Local Science Engagement Network Community

Thanks for the recommendations.  I was intrigued by a couple of reviews of the biography of Tennyson when it came out, which reminded me of the importance of science writing in its cultural effects, including in regard to evolution and Darwin. If anyone can recommend other books or sources on the early broader cultural penetration of Darwin's theories among non-scientists in the pivotal 19th and early 20th century periods, please let me know.

One of Tennyson's most quoted lines has been "nature red in tooth and claw", which has long seemed to me to be reductive and not deserving the attention it gets.  A similar effect of science writing downstream from the 19th century continues in the frequent references in the business and cultural press to a "Darwinian" world that we are now said to live in, by which the writers seem to mean a ruthless contest for "survival of the fittest".  Two historians of the 19th century have pointed out that the misconstruing of Darwin was not the dominant cultural interpretation of him at the time.  Hoppen in his history, 'The Mid-Victorian Generation', posits that the deepest absorption of Darwin in literature of the time was not Tennyson, but rather Thomas Hardy's novels and George Eliot in her novel 'Middlemarch'.  As a careful historian of Britain and its culture and technology, Hoppen, I recall, comments that Darwin would probably have regretted including the phrase "survival of the fittest", at the urging of his rival Wallace, in Darwin's last revised edition of 'The Origin of Species'.  The extraordinary American historian Richard White makes a similar comment in his history of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 'The Republic for Which It stands', where he recounts that "survival of the fittest" was a phrase misconstruing Darwin that was popularized in the U.S. by Herbert Spencer, in his efforts to support the self-justifications propounded by Andrew Carnegie's doctrine of wealth and by other Gilded Age industrial money-getters.

Some of my favorite recent readings of science books are geology books, including Doris Sloan's beautiful 'Geology of the San Francisco Bay Region' and the fun 'Roadside Geology of Kansas', one of the most recent in 'Roadside Geology' series written for a popular and general audience.  Geology, like evolution and now neuroscience, has had fascinating cultural and historical effects, including, of course, the writings of Hutton and Lyell in the 19th century and even such texts as 'The Geology of Florida' by Randazzo and Jones and U.S. Geological Survey publications.  In the current political contests over science and science funding, science writing in history truly resonates.

Any neuroscience book recommendations that avoid pop-neuroscience spin would be appreciated.

Simon Taylor