Marty, I realize that you said to send them to you off-list, but TIPS has a long tradition of posting "summer reading" suggestions, so I am sending these to the list.
/Origin of Species/ is ALWAYS a good thing for students to read. Darwin does it better than most of his would-be expositors. And we would love to have your students up here in Toronto at the Royal Ontario Museum to see the touring Darwin exhibit if they missed it in New York and Chicago (off to London next!!). Keeping with the evolutionary theme, I have just finished Jan Sapp's /Genesis: The Evolution of Biology/. Fabulous stuff! From Lamarck to about the year 2000. One of the few histories of biology that gets into the nitty gritty of the cracks that have recently formed in Watson & Crick's "Central Dogma," and the return of a certain kind of "Lamarckism" (very loosely speaking) to evolutionary biology in the past couple of decades (gene transfer, epigenetics, structural inheritance, symbiosis, etc.). Unfortunately, because of the war with the creationists of late, biologists have been wary to speak publicly of the anomalies that have been gradually creeping into "Modern Synthesis" (of Darwin and Mendel) over the past generation or so (for fear they will be exploited by politically powerful Evangelicals). This book has no truck with the creationists, however, and describes quite freely the changes that are being wrought in evolutionary and genetic theory by recent developments. (Very good coverage of the more distant history of the discipline as well -- the war between the geneticists and the embryologists, the near collapse of Darwinism before the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s/40s, the struggles to interpret the discovery of DNA and how molecular coding works, and the unexpected findings in when the genome was finally decoded (too few genes, too many natural mechanisms that undo, or redo differently, what genetic engineers though they would do). Along similar lines (though more explicitly agenda-driven) is Jablonka & Lamb's /Four Dimensions of Evolution/ (being genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic). It is a little "out there" but solidly written and highly comprehensible by the attentive reader. Other books that I have taken off my shelf to be read this summer include Alison Winter's /Mesmerized/ which is about the sociocultural meaning of Mesmerism in Victorian England. The commonly heard dismissal of Mesmerism as a "pseudoscience" doesn't begin to do the topic justice (not that it wasn't a pseudoscience, but it was also so much more). Last summer I read John Van Wyhe's /Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism/, an equally important book on a related topic (Van Wyhe has since become the director of the Darwin Online collection). Another book awaiting me is a translation of a biography of Fechner entitled /Nature from Within/, first written (in Geman) in the 1990s by Michael Heidelberger. Apparently it does more to set Fechner in the early 19th-century German intellectual culture (and thereby make this very complicated, astonishingly intelligent man more comprehensible to us). Finally I have to put in a plug for John Carson's new book on intelligence testing, /The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750-1940/. What the French and the American thought of and did with intelligence test were two quite different things (especially for countries that -- FOX "News" notwithstanding -- are politically similar in so many ways. Regards, Chris Green York U. Toronto ============= Bourgeois, Dr. Martin wrote: > > > I often find myself recommending books for psychology majors to read > during the summer, etc., and it made me wonder which books others > recommend. Of course, my lists of books reflect my biases as a social > psychologist.That got me thinking about compiling a list of books that > most of us would consider to be essential reading for psychology > majors, whether the books are specific to psychology (e.g., Obedience > to Authority would be on my list) or not (e.g., Origin of Species). > So, I'm asking list members to send me, off-list, suggestions of books > that you believe that every psychology major should read by the time > they graduate, whether in class or outside class. I will compile the > list for awhile (as long as nominations come in) and send a survey > back to the list of all the books nominated, and ask everyone to > decide, for each book on the list, whether you consider it to be > essential. Then I will send the completed survey back to the list, > with all the books rank ordered; I'll also think of other ways to > disseminate the list more widely (e.g., to other web teaching > resources, maybe a brief report for Teaching of Psychology). I would > like as many people as possible to nominate books and to vote on the > completed list, so please forward this email to others in your > department who may be interested and to other listserves related to > psychology. > > Please send nominations to me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. > > Thanks! > Marty Bourgeois > Florida Gulf Coast University > > --- > To make changes to your subscription contact: > > Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) > --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
