Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and MachinesWhat do biologists want? If, unlike their counterparts in physics, biologists are generally wary of a grand, overarching theory, at what kinds of explanation do biologists aim? How will we know when we have made sense of life? Such questions, Evelyn Fox Keller suggests, offer no simple answers. Explanations in the biological sciences are typically provisional and partial, judged by criteria as heterogeneous as their subject matter. It is Keller's aim in this bold and challenging book to account for this epistemological diversity--particularly in the discipline of developmental biology. In particular, Keller asks, what counts as an explanation of biological development in individual organisms? Her inquiry ranges from physical and mathematical models to more familiar explanatory metaphors to the dramatic contributions of recent technological developments, especially in imaging, recombinant DNA, and computer modeling and simulations. A history of the diverse and changing nature of biological explanation in a particularly charged field, Making Sense of Life draws our attention to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural components of what biologists mean, and what they understand, when they propose to explain life. |
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This a great book, but a TERRIBLE ebook: no picture, no formula, no reference. And a quirky systematic typo: the combination of the two letter fi is rendered 'a' . So the word "find"becomes "and", "fit"becomes "at".
EFK is one of our great intellectuals...
Contents
| 1 | |
| 11 | |
| 15 | |
| 50 | |
| 79 | |
Genes and Developmental Narratives | 113 |
4 Genes Gene Action and Genetic Programs | 123 |
5 Taming the Cybernetic Metaphor | 148 |
Understanding Development with Computers Recombinant DNA and Molecular Imaging | 199 |
7 The Visual Culture of Molecular Embryology | 205 |
8 New Roles for Mathematical and Computational Modeling | 234 |
9 Synthetic Biology ReduxComputer Simulation and Artificial Life | 265 |
Understanding Development | 295 |
Notes | 305 |
References | 351 |
Index | 382 |
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Common terms and phrases
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Popular passages
Page 320 - But yet, if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment, and so indeed are perfect cheat...
Page 234 - Conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide Hereafter; when they come to model heaven And calculate the stars, how they will wield The mighty frame! how build, unbuild, contrive To save appearances; how gird the sphere With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er, Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb...
Page 50 - The study of form may be descriptive merely, or it may become analytical. We begin by describing the shape of an object in the simple words of common speech: we end by defining it in the precise language of mathematics; and the one method tends to follow the other in strict scientific order and historical continuity. . . . The mathematical definition of a "form...
Page 50 - Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean the universe - which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.
Page 98 - The attempt which I then made to imagine a working model of this mechanism must be taken for no more than it really is, a demonstration that mechanism may be imagined capable of producing a connexion mechanically equivalent to the actual connexion of the parts of the electromagnetic field.
Page 70 - Weismann and others speak, of an "hereditary substance," a substance which is split off from the parent-body, and which hands on to the new generation the characteristics of the old, we can only justify our mode of speech by the assumption that that particular portion of matter is the essential vehicle of a particular charge or distribution of energy, in which is involved the capability of producing motion, or of doing "work...
Page 124 - Between the characters, that furnish the data for the theory and the postulated genes, to which the characters are referred, lies the whole field of embryonic development. The theory of the gene, as here formulated, states nothing with respect to the way in which the genes are connected with the end-product or character.
Page 173 - Mihi a docto doctore Domandatur causam et rationem quare Opium facit dormire? A quoi respondeo Quia est in eo Virtus dormitiva, Cujus est natura Sensus assoupire.
Bibliographic information
| Title | Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines |
| Authors | Evelyn Fox KELLER, Evelyn Fox Keller |
| Edition | reprint |
| Publisher | Harvard University Press, 2009 |
| ISBN | 0674039440, 9780674039445 |
| Length | 400 pages |
| Subjects | › › Science / Life Sciences / Biochemistry Science / Life Sciences / Biology |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |