Books like A Naturalist at Large — picked by fans

Perhaps more than any other group of animals, the 20,000 (or more) known bee species make the case that much of evolution is about the diversification of ways in which species interact with each other species and form coevolutionary alliances. In this book, scientist/naturalist Thor Hanson gives us a whirlwind tour of that diversity, showing us that honeybees are just the tip of the iceberg of the many relationships between bees and plants. As with the other authors on this list, Hanson is a reliable guide with a passion and wonder for whatever he chooses to study and write about, using clear, accessible, and enjoyable prose. 

There are few clearer examples of how species have coevolved relentlessly than the interactions between cuckoos and other birds. Cuckoos have evolved an arsenal of ways to deceive other avian species into raising their young, and their avian hosts have evolved a counter-arsenal of defenses to protect themselves from cuckoos. Nick Davies, who is one of the world’s leading ornithologists and evolutionary ecologists, has been studying this evolutionary arms race for decades at Wicken Fen near Cambridge, England. In this engaging book, he takes us on a scientific journey, relating what others had already discovered before he began his work and then what he and others have discovered since the 1980s at Wicken Fen and elsewhere through many years of patient observations and experiments. 

Parasitism of other species is probably the most common way of life on earth. It is not uncommon for a species to have tens to hundreds of parasites that exploit it. Viruses have fine-tuned the parasitic lifestyle to the extreme, attacking just about all other forms of life and fueling the evolution of counter-defenses in their hosts. Viruses co-opt the genetic machinery of their hosts for just about everything they need to replicate themselves. Carl Zimmer’s book is not only the best introduction I know to the remarkable diversity of viruses, it also is written with the crystal clear, elegant prose and solid scientific grounding that are the hallmarks of all his writing. 

Plants and insects make up most of the species on earth, and they have spent millions of years interacting and coevolving with each other. In this book, Anurag Agrawal weaves together what scientists have learned about one of the most charismatic of these interactions, those between milkweeds and monarch butterflies. He explores why the evolution of these interactions never ceases, but he also shows us just how difficult it can be to sort out how particular species coevolve. The book is a window into why the interactions between plants and insects may be the most diverse interactions that have ever evolved between complex organisms. Agrawal is a leading researcher on the evolution of interactions between plants and insects, and, fortunately, he is also an absorbing writer. 

I remember reading this book probably about twenty years ago, and it has a great deal of insight into how to understand the scientific process, both in how it is carried out as well as how scientists can get better at discovery. Written primarily in the form of a dialogue between a set of archetypical characters and informed by a huge amount of work into the history and sociology of science, it takes the reader through how to understand creativity in science.

As a circular economy professional from Cambridge university, I pursue to cross that bridge between life sciences and organizational theory.

Capra and Luisi provide exactly that. Their synthesis of systems thinking, complexity theory, and living systems research gives us the conceptual foundation for understanding why organizations function best when mimicking natural characteristics.

I was especially moved by their argument that the mechanistic worldview dominating business for centuries is not just outdated but actively harmful. They show how living systems operate through networks of relationships rather than hierarchies, through emergence rather than control, through continuous adaptation rather than static structures.

Every time I work with an organization struggling with rigid hierarchies or siloed thinking, I draw on frameworks from this book. Their chapter on cognition and consciousness in living systems shifted how I think about organizational learning.

This is dense material, but they write with such clarity that complex concepts become… show more.

I really like this book and I regularly use it as a textbook in my Introduction to the Philosophy of Science course.

What I like is the way that Losee uses very short case studies in the history of science to refute the popular view that, through experimentation and observation, nature decides between competing theories and provides the justification for replacing an older theory with a new one. Although Losee does not always agree with Kuhn, I find that his book beautifully complements the history-based argument in Kuhn’s book, and both are short!

I appreciate this book because it provides an excellent historical overview of an important aspect of science, i.e., the occurrence of scientific revolutions from the 17th to the 20th century, and it does not include psychoanalysis.

Cohen’s book proposes an interesting "theory" of scientific revolutions which inspired me to develop a philosophical model of scientific revolutions, which I dubbed the "chain-of-reasoning" model.

Cohen was a renowned historian of science. His book is very well written and does not require technical knowledge of particular theories. It is very long but it can be studied selectively. 

This is a collection of twenty-four essays by thirty-six prominent researchers, demonstrating how important this topic has become for both scientific and philosophical research. In 2016 (after I had published ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE: Toward a Metaphysics of Emergence [2012], where I discuss Paul Humphreys’ view on pp. 231-2), he published EMERGENCE: A Philosophical Account, Oxford University Press, New York.

What I find especially significant in this more recent (and more challenging) work is that, in effect, emergence theory has developed into both a metascience and a metaphilosophy–as is evident in Humphreys’ Chapters 2, “Ontological Emergence” and 5, “Conceptual Emergence,” as well as Chapters 6, “Philosophical Topics Related to Emergence,” and 7, “Scientific Topics Related to Emergence.” This parallels very closely my own perspective on both scientific and philosophical conceptions of emergence.

I first encountered the philosophy of physicist Bohm in another book by the philosopher Renée Weber (Dialogues with Scientists and Sages) in which she, the Dalai Lama, and Bohm (among others) explore, well, everything. But Bohm’s own exploration blends Buddhist concepts with physics. One of the many reasons I am Buddhist myself is its architecture and allowance for new concepts including physics theory and the reality of light itself. His implicate order for the universe explains more about its reality than accepted current theory. I’m no physicist nor towering intellectual, but I am following the Buddha’s advice to figure it out for myself. This book helped immensely. Sadly his work is overlooked by the scientific community.