The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick

A "wide-ranging, witty, and astonishingly learned" scientific and cultural history of the concept of the capacity to act in nature (London Review of Books).

Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always ...