Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves - Softcover

Fanu, James Le

3.69

119 ratings by Goodreads

9780007120284: Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007120281 ISBN 13: 9780007120284

Publisher: HarperPress, 2010

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

In ‘Why Us?’, James Le Fanu explores the major implications of the most recent findings of genetics and neuroscience, challenging the common assumption that they must ultimately explain all there is to know about life and man’s place in the world. On the contrary, he argues, they point to an unbridgeable explanatory gap between the genes strung out along the Double Helix and the near infinite beauty and diversity of the living world to which they give rise, and between the monotonous electro-chemistry of the brain and richness and creativity of the human mind. “There is,” he writes, “a powerful impression that science has been looking in the wrong place, seeking to resolve questions that somehow lie outside its domain. It is as if we – and indeed all living things – are in some way different, profounder and more complex than the physical world to which we belong.” A N Wilson in his review described it as ‘an extraordinary work of science ... quite wonderfully refreshing’; for Christopher Booker in The Spectator it was “enthralling”: “one of the glories of Le Fanu’s erudite and beautifully written book is that a sense of wonder is evident on every page, even as he lucidly analyses the limitations of the narrow intellectual prism in which science has languished too long.”

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

"Simple and compelling; a bold attempt to reunite science with a sense of wonder."
--The Sunday Times (London)

"An extraordinary work of science. . . . Quite wonderfully refreshing."
--A. N. Wilson, Reader's Digest (UK)

"[Le Fanu reminds us] that life is finally inexplicable, and the universe full of mysteries that are inaccessible to scientific probing. The fact that these rarely stated realities are so superbly brought to life here makes this a brave, brilliant and fascinating book."
--The Sunday Telegraph (London)

"Excellent. . . . An important, luminously written book. . . . Carefully-documented, scrupulously fair-minded. . . . It deserves a very wide readership. . . . A careful reader, analyst, and conveyor of this body of research, and an admirer of its revelations and the ingenuity of those who have made them, LeFanu is also possessed of something even rarer than a gift for luminous explication of scientific complexity: he has what the great, polymathic thinker Blaise Pascal called 'l'esprit de finesse, ' or a philosophical mind."
--Modern Age

"James Le Fanu's lively literary imagination makes this book such a stimulating and challenging read."
--Literary Review (UK)

"Erudite and beautifully written. . . . Le Fanu lucidly analyses the limitations of that narrow intellectual prison in which science has languished too long."
--The Spectator (UK)

"Le Fanu sets his stall out with admirable clarity, and not a little brio. . . . [He is] a lucid and compelling writer."
--Evening Standard (UK)

"This challenge is so knowledgeable, so meticulously constructed that mere prejudice will not be enough to undermine this major work."
--Catholic Herald

"A bold synthesising polemic."
--Standpoint Magazine

"Le Fanu eviscerates salvation by science. The Double Helix is impenetrable, the brain unfathomable, the genome over-rated, the self a mystery."
--World Magazine

"An outstandingly readable and informative book. . . . Le Fanu knows a lot but wears his erudition lightly."
--David Klinghoffer, The Discovery Institute

About the Author:

James Le Fanu is a medical doctor and regular columnist for the Sunday Telegraph and Daily Telegraph. He graduated from Cambridge University and the Royal London Hospital in 1974. He has published research articles in the ‘British Medical Journal’, ‘Lancet’ and the ‘Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine’.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.