Hidden Histories of Science by Robert B Silvers

This volume examines the ways in which science is influenced by culture. It highlights the misleading images that have distorted people’s view of the history of life. It explores areas of darkness and forgetting in scientific research, and the use of inappropriate mechanistic metaphors in the understanding of biological systems. It also considers the neglect of useful research that does not fit the current intellectual fashion in science. Stephen Jay Gould gives a summary of his critique of conventional “progressive” pictures of evolutionary change, using trees, ladders and cones. Richard Lewontin rejects the attempt to reduce the complexity of living things to the simplicity of physics. Oliver Sacks offers tour of scientific roads not taken, or taken too late. The history of science, Daniel Kevles recounts the the strange story of resistance to the idea that viruses can cause cancer. Jonathan Miller, with typical wit and insight, shows how the discredited panacea of hypnotism could have helped to reveal a non-Freudian view of the unconscious – an unconscious that is not simply the dark underside of the mind, but a powerfully enabling form of knowledge.