Richard Dawkins's survey said!, or, He livened me - with science!

Publisher Comments:

Boaasting almost one hundred pieces, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing is a breathtaking celebration of the finest writing by scientists — the best such collection in print — packed with scintillating essays on everything from "the discovery of Lucy" to "the terror and vastness of the universe."

Edited by best-selling author and renowned scientist Richard Dawkins, this sterling collection brings together exhilarating pieces by a who's who of scientists and science writers, including Stephen Pinker, Stephen Jay Gould, Martin Gardner, Albert Einstein, Julian Huxley, and many dozens more.

Readers will find excerpts from bestsellers such as Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, Francis Crick's Life Itself, Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey, Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us. There are classic essays ranging from J.B.S. Haldane's "On Being the Right Size" and Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" to Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and Albert Einstein's famed New York Times article on "Relativity." And readers will also discover lesser-known but engaging pieces such as Lewis Thomas's "Seven Wonders of Science," J. Robert Oppenheimer on "War and Physicists," and Freeman Dyson's memoir of studying under Hans Bethe.

A must-read volume for all science buffs, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing is a rich and vibrant anthology that captures the poetry and excitement of scientific thought and discovery.

New Scientist:  If you could only ever read one science book, this should probably be it.

Jerry A. Coyne, TLS:

[a] collection of delectable prose, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, is less an anthology of set pieces than a treasury: a series of short titbits designed to pique the reader's appetite, helping him to decide which science writers to investigate more deeply ... [Dawkins's] eye is impeccable. You'll find all your old favourites -- Stephen Jay Gould, Steve Jones, Steven Pinker, Lewis Wolpert and Oliver Sacks. Within each oeuvre the choice is equally judicious. Among all of Gould's wonderful essays, for example, Dawkins has selected the best, an analysis of Darwin's work on earthworms -- an ineffably beautiful treatment of a mundane subject ... There are many delightful snippets by famous scientists who are less well known to the public ... Every school library should own a copy of this book; every person with even a passing interest in science should read it.

Peter Forbes, The Independent:

The anthology proves that there is a canon of science literature and that the best science writers are prose stylists of the highest order. Every major field has great writers who can render the developing stories as real narratives.

Contents

The book is divided into four segments. The following is a list of pieces included in each segment.

What Scientists Study

from The Mysterious Universe by James Jeans
from Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees
from Creation Revisited by Peter Atkins
from The Ant and the Peacock by Helena Cronin
from The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection by R. A. Fisher
from Mankind Evolving by Theodosius Dobzhansky
from Adaptation and Natural Selection by G. C. Williams
from Life Itself by Francis Crick
from Genome by Matt Ridley
'Theoretical Biology in the Third Millennium' by Sydney Brenner
from The Language of the Genes by Steve Jones
from 'On Being the Right Size' by J. B. S. Haldane
from The Explanation of Organic Diversity by Mark Ridley
'The Importance of the Nervous System in the Evolution of Animal Flight' by John Maynard Smith
from Man in the Universe by Fred Hoyle
from On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Thompson
from The Meaning of Evolution by G. G. Simpson
from Trilobite! by Richard Fortey
from The Mind Machine by Colin Blakemore
from Mirrors in Mind by Richard Gregory
'One Self: A Meditation on the Unity of Consciousness' by Nicholas Humphrey
from The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
from The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond
from The Life of the Robin by David Lack
from Curious Naturalists by Niko Tinbergen
from Social Evolution by Robert Trivers
from The Open Sea by Alister Hardy
from The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson
from 'How Flowers Changed the World' by Loren Eiseley
from The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson

Who Scientists Are

from The Expanding Universe by Arthur Eddington
from the Foreword to G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology by C. P. Snow
from Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson
from 'War and the Nations' by J. Robert Oppenheimer
'A Passion for Crystals' by Max F. Perutz
'Said Ryle to Hoyle' by Barbara and George Gamow
'Cancer's a Funny Thing' by J. B. S. Haldane
from The Identity of Man by Jacob Bronowski
from 'Science and Literature, 'Darwin's Illness', 'The Phenomenon of Man', the postscript to 'Lucky Jim', and 'D' Arcy Thompson and Growth *and Form' by Peter Medawar
from Self-Made Man by Jonathan Kingdon
from Origins Reconsidered by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin
from Lucy by Donald C. Johanson and Maitland A. Edey
'Worm for a Century, and All Seasons' by Stephen Jay Gould
from Life Cycles by John Tyler Bonner
from Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks
'Seven Wonders' by Lewis Thomas
from Avoid Boring People by James Watson
from What Mad Pursuit by Francis Crick
from The Unnatural Nature of Science by Lewis Wolpert
from Essays of a Biologist by Julian Huxley
'Religion and Science' by Albert Einstein
from The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

What Scientists Think

from The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman
from What is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger
from Darwin's Dangerous Idea and Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett
from The Growth of Biological Thought by Ernst Mayr
from 'The Tragedy of the Commons' by Garrett Hardin
from Geometry for the Selfish Herd and Narrow Roads of Geneland by W. D. Hamilton
from How Nature Works by Per Bak
The Fantastic Combinations of John Conway's New Solitaire Game 'Life' by Martin Gardner
from Mathematics for the Million by Lancelot Hogben
from The Miraculous Jar by Ian Stewart
from The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver
from Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing
from 'What is the Theory of Relativity?' by Albert Einstein
from Mr Tompkins by George Gamow
from The Goldilocks Enigma by Paul Davies
from The Time and Space of Uncle Albert by Russell Stannard
from The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
from A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

What Scientists Delight In

from Truth and Beauty by S. Chandrasekhar
from A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy
from Dreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg
from The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin
from The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose
from Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
from Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam by John Archibald Wheeler and Kenneth Ford
from The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch
from The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
from Life: An Unauthorized Biography by Richard Fortey
from The Meaning of Evolution by George Gaylord Simpson
from Little Men and Flying Saucers by Loren Eiseley
from Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan