key scientists involved in the struggle to end race science. Saini weaves together stories that get at the more intimate details of, on the one hand, the persistence and continual reinvention of race and race science, and on the other, the work of individuals including Jonathan Marks and Jay Kaufman to move us all to better understanding why racism, not biological race, is the cause of inequalities in health and wealth. Superior is the most readable of all the books that focus on race and human variation.
Financial Times Book of the Year
Telegraph Top 50 Books of the Year
Guardian Book of the Year
New Statesman Book of the Year
'Roundly debunks racism's core lie - that inequality is to do with genetics, rather than political power' Reni Eddo-Lodge
Where did the idea of race come from, and what does it mean? In an age of identity politics, DNA ancestry testing and the rise of the far-right, a belief in biological differences between populations is experiencing a resurgence. The truth is: race is a social construct. Our problem is we find this hard to believe.
I studied statistics and data science for years before anyone ever suggested to me that these topics might have an ethical dimension, or that my numerical tools were products of human beings with motivations specific to their time and place. I’ve since written about the history and philosophy of mathematical probability and statistics, and I’ve come to understand just how important that historical background is and how critically important it is that the next generation of data scientists understand where these ideas come from and their potential to do harm. I hope anyone who reads these books avoids getting blinkered by the ideas that data = objectivity and that science is morally neutral.
This book is now 50 years old, but its message is as relevant and important now as when it was written. In a series of witty essays that border on rants, Andreski attacks much of social science as fluff obscured by technical jargon and methodology. In particular, he laments the growth of quantitative methods as an attempt to add objectivity to social science and make it appear “harder.” True objectivity is about more than mechanical number-crunching, he says; it’s about a commitment to fairness and resisting the temptations of wishful thinking – a challenge anyone who works with data concerning people and their lives should take seriously.
"Seldom have the social sciences been subject to quite so comprehensive, yet non-partisan, attack. There can be little doubt SOCIAL SCIENCES AS SORCERY is an uncomfortably important and embarassingly comprehensive book." -- Times Literary Supplement "Liberating!" -- Harpers "Andreski has written a new book that is certain to enrage his colleagues ... He documents his charges and spares few of the luminaries of social science in the process." -- TIME Magazine
I studied statistics and data science for years before anyone ever suggested to me that these topics might have an ethical dimension, or that my numerical tools were products of human beings with motivations specific to their time and place. I’ve since written about the history and philosophy of mathematical probability and statistics, and I’ve come to understand just how important that historical background is and how critically important it is that the next generation of data scientists understand where these ideas come from and their potential to do harm. I hope anyone who reads these books avoids getting blinkered by the ideas that data = objectivity and that science is morally neutral.
The thing you should know about science is that it’s a human enterprise. As a result, it’s dependent on human factors like social consensus and prejudice. In this series of case studies of famously expensive and difficult-to-replicate experiments probing the limits of scientific understanding from biology to theoretical physics, Collins and Pinch show how scientific knowledge gathering is rarely straightforward because there are always alternative explanations available for the data. Was the phenomenon real or was the experiment set up badly? We can never know for sure, but we decide collectively what we believe. Scientists are experts participating in human culture, they argue, not mysterious clergy issuing declarations of absolute truth.
Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch liken science to the Golem, a creature from Jewish mythology, powerful yet potentially dangerous, a gentle, helpful creature that may yet run amok at any moment. Through a series of intriguing case studies the authors debunk the traditional view that science is the straightforward result of competent theorisation, observation and experimentation. The very well-received first edition generated much debate, reflected in a substantial new Afterword in this second edition, which seeks to place the book in what have become known as 'the science wars'.
I studied statistics and data science for years before anyone ever suggested to me that these topics might have an ethical dimension, or that my numerical tools were products of human beings with motivations specific to their time and place. I’ve since written about the history and philosophy of mathematical probability and statistics, and I’ve come to understand just how important that historical background is and how critically important it is that the next generation of data scientists understand where these ideas come from and their potential to do harm. I hope anyone who reads these books avoids getting blinkered by the ideas that data = objectivity and that science is morally neutral.
If you’ve never thought of “intersectional feminism” or “the gender binary” as essentially data-scientific terms, please allow this book to correct that. Data science is a locus of power, and that power can be wielded in the service of oppression or liberation. This book raises essential questions about the predominantly white, male, technocratic interests served by the traditional narratives of data analysis and what feminism and data science have to offer each other. Bottom line: the data doesn’t speak for itself, never has, and never will.
A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism.
Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In…
I am Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Bristol. I am interested in most areas of contemporary philosophy, in particular the interplay between philosophy and the natural and social sciences. Much of my recent work has focused on evolutionary biology, a science that is replete with implications for traditional philosophical debates about human nature, knowledge, and our place in the world.
This book is an engaging treatment of philosophical issues in biology, with a strong though not exclusive focus on evolution. Written by two leading practitioners, the book continues to be an excellent entry point into the subject despite being more than 20 years old. For any reader of my own book who wants more detail, Sterelny and Griffiths’ text is ideal. Chock full of real-life examples, the book offers an excellent model of how philosophy can engage with biology. Topics discussed include function and adaptation, reductionism, levels of selection, the “selfish gene” theory, and more.
Is the history of life a series of accidents or a drama scripted by selfish genes? Is there an "essential" human nature, determined at birth or in a distant evolutionary past? What should we conserve-species, ecosystems, or something else?
Informed answers to questions like these, critical to our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, require both a knowledge of biology and a philosophical framework within which to make sense of its findings. In this accessible introduction to philosophy of biology, Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths present both the science and the philosophical context necessary for a critical…
I am Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Bristol. I am interested in most areas of contemporary philosophy, in particular the interplay between philosophy and the natural and social sciences. Much of my recent work has focused on evolutionary biology, a science that is replete with implications for traditional philosophical debates about human nature, knowledge, and our place in the world.
The traditional neo-Darwinian view of evolution understands inheritance in genetic terms, as the transmission of DNA from parents to offspring. Jablonka and Lamb argue convincingly that in addition to genetic inheritance, there exist three other inheritance systems in nature – epigenetic, symbolic, and behavioural – all of which play an important role in evolution. The book is not a work of philosophy in the strict sense, but rather a fascinating and conceptually-rich synthesis of a diverse body of empirical findings which, the authors argue, can only be accommodated by going beyond a purely geno-centric view of evolution.
Ideas about heredity and evolution are undergoing a revolutionary change. New findings in molecular biology challenge the gene-centered version of Darwinian theory according to which adaptation occurs only through natural selection of chance DNA variations. In Evolution in Four Dimensions, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb argue that there is more to heredity than genes. They trace four "dimensions" in evolution -- four inheritance systems that play a role in evolution: genetic, epigenetic (or non-DNA cellular transmission of traits), behavioral, and symbolic (transmission through language and other forms of symbolic communication). These systems, they argue, can all provide variations on which…
Sam Kean is the New York Times bestselling author of five books, including The Bastard Brigade, The Dueling Neurosurgeons, and The Disappearing Spoon. He edited The Best American Nature and Science Writing in 2018, and his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, and Slate. His work has been featured on NPR’s “Radiolab,” “Science Friday,” “All Things Considered,” and “Fresh Air,” and his podcast, The Disappearing Spoon, debuted at #1 on the iTunes charts for science podcasts.
The ultimate big-picture book. Wilson outlines how fields like history and the humanities can incorporate insights from biology and the study of human nature—to the benefit of both science and the arts. A bracing look at the future of human knowledge.
In this groundbreaking new book, one of the world's greatest living scientists argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for what he calls consilience, the composition of the principles governing every branch of learning. Edward O Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, once again breaks out of the conventions of current thinking. He shows how our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos. It is a vision that found its apogee in the…
I love to hear stories about how people solve problems, and I have been curious about how science works since I was 12 years old. A decade later, when I was 22 years old, some of my friends joked that I "spoke DNA," and it’s true that I have been obsessed with trying to understand the physical structures of DNA for more than four decades now. I live my life vicariously through my students and help them to learn to tinker, troubleshoot, and recover from their failures.
I love François Jacob’s book. One of my favorite quotes from this is, "Evolution is a tinkerer."
I think that this is a great insight from one of the founders in the field, who shared the Nobel prize in 1965, for showing how genetic information flows from DNA to RNA to protein and that the control or regulation of this could come from proteins binding to regions of DNA upstream from genes.
"The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written."-Michel Foucault
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francois Jacob's The Logic of Life is a landmark book in the history of biology and science. Focusing on heredity, which Jacob considers the fundamental feature of living things, he shows how, since the sixteenth century, the scientific understanding of inherited traits has moved not in a linear, progressive way, from error to truth, but instead through a series of frameworks. He reveals how these successive interpretive approaches-focusing on visible structures, internal structures (especially cells), evolution, genes, and DNA and other molecules-each have their own…
A late bloomer—Ph.D. at 38, married at 39, father at 47—I struggled to “individuate,” torn between my rational nature, inherited from Dad, and my intuitive side from Mom. Serendipitously, in mid-life, I happened upon an extraordinary mentor, the late Quaker mystic John Yungblut. Through John, I encountered shining examples of those who successfully navigated the “struggle of the mystic,” among them the iconic psychoanalyst Carl Jung and the French paleontologist-priest Teilhard de Chardin. As I subsequently achieved some success at individuation, I came to see my struggle as symptomatic of broader tensions within Western society: the perennial conflict between science and religion. Reason and Wonder celebrates both modes of knowing.
Fleeing the Nazi Anschluss, Austrian quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger (famous for the wave equation and his eponymous cat) took refuge at Trinity College in Dublin. To thank his hosts, Schrödinger delivered a series of ground-breaking lectures in 1943, later published as What is Life?Schrödinger’s thought-provoking queries, originating from quantum mechanics, paved the way for the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. After the war, in subsequent lectures published as Mind and Matter, Schrödinger tackled a deeper subject: the nature of consciousness.
Together, these classics are unparalleled in what they imply about life and its most remarkable attribute: sentience.
Troubling aspects of Schrödinger’s personal life make it tempting to exclude this work. Ultimately, it's crucial to separate the profound message from the messenger, who was deeply flawed.
Nobel laureate Erwin Schroedinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the twentieth century. It was written for the layman, but proved to be one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of DNA. What is Life? appears here together with Mind and Matter, his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times. Brought together with these two classics are Schroedinger's autobiographical sketches, which offer a fascinating account of his life as a background to his scientific writings.
I am an evolutionary biologist who wrote two books on my theory that all species increase the biodiversity of their ecosystem in a natural environment (humans are an exception to this). I am a dedicated conservationist and founder and president of the World Rainforest Fund (worldrainforest.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the Earth’s rainforests. I collected reptiles and fossils when I was a child, and never out-grew my passion and love for science, biology, biodiversity, the natural world, animals, plants, ecology, and evolution. I love reading about these topics, hearing lectures on them, and learning about them. I love being in nature, traveling to natural ecosystems, and seeing wildlife.
This book presents a fascinating theory that life created an atmosphere favorable to life. The sun is much hotter than when life began. Life kept the temperature beneficial to life by removing greenhouse gasses from the air. Organisms created an atmosphere high in oxygen.
The book is exciting and educates the reader on the interaction of life and the geophysical environment. This book is relevant to and influenced my theory that all species increase biodiversity, the theory about which I wrote the two books I am featuring here.
In this classic work that continues to inspire many readers, Jim Lovelock puts forward his idea that the Earth functions as a single organism. Written for non-scientists, Gaia is a journey through time and space in search of evidence in support of a radically different model of our planet. In contrast to conventional belief that life is passive in the face of threats to its existence, the book explores the hypothesis that the Earth's living matter influences air, ocean, and rock to form a complex, self-regulating system that has the capacity to keep the Earth a fit place for life.…
