Terrible Lizards—Impure Science?

摘要

Years ago as an unsuspecting undergraduate at a Canadian university, I was enrolled in a faculty of Pure and Applied Science, innocent of the understanding that there is no such thing as "pure science." For anyone who has not yet been exposed to a social critique of science, W. J. T. Mitchell's lively and entertaining treatise is as good a way to begin as any. This is not a book about dinosaurs. (Mitchell makes it clear that he is not a great fan of dinosaurs. He was bored by them as a child and reveals ambivalent feelings about them today—are they "a curable disease, a self-limiting epidemic, or a symptom of an irreversible catastrophe"?) Instead, it is a book about dinosaurs in popular culture, past and present.