When you consider that it once took such wild unlikelihoods as a
pig-headed sheep to evoke an explanation of biological inheritance,
you begin to see the potential fascination of the subject. Jacob,
who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for medicine with Jacques Monod,
fulfills that potential on a grand scale, combining something of
the popular liveliness of a book like Rats, Lice and History with
the serious thematic and contextual approach that earmarks the best
recent intellectual history - for that really is what he is
writing. The evolution of the 16th century concept of "generation"
into our present molecular understanding of heredity is taken as a
demonstration of the processes of thought as a cultural and
historical phenomenon, which will be accelerated along some lines
and inhibited in others according to the devices available at any
given time. Thus, instead of isolating ancestral ideas, Jacob
concentrates on the acquisition, over four centuries, of a suitable
intellectual apparatus (mechanical apparatus is relegated to the
background) - classification, methods of analysis and
experimentation, and, most especially, potentiating theories, which
were shared among all the sciences and responsive to suggestions
from society at large, 19th-century horticulture and statistical
physics, for example, proving more important in the long run than,
say, Lamark and his premonitory ilk. The main theoretical
tributaries, and their inherent obstacles, are discussed in more or
less chronological lectures, which are perhaps the most exquisite
application to date of Kuhn's paradigm of scientific revolutions.
This is not for beginners, but near-beginners and sophisticates
both will propel themselves through provided they have any interest
at all in culture, history or science, and not necessarily in
genetics. Notes. (Kirkus Reviews)
In "The Logic of Life" Francois Jacob looks at the way our
understanding of biology has changed since the sixteenth century.
He describes four fundamental turning points in the perception of
the structure of living things: the discoveries of the functions of
organs, cells, chromosomes and genes, and DNA."
General
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