Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines / Edition 1

by Evelyn Fox Keller

Overview

What do biologists want? If, unlike their counterparts in physics, biologists are generally wary of a grand, overarching theory, at what kinds of explanation do biologists aim? How will we know when we have “made sense” of life? Such questions, Evelyn Fox Keller suggests, offer no simple answers. Explanations in the biological sciences are typically provisional and partial, judged by criteria as heterogeneous as their subject matter. It is Keller’s aim in this bold and challenging book to account for this epistemological diversity—particularly in the discipline of developmental biology.

In particular, Keller asks, what counts as an “explanation” of biological development in individual organisms? Her inquiry ranges from physical and mathematical models to more familiar explanatory metaphors to the dramatic contributions of recent technological developments, especially in imaging, recombinant DNA, and computer modeling and simulations.

A history of the diverse and changing nature of biological explanation in a particularly charged field, Making Sense of Life draws our attention to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural components of what biologists mean, and what they understand, when they propose to explain life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674012509
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/31/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Evelyn Fox Keller was Professor Emerita of History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and numerous honorary degrees.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE Models: Explaining Development without the Help of Genes

1. Synthetic Biology and the Origin of Living Form

2. Morphology as a Science of Mechanical Forces

3. Untimely Births of a Mathematical Biology

PART TWO Metaphors: Genes and Developmental Narratives

4. Genes, Gene Action, and Genetic Programs

5. Taming the Cybernetic Metaphor

6. Positioning Positional Information

PART THREE Machines: Understanding Development with Computers, Recombinant DNA, and Molecular Imaging

7. The Visual Culture of Molecular Embryology

8. New Roles for Mathematical and Computational Modeling

9. Synthetic Biology Redux-Computer Simulation and Artificial Life

Conclusion: Understanding Development

Notes

References

Index

What People are Saying About This

A terrific book full of thought-provoking and original ideas and observations. Keller's discussion of "explanation" in the life sciences is easily one of the very best and most interesting treatments of this topic that I have ever read.

Jim Woodward

A terrific book full of thought-provoking and original ideas and observations. Keller's discussion of "explanation" in the life sciences is easily one of the very best and most interesting treatments of this topic that I have ever read.
— Jim Woodward, J.O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of the Humanities, California Institute of Technology

Editorial Reviews

A terrific book full of thought-provoking and original ideas and observations. Keller’s discussion of ‘explanation’ in the life sciences is easily one of the very best and most interesting treatments of this topic that I have ever read.

Jim Woodward

Evelyn Fox Keller, once a mathematical physicist but now primarily a historian of biology, has analyzed the varied attempts of 20th-century biologists to provide an explanation for the nature and origin of life… Keller’s achievement is to historicize 20th-century biological concepts, so that we can begin to see that they are not inevitable, springing directly from a realization of ‘how nature is’, but rather are culturally located, and shaped by complex social forces.

Steven Rose

Keller writes beautifully, explains exquisitely, does a really good job of showing how today’s four-dimensional color gene-product-marked embryo pictures, available to all on the Web, have answered most of the old questions…and how they have generated a whole new set: about artificial life, about complex systems and emergence, about what we want to understand development for… I hope she finds a new generation of biology students, as well as historians, who’ll appreciate her subtle thinking; this book makes sense of embryology at last.

Biologist - Jack Cohen

Making Sense of Life is about the importance of recognizing [the] tight connection between the use of language in the social domain and how it produces biological ‘understanding’… The central arguments of Making Sense of Life are made with grace and authority. Those who are unsettled by them, and who wish to take issue with Keller, could not ask for a more accomplished and eloquent adversary.

New Scientist - Lisa Jardine

Evelyn Fox Keller, once a mathematical physicist but now primarily a historian of biology, has analyzed the varied attempts of 20th-century biologists to provide an explanation for the nature and origin of life...Keller's achievement is to historicize 20th-century biological concepts, so that we can begin to see that they are not inevitable, springing directly from a realization of "how nature is", but rather are culturally located, and shaped by complex social forces.
— Steven Rose

Lancet

Keller writes beautifully, explains exquisitely, does a really good job of showing how today's four-dimensional color gene-product-marked embryo pictures, available to all on the Web, have answered most of the old questions...and how they have generated a whole new set: about artificial life, about complex systems and emergence, about what we want to understand development for...I hope she finds a new generation of biology students, as well as historians, who'll appreciate her subtle thinking; this book makes sense of embryology at last.
— Jack Cohen

Biologist

Making Sense of Life is about the importance of recognizing [the] tight connection between the use of language in the social domain and how it produces biological "understanding"...The central arguments of Making Sense of Life are made with grace and authority. Those who are unsettled by them, and who wish to take issue with Keller, could not ask for a more accomplished and eloquent adversary.
— Lisa Jardine

New Scientist

The Barnes & Noble Review
Now that we find ourselves in the post-genomic era, are we ready to tackle the question, What is life? Perhaps we are, Evelyn Fox Keller suggests in this thoughtful and timely book, but first we must understand what we are asking and what we expect from any satisfactory answer.

How do biologists make sense of what they are seeing? Keller, a noted historian and philosopher of science, takes a historical approach to this question, demonstrating that the ways in which biologists have attempted to explain life have varied according to their needs and what she calls their epistemological values. This is most evident in the area of embryogenesis, which has seen many theories applied in an attempt to understand how a life begins and how its development is directed. Indeed, a central concern of this book is the role that theory plays in biology, where theory is by no means the lofty instigator of experimental activity that it is in physics. Biology is messy and contingent. Biologists study individual organisms or their individual parts, not expecting to uncover simple laws to which all of life must, by logical necessity, conform. Yet, through their use of models, metaphors, and machines, they do incorporate theoretical elements into their explanations. Dividing the book into three parts, Keller takes a close look at some of these models, metaphors, and machines, including the early material and mathematical models of growth and form; the extended metaphor of the gene that has dominated 20th-century biology; and the extraordinary advances in imaging that have recently brought the living cell into view, in real time, undisturbed and uninterrupted. All of these devices have produced what Keller calls epistemic mutations -- shifts in the language, assumptions, and explanatory needs of scientists. Have they finally brought us to a point where we might answer the big question? Or have they, by parsing the boundary between life and non-life with increasing refinement, dissolved it altogether? (Amy Bianco)

bn.com

Keller (The Century of the Gene), professor of history and philosophy of science at MIT, analyzes the history of developmental biology. She explains the type of information scientists have accepted, why changes in acceptance may occur and, on a broader scale, what it means to understand the natural world. Models we now view as scientifically absurd held sway a mere century ago, while others, based on mathematics and visualized on computers but devoid of any confirmation from a biology laboratory, have now captured many imaginations. Keller shows that biology, like all of the sciences, is influenced by many factors: "Both what counts as knowledge and what we mean by knowing depend on the kinds of data we are able to acquire, on the ways in which those data are gathered, and on the forms in which they are represented." While Keller's prose is graceful and informed, her thesis is complex and unlikely to be fully appreciated by those without significant grounding in philosophy and biology. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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