Hen's teeth and horse's toes
Une compilation de trente essais parus pour la plupart dans ##Natural history magazine## et articulés autour de la théorie de l'évolution. Sept parties: Des bizarreries raisonnables - Personnalités - Adaptation et évolution - Teilhard et Piltdown - Science et politique - L'extinction - Une trilogie du zèbre. L'auteur, professeur à l'Université de Harvard, a précédemment publié deux autres recueils: ##Darwin et les grandes énigmes de la vie## (1979) et ##Le pouce du panda## (1982). [SDM].
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- There are already suggestions in this thread that are better than mine, but I'll still throw my hat in the ring.
That's great that she's interested in biology. I'd like to gently suggest that if she "isn't very enthusiastic about computers or technology", you should instead try to nurture her demonstrated interest in art, biology, and other science.
I know absolutely nothing about art, except that I apparently have no taste. So I'll refrain from making any suggestions on art books.
TL;DR: Skip down to the third section for the "technical book" suggestion.
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(1)
Here are some suggestions of books on general science, biology, and chemistry (in no particular order, these are some of the first ones that come to my mind):
"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" By Thomas S. Kuhn
"The Diversity of Life" By Edward O. Wilson
"The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time" by Jonathan Weiner
"Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History" by Stephen Jay Gould
"Life on a Young Planet" By Andrew H. Knoll
"Galápagos" By Kurt Vonnegut (Fiction, but related) (I loved this book, but it's not for everyone I suppose. A couple of my friends didn't like it.)
"Napoleon's Buttons" By Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson
"The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher" By Lewis Thomas
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(2)
If she's interested in learning a lot about cellular biology in beautifully exhaustive detail, buy her this textbook:
"Molecular Biology of the Cell" By Bruce Alberts, Paul Walter, Alexander Johnson, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts
This book is huge. And it is wonderful.
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---Read this suggestion if my other suggestions aren't good---
(3)
So you want a technical book? And she's interested in biology?
Buy her a copy of:
"The Principles of Biomedical Informatics" By Ira J. Kalet
This textbook is incredible. It teaches you some fundamentals of many different flavors of bioinformatics. (Different flavors, because, as the author acknowledges, bioinformatics can mean many things.) You can learn how to work with amino acid sequences, protein modeling, medical imaging, probabilistic biomedical models, and more!
Since you have SICP and LoL on your bookshelf already, you might love the next part. The entire textbook is a cleverly accessible primer on how to build applications with Common Lisp. Whether you're a greybeard Lisp hacker or a repl-noob, you'll like this book if you are interested in learning about bioinformatics.
I've had the first edition for quite some time. Recently, I think in the past few months, a second edition was released. Someone gifted me the 2nd ed, :) but I haven't really compared the two.
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I was going to suggest Gödel, Escher, Bach when you mentioned she was interested in art, and were hoping to find a technical book for her. Then I saw that you already had tried that one. I'm going to leave the suggestion anyway because these types of threads are wonderful for finding great books.
- Stephen Jay Gould's "Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars", in "Hen's teeth and horse's toes" at https://archive.org/details/hensteethhorsest00step/page/314/... shows the size trend from the 2.0 ounces of 1960 to the the 1.2 ounce of 1980, when it was published.
- "On February 29, 1980 (enough of a rarity in itself), E.J. Kollar and C. Fisher reported an ingenious technique for coaxing chickens to reveal some surprising genetic flexibility retained from a distant past."
-- Stephen Jay Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes
Two pages of technical explanation follow, but they got chicken embryo tissue to produce teeth.
- Oh, and in 1983 Stephen J. Gould in "Hen's teeth and horse's toes" wrote the essay "Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars" about the diminishing size of Hershey bars between 1949 to 1979.
Here's a link to one copy at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/hensteethhorsest00goulrich/page/... .
