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Search - Asking About Life

Asking About Life
Author: Marni Fylling

Asking About Life is an introductory biology textbook for first-year college students and other interested readers. The strengths of the book include engaging stories about the process of science, an emphasis on experimentation, and stylish prose. It is unusually current for an introductory text, and has a striking art program. The authors, ... more »a distinguished research scientist and a professional science writer, use a unique approach to biology that emphasizes questions, experimentation, and principles as well as the human drama that has allowed scientists to arrive at these principles. The text introduces biology as an engaging human quest fraught with conflict and illuminated by discovery. The authors accomplish this by telling stories of individuals struggling against ignorance, ideology, and other barriers to understanding. This new approach brings to the classroom the human drama needed to sustain student interest, without the dreary emphasis on disease and suffering that some biology textbooks use as a "human" approach. Subjects for profile range from outspoken mavericks such as Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis and immunologist Polly Matzinger to quiet and tenacious researchers such as geneticist Barbara McClintock and Charles Darwin. The profiles feature scientists whose flaws, passions, and independence play a significant role in the way they do science. In this way, Asking About Life shows that science is a social endeavor and that discoveries may hinge on which researchers work in groups and which ones work in isolation. This approach to teaching biology gently engages the reader in the process of doing science and humanizes both biologists and biology. Asking About Life also emphasizes that science is primarily a series of questions. The way in which biologists ask questions and attempt to answer those questions is the book's central theme. Each chapter is structured around a series of questions and answers that engage the reader step by step in the process of discovery. Readers learn that sometimes the greatest contribution a scientist can make is not the answer to an important question, but the question itself. The authors of Asking About Life ask: What questions have the most engaged biologists argued about in the past? How have past controversies led to our current understanding of biology and to the questions that fascinate today's biologists? Finally, they ask, what are the important unanswered questions in biology? In keeping with this emphasis on asking and answering questions, Asking About Life describes the experiments that provided the answers to important questions in biology. Students who have learned the experimental underpinnings of current concepts are in a better position to assimilate new information as it emerges(whether in later classes or in the daily news. Asking About Life is unusually current for an introductory text, using up-to-date examples throughout and grappling with topical issues such as gene therapy, the cloning of humans, the role of dietary salt in hypertension, and the role of nicotine in heart disease. These examples engage not only the student but the instructor as well. The authors operate from the premise that when an instructor is intellectually engaged with the text, students benefit.

ISBN-13: 9780030270512
ISBN-10: 0030270510
Publication Date: 9/2000
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Holt Rinehart Winston
Book Type: Paperback
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Science & Math >> Technology >> General & Reference

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