Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology

Robert E Kohler

ISBN 10: 0226450090 / ISBN 13: 9780226450094

Published by University of Chicago Press November 2002, 2002

About this Item

used hardcover copy, lacking a dust jacket. light shelfwear, corners perhaps slightly bumped. pages and binding are clean, straight, and tight. there are no marks to the text or other serious flaws save for the lack of the original jacket.

Seller Inventory # 1540650

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press November 2002
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226450090
• ISBN 13: 9780226450094
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Good+
• Seller catalogs:
  • SCI biology / natural history

About this title

Synopsis

What is it like to do field biology in a world that exalts experiments and laboratories? How have field biologists assimilated laboratory values and practices, and crafted an exact, quantitative science without losing their naturalist souls?

In Landscapes and Labscapes, Robert E. Kohler explores the people, places, and practices of field biology in the United States from the 1890s to the 1950s. He takes readers into the fields and forests where field biologists learned to count and measure nature and to read the imperfect records of "nature's experiments." He shows how field researchers use nature's particularities to develop "practices of place" that achieve in nature what laboratory researchers can only do with simplified experiments. Using historical frontiers as models, Kohler shows how biologists created vigorous new border sciences of ecology and evolutionary biology.

About the Author

Robert E. Kohler is a professor of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life, published by the University of Chicago Press.