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The Sentient Universe. Bibliography Guillermo Agudelo Murguía; Juan Sebastián Agudelo http://www.iieh.com/autores/ Research Institute on Human Evolution © Copyright 2002-2004 Guillermo Agudelo Murguía; Juan Sebastián Agudelo. © Copyright 2002-2004 Research Institute on Human Evolution. All rights reserved.
It is impossible to give a full list of all the books which, during the course of the years, have had some influence on this book. The following selection has been made according to three principles. It contains, first of all, all the books from which we have quoted; second all the books which have played a decisive part in shaping the thought behind the book, those without which we would have bit arrived at certain conclusions. Finally we list books which have been invaluable didactic resources, books which with grace and clarity managed to untangle the rather convoluted alleys of modern science. Steven Jay Gould is a prolific, some would say profligate writer. His bibliography extends to over a dozen books. However, to understand his thought and the arguments that have made him central in the world of evolutionary biology, one only need to consult what Gould himself sees as central to his thought, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History and Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. The bibliography on Gould's critics is almost as extensive. The book that dissects his analysis of the Burgess Shale best is Simon Conway Morris' . The Crucible of Creation: The Burges Shale and the Rise of Animals. Another, less intransigent but not less pointed critic of Gould is Richard Fortey, whose book Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth is a model of clarity and organization. With Gould, Richard Dawkins seems to be the main interpreter of Darwin's work. Like Gould's, we find his work tainted with nihilistic pronouncements that come off as rather pubescent. We will be remembered as the age that passed the grandiose adolescent grimness for actual profundity. The book to exemplify it will be Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. Unfortunately, neither Gould nor Dawkins are good guides to Darwin's work. So we can only recommend going to the source when it comes to Darwin. We used the Oxford Edition of The Origin of the Species. Unlike more arcane or difficult theories, the theory of evolution does not require major explanation and if people only read one book on science, The Origin of the Species is the one. Physics, on the other hand will always require some sort of explanation and too many writers of popular science were seminal to our own understanding of the material. If anything spurred us to write the book, however, it was our reaction to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Hawking is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant minds, like Gould and Dawking, the conclusions he draws from theory are appallingly immature. Hi book, alas, is also not very good at exposition. Even though it was marketed for the layman and succeeded tremendously on the market, the actual central argument is so difficult to grasp that we would recommend people start with more general books. The don of popular physics is Timothy Ferris. All of his books are unbiased and clear expositions of different aspects in physics. His The Whole Sheebang: A State of the Universe Report might be the clearest book on cosmology ever written. Unlike most writers who tend to favor one or another theory, Ferris gives equal weight to all and manages to present a veritable counterpoint of opinion and depict an exciting climate. Similarly, Ferris' The Coming of Age of the Milky Way is a more than engaging account of those minds that allowed us to gain insights on the cosmos. Other books attempt to do what Ferris' do. None are as successful. Still, since they are often written by prominent scientists, they have tremendous insight. Martin Rees' two books, Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others and Just Six Numbers were very useful. Similarly, Alan H. Guth's The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins is, while difficult, the one book about inflation. Many books attempt to interpret cosmic history under the light of evolution, few succeed as well as The Life of the Cosmos an excellent book by Lee Smolin. It goes without saying that David Layzer Cosmogenesis was the pioneer work on this and while dated, it should still be consulted. John Archibald Wheeler's Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics is an enthralling memoir that also manages to flesh out how some of the most profound questions in physics arose and how they might be resolved. And while Wheeler never is an outspoken advocate for an evolutionary model, he hints at it plenty of time. There are also too many books which allowed us to establish that all important link between cosmological scales and quantum scalar. The two which might be the most prescient in their argument were Penrose's The Emperor's New Clothes. Throughout he argues for a quantum understanding of intelligence and of complexity. John Gribbin's In Search of the Double Helix: quantum Physics and Life is another book that bridges the gap between particle physics and both biology and complexity. In fact, Gribbin's work as a whole proved an invaluable resource. His In Search of Schoedinger's Cat might be one of the best explanations of quantum. Few people, unless they are professionals or insane will keep their magic numbers from their isotopic spin, so Gribbin's most invaluable book proved to be his Q is for Quantum: An Encyclopedia of Particle Physics. If our text left some terms unexplained, we refer the reader to Gribbin's encyclopedia. There were other books which helped as far as explaining quantum was concerned. They all labored to provide vivid analogies by which to understand that difficult world. David Lindley's Where Does the Weirdness Go? Why Quantum Mechanics is Strange but not as Strange as you Think is not only clear, but insightful. Banesh Hoffman's The Strange Story of the Quantum: An Account for the General Reader of the Growth of the Ideas Underlying our Present Atomic Knowledge has Dated considerably but is still a useful book. Finally, while Nick Herbert's Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics has problematic terms and arguments, the exposition is quite clear. So is David Z. Alber's Quantum Mechanics and Experience in his discussion of the implications of quantum in everyday reality. For the even more cutting age physics, there were two invaluable guides. Gordon Kane manages to do a decent job at explaining Super symmetry in Super symmetry: Unveiling the Ultimate Laws of Nature. Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe: Super string, Hidden Dimensions, and The Quest for the Ultimate Theory is really a model of its kind. Greene's is the kind of writing that any aspiring or professional science writer should aspire to. We envy and admire him. Lucid, clear, insightful and fun, The Elegant Universe is one of the best science books published in recent years. Unfortunately we cannot say the same for David Deutch's The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications. The book has some insights into the possible ways in which we could unify the sciences, the conclusions are dismal though. A model as scientist and human being which has been central in shaping our thought on particle physics was David Bohm. His 1951 Quantum Theory is still the best exposition of the Copenhagen interpretation around. Wholeness and the Implicate Order is still a book to be read and understood. In fact, we argue that in many ways it should be the guiding light for current research. We consulted other books when it came to tying things together as far as our argument was concerned. History, History of Science and the history of ideas played a central role in the entire argument. The seminal book on history of science is the highly flawed classic by Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A more ample argument is James T. Cushing's Philosophical Concepts in Physics: The Historical Relation Between Philosophy and Scientific Theories. There is yet to be a social history of science and aside from Foucault's very flawed critique of institutions and the enlightenment, there are few dissenting voices. For those who want to get to know Foucault's as well as Derrida more philosophical port-modern strand of nihilism, the books to start with The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. For those who are either interested or insane, Derrida's most important works are Of Grammatology, Margins of Philosophy and Writing and Difference. It is a blessing that Derrida's thought has lost some of its ilk in academic circles and he is no longer seen as the torchbearer of the western philosophical tradition. A good summary of the post-modernist stance and central philosophical gripes can be found in Vincent Descombres Modern French Philosophy. All of the books we have mentioned were central to our book only in so far as we reacted to them. A more lucid, if rather bitter critique of science coming from an insider can be found in Michael Hawkins Hunting Down the Universe. The Bibliography on De Chardin is an extensive one. Unfortunately, as it is the case with every mayor figure, the bulk of it tends to be either redundant or reductive. Still We found several resources invaluable: Claude Cuénot's Teilhard de Chardin is not the ideal of biographies. Nevertheless, since there is no definite biography on sight, we will have to make do with it for a while. The main problem here is the bias of a long friendship. James A Birx's Interpreting Evolution: Darwin and Teilhard de Chardin makes a good case for the difference between theory and interpretation, arguing that when scientists present information, they are not giving us unbiased information, but actually are filtering the information through an interpretative scheme, an argument we have tried too make central to our book. Allerd Stikker's The Transformation Factor: Towards an Ecological Consciousness tries to place Teilhard de Chardin's thought in the context of his experience in China and traces the similarities between Teilhard de Chardin and Taoism. Some books while not dedicated to Teilhard's thought per se, have integrated his ideas so much that they were essential to out re-interpretation of scientific data. Danah Zohar's The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness as Defined by the New Physics, is just one of those books. Not for those with short attention spans, the book does not flinch at difficulties but in doing so manages to use quantum as the link between matter, consciousness and complexity. Robert Wright Non-Zero might not be as successful at integrating Teilhard's thought but presents a good argument for game theory as a way to understand evolution. Ecology is a vast subject and our files on newspaper articles alone would fill too many pages. For those who care top gage the sort of damage which we have done to our planet since the industrial revolution might want to read J.R. McNeil's inevitably depressing Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World. While the book might be a bit awkward as far as organization is concerned, the data is solid and grim. For those who much rather see what ecologists do and how they do it and also get a decent survey of most of the theoretical knowledge of ecology, then David Quammen's wonderful and enthralling The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions is the book. Finally, a book that helped us connect the dots between culture, progress and its irreversible impact on both the environment as well as on aboriginal cultures was Jared Diamond's Pulitzer prize winner Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Bibliography |
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