Finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology: the surprising, untold story about the poetic and deeply human (cognitive) capacity to name the natural world. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus set out to order and name the entire living world and ended up founding a science: the field of scientific classification, or taxonomy. Yet, in spite of Linnaeus’s pioneering work and the genius of those who followed him, from Darwin to E. O. Wilson, taxonomy went from being revered as one of the most significant of intellectual pursuits to being largely ignored. Today, taxonomy is viewed by many as an outdated field, one nearly irrelevant to the rest of science and of even less interest to the rest of the world. Now, as Carol Kaesuk Yoon, biologist and longtime science writer for the New York Times, reminds us in Naming Nature, taxonomy is critically important, because it turns out to be much more than mere science. It is also the latest incarnation of a long-unrecognized human practice that has gone on across the globe, in every culture, in every language since before time: the deeply human act of ordering and naming the living world. In Naming Nature, Yoon takes us on a guided tour of science’s brilliant, if sometimes misguided, attempts to order and name the overwhelming diversity of earth’s living things. We follow a trail of scattered clues that reveals taxonomy’s real origins in humanity’s distant past. Yoon’s journey brings us from New Guinea tribesmen who call a giant bird a mammal to the trials and tribulations of patients with a curious form of brain damage that causes them to be unable to distinguish among living things. Finally, Yoon shows us how the reclaiming of taxonomy―a renewed interest in learning the kinds and names of things around us―will rekindle humanity’s dwindling connection with wild nature. Naming Nature has much to tell us, not only about how scientists create a science but also about how the progress of science can alter the expression of our own human nature. 27 illustrations

Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science

Science & Math

Carol Kaesuk Yoon

Biological Sciences

W.W.Norton&Company

Discover Biology helps students become biologically literate students―to progress from science to scientific literacy. Written from the ground up for nonmajors, Discover Biology is the only introductory biology textbook to present consistently applied features in each chapter that not only demonstrate biology’s everyday relevance, but teach students how to move from simply understanding core biological concepts to actively applying those concepts to our rapidly changing world.

Discover Biology

Michael L. Cain

Hans Damman

Robert A Lue

Sinauer Associates & W. W. Norton

Discover Biology takes an innovative approach to the teaching of the one-semester non-majors' biology course. Rather than overwhelming the non-major student with a mass of detail, secondary concepts, and vocabulary terms, the authors emphasize applied topics in biology, with the goal of improving students' biological literacy. Six major units address the diversity of life, cells, genetics, evolution, form and function, and interactions with the environment. Each chapter opens with a short vignette, providing context for the chapter content, and ends with an "evaluating the news" section that hones critical reasoning skills. Concise chapters, annotated figures, outstanding pedagogy, and a host of ancillaries make Discover Biology the clear choice for nonmajors' biological science survey courses.

W. W. Norton & Company; Incorporated

Shizen o nazukeru : naze seibutsu bunrui dewa chokkan to kagaku ga shoÌ„totsu suru noka

KyoÌ„ko Nonaka

Nobuhiro Minaka

ToÌ„kyoÌ„ : EnutiÌ„tiÌ„shuppan, 2013

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Books by Carol Kaesuk Yoon