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kevin_shepherd's review against another edition
4.0
The Reality Club
For fifteen years (1981 - 1996) a select group of intellectuals, most from New York City, met regularly and informally to discuss a wide variety of philosophical and scientific topics…
"…to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.” -James Lee Byars
In 1997 The Reality Club marshaled its assets and became The Edge Foundation, a brain pool of heavy hitters now publicly accessible at edge.org
Life is the fifth book in the “Best of Edge” series (the others being Mind, Culture, Thinking, and The Universe). This is a collection of essays, interviews, lectures, and transcribed discussions from individuals who are trailblazers in their respective fields.
Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biologist, Oxford), David Haig (evolutionary biologist and geneticist, Harvard), Robert Trivers (evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist, Rutgers), Ernst Mayr (evolutionary biologist and taxonomist, Humboldt University), Steve Jones (geneticist, University College London), E.O. Wilson (biologist, naturalist, ecologist, entomologist, and founder of sociobiology, Harvard), Freeman Dyson (theoretical physicist, Princeton), and Drew Endy (bioengineer, Stanford) are but a few of the names on the long list of prestigious contributors.
Topics, eighteen in all, include Evolvability, Genomic Imprinting, Bio-Computation, Aesthetic Evolution, and Neanderthal Genomics—plus some really weird sh*t that I’ll let you discover on your own.
As much as I enjoyed this, I find it a wee bit arduous to critique collections of this nature. There’s just a LOT of interesting pieces here that I want to comment on (the juxtaposition of Richard Dawkins’ genotype with Robert Trivers’ phenotype alone would fill a small notebook!).
The only peccadillo I have is that I’m not a huge fan of transcribed round table discussions (see Life: What a Concept! with Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George M. Church, Seth Lloyd, Robert Shapiro, et al). Unless I’m intimately familiar with the personalities on hand (see The Four Horsemen) I get a little disoriented.
Four stars.
For fifteen years (1981 - 1996) a select group of intellectuals, most from New York City, met regularly and informally to discuss a wide variety of philosophical and scientific topics…
"…to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.” -James Lee Byars
In 1997 The Reality Club marshaled its assets and became The Edge Foundation, a brain pool of heavy hitters now publicly accessible at edge.org
Life is the fifth book in the “Best of Edge” series (the others being Mind, Culture, Thinking, and The Universe). This is a collection of essays, interviews, lectures, and transcribed discussions from individuals who are trailblazers in their respective fields.
Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biologist, Oxford), David Haig (evolutionary biologist and geneticist, Harvard), Robert Trivers (evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist, Rutgers), Ernst Mayr (evolutionary biologist and taxonomist, Humboldt University), Steve Jones (geneticist, University College London), E.O. Wilson (biologist, naturalist, ecologist, entomologist, and founder of sociobiology, Harvard), Freeman Dyson (theoretical physicist, Princeton), and Drew Endy (bioengineer, Stanford) are but a few of the names on the long list of prestigious contributors.
Topics, eighteen in all, include Evolvability, Genomic Imprinting, Bio-Computation, Aesthetic Evolution, and Neanderthal Genomics—plus some really weird sh*t that I’ll let you discover on your own.
As much as I enjoyed this, I find it a wee bit arduous to critique collections of this nature. There’s just a LOT of interesting pieces here that I want to comment on (the juxtaposition of Richard Dawkins’ genotype with Robert Trivers’ phenotype alone would fill a small notebook!).
The only peccadillo I have is that I’m not a huge fan of transcribed round table discussions (see Life: What a Concept! with Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George M. Church, Seth Lloyd, Robert Shapiro, et al). Unless I’m intimately familiar with the personalities on hand (see The Four Horsemen) I get a little disoriented.
Four stars.
ckehoe79's review against another edition
4.0
Interesting articles/essays. It makes you think. A worthy read.
kristina888's review against another edition
4.0
This book was overall very interesting and I'm glad that I finally took the time to read it. However, I find it hard to believe that John Brockman was unable to find any women doing worthwhile research in any of the fields that were covered in this book...
magis1105's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
This was published in 2015, I expect that with the exponential rate science and technology has been going we can expect some other breakthroughs to have happened by now.
found this book to be enjoyable and very interesting. They have been written well and are accessible for the general public. Even though I got lost in a few sections but not have too much to make it not understandable.
The only detail I found I have issues with was that every contributor was male, its kind of interesting how a site that is trying to be innovative and promote knowledge does not branch out to reach out to women in science. Sad that it still needs to be mentioned that women in science should not be ignored. Hope that the editors realize their bias and stop contributing to the stereotypical belief that only men have worthwhile research and discoveries to report.
The full review can be found https://bunkerofbooks05.wixsite.com/bunker-of-books/post/life-the-leading-edge-of-evolutionary-biology-genetics-anthropology-and-environmental-science
found this book to be enjoyable and very interesting. They have been written well and are accessible for the general public. Even though I got lost in a few sections but not have too much to make it not understandable.
The only detail I found I have issues with was that every contributor was male, its kind of interesting how a site that is trying to be innovative and promote knowledge does not branch out to reach out to women in science. Sad that it still needs to be mentioned that women in science should not be ignored. Hope that the editors realize their bias and stop contributing to the stereotypical belief that only men have worthwhile research and discoveries to report.
The full review can be found https://bunkerofbooks05.wixsite.com/bunker-of-books/post/life-the-leading-edge-of-evolutionary-biology-genetics-anthropology-and-environmental-science
dancarey_404's review against another edition
3.0
Lots of interesting science in the articles. But that also means some of them are a bit opaque. (And from my own personal biases, there wasn't enough botany.)
cookiewins1's review against another edition
Really boring. I gave up in the 4th chapter. I was hoping to have a better insight in evolution but the first 4 chapters were a brief skim on the idea of evolution. The content were mainly transcripts edited from talks, I believe. Most of the content does not seem appealing in written form, unfortunately.
ant's review
4.0
I enjoyed the lectures and discussions included in this volume (some more than others).
The variety of views (often differing) expressed made the book feel like it gave a very balanced of the state of biology a few years ago.
The variety of views (often differing) expressed made the book feel like it gave a very balanced of the state of biology a few years ago.
ckeeve's review
2.0
I expected a lot from this and it was mostly vaguely underwhelming, with a few high points scattered throughout. The essays tended to focus on presenting cool ideas without much depth or substance, and heavily and uncritically prioritized the more established "figureheads" of the Biological Sciences
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