"The New York Review has published a widely accessible book in which five renowned contributors...remind us of "paths not taken" in science, and show how, by partially retracing our steps, we might gain (or have gained) a fuller picture of how our world is...Readers familiar with the authors’ work will know what to expect from this short collection. Others may be surprised by the breadth and depth of analysis that it contains."

--WILLIAM FOULKES, British Medical Journal

"Robert Silvers, the editor, has inspired a rewarding collection of good writing. Even where the substance inflames, the literary excellence assuages. Let’s hear it for The New York Review of Books."

--WALTER GRATZER, Nature

We often think of science as continuously advancing. In this collection of essays, five world-renowned writers explore obscure and neglected episodes in the history of science which suggest instead that the process of understanding the significance of scientific discoveries can be erratic, contradictory, even irrational. Jonathan Miller, Oliver Sacks, and Daniel Kevles show how promising new ideas may at first fail to be noticed or accepted, and then, years after they have been dismissed or forgotten, are recognized in a different form as important. R.C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould discuss the ways that words and images used by scientists and popularizers alike, from the murals on the walls of natural history museums to such ubiquitous terms as "adaptation" and "environment," reflect serious and often unacknowledged distortions in the way we conceive of both individual organisms and the natural history of the world.

These essays demonstrate that science is, in the words of Oliver Sacks, "a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past, but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhood."

Introduction

JONATHAN MILLER

Going Unconscious

STEPHEN JAY GOULD

Ladders and Cones:

Constraining Evolution by Canonical Icons

DANIEL J. KEVLES

Pursuing the Unpopular:

A History of Courage, Viruses, and Cancer

R. C. LEWONTIN

Genes, Environment, and Organisms

OLIVER SACKS

Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science

Notes on Contributors

Sources of illustrations