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John Casti's Paradigms Lost presents a masterful, easy-to-grasp
overview of science's answers to the great questions as we understand them today.
The heart of the book consists of six chapters, each devoted to a case study of
one of the major mysteries of modern science: the origin of life on planet Earth,
the real sources of human behavior and social patterns, how we acquire language,
the fundamental nature of our thinking processes, the possible existence of intelligent
life elsewhere in the universe, the impact of our own security on what we observe
as real. Paradigms Lost gives a complete and readable account of the competing
positions in the important debates in progress on each of these issues. But the
grand theme of these chapters is to ask what, if anything, is unique about us
human beings. Each chapter of Paradigms Lost is
structured in the form of a jury trial. The conventional scientific wisdom on
each topic is presented by the Prosecution. The alternative views on the question
are then presented by the Defense. After the summary arguments, Casti steps in
to act as a juror, casting his ballot for one side or the other and offering an
explanation of how he voted. The author intends that his readers also serve on
the jury by deciding for themselves on these questions. Paradigms
Lost is really a book aimed at showing that it is possible to share the knowledge
of the experts by means of a clear distillation of their deepest and most important
arguments. Finally, the book demonstrates that the reader can participate in science's
exciting quest for ever more refined knowledge of where the species Homo sapiens
stands within the cosmic order as we perceive it today. John
L. Casti was born in Portland, Oregon. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from
the University of Southern California and then worked at the RAND Corporation
and at the University of Arizona. He was one of the first research staff members
of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna,
Austria. He is now on the faculty of the Technical University of Vienna.
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