By Evelyn Fox Keller
What do biologists wish? If, not like their opposite numbers in physics, biologists are in general cautious of a grand, overarching conception, at what varieties of rationalization do biologists goal? How can we be aware of once we have "made sense" of lifestyles? Such questions, Evelyn Fox Keller indicates, supply no basic solutions. motives within the organic sciences are usually provisional and partial, judged by means of standards as heterogeneous as their subject material. it truly is Keller's goal during this daring and difficult e-book to account for this epistemological diversity--particularly within the self-discipline of developmental biology.
particularly, Keller asks, what counts as an "explanation" of organic improvement in person organisms? Her inquiry levels from actual and mathematical types to extra known explanatory metaphors to the dramatic contributions of modern technological advancements, specifically in imaging, recombinant DNA, and laptop modeling and simulations.
A background of the varied and altering nature of organic clarification in a very charged box, Making experience of Life attracts our consciousness to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural parts of what biologists suggest, and what they comprehend, after they suggest to provide an explanation for existence.
(20020510)
Read Online or Download Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines PDF
Similar science books
A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion: The Essential Scientific by Stephen Hawking PDF
With observation through the best physicist of our time, Stephen Hawking, this anthology has garnered extraordinary experiences. PW has known as it "a gem of a collection" whereas New Scientist journal notes the "thrill of examining Einstein's personal phrases. " From the writings that exposed the well-known concept of Relativity, to different papers that shook the clinical global of the twentieth century, A Stubbornly chronic phantasm belongs in each technological know-how fan's library.
New PDF release: Agroforestry - The Future of Global Land Use (Advances in
This quantity includes a strong physique of the present kingdom of information at the numerous subject matters and actions in agroforestry around the world. it really is equipped into 3 sections: the advent part includes the summaries of six keynote speeches on the second international Congress of Agroforestry held in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2009; that's via sections of peer-reviewed thematic chapters grouped as “Global Perspectives” (seven chapters) and “Regional Perspectives” (eleven chapters), authored by way of specialist leaders of their respective agroforestry-related fields around the world.
The three-volume set LNCS 5101-5103 constitutes the refereed court cases of the eighth overseas convention on Computational technology, ICCS 2008, held in Krakow, Poland in June 2008. The 167 revised papers of the most convention song offered including the abstracts of seven keynote talks and the a hundred revised papers from 14 workshops have been conscientiously reviewed and chosen for inclusion within the 3 volumes.
- Thirst for Power: Energy, Water, and Human Survival
- Freedom Evolves
- Newton: A Very Short Introduction
- The Drake Equation: Estimating the Prevalence of Extraterrestrial Life Through the Ages (Cambridge Astrobiology, Volume 8)
- Teachers’ Learning: Stories of Science Education
Additional info for Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines
Sample text
32 For the most part, English and American reviewers were noticeably more sympathetic, even if they were a bit uncertain as to whether this was biology or not. Bashford Dean, a biologist at Columbia University, reviewed the 1910 book for Science, and although he begins by suggesting that “analogy” would be a more appropriate word for the title of Leduc’s book than “theory,” he is inclined to give the author a great deal of credit, if only for reminding us of the still unsolved problem that lies at the foundation of biology.
Despite numerous successes in identifying the physical and chemical basis of vital phenomena, the processes that were then seen as most basic to organismic life—growth and reproduction, and perhaps especially morphogenesis and development—appeared totally resistant to physicalist explanation. Faced with this question, Leduc’s efforts were far from silly: while they may not have been useful in identifying the actual physical basis of such phenomena, at the very least they 48 l MAKING SENSE OF LIFE demonstrated that purely physical dynamics could, in principle, give rise to processes so similar as to void the most obvious complaint.
Furthermore, other questions—especially questions about the mechanism of heredity—had come to take center stage, and to these questions Leduc’s method could contribute nothing at all. One last point, and it is to note the frequency with which such descriptors as marvelous, wonderful, spectacular, strange, and amazing were employed by Leduc and his readers. Indeed, even Leduc’s detractors’ insistence that his creations bore no greater resemblance to actual organisms than that between “a live person and his marble image” summons forth, merely by the invocation of entrenched myths and literary motifs in which statues do come to life (or in which living beings are turned to stone), the very sense of wonder these critics wished to squelch.
Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines by Evelyn Fox Keller
by Richard
4.5