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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781400030545 |
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Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 04/06/2010 |
Pages: | 336 |
Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
www.jameslefanu.com
Read an Excerpt
When cosmologists can reliably infer what happened in the first few minutes of the birth of the universe and geologists can measure the movements of vast continents to the nearest centimeter, then the inscrutability of those genetic instructions that should distinguish a human from a fly, or the failure to account for something as elementary as how we recall a telephone number, throws into sharp relief the unfathomability of ourselves. It is as if we, and, indeed, all living things, are in some way different, profounder, and more complex than the physical world to which we belong . . . This is not just a matter of science not yet knowing all the facts; rather, there is the sense that something of immense importance is “missing” that might transform the bare bones of genes into the wondrous diversity of the living world and the monotonous electrical firing of the neurons of the brain into the vast spectrum of sensations and ideas of the human mind.
Table of Contents
List of illustrations vii
Introduction: A Mystery to Ourselves xiii
1 Science Triumphant, Almost 1
2 The Ascent of Man: A Riddle in Two Parts 24
3 The Limits of Science 1: The Quixotic Universe 59
4 The (Evolutionary) ‘Reason for Everything’: Certainty 72
5 The (Evolutionary) ‘Reason for Everything’: Doubt 110
6 The Limits of Science 2: The Impenetrable Helix 126
7 The Fall of Man: A Tragedy in Two Acts 148
8 The Limits of Science 3: The Unfathomable Brain 176
9 The Silence 230
10 Restoring Man to His Pedestal 253
Acknowledgements 263
Notes 265
Index 293