Publishers Weekly
01/13/2020
Haig, a Harvard biology professor, debuts with an expansive, if sometimes impenetrable, exploration of deep questions about the meaning of life. His main goal “is to explain how a physical world of matter in motion, of material and efficient causes, gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning.” Along the way, he argues that meaning arises from interpretation of data, regardless of whether the data resides in DNA or a line of poetry, and that “an appreciation of this continuum of meaningful interpretation will help to reunite the humanities and sciences in a continuum of intellectual endeavor.” This conciliation depends upon his likely to be contentious assertion that biologists must “incorporate subjectivity into their objective understanding of living things.” To discuss biology, Haig focuses on research into natural selection and provides details of cutting-edge work—which, unfortunately, only specialists will fully understand. His discussions of philosophy and literature are similarly forbidding. Haig does evince, however, an inviting sense of wit in his writing (a footnote to his reference to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave reads simply “This is my footnote to Plato”). Nonetheless, the audience for a book of this breadth and depth will not be vast. (May)
From the Publisher
"A challenging though rewarding exploration of the meaning and purpose of life."—Kirkus Reviews
"What, Haig asks, is the teleological purpose of consciousness? In the case of human beings, our consciousness is designed to interpret, through an evolved instinct of sympathy, the subjective attitudes and intentions of others."—CHOICE
“David Haig's powerful mind and trenchant wit are fully matched by his caring heart and his gracious style. I shall be recommending this book to my students, giving it to my friends, and sampling it repeatedly.”—Stephen C. Stearns, Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University; author of Evolutionary Medicine
Haig's book could be a game-changer in the fraught relation between the biological sciences and philosophy. Its intriguing moral may be his dauntingly scientific first thirteen chapters legitimize and actually call for the kind of philosophical thinking that his last chapters unabashedly exemplify.”—Richard Schacht, Jubilee Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus), University of Illinois
In this profound and witty book, David Haig rediscovers Aristotle's four causes and tackles the foundations of biology and philosophy (and their joint history). He offers a subtle yet far-reaching, reinterpretation of genetics, culture, and the nature and meaning of meaning. Read it; he writes, and rewrites, all of us.”—Eric Schliesser, Professor, Political Science, University of Amsterdam, and Visiting Scholar, Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy, Chapman University
Kirkus Reviews
2020-02-09
Of Mendelian demons, genetic catalysis, and other evolutionary matters having to do with why we’re here.
We are born, we grow up, and we die. If we have fulfilled our biological mandate, we produce others who do the same. Is that all there is? Biologists have long shied away from the question of whether life has meaning. For instance, writes Harvard evolutionary biology professor Haig, the great scholar Ernst Mayr dismissed early efforts as “impoverished and inadequate for understanding the living world.” Charles Darwin provided a framework for that understanding with his evolutionary theories, though, especially natural selection. Haig explores ideas from Aristotle to Richard Dawkins, examining teleological questions that seek answers for the “end” of why we live and what we live for. The author accomplishes this with, among other avenues, a detailed exploration of how genes work. Sometimes his explanations are resoundingly clear, as when he likens organismal behavior, made up of the interactions between “the historical individuals we identify as organisms and the historical individuals I have called strategic genes,” to the relationship between a nation and its citizens. At other times, it helps to have some background in modern biology and its concepts and language, as when he writes, “bacterial recombination involves the formation and dissolution of partnerships between coreplicons or the substitution of one gene for another in a process that has clear winners and losers.” Winning and losing are part of the whole process of evolution but not all of it. As Haig writes, departing from that terminology to add a fresh concept to the mix, “fitness is the telos of our genetic adaptations, but each passion has a proximate telos toward which it cajoles us to action.” That is to say, when we’re hungry, we seek food—and, according to other moods, sex, fame, and the like, a comprehensible notion made all the richer by Haig’s capable layering of more complex ideas. Daniel Dennett provides the foreword.
A challenging though rewarding exploration of the meaning and purpose of life.
