JAN 2021 | ISSUE 17
This Week’s Reads: Science & Ethics
Happy New Year! We’d like to thank you, our readers, for supporting us thus far. If your New Year’s resolution is to read more books, we’ll be your perfect motivational companion. Start off 2021 with these reads on Science and Ethics – an apt topic as you wait in line to get vaccinated. And before school starts, why not join us for our January Book Club, where we’ll be discussing the Netflix miniseries: The Queen’s Gambit!
The book aims to revitalise the interdisciplinary debate about evolutionary ethics and substantiate the idea that evolution science can provide a rational and robust framework for understanding morality.
This volume tackles the burden of judgment and the challenges of ethical disagreements, organising the cohabitation of scientific and ethical argumentations in such a way they find their appropriate place in the political decision.
The book explores ethical issues in connection with recent biotechnological advances and urges the reader to move beyond a disciplinary understanding and adopt an interdisciplinary view of the entire issue.
Six factors help create a societal “perfect storm” regarding ethics and biotechnology: social demand for ethical discussion; societal scientific illiteracy; poor social understanding of ethics; a “Gresham’s Law for Ethics;” scientific ideology; vested interests dominating ethical discussion.
Reading News
We’re discussing The Queen’s Gambit for our January Book Club!
From the outset, the film’s title – The Queen’s Gambit – already foregrounds a sacrifice. Through The Queen’s Gambit, we examine the trope of loss, branching out to consider related themes of addiction, gender representations, political ideologies, as set out in the film.
Fun fact: The Queen’s Gambit is based on the book of the same name by Walter Tevis (as seen below)
Sign ups are free, and the book club will be held in an interactive online format 🙂
Is your New Year’s resolution to read?
Let us help you!
Add to your reading list with our favourite 20 books of 2020 – specially compiled by the teams at ReadNUS and NUS Libraries, and by you – our fellow readers!
We’ve broken down your top submissions into 5 categories: Biographies and Memoirs, Politics, Environment, Self-Help and Fiction. To read the reviews of these books, head on over to our website!
Email any suggestions for future books or your book reviews to
ReadNUS.
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