This anthology is an intoxicating wellspring of ideas which, if you pore through it, often upsets the general settle of the history of science and philosophy. You've got Noam Chomsky's elegant demolition of B. F. Skinner's behaviourism in 1971, the great lefty J. B. S.
Haldane on "Food Control in Insect Societies" (1928); the extraordinarily synthetic eye of Leonardo da Vinci's "Seashells in the Mountains"; "Carbon" from Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi's The Periodic Table; arch-philosopher of science, Karl Popper's "Heroic Science"; excerpts - "Idols of the Tribe" - from Francis Bacon's 1620 Novuum Organum (although not his sublime list of the various types of self-delusion). You've got Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin and Alfred Wallace, Piaget, Hoyle, Oppenheimer, Heisenberg, Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould (but not Dawkins!) - all ranging haphazardly from Herodotus's musings on the Nile basin in 444 BC and Lucretius's poetic discourse on atoms (60BC) to George Smoot's "Looking for the Big Bang" and Bolles' own 1991 piece on Gestalt psychology. A gem.