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Making Sense of Life
Evelyn Fox Keller
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Description for Making Sense of Life
Paperback. What do biologists want? How will we know when we have 'made sense' of life? Explanations in the biological sciences are provisional and partial, judged by criteria as heterogenous as their subject matter. This text accounts for this diversity. Num Pages: 400 pages, 5 halftones, 4 line illustrations. BIC Classification: PDA; PS. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 216 x 142 x 22. Weight in Grams: 502.
What 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.
Product Details
Publisher
Harvard University Press United States
Number of pages
400
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2003
Condition
New
Number of Pages
400
Place of Publication
Cambridge, Mass, United States
ISBN
9780674012509
SKU
V9780674012509
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1
About Evelyn Fox Keller
Evelyn Fox Keller is Professor Emerita of History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and numerous honorary degrees.
Reviews for Making Sense of Life
Making Sense of Life is about the importance of recognizing [the] tight connection between the use of language in the social domain and how it produces biological understanding ...The central arguments of Making Sense of Life are made with grace and authority. Those who are unsettled by them, and who wish to take issue with Keller, could not ask for a more accomplished and eloquent adversary.
Lisa Jardine New Scientist 20020510 Keller writes beautifully, explains exquisitely, does a really good job of showing how today's four-dimensional color gene-product-marked embryo pictures, available to all on the Web, have answered most of the old questions...and how they have generated a whole new set: about artificial life, about complex systems and emergence, about what we want to understand development for...I hope she finds a new generation of biology students, as well as historians, who'll appreciate her subtle thinking; this book makes sense of embryology at last.
Jack Cohen Biologist 20021201 Evelyn Fox Keller, once a mathematical physicist but now primarily a historian of biology, has analyzed the varied attempts of 20th-century biologists to provide an explanation for the nature and origin of life...Keller's achievement is to historicize 20th-century biological concepts, so that we can begin to see that they are not inevitable, springing directly from a realization of how nature is , but rather are culturally located, and shaped by complex social forces.
Steven Rose Lancet 20030208
Lisa Jardine New Scientist 20020510 Keller writes beautifully, explains exquisitely, does a really good job of showing how today's four-dimensional color gene-product-marked embryo pictures, available to all on the Web, have answered most of the old questions...and how they have generated a whole new set: about artificial life, about complex systems and emergence, about what we want to understand development for...I hope she finds a new generation of biology students, as well as historians, who'll appreciate her subtle thinking; this book makes sense of embryology at last.
Jack Cohen Biologist 20021201 Evelyn Fox Keller, once a mathematical physicist but now primarily a historian of biology, has analyzed the varied attempts of 20th-century biologists to provide an explanation for the nature and origin of life...Keller's achievement is to historicize 20th-century biological concepts, so that we can begin to see that they are not inevitable, springing directly from a realization of how nature is , but rather are culturally located, and shaped by complex social forces.
Steven Rose Lancet 20030208