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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.
List of contents
Preface 1The Visible Structure Generation Deciphering Nature Mechanism Species Preformation Heredity 2Organization Memory and Heredity The Hidden Architecture Life The Chemistry of Life The Plan of Organization The Cell 3Time Cataclysms Transformations Fossils Evolution 4The Gene Experimentation Statistical Analysis The Birth of Genetics The Dance of the Chromosomes Enzymes 5The Molecule Macromolecules Micro-organisms The Message Regulation Copy and Error Conclusion: The Integron Notes Index
About the author
François Jacob (1920-2013) was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1965 and was one of the world's leading molecular biologists.
Summary
“The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written.”—Michel Foucault
Nobel Prize–winning scientist François Jacob’s The Logic of Life is a landmark book in the history of biology and science. Focusing on heredity, which Jacob 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 (especially 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.
Additional text
"An unusual and illuminating history."---Edward Edelson, Washington Post Book World
