By Steven Rose
ISBN-10: 0198034245
ISBN-13: 9780198034247
Title note: formerly released as Lifelines: Biology past Determinism
Publish 12 months note: First released in 1997, 1998 through Penguin, 2003 via OUP
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A unique voice within the nature/nurture debate, Rose's sequence of essays are a reaction to the organic reductionism of Richard Dawkins's booklet, The egocentric Gene (OUP, 1990), which insists that each one features of human existence are in our genes, and every thing arises due to common choice.
Rose argues that lifestyles will depend on the frilly net of interactions that ensue inside of cells, organisms, and ecosystems, and within which DNA has yet one half to play.
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Extra info for Lifelines: Life Beyond the Gene
Example text
Many more minuscule living creatures inhabit the surface of our body, skin and hair. Some we are conscious of, often unpleasantly so; others not. We don't normally regard them as contributing to our sense of individuality, yet deprived entirely of these other living forms which share our personal space with us, we would scarcely be able to survive. What may thus seem at one level of magnification, and for much of the time, a clear-cut division between any individual and the outside world which forms his or her environment ceases to be so the moment we look closer.
But the metaphor of homeostasis constrains our view of living systems. Lifelines are not purely homeostatic: they have a beginning at conception, and an end at death. Organisms, and indeed ecosystems, develop, mature and age. The set points of homeostatic theory are not themselves constant during this trajectory but change over time. The organism switches its own thermostat. Organisms are active players in their own fate, not simply the playthings of the gods, nature or the inevitable workings-out of replicator-driven natural selection.
One consequence has been the power of technological metaphor in biology, whereby living systems become analogized to machines (hearts as pumps, colons and bladders as sewage systems, brains as computers, immune systems as military organizations . . ) - thus reversing a much older tradition in many cultures in which the physical world too was regarded as if it were alive. It is a fun thought experiment to consider what might have happened had this tradition been maintained, and biology had developed as a modern science before physics did.
Lifelines: Life Beyond the Gene by Steven Rose
by Joseph
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