A history of scientific ideas about extinction that explains why we learned to value diversity as a precious resource at the same time as we learned to "think catastrophically" about extinction.We live in an age in which we are repeatedly reminded—by scientists, by the media, by popular culture—of the looming threat of mass extinction. We're told that human activity is currently producing a sixth mass extinction, perhaps of even greater magnitude than the five previ...

"David Sepkoski's book is the first to examine the rise of paleobiology and the emergence of macroevolution as a discipline in the 1970s." —Kevin Padian, University of California, BerkeleyRereading the Fossil Record presents the first-ever historical account of the origin, rise, and importance of paleobiology, from the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1980s. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, David Sepkoski shows how the movement was conceived and ...

What was the basis for the adoption of mathematics as the primary mode of discourse for describing natural events by a large segment of the philosophical community in the seventeenth century?In answering this question, this book demonstrates that a significant group of philosophers shared the belief that there is no necessary correspondence between external reality and objects of human understanding, which they held to include the objects of mathematical and linguistic discourse. T...

The history of data brings together topics and themes from a variety of perspectives in history of science: histories of the material culture of information and of computing, the history of politics on individual and global scales, gender and women’s history, as well as the histories of many individual disciplines, to name just a few of the areas covered by essays in this volume. But the history of data is more than just the sum of its parts. It provides an emerging new rubric for consider...

This open access handbook aims to provide a definitive assessment of the historiography and the future of major themes and approaches within the history of the earth sciences, understood broadly. The volume is intended for a broad range of readers, including graduate students, other scholars, and scientists, both familiar with and new to the history of the earth and environmental sciences.Essays in the collection reflect on various problems in the study of the history of the earth ...