The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity

(Paperback)

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Description

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 approachesfocusing on visible structures, internal structures (especially cells), evolution, genes, and DNA and other moleculeseach have their own power but also limitations. Fundamentally challenging how the history of biology is told, much as Thomas Kuhns 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.

'The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written.' Michel Foucault

'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, New Yorker

Reviews

"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, New Yorker
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[A] lucid account of mans changing ideas about heredity. . . . It seizes and stimulates the imagination.

Author Bio

Franois Jacob (19202013) was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1965 and was one of the worlds leading molecular biologists.