Mapping the future of biology : evolving concepts and theories
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Mapping the future of biology : evolving concepts and theories
（Boston studies in the philosophy of science, 266）
Springer, c2009
- : hbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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 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.
Table of Contents
Foreword: Carving Nature at its Joints?
Richard Lewontin
Chapter 1: Introduction
Anouk Barberousse, Michel Morange, Thomas Pradeu
Chapter 2: Articulating Different Modes of Explanation: The Present Boundary in
Biological Research
Michel Morange
Chapter 3: Compromising Positions: The Minding of Matter
Susan Oyama
Chapter 4: Abstractions, Idealizations, and Evolutionary Biology
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Chapter 5: The Adequacy of Model Systems for Evo-Devo: Modeling the Formation Of
Organisms / Modeling the Formation Of Society
Scott F. Gilbert
Chapter 6: Niche Construction in Evolution, Ecosystems and Developmental Biology
John Odling-Smee
Chapter 7: Novelty, Plasticity and Niche Construction: The Influence of Phenotypic
Variation on Evolution
Kim Sterelny
Chapter 8: The Evolution of Complexity
Mark A. Bedau
Chapter 9: Self-Organization, Self-Assembly, and the Origin of Life
Evelyn Fox Keller
Chapter 10: Self-Organization and Complexity in Evolutionary Theory, or, In this Life
the Bread Always Falls Jammy Side Down
Michael Ruse
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