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
Imprint:   Springer
Edition:   Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st ed. 2009
Volume:   266
Dimensions:   Width: 15.50cm , Height: 1.00cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9789048181759

ISBN 10:   9048181755
Pages:   173
Publication Date:   22 October 2010
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Articulating Different Modes of Explanation: The Present Boundary in Biological Research.- Compromising Positions: The Minding\newline of Matter.- Abstractions, Idealizations, and Evolutionary Biology.- The Adequacy of Model Systems for Evo-Devo: Modeling the Formation of Organisms/ Modeling the Formation of Society.- Niche Construction in Evolution, Ecosystems and Developmental Biology.- Novelty, Plasticity and Niche Construction: The Influence of Phenotypic Variation on Evolution.- The Evolution of Complexity.- Self-Organization, Self-Assembly, and the Origin of Life.- Self-Organization and Complexity in Evolutionary Theory, or, in this Life the Bread Always Falls Jammy Side Down.

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)

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