100 Books Like The Biology of Wonder

This book helped me release shame after a colleague of mine told me my work wasn’t “science.”

Here’s the truth: to create a healing platform, I needed to tap into ways of thinking that academia sees as “woo woo” and “savage.” I looked to the stars. I meditated. I did rituals and read myths.

Dr. Kimmerer, trained as a traditional botanist, realized that the Indigenous myths and stories she was told as a child contained scientific knowledge passed down for generations by her tribe.

She realized there were scientific truths her community knew for millennia that traditional scientists only discovered within the last 100 years. This is the power of Ancestral Intelligence, disregarded by the same science that ultimately created AI.

What stories, fables, and myths have taught you valuable lessons about the world?

I am simultaneously inspired and repulsed by this book because it presents a terrible and wonderful fictionalized case study in apocalyptic optimism. In the novel, Robinson weaves a story of hope embedded in despair.

Having studied efforts to solve the climate crisis for over 25 years while witnessing its growing effects, the novel is pitch-perfect on the tensions we must overcome to save ourselves. 

I loved this book as it opened up a whole new perspective on climate change for me, and how we can tell a different story, a new one.

Discussions about climate change are often characterised by an adversarial nature and war-like terminology (we need to fight climate change, we need to prove the sceptics wrong), and the book moves beyond simplistic carbon reductionism and climate fundamentalism to focus on our love of nature and how we can use that to create a different story of “interbeing,” a story of regeneration, of reanimation, of love and of abundance to care for and protect nature on which we all depend.

And who can argue with love?

I liked that Jahren told the unvarnished truth of her experience in academia; like Zimmerman, she also shares how academia treats pregnant people. 

She talks about training the next generation of scientists, which is one of the main goals of the scientific enterprise.

Though I wasn’t impressed with the hazing ritual she and her lab manager had for new students in the lab, I did appreciate the excellent writing and well-paced narrative. Jahren is a stunning writer, and her book is neatly separated into sections about a tree, followed by a chapter about life mimicking that tree. 

People need less Dawkins in their lives and more Lewontin, whose thought-provoking, accessible writing about evolutionary biology stands in fierce opposition to the trend toward genetic determinism that seems to be the rage nowadays. We are not simply our genes, Lewontin says, because the effects DNA has on our lives are mediated by social and environmental factors, many of which we can influence. While it’s nominally about biology, I also read this as a critique of causal inference, generally. What we consider a “cause” reveals our ideological commitments to certain aspects of the world being maintained, and we should be careful what causal lessons we draw from data.

This book is an engaging treatment of philosophical issues in biology, with a strong though not exclusive focus on evolution. Written by two leading practitioners, the book continues to be an excellent entry point into the subject despite being more than 20 years old. For any reader of my own book who wants more detail, Sterelny and Griffiths’ text is ideal. Chock full of real-life examples, the book offers an excellent model of how philosophy can engage with biology. Topics discussed include function and adaptation, reductionism, levels of selection, the “selfish gene” theory, and more. 

The traditional neo-Darwinian view of evolution understands inheritance in genetic terms, as the transmission of DNA from parents to offspring. Jablonka and Lamb argue convincingly that in addition to genetic inheritance, there exist three other inheritance systems in nature – epigenetic, symbolic, and behavioural – all of which play an important role in evolution. The book is not a work of philosophy in the strict sense, but rather a fascinating and conceptually-rich synthesis of a diverse body of empirical findings which, the authors argue, can only be accommodated by going beyond a purely geno-centric view of evolution.

This is the best scientific novel I have ever read. The story is fiction (not 'science fiction' in the sense of fantasy, but a story that could easily take place in the real world right now), but its portrayal of how science is done, by a bunch of completely believable characters, is really true-to-life. It's a great way for young people considering a research career to taste what they are really like, and a great way for everyone to ask why we do science the way we do, while enjoying a well-paced multi-layer story, that is written with real wit. [Declaration for transparency: I know the author as a scientific collaborator, but this is nothing to do with my recommendation of her fiction]. 

Thomas captured the beauty and mystery of nature and science—how billions of cells in our body work intricately together to form tissues and organs that make us breathe, move, see, think, and fight infections, and how the world itself is analogous to one big cell.

I was amazed to understand the extraordinary complexities of Nature—how ants plan, communicate, and build farms, how our noses smell, how our eyes see and communicate to our brains, and how we hear and appreciate music.

The air we breathe and the water we drink are wild with microbes! This book tells amazing true tales about the personal microbes in our home, and how a space station lacked important microbes because no astronaut was female.

I love how some experiments failed the first time, but then revealed amazing finds. The same epidemiology that showed the cause of cholera now reveals “diseases of absence” of the microbes we need to protect us from asthma and food allergies. And our best drinking water contains microscopic crustaceans.

I learned so much about our body’s live-in microbes.