Synopses & Reviews
"The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written."
--Michel Foucault"A great story. . . . A compact encyclopedia of biology, it manages to convey, for all the weight of its content, a sense of continual excitement and wonderment."--Lewis Thomas, author of The Lives of a Cell
Review
Brilliant. . . . One thing the book reveals to the general reader is the interconnection of the development of biological ideas with the development of the rest of science and technology. -- Jeremy Bernstein, The New Yorker [A] lucid account of man's changing ideas about heredity. [It] seizes and stimulates the imagination. -- Arnold W. Ravin, Science François Jacob, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on genetics, has written an unusual and illuminating history of his discipline. It is not so much a history of science as a history of the ideas of science. -- Edward Edelson, Washington Post Book World [One of] the most important discussions yet published of the recent advances in molecular biology. . . . -- The Times Literary Supplement
Review
"Brilliant. . . . One thing the book reveals to the general reader is the interconnection of the development of biological ideas with the development of the rest of science and technology."--Jeremy Bernstein, The New Yorker
Review
"[A] lucid account of man's changing ideas about heredity. [It] seizes and stimulates the imagination."--Arnold W. Ravin, Science
Review
"François Jacob, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on genetics, has written an unusual and illuminating history of his discipline. It is not so much a history of science as a history of the ideas of science."--Edward Edelson, Washington Post Book World
Review
"[One of] the most important discussions yet published of the recent advances in molecular biology."--The Times Literary Supplement
Review
[One of] the most important discussions yet published of the recent advances in molecular biology. . . . Edward Edelson - Washington Post Book World
Review
"Franois Jacob, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on genetics, has written an unusual and illuminating history of his discipline. It is not so much a history of science as a history of the ideas of science."--Edward Edelson, Washington Post Book World
Synopsis
"The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written."--Michel Foucault
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Fran ois Jacob's The Logic of Life is a landmark book in the history of biology and science. Focusing on heredity, which Jacobs considers the fundamental feature of living things, he shows how, since the sixteenth century, the scientific understanding of inherited traits has moved not in a linear, progressive way, from error to truth, but instead through a series of frameworks. He reveals how these successive interpretive approaches--focusing on visible structures, internal structures such as cells, evolution, genes, and DNA and other molecules--each have their own power but also limitations. Fundamentally challenging how the history of biology is told, much as Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for the history of science as a whole, The Logic of Life has greatly influenced the way scientists and historians view the past, present, and future of biology.
Synopsis
In The Logic of Life François 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.
Synopsis
In The Logic of Life François 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.
Synopsis
"The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written."--
Michel Foucault"A great story. . . . A compact encyclopedia of biology, it manages to convey, for all the weight of its content, a sense of continual excitement and wonderment."--Lewis Thomas, author of The Lives of a Cell
Table of Contents
| Preface | |
| Introduction: The Programme | 1 |
1 | The Visible Structure | 19 |
| Generation | 20 |
| Deciphering Nature | 28 |
| Mechanism | 32 |
| Species | 44 |
| Preformation | 52 |
| Heredity | 67 |
2 | Organization | 74 |
| Memory and Heredity | 75 |
| The Hidden Architecture | 82 |
| Life | 88 |
| The Chemistry of Life | 92 |
| The Plan of Organization | 100 |
| The Cell | 111 |
3 | Time | 130 |
| Cataclysms | 131 |
| Transformations | 142 |
| Fossils | 152 |
| Evolution | 160 |
4 | The Gene | 178 |
| Experimentation | 180 |
| Statistical Analysis | 192 |
| The Birth of Genetics | 201 |
| The Dance of the Chromosomes | 209 |
| Enzymes | 226 |
5 | The Molecule | 247 |
| Macromolecules | 249 |
| Micro-organisms | 260 |
| The Message | 267 |
| Regulation | 279 |
| Copy and Error | 286 |
| Conclusion: The Integron | 299 |
| Notes | 325 |
| Index | 339 |