Volume 97 | Number 5 | September-October 2009
Chris Beard
A review of The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor, by Colin Tudge, with Josh Young. According to Beard, the 47-million-year-old fossil Ida differs in minor details from other adapiform fossils, but not in ways that make it likely that she is an ancestor of living monkeys, apes and humans
Ethan Remmel
A review of The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, by Alison Gopnik. Gopnik argues that studying the psychology of young children provides insight into issues of consciousness, identity and morality—and that philosophers have failed to appreciate that fact
Robert J. Richards
A review of Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. Did Darwin’s antislavery sentiments lead him to reject racial hierarchy, thereby opening the way for him to believe in the common descent of the human races and then in the common descent of all creatures?
Solomon Feferman
A review of Plato's Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics, by Jeremy Gray. Modern mathematics took shape between 1890 and 1930, during the same era that modernism became the dominant form in literature and the arts. Is it just a coincidence that the nature of mathematical truth was being put into question at the same time that radical societal, cultural and scientific changes were occurring?
Hugh Gusterson
A review of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, by P. W. Singer. Singer first hypes new robotic technologies designed for the battlefield and then explores their ethical and political implications, asking farsighted questions
Michael Goodchild
A review of Picturing the Uncertain World: How to Understand, Communicate, and Control Uncertainty Through Graphical Display, by Howard Wainer. According to Goodchild, this is a book not so much about uncertainty as about the communication of facts and the interplay of information with interpretation, emotion and other subjective dimensions of the human experience
Melvin Konner
A review of Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, by Michael S. Gazzaniga. If you want to learn what we know about how human brains and minds transcend those of other species, this is the book for you, says Konner
Peter A. Bednekoff
A review of Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators, by William Stolzenburg. Stolzenburg documents that predators have important and often enriching effects on ecosystems. The science that he summarizes suggests that we cannot maintain ecological equilibrium without maintaining large predators
Brian Hayes
A review of Mathematicians: An Outer View of the Inner World, a book of portraits by Mariana Cook
Fenella Saunders
A review of Wild China: Natural Wonders of the World’s Most Enigmatic Land, by Phil Chapman and the BBC Wild China Team
Total Records : 11