Overview
Carving Nature at its Joints? In order to map the future of biology we need to understand where we are and how we got there. Present day biology is the realization of the famous metaphor of the organism as a bete ˆ machine elaborated by Descartes in Part V of the Discours,a realization far beyond what anyone in the seventeenth century could have im- ined. Until the middle of the nineteenth century that machine was an articulated collection of macroscopic parts, a system of gears and levers moving gasses, solids, and liquids, and causing some parts of the machine to move in response to the force produced by others. Then, in the nineteenth century, two divergent changes occurred in the level at which the living machine came to be investigated. First, with the rise of chemistry and the particulate view of the composition of matter, the forces on macroscopic machine came to be understood as the ma- festation of molecular events, and functional biology became a study of molecular interactions. That is, the machine ceased to be a clock or a water pump and became an articulated network of chemical reactions. Until the ?rst third of the twentieth century this chemical view of life, as re?ected in the development of classical b- chemistry treated the chemistry of biological molecules in much the same way as for any organic chemical reaction, with reaction rates and side products that were the consequence of statistical properties of the concentrations of reactants.
Full Product Details
Author: Anouk Barberousse ,
Michel Morange ,
Thomas Pradeu
Publisher: Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
Imprint: Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
Edition: 2009 ed.
Volume: 266
Dimensions:
Width: 15.50cm
, Height: 1.20cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.980kg
ISBN: 9781402096358
ISBN 10: 1402096356
Pages: 173
Publication Date: 12 March 2009
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
From the reviews: This book includes an interesting collection of papers written by a group of first-rate philosophers and biologists. ! This book is a success as it contains worthy contributions. ! very valuable for the serious student of biology. (Davide Vecchi, Metapsychology Online Reviews, February, 2010) This book attempts a challenging integration of recent theoretical concepts in the fields of ecological-evolutionary-development. ! the appeal of this book will be mostly to biological philosophers and ! systems scientists. (A. J. J. Lynch, Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, Vol. 17, June, 2010)
From the reviews: This book includes an interesting collection of papers written by a group of first-rate philosophers and biologists. ... This book is a success as it contains worthy contributions. ... very valuable for the serious student of biology. (Davide Vecchi, Metapsychology Online Reviews, February, 2010) This book attempts a challenging integration of recent theoretical concepts in the fields of ecological-evolutionary-development. ... the appeal of this book will be mostly to biological philosophers and ... systems scientists. (A. J. J. Lynch, Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, Vol. 17, June, 2010)
