Mind, Life and Universe affords all the pleasures as well as the dissatisfactions of a short-format TV program(in fact, the 36 interviews with distinguished scientists presented here are excerpted from interviews conducted by Eduardo Ponset for Spanish television). The reader is titillated by the taste of something good, but never quite makes it to the real meal. That said, an extensive supplementary reading list follows the interviews, to encourage readers to read on. The interviews are grouped under 4 headings (each with sub-headings) entitled "People Primates," "Animal Body-Mind," "Life on an Animate Planet," and "Toward the Invisible." The interviewees are all currently active and influential in their respective fields: Psychology, Neuroscience, Zoology, Psychobiology, Ethology, Entomology, Evolutionary Biology, Cognitive Studies, Human Genetics, Mechanics, Medicine, Human Biology, Paleontology, Microbiology, and Physics.
Among the interviewees are Jane Goodall, Edward O. Wilson, Oliver Sacks, Diana Deutsch, William Haseltine, James E. Lovelock, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Dorion Sagan, Eugene Chudnovsky and Lisa Randall. Interestingly, although the book is edited by evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, only three female scientists are included. And, despite characterization of the world of scientific research and exploration as transnational and unbounded, the male scientists are all North Americans or Europeans. This last may be simply a function of access and/or language, but I still find it disappointing.
Read this collection like a magazine and it won't disappoint. At a minimum, it points in some interesting directions.




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Loved this book really interesting to read. I enjoyed hearing what each of these people do in there fields and why they love what they do. You get to know them a little and get to see why they love doing what they do. ( )

The 36 interviewees include Jane Goodall, Edward O Wilson, Daniel Dennett, James Lovelock, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Sheldon Glashow, Lisa Randall, and Paul Davies.