This book by Dolnick is a survey of the history of science (primarily biology) from the 15th century to the 20th. I post it here because it provides a great window into the vast difficulties that scientists have making inductions and deductions from experimental data, and the ingenuity required to design experiments especially dealing with slippery, messy biological phenomena. Anyone who wants to think about the actual process that scientists have to go through in order to arrive at truth, should read this book, because it is illustrates repeatedly the thinking process of experimenters and theorists.
Did you know that no one proved how humans are conceived until 1875?
That’s the arc of the book, written as a type of mystery story — showing the literally hundreds of observations, experiments, false theories, dead ends, and ultimately the painstakingly found truths that resulted in the sciences of biology and organic chemistry. This whole arc of inductive science is bound together by one of — or the most burning question — of human life: how are babies conceived? It was only in 1875 that someone actually observed that a spermatozoon entered a female egg and started the process of splitting and growing cells into a new animal, or human baby.
One fun aspect that runs through the book is all the unbelievable conclusions and theories that various eminent scientists held during those five centuries of searching for the answer. These often bizarre, but sometimes reasonable, conclusions are cause for any reader to take away the lesson: exercise extreme caution in asserting that you have obtained unassailable truth in your experiments in life.
/sb
