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11 Works 790 Membros 9 Críticas

About the Author

Simon LeVay, PhD; has served on the faculties of Harvard Medical School and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He has written eleven books, including the New York Times best-seller When Science Goes Wrong (2008) and the textbook Discovering Human Sexuality (2015).

Inclui os nomes: Simon LeVay, Simon Le Vay

Image credit: Larry D. Moore

Obras por Simon LeVay

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Data de nascimento
1943-08-28
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
UK
Local de nascimento
Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK
Ocupações
neuroscientist
Relações
le Vay, Benedict (brother)
Agente
Andrew Lownie Literary Agency

Membros

Críticas

This is a good overview of what science currently has to say about the biological underpinnings of sexual orientation. The author himself is gay, which lends more credence to his apparently even-handed review of the evidence for various theories behind the development of sexual orientation. Although there is not single line of evidence that unequivocally explains the biological roots of secual orientation, it is quite clear that sexual orientation is primarily biologically determined to a great extent, but that the complexity involved is great enough that there may be more than on way that sexual orientation gets determined. LeVay does conclude that the primary factor is probably the quantities and timing of testosterone levels during fetal development that are the primary factors, with the potential varying response of the fetus to the presence of testosterone.

The one gripe I did have with this book is that although a few intersex conditions such as adrenal hyperplasia and CAIS are brought up to provide evidence for the underlying role of hormones during development, LeVay never uses the term intersex in reference to these conditions. I do not know whether this is because he thinks using the term intersex might add complications, or that he somehow does not consider intersex to be a valid condition. It seems like in a book of this nature, a clear mention of intersex is needed, which left me disappointed.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
bness2 | 2 outras críticas | May 23, 2017 |
Fascinating, super educational, and very easy to read for such a science-y book!
 
Assinalado
DanielleMD | 2 outras críticas | Jun 20, 2015 |
From The Book Wheel:

When I first picked up this book I immediately went to Goodreads to see what other people thought. One of the biggest complaints is that it was too “sciency” or technical, which baffled me because it’s about science going wrong. That’s right – science. Of course it is going to have some scientific jargon! A chapter about hurricanes would be incomplete without a mention of the Coriolis effect, so I didn’t factor these complaints into my decision to read it. But while most of the scientific sections were about things I learned in high school, there were parts of the book that were really heavy on the technical terms. To be fair, they were necessary to understanding how and why things went wrong, but I did find myself skimming over the chapters about engineering and chemistry.

Not that that detracted from the book whatsoever. In the end, morbid curiosity and extremely approachable writing by Simon LeVay propelled me through the book. If you had asked me a week ago whether I thought human experiments were actually happening with catastrophic implications, I would have said no. Between the FDA, the review boards, and the internet, there couldn’t possibly be genetic testing that resulted in an ear bone growing in someone’s brain or blatantly ignoring FDA regulations, right?

Wrong. Dead wrong.

For the full review, including the Top 5 Lessons I learned,click here.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
thebookwheel | 4 outras críticas | Aug 24, 2013 |
Twelve stories of spectacular mistakes (or, in one case, a particularly bizarre and egregious bit of fraud) in various fields of applied science, most of which resulted in lost lives. Specifically, the stories of: a experimental treatment for Parkinson's disease that had a truly grotesque effect on the patient's brain, a devastating hurricane about which meteorologists failed to warn the public, a group of vulcanologists killed on a field trip to an active volcano they should have had reason to be suspicious of, a study "proving" harmful effects of the drug ecstasy on the brain that turned out to be testing the wrong drug, a dam built in a geologically unsuitable area, a gene therapy trial that resulted in a young man's death, a nuclear reactor explosion that may or may not have been accidental, a release of anthrax spores from a Soviet biological research facility, an innocent teenager convicted of rape by sloppy DNA analysis, the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter due to a failure to convert to metric units, an unethical study from the 1930s designed to see if speech disorders could be induced in children, and the announcement by a group of prestigious nuclear chemists that they'd discovered a new element that turned out not to exist.

I found these stories fascinating, if often horrifying, and in most of them there's some interesting element of scientific mystery as people try to figure out afterwards exactly what went wrong. LeVay's prose is not fancy, but it gets the job done, and he's very good about remaining objective, providing everyone's point of view, and making it clear when there are disagreements about what really happened. In each case, he personally interviewed as many of the people involved as possible, to let them tell their side of things. I also like the fact that he didn't necessarily go for the most obvious and familiar examples. The only incidents I'd heard of before were the nuclear meltdown, which I just read about for the first time a few years ago and immediately exclaimed, "Why the hell haven't I heard about this before?!", and the Mars Climate Orbiter fiasco, which I think most people have heard about but few know the details of.

It should be noted that this book definitely isn't an attempt to slam science or scientists. The author himself is a neuroscientist and has great respect for science as a human endeavor. I don't think that there really is any great moral here, other than that all humans are fallible and scientists are no exception. Which is probably something that's worth pointing out occasionally.
… (mais)
2 vote
Assinalado
bragan | 4 outras críticas | Nov 28, 2012 |

Prémios

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Estatísticas

Obras
11
Membros
790
Popularidade
#32,237
Avaliação
½ 3.6
Críticas
9
ISBN
52
Línguas
4

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