Refiguring life

Description

Refiguring Life begins with the history of genetics and embryology, showing how discipline-based metaphors have directed scientists' search for evidence. Keller continues with an exploration of the border traffic between biology and physics, focusing on the question of life and the law of increasing entropy. In a final section she traces the impact of new metaphors, born of the computer revolution, on the course of biological research. Keller shows how these metaphors began as objects of contestation between competing visions of the life sciences, how they came to be recast and appropriated by already established research agendas, and how in the process they ultimately came to subvert those same agendas. Refiguring Life explains how the metaphors and machinery of research are not merely the products of scientific discovery but actually work together to map out the territory along which new metaphors and machines can be constructed. Through their dynamic interaction, Keller points out, they define the realm of the possible in science. Drawing on a remarkable spectrum of theoretical work ranging from Schroedinger to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Refiguring Life fuses issues already prominent in the humanities and social sciences with those in the physical and natural sciences, transgressing disciplinary boundaries to offer a broad view of the natural sciences as a whole. Moving gracefully from genetics to embryology, from physics to biology, from cyberscience to molecular biology, Evelyn Fox Keller demonstrates that scientific inquiry cannot pretend to stand apart from the issues and concerns of the larger society in which it exists.

First Sentence

A belief long standing among geneticists (and one that has acquired greater currency in recent years for the public at large) is that genes are the primary agents of life: they are the fundamental units of biological analysis; they cause the development of biological traits; and the ultimate goal of biological science is the understanding of how they act.

Excerpt

A belief long standing among geneticists (and one that has acquired greater currency in recent years for the public at large) is that genes are the primary agents of life: they are the fundamental units of biological analysis; they cause the development of biological traits; and the ultimate goal of biological science is the understanding of how they act.

Subjects

Series Statement

• The Wellek Library lecture series at the University of California, Irvine

Other Editions

• Refiguring life: metaphors of twentieth-century biologyColumbia University Press1995-01-01
• Refiguring LifePaperbackColumbia University Press1996-04-15
• Refiguring lifeColumbia University Press1999-01-01