HIDDEN HISTORIES OF SCIENCE

We often think of science as continuously advancing. In thiscollection of essays, five world-renowned writers explore obscureand neglected episodes in the history of science which suggestinstead that the process of understanding the significance ofscientific discoveries can be erratic, contradictory, evenirrational. Jonathan Miller, Oliver Sacks, and Daniel Kevles showhow promising new ideas may at first fail to be noticed oraccepted, and then, years after they have been dismissed orforgotten, are recognized in a different form as important. R.C.Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould discuss the ways that words andimages used by scientists and popularizers alike, from the muralson the walls of natural history museums to such ubiquitous terms as"adaptation" and "environment," reflect serious and oftenunacknowledged distortions in the way we conceive of bothindividual organisms and the natural history of the world.　　These essays demonstrate that science is, in the words of OliverSacks, "a human enterprise through and through, an organic,evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strangedeviations, too. It grows out of its past, but never outgrows it,any more than we outgrow our childhood."