Carving Our Destiny: Scientific Research Faces a New Millennium - Hardcover

This is a book for people who love and understand science and want to know more about contemporary research frontiers. The questions addressed are as fascinating as they are diverse: Is the human mind truly unique among the primates? Does "dark matter" really exist in the universe? What can the human genome tell us about our evolutionary history?

These wide-ranging topics are brought together by virtue of their impact on our understanding of ourselves--and by the caliber of the authors: ten young scientists and scholars, reaching the height of their powers, who are especially talented in communicating their research findings to broad audiences. They were chosen to receive the prestigious Centennial Fellowships awarded in 1998 by the McDonnell Foundation, established and funded by the late aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell.

• Front Matter
• The Minds of Humans and Apes Are Different Outcomes of an Evolutionary Experiment
• The Cognitive Neuroscienceof Numeracy: Exploring the Cerebral Substrate, the Development, and the Pathologies of Number Sense
• More Than Mere Coloring: A Dialog Between Philosophy and Neuroscience on the Nature of Spectral Vision
• Why Neuroscience Needs Pioneers
• Taking a Snapshot of the Early Universe
• Looking for Dark Matter Through a Gravitational Lens: A Next-Generation Microlensing Survey
• Advancing Our Knowledge of the Universe
• Putting the Genome on the Map
• Human Genetics in the Twenty-First Century
• The Body in Parts: Disease and the Biomedical Sciences in the Twentieth Century
• Genetics Meets Genomics: Trends and Implications
• Scales that Matter: Untangling Complexity in Ecological Systems
• Currents of Change: The Ocean's Role in Climate
• Simplicity and Complexity
• Index