Barberousse / Morange / Renn Mapping the Future of Biology

Evolving Concepts and Theories
1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4020-9636-5
Verlag: Springer Netherland
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 266, 178 Seiten, eBook

Reihe: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science

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.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Renn, Jürgen

Gavroglu, Kostas

Barberousse, Anouk

Morange, Michel

Pradeu., Thomas

Pradeu, Thomas

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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.