Rethinking Biology: Public Understandings - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9811208263 ISBN 13: 9789811208263

Publisher: WSPC, 2019

Synopsis

Biologists always need to grapple with integrating two explanatory approaches. On the one hand, there is necessarily an effort to drill down to the lowest possible level to explain what is happening in whatever is being studied. That involves looking at how higher-level processes arise from lower level ones. On the other hand, there is a need to consider how the broader context influences bottom-up processes; that involves looking at how the whole influences the parts. Neither approach is satisfactory on its own. There is always a need to integrate the consideration of how parts influence wholes with how wholes influence parts.

This book arises from a concern that in the public dissemination of biology the need to integrate these different perspectives is not coming across well. In popularisations, simplistic micro explanations always seem to arouse most interest and to capture the headlines. That risks distorting and simplifying the complexity of biological processes, and can mislead people. In this book we are urging a concerted attempt to come to grips with the interactive complexity of biology, and to find ways of conveying it to the public accessibly and effectively.

We are particularly concerned with how biology is communicated to the public. Too often, what comes over to the public is a crude, out-of-date, simplistic, mono-causal, reductionist biology. Why so? Why is biology so misrepresented? Who is responsible? It is partly the media, of course, but we suggest that biologists themselves are often partly responsible. When it comes to communication with the public, they tend to over-simplify in a way that distorts.

Readership: The book is aimed primarily at biology educators in secondary and tertiary education, working biologists, and philosophers of biology.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael J Reiss is Professor of Science Education at UCL Institute of Education, University College London, Visiting Professor at the Universities of Kiel and York and the Royal Veterinary College, Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association and of the College of Teachers, Docent at the University of Helsinki and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. His research and consultancy interests are in science education, sex education, curriculum studies and bioethics.

Fraser Watts was Reader in Theology and Science in the University of Cambridge, where he was Director of the Psychology and Religion Research Group and a Fellow of Queens' College. He is a former President of the British Psychological Society and of the International Society for Science and Religion, and a former Chair of the British Association of Christians in Psychology. He is now Visiting Professor of Psychology of Religion at the University of Lincoln, Executive Secretary of the International Society of Science and Religion, and Director of the Cambridge Institute for Applied Psychology and Religion.

In the first half of his career his research was mainly in clinical psychology, especially on cognitive approaches to emotional disorders. Over the last 20 years he has worked mainly on psychology and religion. That has been mainly on the interface of theology and psychology, arguing that there is more of a two-way relationship than obtains in most areas of theology and science. He has also contributed to the psychological study of religion, especially exploring the implications for the evolution of religion of dual-process models of human cognition, and exploring the implications of the scientific study of religion for theology. His wider interests in theology and science have focused mainly on evolutionary and systemic biology, and on general methodological issues in theology and science.

Dr Harris Wiseman is a Research Associate at the University of Birmingham. He has a PhD in Divinity (psychology of religion) from the University of Cambridge, where he was Research Associate for two years. During that time he published The Myth of the Moral Brain — The Limits of Moral Enhancement (MIT Press). His bioethics and his 'religion and technology' work have been published in many of the leading journals and publishers in the field, the American Journal of Bioethics, Cambridge Healthcare Quarterly, the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and Zygon. He was a convener of the Boyle Lecture Series, honorary Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Education, UCL; and remains a regular contributor to the Geneva Center for Security Policy's Geopolitics and Global Futures program (specifically, the neurophilosophy of global security).

About this edition

• Publisher: WSPC
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 9811208263
• ISBN 13: 9789811208263
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 366
• Editor: Reiss Michael J, Watts Fraser, Wiseman Harris