How the concept of “deep time” began as a metaphor used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesIn this interdisciplinary book, Noah Heringman argues that the concept of “deep time”—most often associated with geological epochs—began as a metaphorical language used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the origins of life beyond the written record. Their ideas about “th...

"Tells the story . . . of how 'natural philosophers' developed the ideas of geology accepted today . . . Fascinating." — San Francisco Book ReviewEarth has been witness to dinosaurs, global ice ages, continents colliding or splitting apart, and comets and asteroids crashing, as well as the birth of humans who are curious to understand it. But how was all this discovered? How was the evidence for it collected and interpreted? In this sweeping and accessible ...

"Quammen brilliantly and powerfully re-creates the 19th century naturalist's intellectual and spiritual journey."--Los Angeles Times Book ReviewTwenty-one years passed between Charles Darwin's epiphany that "natural selection" formed the basis of evolution and the scientist's publication of On the Origin of Species. Why did Darwin delay, and what happened during the course of those two decades? The human drama and scientific basis of these years c...

Stephen Jay Gould's writing remains the modern standard by which popular science writing is judged. Throughout his work Gould has developed a distinctive and personal form of essay to treat great scientific issues in the context of biography. With I Have Landed, Gould once again applied biographical perspectives to the illumination of key scientific concepts and their history. Ranging from the discovery of the new scourge of syphilis by Fracastero in the sixteenth century and Isab...

Eminent historian Paul Johnson provides a rich, succinct portrait of Charles DarwinCharles Darwin is arguably the most influential scientist of all time. His Origin of Species forever changed our concept of the world’s creation.Darwin’s revolutionary career is the perfect vehicle for historian Paul Johnson. Marked by the insightful observation, spectacular wit, and highly readable prose for which Johnson is so well regarded, Darwin brings the gentl...

Stephen Jay Gould's writing remains the modern standard by which popular science writing is judged. Ever since the last 1970s, his monthly essay in Natural History and his full-length books have bridged the yawning gap between science and the wider culture. This fascinating new collection of essays contains some of Gould's bestw riting on a variety of subjects ranging from Leonardo da Vinci and Martin Luther to fossils and the history of science. As always, these essays brillantly display ...

What do walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing and writing have in common? The answer is that they all proceed along lines. In this extraordinary book Tim Ingold imagines a world in which everyone and everything consists of interwoven or interconnected lines and lays the foundations for a completely new discipline: the anthropological archaeology of the line.Ingold’s argument leads us through the music of Ancient Greece and contemporary Japan, Siberian labyrint...

Darwin's theory that our ancestors were apes caused a furore in the scientific world and outside it when The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Arguments still rage about the implications of his evolutionary theory, and scepticism about the value of Darwin's contribution to knowledge is widespread. In this analysis of Darwin's major insights and arguments, Jonathan Howard reasserts the importance of Darwin's work for the development of modern biology.

"An ambitious re-writing—a re-synthesis, even—of concepts of media and culture . . . It is nothing less than an attempt at a history of Being." — Los Angeles Review of BooksWhen we speak of clouds these days, it is as likely that we mean data clouds or network clouds as cumulus or stratus. In their sharing of the term, both kinds of clouds reveal an essential truth: that the natural world and the technological world are not so distinct. In The Marvelous...

The work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari has been inspirational for architects and architectural theorists in recent years. It has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Greg Lynn and David Chipperfield, and is regularly cited by avant-gardist architects and by students, but usually without being well understood.The first collaboration between Deleuze and Guattari was Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which was taken up as a manifesto for the...

It is tempting to take the tremendous rate of contemporary linguistic change for granted. What is required, in fact, is a radical reinterpretation of what language is. Steven Roger Fischer begins his book with an examination of the modes of communication used by dolphins, birds and primates as the first contexts in which the concept of ‘language’ might be applied. As he charts the history of language from the times of Homo erectus, Neanderthal humans and Homo sapiens through to the ninetee...

It is tempting to take the tremendous rate of contemporary linguistic change for granted. What is required, in fact, is a radical reinterpretation of what language is. Steven Roger Fischer charts the history of language from the times of Homo erectus, Neanderthal humans and Homo sapiens through to the nineteenth century, when the science of linguistics was developed, as he analyses the emergence of language as a science and its development as a written form. He considers ...