The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity

by François Jacob, Betty E. Spillmann

Overview

“The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written.”—Michel Foucault

Nobel Prize–winning scientist François Jacob’s The Logic of Life is a landmark book in the history of biology and science. 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 approaches—focusing on visible structures, internal structures (especially cells), evolution, genes, and DNA and other molecules—each have their own power but also limitations. Fundamentally challenging how the history of biology is told, much as Thomas Kuhn’s 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691000428
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/09/1993
Series:	Princeton Science Library Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

François Jacob (1920–2013) was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1965 and was one of the world’s leading molecular biologists.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Programme 1

1 The Visible Structure 19

Generation 20

Deciphering Nature 28

Mechanism 32

Species 44

Preformation 52

Heredity 67

2 Organization 74

Memory and Heredity 75

The Hidden Architecture 82

Life 88

The Chemistry of Life 92

The Plan of Organization 100

The Cell 111

3 Time 130

Cataclysms 131

Transformations 142

Fossils 152

Evolution 160

4 The Gene 178

Experimentation 180

Statistical Analysis 192

The Birth of Genetics 201

The Dance of the Chromosomes 209

Enzymes 226

5 The Molecule 247

Macromolecules 249

Micro-organisms 260

The Message 267

Regulation 279

Copy and Error 286

Conclusion: The Integron 299

Notes 325

Index 339

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"A great story. . . . A compact encyclopedia of biology, it manages to convey, for all the weight of its content, a sense of continual excitement and wonderment."—Lewis Thomas, author of The Lives of a Cell

Lewis Thomas

A great story. . . . A compact encyclopedia of biology, it manages to convey, for all the weight of its content, a sense of continual excitement and wonderment.
— Lewis Thomas, author of "The Lives of a Cell"

Michel Foucault

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

Editorial 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

"

[A] lucid account of man’s changing ideas about heredity. . . . It seizes and stimulates the imagination.

"—-Arnold W. Ravin, Science

"An unusual and illuminating history."—-Edward Edelson, Washington Post Book World

From the Publisher

"[One of] the most important discussions yet published of the recent advances in molecular biology."

The Times Literary Supplement

François Jacob, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on genetics, has written an unusual and illuminating history of his discipline. It is not so much a history of science as a history of the ideas of science.

Washington Post Book World - Edward Edelson

[A] lucid account of man's changing ideas about heredity. [It] seizes and stimulates the imagination.

Science - Arnold W. Ravin

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.

The New Yorker - Jeremy Bernstein

François Jacob, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on genetics, has written an unusual and illuminating history of his discipline. It is not so much a history of science as a history of the ideas of science.
— Edward Edelson

Washington Post Book World

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

The New Yorker

[A] lucid account of man's changing ideas about heredity. [It] seizes and stimulates the imagination.
— Arnold W. Ravin

Science