Science as a Way of Knowing

Science was not always the dominant way of knowing, as we see in this exploration of how human beings over the millennia have sought to understand the phenomena of life. Central to the puzzle are several questions: How did living matter arise, and how does it reproduce itself? How does life develop from a single cell into a complex organism? And how did the vast variety of species we see around us, and those long-extinct, come to be? One of the intellectual wonders of our time has been biologists' gradual solution of these great mysteries, beginning with the investigations of Aristotle and the Greeks, continuing through the experiments and theories of Darwin and his contemporaries, and culminating in the researches of 20th-century geneticists, developmental biologists, paleontologists, and other specialists. John Moore has taught biology instructors how to teach biology - by emphasizing the questions people have asked about life through the ages and the ways natural philosophers and scientists have sought the answers. This book makes his experience available to the general reader in an illustrated account of the history and workings of life.
Employing a breadth of rhetorical strategies - including case histories, hypotheses and deductions, and chronological narrative - "Science as a Way of Knowing" aims to provide not only a cultural history of biology but also an introduction to the procedures and values of science. This book's interpretive, non-technical approach to the sciences of life should delight and inform anyone curious about what we knew and when we knew it. It is for the non-specialist seeking a deeper understanding of how modern molecular biology, ecology and biotechnology came to be.