Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology

Kohler, Robert E.

ISBN 10: 0226450104 / ISBN 13: 9780226450100

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2002

About this Item

61 BW illustrations.

Seller Inventory # 000498

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226450104
• ISBN 13: 9780226450100
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

What is it like to do field biology in a world that exalts experiments and laboratories? How have field biologists assimilated laboratory values and practices, and crafted an exact, quantitative science without losing their naturalist souls?

In Landscapes and Labscapes, Robert E. Kohler explores the people, places, and practices of field biology in the United States from the 1890s to the 1950s. He takes readers into the fields and forests where field biologists learned to count and measure nature and to read the imperfect records of "nature's experiments." He shows how field researchers use nature's particularities to develop "practices of place" that achieve in nature what laboratory researchers can only do with simplified experiments. Using historical frontiers as models, Kohler shows how biologists created vigorous new border sciences of ecology and evolutionary biology.

About the Author

Robert E. Kohler is professor of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life, published by the University of Chicago Press.