Amazon.com: Paradigms Regained: A Further Exploration of the Mysteries of Modern Science: John L. Casti: Books

Amazon.com
In Paradigms Regained, John Casti reexamines the six big questions he looked at in his 1989 book, Paradigms Lost: Did life begin naturally and on Earth? Is human behavior genetically determined? Is there a language organ in the human brain? Can computers think? Can we talk to ET? Is there a Real World?

In Paradigms Lost, he presents the evidence for yes and no answers to each question as though in a trial by jury, with witnesses arguing for the prosecution and defense, then a summary of the evidence and a verdict. Paradigms Regained takes the same questions to an appeals court, summarizes the evidence from the "trial" and introduces new evidence from the intervening decade.

Casti's goal is to show how science works, how "the single most characteristic feature of science is that its conclusions are tentative." So in three cases he now reaches a ruling of "appeal upheld," overturning his previous verdicts. In fact, the only one truly overturned is his conclusion of "not proven" to the question about the genetic determination of human behavior: he thinks the evidence for "yes" has become much stronger. In the cases of the origin of life and the existence of a Real World, he has kept the same one-word answers but now favors different mechanisms.

Together, the two books are good illustrations of how science looks at the questions that most interest nonscientists and of how scientific knowledge builds and changes. They make excellent maps to the borders between science and philosophy, science and religion, and science and pseudoscience. --Mary Ellen Curtin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
The success of Paradigms Lost, Casti's 1989 survey of science's most compelling questions, made this successor and its title nearly inevitable. Unfortunately, the new book fails both as a complement and as a contrast to the earlier work. Like its predecessor, it transforms multifaceted scientific inquiry into the motif of an adversarial courtroom battle--a device that, though useful for framing the discussion and possessed of some entertainment value, inevitably produces a distorted picture of the evolution of scientific thought. Scientific progress is continually punctuated by breakthroughs that vault new areas of inquiry into the foreground and relegate others to the background realm of apparently resolved questions. Because of these shifts in scientific thought, not all the topics important in 1989 merit the same level of attention in 2000--and yet Casti insists on revisiting them. As a result, although he devotes a dull chapter to recapitulating old arguments about artificial intelligence, for example, he admits in those pages that "nothing of eyebrow-raising substance has really changed in the AI debate since the mid-1980s." The book's strongest chapter is its last, which discusses the peculiarities of the quantum mechanical world. Casti's fascinating discussion of new insights into the wave-particle duality of matter and energy might make readers wish he had written a book about new paradigms for a new millennium instead of this sometimes contrived and oft-contorted sequel. Illustrations. (Mar.) FYI: Also in March, Wiley will release the second volume of Casti's survey of math in the last century, Five More Golden Rules: Gordian Knots, Secret Codes, and the Importance of Being Nonlinear--More Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics, with illustrations ($27.95 256p ISBN 0-471-32233-4).
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Paradigms Regained: A Further Exploration of the Mysteries of Modern Science (Paperback)

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