Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision

Wade, Nicholas

Medical Books

Academic Pr

Nicholas Wade’s articles are a major reason why the science section has become the most popular, nationwide, in the New York Times. In his groundbreaking Before the Dawn, Wade reveals humanity’s origins as never before—a journey made possible only recently by genetic science, whose incredible findings have answered such questions as: What was the first human language like? How large were the first societies, and how warlike were they? When did our ancestors first leave Africa, and by what route did they leave? By eloquently solving these and numerous other mysteries, Wade offers nothing less than a uniquely complete retelling of a story that began 500 centuries ago.

Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Penguin

A New York Times science reporter makes a startling new case that religion has an evolutionary basis. For the last 50,000 years, and probably much longer, people have practiced religion. Yet little attention has been given to the question of whether this universal human behavior might have been implanted in human nature. In this original and thought-provoking work, Nicholas Wade traces how religion grew to be so essential to early societies in their struggle for survival, how an instinct for faith became hardwired into human nature, and how it provided an impetus for law and government. The Faith Instinct offers an objective and nonpolemical exploration of humanity's quest for spiritual transcendence.

The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures

History

World

Penguin Publishing Group

Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well. Wade, the longtime journalist covering genetic advances for The New York Times, draws widely on the work of scientists who have made crucial breakthroughs in establishing the reality of recent human evolution. The most provocative claims in this book involve the genetic basis of human social habits. What we might call middle-class social traits—thrift, docility, nonviolence—have been slowly but surely inculcated genetically within agrarian societies, Wade argues. These “values” obviously had a strong cultural component, but Wade points to evidence that agrarian societies evolved away from hunter-gatherer societies in some crucial respects. Also controversial are his findings regarding the genetic basis of traits we associate with intelligence, such as literacy and numeracy, in certain ethnic populations, including the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. Wade believes deeply in the fundamental equality of all human peoples. He also believes that science is best served by pursuing the truth without fear, and if his mission to arrive at a coherent summa of what the new genetic science does and does not tell us about race and human history leads straight into a minefield, then so be it. This will not be the last word on the subject, but it will begin a powerful and overdue conversation.

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Penguin??Books

Examines instances of scientific fraud in research areas ranging from astronomy and physics to biology and medicine, and assesses the influence of huge monetary rewards and enormous research organizations on corruption in science

Betrayers of the Truth (Oxford Paperbacks)

Broad, William J.

Science & Math

Oxford Univ. Pr.

Eye movements are a vital part of our interaction with the world. They play a pivotal role in perception, cognition, and education. This book is unique in tracing the history of eye movement research. It shows how great strides were made in this area long before modern recording devices were available. Anyone interested in the origins of psychology and neuroscience will find much to stimulate and surprise them in this valuable new work.

'The Moving Tablet of the Eye': The Origins of Modern Eye Movement Research

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Tatler, Benjamin

Psychology & Counseling

Oxford University Press

This collection of perceptual portraits of more than 100 thinkers who have fashioned our understanding of mind and behaviour provides an alternative view of the history of psychology. Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Pierre Broca, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Ruth Benedict, Allen Newell, David Marr and scores of others whose ideas have made psychology an empirical discipline emerge from motifs specifically drawn by the author or derived from a figure or text in one of the portrayed person's books, or an apparatus he or she invented. The treatment of portrait/motifs often challenges the viewer to discern the faces embedded in them and always tells us more than how these students of mind looked: these portraits reflect their thoughts and lead us to forage further into their lives and legacies. The portraits and motifs have been manipulated in a variety of ways, using graphic and photo graphic procedures. They are arranged in order of birth date in a format of one page of descriptive text facing a full-page portrait. The text presents a brief synopsis of the persons portrayed, that person's ideas and the source of both the portrait and the motif. Interrelations between people are stressed, bringing to light common threads that run through the work of particular groups and adding yet another level to this unique gallery of psychology's pioneers.

Psychologists in Word and Image

Biographies & Memoirs

Bradford Books

This illustrated survey covers what Nicholas Wade calls the "observational era of vision," beginning with the Greek philosophers and ending with Wheatstone's description of the stereoscope at the end of the 1830s (after which vision became an experimental science). Although there are other histories of vision, this is the first to present extracts of the works of scholars, organized both topically and chronologically. In what has become the author's signature style, the book juxtaposes verbal and visual descriptions. Many of the over three hundred illustrations are derived from engravings--of portraits of the scholars cited, as well as of scientific diagrams.Each portrait appears beside a significant quotation by the scholar, along with the dates of birth and death, and the source of the original illustration. The author's commentary provides the context for the quotations and traces the scientific development within each topic. The book is organized around the principal topics within the investigation of visual phenomena: light, color, subjective visual phenomena (such as afterimages and pattern distortions), motion, binocularity, space, and visual illusions.

A Natural History of Vision

Mental Health

We are all fascinated by physiognomy, intrigued by the appearance of the people we admire. These perceptual portraits of more than 100 thinkers who have fashioned our understanding of mind and behavior provide an alternative view of the history of psychology that is both pleasing and puzzling. Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Pierre Broca, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Ruth Benedict, Allen Newell, David Marr and scores of others whose ideas have made psychology an empirical discipline emerge from motifs specifically drawn by the author or derived from a figure or text in one of the portrayed person's books, or an apparatus he or she invented. The ingenious treatment of portrait/motifs often challenges the viewer to discern the faces embedded in them and always tells us more than how these students of mind looked: these portraits reflect their thoughts and lead us to forage further into their lives and legacies. The portraits and motifs have been manipulated in a variety of ways, using graphic and photographic procedures. They are arranged in order of birth date in a format of one page of descriptive text facing a full-page perceptual portrait. The text presents a brief synopsis of the person portrayed, that person's ideas, and the source of both the portrait and the motif. Interrelations between people are stressed, bringing to light common threads that run through the work of particular groups and adding yet another level to this unique gallery of psychology's pioneers.

This illustrated survey covers what Nicholas Wade calls the "observational era of vision," beginning with the Greek philosophers and ending with Wheatstone's description of the stereoscope in the late 1830s. This is the first history of vision to present extracts of the works of scholars, organized both topically and chronologically. In what has become the author's signature style, the book juxtaposes verbal and visual descriptions. Many of the more than three hundred illustrations are derived from engravings—of portraits of the scholars cited, as well as of scientific diagrams. Each portrait appears beside a significant quotation by the scholar and the source of the original illustration. The author's commentary provides the context for the quotations and traces the scientific development within each topic. The book is organized around the principal topics within the investigation of visual phenomena: light, color, subjective visual phenomena (such as afterimages and pattern distortions), motion, binocularity, space, and visual illusions.

A Natural History of Vision (Bradford Books)

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Books by Wade, Nicholas

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wade, Nicholas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision

Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

Betrayers of the Truth (Oxford Paperbacks)

'The Moving Tablet of the Eye': The Origins of Modern Eye Movement Research

Psychologists in Word and Image

A Natural History of Vision

Psychologists in Word and Image

A Natural History of Vision (Bradford Books)