A brilliant examination of how language, metaphor, and social
history shaped the progress of genetic science. Keller (Reflections
on Gender and Science, 1985) relieves us of the notion that
scientists have a superior objectivity and know what they are
doing. In three essays, she examines how genetics has been
linguistically conceived and how its language determined the
direction of almost four decades of research. Her central argument
concerns the schism that developed between molecular biology and
embryology (now called developmental biology), and how computer
science has played an important role in reintegrating the two.
Esoteric? Maybe. But Keller's story provides an important
commentary that can be applied to any field of intellectual
inquiry. She begins in the '40s, when geneticists first used the
term "gene action." This action was by no means understood. But the
assumption of the active gene (and by implication, the merely
receptive organism) left behind embryology and its tedious
experimentation with Drosophila. This simplification was the
product of a reductive society, but it also marked a necessary leap
of faith that pushed the discipline forward - progressing, however,
much like a brain without a body. Keller then shifts her focus to
the development of a scientific language for "life." This language
contained the seeds of "systems" and "organized complexity," the
metaphors of cyberscience that would eventually lead geneticists
back to embryology and other paradigms that reflect how "the
computer has reconfiured our ways of thinking about our bodies."
Keller draws on the writings of scientists who contributed to this
history, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and
physicist/philosopher Erwin Shroedinger. She simplifies
sophisticated material without sounding hollow and tackles
uncharted territory with sparkling authority. This book stands out
for its wisdom and sheer enjoyment in the progress of ideas.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Refiguring Life begins with the history of genetics and embryology,
showing how discipline-based metaphors have directed scientists'
search for evidence. Keller continues with an exploration of the
border traffic between biology and physics, focusing on the
question of life and the law of increasing entropy. In a final
section she traces the impact of new metaphors, born of the
computer revolution, on the course of biological research. Keller
shows how these metaphors began as objects of contestation between
competing visions of the life sciences, how they came to be recast
and appropriated by already established research agendas, and how
in the process they ultimately came to subvert those same agendas.
Refiguring Life explains how the metaphors and machinery of
research are not merely the products of scientific discovery but
actually work together to map out the territory along which new
metaphors and machines can be constructed. Through their dynamic
interaction, Keller points out, they define the realm of the
possible in science. Drawing on a remarkable spectrum of
theoretical work ranging from Schroedinger to French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan, Refiguring Life fuses issues already prominent in
the humanities and social sciences with those in the physical and
natural sciences, transgressing disciplinary boundaries to offer a
broad view of the natural sciences as a whole. Moving gracefully
from genetics to embryology, from physics to biology, from
cyberscience to molecular biology, Evelyn Fox Keller demonstrates
that scientific inquiry cannot pretend to stand apart from the
issues and concerns of the larger society in which it exists.
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