Books > Medicine > Nursing & ancillary services > Biomedical engineering
|
Buy Now
From Darwin to Derrida - Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R799
Discovery Miles 7 990
|
|
From Darwin to Derrida - Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life (Hardcover)
Series: The MIT Press
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
|
How the meaningless process of natural selection produces
purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. In From Darwin to
Derrida, evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical
world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose
and meaning. Natural selection, a process without purpose, gives
rise to purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. The key to
this, Haig proposes, is the origin of mutable "texts"-genes-that
preserve a record of what has worked in the world. These texts
become the specifications for the intricate mechanisms of living
beings. Haig draws on a wide range of sources-from Laurence
Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power
of Judgment to the work of Jacques Derrida to the latest findings
on gene transmission, duplication, and expression-to make his
argument. Genes and their effects, he explains, are like eggs and
chickens. Eggs exist for the sake of becoming chickens and chickens
for the sake of laying eggs. A gene's effects have a causal role in
determining which genes are copied. A gene (considered as a lineage
of material copies) persists if its lineage has been consistently
associated with survival and reproduction. Organisms can be
understood as interpreters that link information from the
environment to meaningful action in the environment. Meaning, Haig
argues, is the output of a process of interpretation; there is a
continuum from the very simplest forms of interpretation,
instantiated in single RNA molecules near the origins of life, to
the most sophisticated. Life is interpretation-the use of
information in choice.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.