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

by Jessica Riskin

Overview

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 been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science.

The Restless Clock examines the history of this principle, banning agency, in the life sciences. It also tells the story of dissenters embracing the opposite idea: that agency is essential to nature. The story begins with the automata of early modern Europe, as models for the new science of living things, and traces questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among many others. Mechanist science, Jessica Riskin shows, had an associated theology: the argument from design, which found evidence for a designer in the mechanisms of nature. Rejecting such appeals to a supernatural God, the dissenters sought to naturalize agency rather than outsourcing it to a “divine engineer.” Their model cast living things not as passive but as active, self-making machines.

The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This history promises not only to inform such debates, but also our sense of the possibilities for what it means to engage in science—and even what it means to be alive.

Praise for The Restless Clock

“A wonderful contribution—and much needed corrective—to the history of European ideas about life and matter.” —Evelyn Fox Keller, author of The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture

“Engrossing and illuminating.” —Nature

“A sweeping survey of the search for answers to the mystery of life. Riskin writes with clarity and wit, and the breadth of her scholarship is breathtaking.” —Times Higher Education (UK)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226303086
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/22/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	119,882
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Jessica Riskin is professor of history at Stanford University and author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Read an Excerpt

The Restless Clock

A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick

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By Jessica Riskin

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2016 Jessica Riskin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30308-6

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CHAPTER 1

Machines in the Garden

Once upon a time, Sir Lancelot's castle, Joyous Guard, was a cursed and miserable place known as Dolorous Guard. Lancelot changed its name after he captured it from the evil lord Brandin of the Isles, defeating three knights of copper. The first knight stood above the castle gate, "big and sturdy, in full armour and holding a great axe in his hands." This knight, however, was easily dispatched: according to the enchantment that had placed him above the gate, he would crash to the ground when the one destined to conquer the castle first caught a glimpse of him. Lancelot gazed upon the copper knight, "big and strange," and down he obligingly crashed.

Further on, however, in the castle cemetery, Lancelot came upon two more copper knights who put up more of a fight. They guarded a door through which Lancelot had to pass to find the key to the castle's enchantments. Holding heavy steel swords, they waited to clobber anyone attempting to pass through. Unafraid, Lancelot raised his shield and leapt between the knights. One smote him on the right shoulder, breaking his shield and piercing his hauberk "so cruelly that the red blood ran down his body," but Lancelot persevered. Next, he encountered "a copper damsel, very finely cast" holding the key he sought. With it, Lancelot opened a copper chest from which thirty copper tubes emanated, releasing a whirlwind of devils. The copper damsel and knights collapsed to the ground: the enchantments were broken.

The automaton knights and damsels of Arthurian legend were accompanied by gold, silver and copper children, satyrs, archers, musicians, oracles and giants. These fictional artificial beings had plenty of real counterparts. Actual mechanical people and animals thronged the landscape of late medieval and early modern Europe, and like the fictional beings, the real automata were responsive, engaging, and frequently given to attacking human trespassers, mostly in good fun.

Automata were familiar features of daily life, originating in churches and cathedrals, and spreading from there. Jesuit missionaries carried them to China as offerings to dramatize the power of Christian Europe. Wealthy estate owners installed automata in their palaces and gardens, where they became major tourist attractions for travelers from across Europe.

Our story begins with these lifelike machines. They provided the material context for the new scientific and philosophical model of living beings as machines that would emerge around the middle of the seventeenth century. If "mechanical" subsequently came to signify passive and rote, in the age of these earlier machines, it meant no such thing. On the contrary, the automata we are about to consider exhibited a vital and even a divine agency.

Deus qua Machina

A mechanical Christ on a crucifix, known as the Rood of Grace, drew flocks of pilgrims to Boxley Abbey in Kent during the fifteenth century (see figure 1.1). This Jesus, which operated at Easter and the Ascension, "was made to move the eyes and lipps by stringes of haire." Moreover, the Rood was able

to bow down and lifte up it selfe, to shake and stirre the handes and feete, to nod the head, to rolle the eies, to wag the chaps, to bende the browes, and finally to represent to the eie, both the proper motion of each member of the body, and also a lively, expresse, and significant shew of a well contented or displeased minde: byting the lippe, and gathering a frowning, forward, and disdainful face, when it would pretend offence: and shewing a most milde, amiable, and smyling cheere and countenaunce, when it woulde seeme to be well pleased.

Before approaching the Rood for benediction, one had to undergo a test of purity administered by a remote-controlled saint:

Sainct Rumwald was the picture of a pretie Boy sainct of stone ... of it selfe short, and not seeming to be heavie: but for as much as it was wrought out of a great and weightie stone ... it was hardly to be lifted by the handes of the strongest man. Neverthelesse (such was the conveighance) by the helpe of an engine fixed to the backe thereof, it was easily prised up with the foote of him that was the keeper, and therefore, of no moment at all in the handes of such as had offered frankly: and contrariwise, by the meane of a pinne, running into a post ... it was, to such as offered faintly, so fast and unmoveable, that no force of hande might once stirre it.

Having proven your "cleane life and innocencie" at the hands of the rigged Saint Rumwald, you could proceed to the mechanized Jesus. Automaton Christs — muttering, blinking, grimacing on the Cross — were especially popular. A sixteenth-century Breton Jesus rolled his eyes and moved his lips while blood flowed from a wound in his side. At his feet, the Virgin and three attendant women gesticulated, while at the top of the Cross, a head symbolizing the Trinity glanced shiftily from side to side.

Mechanical devils were rife. Poised in sacristies, they made dreadful faces, howled, and stuck out their tongues to instill fear in the hearts of sinners. The Satan machines rolled their eyes and flailed their arms and wings; some even had moveable horns and crowns (see plate 1). One sixteenth-century life-size wooden devil burst from its cage, "horrible, twisted, horned, rolling furious eyes, sticking out a blood-red tongue, seeming to throw itself upon the spectator, spitting in his face and letting out great howls," while making an obscene gesture with its left hand. This devil was moved by a weight that also powered a set of bellows, forcing air and water through a copper tube in the neck and mouth, allowing the creature to howl and spit. A muscular, crank-operated devil with sharply pointed ears and wild eyes remains in residence at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan (see plate 2).

There were also automaton angels. In one Florentine festival, a host of these carried the soul of Saint Cecilia up to Heaven. For the feast of the Annunciation at San Felice, the fifteenth-century Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi sent the archangel Gabriel in the reverse direction in a mechanical "mandorla," an almond-shaped symbol in which two merging circles represent Heaven and earth, matter and spirit. Brunelleschi, a master of holy mechanics, mechanized Heaven too. His mechanical Paradise was "truly marvellous ... for on high a Heaven full of living and moving figures could be seen as well as countless lights, flashing on and off like lightning."

Brunelleschi was outdone in the second half of the century by Cecca (Francesco D'Angelo), who engineered Christ's Ascension at the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Here, where Christ was borne aloft on "a Mount very well made of wood" the "said Heaven was somewhat larger than that of S. Felice in Piazza." The festival planners added a second Heaven over the chief tribune, with "certain great wheels" that "moved in most beautiful order ten circles standing for the ten Heavens." These were filled with stars: little copper lamps suspended from pivots so that they would remain upright as the heavens turned. Two angels stood on a platform suspended from pulleys. They were arranged to come down and announce to Christ that he was to ascend into Heaven.

The heavenly machinery was balanced below by elaborately engineered hells. The Passion play at Valenciennes in 1547 featured a hell with a monstrous mouth that gaped open and shut, revealing devils and tormented sinners. The mechanical infernos with moving gates were accompanied by rumbling thunder and flashes of lightning, and writhing automaton demons and dragons.

A menagerie of mechanical beasts played roles in religious theater. A mechanical bear menaced David's sheep. Daniel's lions gnashed their teeth and more lions knelt before Saint Denis. Balaam's ass balked and swerved before the angel of the Lord. The serpent twined itself round the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge to proffer its apple to Eve. A wild boar tracked by hunters, a leopard that sniffed Saint André, a dromedary that wagged its head, moved its lips, and stuck out its tongue, a host of dog-and wolf-shaped devils surging up from the underworld, and serpents and dragons spewing flames from their mouths, noses, eyes, and ears rewarded the devoted spectators at the forty-day performance of the Mystère des actes des apôtres in Bourges in 1537. The machines were commissioned from local artisans, usually clockmakers.

Mechanical enactments of biblical events spread across the European landscape, during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The holy machinery was not only to be found in cities. In May 1501, an engineer in the village of Rabastens, near Toulouse, was engaged to build an endless screw that could propel the Assumption of the Virgin. The following August, the Virgin rose heavenward, attended by rotating angels, and disappeared into Paradise, its entrance hidden in clouds. Meanwhile a golden, flaming sun also rotated, carrying more angels on its rays. Another mechanical Assumption of the Virgin took place annually in Toulouse, moving in alternate years between the Eglise Notre-Dame de la Daurade and the Eglise Saint-Etienne. At home, in the region around Toulouse, children built small replicas of the Virgin elevator for the Assumption in the same way that they arranged crèches at Christmas.

The Eternal Father appeared in mechanical reenactments. In Dieppe, he loomed at the top of the Eglise Saint-Jacques, a "venerable old man" astride a cloud in an azure, star-sprinkled canopy of Heaven. Mechanical angels flew about him, flapping their wings and swinging their censers. Some played the Ave Maria in time to the organ on handbells and horns at the end of each office. After the service, the angels blew out the altar candles. At the feast of Whitsuntide, the Holy Ghost, in the form of a white dove, flew down from the main vault of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London, breathing a "most pleasant Perfume" over the congregation.

The earliest modern mechanical figures were found mostly in churches and cathedrals and exhibited religious themes. Many figures were connected to clocks, outgrowths of the Church's drive to improve timekeeping for the sake of a reformed calendar and better prediction of feast days, or with organs. A mechanical man gripping a mallet to ring the hour became a familiar sight on clock towers across Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. He went by the name "Jack" in England; "Jean" in Flanders; "Jacquemart" in France; and "Hans" in Germany. Over the next century, the bell-ringer acquired company. On the clock in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, beginning in 1499, two giant shepherds struck the hour while an angel playing a horn emerged, followed by the three Magi (see figure 1.2). The Magi bowed before the Virgin and Child and removed the crowns from their heads with one hand while using the other to extend their gifts. They then stood, replaced their crowns, and exited through an automatic door. The scene of the Magi was a common motif on church clocks, which also often included calendars indicating feast days; the positions, oppositions, and conjunctions of the stars; the signs of the zodiac; the phases of the moon; and, as in the San Marco clock, astronomical models of a Ptolemaic cosmos.

There were also roosters. Mechanical cocks crowed and flapped their wings on clocks across Europe from about the mid-fourteenth century. Perhaps the earliest, built around 1340, flapped and crowed on the hour at Cluny Abbey, near Macon. Meanwhile, an angel opened a door to bow before the Virgin; a white dove representing the Holy Spirit flew down and was blessed by the Eternal Father; and fantastic creatures emerged to stick out their tongues and roll their eyes before retreating inside the clock. Another rooster did its flapping and crowing on the town clock in Niort from about 1570. This bird presided over three separate scenes involving some forty figures. Care appeared in a window to exhort Servitude to come out and strike the hour. An automaton Gabriel enacted the Annunciation with a mechanical Mary, Holy Ghost, and Eternal Father. A mechanical choir of angels sang while their Kapellmeister, holding the music and beating time, inclined successively toward each group in the choir as its members rang their appointed carillons. Saint Peter appeared from behind a door, looked about, opened another door and, at the admonition of two children, disappeared back into his chamber to make way for the twelve Apostles. These arrived holding hammers with which they rang the hour while the children nodded their heads in time. The clock depicted a door with two automaton Hercules on either side, ready to drop their clubs on anyone who tried to enter; above them, Vulcan with his hammer also stood guard.

The Cluny, Niort, and other roosters all were outdone by the renowned Rooster of Strasbourg Cathedral. For nearly five centuries, the Strasbourg Rooster cocked its head, flapped its wings, and crowed on the hour atop the Clock of the Three Kings, originally built between 1352 and 1354, and refurbished by the clockmaker brothers Isaac and Josias Habrecht between 1540 and 1574 (see figure 1.3). Beneath the Rooster, the astrolabe turned and the Magi scene played out its familiar sequence. In the Habrecht version, the Rooster, Magi, Virgin, and Child were joined by a host of other automata: a rotation of Roman gods who indicated the day of the week; an angel who raised her wand as the hour was rung, and another who turned her hourglass on the quarter hour; a baby, a youth, a soldier, and an old man representing the four stages of life, who rang the quarter hours; and above them, a mechanical Christ came forth after the old man finished ringing the final quarter hour, but then retreated to make way for Death to strike the hour with a bone.

Apart from church clocks, the other prime spot for mechanical figures was the church organs. Organ-driven mechanical angels came in whole choirs of bustling figures, sometimes accompanied by flocks of singing birds. Automaton angels lifted horns to their mouths and played drums and carillons. At the cathedral in Beauvais, Saint Peter towered atop an organ of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century and blessed the congregation on his feast day by nodding his head and moving his eyes. Strasbourg Cathedral was hectic with mechanical activity, having automata connected to its organ as well as its clock. Three moving figures, known as Rohraffen, were attached to the strings of the organ in the late fifteenth century (where they remain): Samson opening and closing the jaws of a lion; the Herald of the village, lifting his trumpet to his lips; and the Bretzelmann (pretzel seller) in a red and black cape.

The Bretzelmann, still at Strasbourg Cathedral, has long hair and a shaggy beard, an aquiline nose, and an evil look. Set in motion, he seems to speak with great emphasis, opening and shutting his mouth while shaking his head and gesticulating with his right arm. At Pentecost, throughout the service, the Bretzelmann mocked the priest, laughing, hurling insults and coarse jokes, and singing nasty songs:

Bellowing forth profane and bawdy songs in a raucous voice accompanied by lewd gestures, [he] drowns the hymns of the people entering and mocks them in derisive pantomime, with the result that he not only turns people's devotion into discord and their lamentation into guffaws, but also hinders even the clerics singing the divine services; nay more, he causes disturbance in the divine solemnities of the masses ... [a disturbance] long abominable and detestable to the zealot for ecclesiastical, nay more, divine reverence.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Restless Clock by Jessica Riskin. Copyright © 2016 Jessica Riskin. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Introduction: Huxley’s Joke, or the Problem of Agency in Nature and Science

1 Machines in the Garden

2 Descartes among the Machines

3 The Passive Telescope or the Restless Clock

4 The First Androids

5 The Adventures of Mr. Machine

6 Dilemmas of a Self- Organizing Machine

7 Darwin between the Machines

8 The Mechanical Egg and the Intelligent Egg

9 Outside In

10 History Matters
  Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

[M]uch of the intellectual energy of the modern era has been devoted to figuring out whether the non-human world is alive or dead, active or passive, full of agency or wholly without it. Jessica Riskin’s extraordinary book The Restless Clock tells that vital and almost wholly neglected story…. The body of powerful, influential, but now utterly neglected ideas explored in The Restless Clock might illuminate for many scientists and many philosophers a few of their pervasive blind spots. ‘By recognizing the historical roots of the almost unanimous conviction (in principle if not in practice) that science must not attribute any kind of agency to natural phenomena, and recuperating the historical presence of a competing tradition, we can measure the limits of current scientific discussion, and possibly, think beyond them.’”
 

Education & Culture: A Critical Review

[Restless Clock] illustrates not only how these machines inspired modern theories of life, but also how the language we use to describe them has important consequences.…it helps us understand the backstory, and the world-altering consequences of language; it joins an important literature in calling for far greater vigilance in the metaphors we use to understand not only ourselves, but also our creations.

Los Angeles Review of Books

"[A] magisterial book...[a] careful and learned study of agency...Riskin’s book is one major intervention in a developing concern about agency."

Victorian Literature and Culture

"Riskin’s fascinating and lively book reframes the conventional narrative of the scientific revolution by tracing the passive and active strains in mechanistic philosophy. She convincingly demonstrates how the view of nature as inert passive matter was theologically based and that it contrasted with the view of nature as mechanical and active. The book made me rethink several assumptions I had about the history of what we now call biology and brought further nuance to contemporary debates about machine and organic intelligence."

The Guardian - Siri Hustvedt

"Riskin has written a lengthy, detailed, impressive monograph based on her concern over a vital paradox of science. The author begins by discussing the argument that some scientific ideas commenced with a model of nature as a clock, which God designed and produced. This argument appeared to be supported by clever automata, which medieval mechanics had developed in Christian churches. Soon there were objections to that model, and skeptics seemed to triumph with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in The Origin of Species (1859). However, there are philosophers of science who still argue that Darwin’s theory is an incomplete understanding of nature, and Riskin takes this claim very seriously. Highly recommended."

Choice

"Among the many virtues of Riskin’s book, perhaps the greatest is its tremendous scope, and its author’s remarkable ability to handle all the periods, figures, and issues in it with equal mastery."

Journal of Modern History

"Riskin’s book begins with Descartes and automata and traces the development of ideas about what animates living things up to the present. Science long ago moved away from theories about a divine clockmaker, but Riskin says some of the ideas from that period persist in surprising form. In particular, she says, atheist philosophers and scientists who regard consciousness in purely mechanistic terms, are inadvertently borrowing a schematic that, in a different time, struck people as evidence of God."

Boston Globe

"The most influential book of the past twenty years. . . . Interest in the similarities and the differences between human beings and machines goes back many centuries—and Jessica Riskin's The Restless Clock is a rich and resonant telling of that long history. . . . Riskin's sweeping survey isn’t didactic or moralizing, but it contains two vitally important lessons for us: Never bet against human ingenuity in making machines do what people once considered impossible. And never bet against human ingenuity in redefining the uniquely human such that machine-intelligence can never match our own."
 

Chronicle of Higher Education - Steven Shapin

"In The Restless Clock, Jessica Riskin brings a fresh view to the historical discourse around the use of mechanical metaphors in biological thought. Using agency as her theoretical starting point, Riskin traces a line through the last six centuries of biological thought with thorough evidence and analysis."

Isis

"Recuperating the tradition of active mechanism—the vision of an animated yet material universe—Riskin demonstrates what a powerful challenge it poses to contemporary modes of thought that claim the authority of science. Ultimately, The Restless Clock offers nothing less than an alternative way of seeing the natural world, and being in it."

The Baffler

The Restless Clock is gorgeous and erudite, full of flute-playing androids and defecating ducks, animal spirits and invisible forces. It explores the hardest problems: where does life come from, and how is it that thoughts seem to dance out of grey matter? This is a book that brings history and language to bear on contemporary science—an important thing in itself in an age where science sometimes looks set to obliterate the humanities.

Literary Review

"In this impressive cultural and intellectual narrative of the sciences of life and the techniques of mechanics, Riskin shows decisively how a richer and broader history of such sciences offers indispensable lessons for controversies surrounding agency and purpose in our understanding of the world. The Restless Clock explores fascinating projects launched by medieval churchmen and Renaissance artisans, enlightened philosophers and modern experimenters. It documents the construction of automata and experimentation in biology, the ambitions of Darwinism and of germ theory, the visions of cybernetics and of neurosciences. These stories reveal the power and importance of a tradition of living machines within the development of western sciences that has been strangely underestimated or dismissed. Its legacies today need just this kind of astute re-evaluation.

This book will become a central reference for many vital debates about the long history of life sciences and the possible futures of intelligent machines."
 

coauthor of Leviathan and the Air-Pump Simon Schaffer

"The Restless Clock is a sweeping survey of the search for answers to the mystery of life. Riskin writes with clarity and wit, and the breadth of her scholarship is breathtaking."

Times Higher Education

"Riskin uses history as a way of thinking about the world, not just as a way of getting facts about the past right. She shows us the many ways in which scholars have sought to understand those parts of the world that are material, movable and predictable, and those that are characterized by agency, passions, chance, suffering and consciousness, as well as the tricky areas where they overlap. She mobilizes powerful examples from the history of the life sciences of where and how attempts at explaining these areas have succeeded and failed. Her journey takes us everywhere in the best possible way as she probes the limits of our efforts to explain—through science and through history—how the world works inside and outside the realm of our agency, purposes and reasoning."

Times Literary Supplement

"The Restless Clock is a work of high scholarly order. Considering its chronological and thematic embrace, this study makes for a challenging scholarly undertaking. The result is both impressive and rewarding. This book is the combined product of Riskin’s penchant for meticulous research as well as her judicious choices and penetrating readings of sources. She uncovers a rich and compelling story that should interest all historians and philosophers of science as well as scientists."

Metascience

"Wide-ranging, witty, and astonishingly learned."

London Review of Books

"At the heart of this scientific and cultural history is the concept of agency—the capacity to act—in nature. Riskin reveals how two distinct interpretations emerged from the mechanical Universe of the Enlightenment: Isaac Newton’s passive version, reliant on a divine tinkerer; and Gottfried Leibniz’s, which saw life as purposeful and 'self-transforming.' Riskin’s investigation of this duality, by way of Renaissance automatons, the gestation of evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics, is engrossing and illuminating." 

Nature

"The Restless Clock unravels the history of thinking about agency in the history of modern science so as to determine how mechanism and passivity became the dominant paradigm. In this expansive work—which draws on primary sources, correspondences between intellectual radicals, and archival materials from across the Western world—Riskin expertly demonstrates not only how the principle of passivity came to dominate modern science in the first place but also how this principle has influenced contemporary science. In taking on the problem of agency as supposedly banished from modern science, she compels us to think about how agency is actually essential in and to nature. Riskin captivatingly tells the story of this “centuries-long argument” over agency with the patience, precision, and the profound depth of explanation that history demands. The Restless Clock provides a much-needed investigation of how scientific understandings of material reality have been undergirded by historical understandings and calls for more deliberate historical analysis not only in scientific work, but also in critical analyses of scientific discourse and ideology. Such a work deepens our comprehension and awareness of the taken-for-granted ideologies that underpin modern science and, subsequently, the contemporary challenges posed to it by movements such as new materialisms. The Restless Clock will become a frequent reference for anyone interested in the matter of matter."

PopMatters

"Wonderfully learned and entertaining."

Raritan - Oren Harman

"An extraordinary achievement."

Inference

"Modern biology is essentially flawed. This is the stark message that underlies the whole of Jessica Riskin’s intricately detailed, meticulously researched, and astonishingly wide-ranging book. . . . Thought-provoking and utterly engrossing."

H-Sci-Med-Tech

"There is an inherent contradiction at the heart of modern science since its inception, and [The Restless Clock] tells this story beautifully. The exclusion of 'agency' from scientific explanations has paradoxically rendered the appeal to a 'divine engineer' necessary; Riskin argues in this compelling and wide-ranging account of the history of mechanism in biological thought. . . . nothing short of a historical 'tour de force' that sheds new light on the history of mechanism and on the rise of the modern scientific worldview. Thanks to its historical breadth and depth of analysis, Riskin's ambitious book will continue to invigorate scholarship in the field of history of (life) science for decades."

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte:

"In this original and masterful book, Riskin recounts how scientists, philosophers, artists, and mechanics have wrestled with the nature of vital entities on the page and canvas, in the workshop and in stone. Here among others are Vaucanson and Kant, Descartes, Leibniz, and Darwin, defecating ducks, talking heads, and robots—giving us both the unfamiliar and the familiar in a new light, presented with deft analysis in luminous prose."

author of The Baltimore Case Daniel J. Kevles

"The Restless Clock examines more than four centuries of debate over the extent to which living beings can be understood as governed by 'mechanism,' and in the process it reorients our understanding of some of the most important themes and individuals in the Western canon during this period, including the thought of Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Lamarck, and Darwin, plus contemporaries such as Dennett, Dawkins, and Gould, among others. Riskin has written a work of tremendous intellectual scope and accomplishment."

author of The Lie Detectors Ken Alder

"This timeless fascination with the question of what it means to be living has been explored most recently be Riskin, a history professor at Stanford University. In her latest book, The Restless Clock, she moves past the previous theologically and philosophically grounded discussions and looks at these questions of autonomy through the lens of a historian....By putting forth these questions in the words of past intellectuals, Riskin engages the reader in evaluating these existential questions with respect to big-picture “processes” like evolution, artificial intelligence and epistemology."

The Tartan

"Fascinating and important."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Tita Chico

A wonderful contribution—and much needed corrective—to the history of European ideas about life and matter.

author of The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Evelyn Fox Keller

"Astonishing. The Restless Clock...has seriously altered my understanding of the last five hundred years of intellectual and cultural history, and has significantly intensified my belief that the only truly theological account of modernity is one deeply immersed in the technological history of this past half-millennium."

The New Atlantis

"Riskin's book provides an excellent strictly chronological examination of the development of two strands of mechanistic thinking since the seventeenth century. In the course of doing so she provides accessible and clearly written introductions to the central ideas of philosophers and scientists who have engaged in mechanistic thinking. Moreover, Riskin's book is a treasure trove of information about the history of machines and automata. . . . A highly valuable, clearly written, and extremely informative contribution to the literature on mechanistic science and the history of
machines and machine metaphors in the life sciences."

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences

"The Restless Clock is a work of high scholarly order. Considering its chronological and thematic embrace, this study makes for a challenging scholarly undertaking. The result is both impressive and rewarding. This book is the combined product of Riskin's penchant for meticulous research as well as her judicious choices and penetrating readings of sources. She uncovers a rich and compelling story that should interest all historians and philosophers of science as well as scientists."-- "Metascience"

"The Restless Clock is gorgeous and erudite, full of flute-playing androids and defecating ducks, animal spirits and invisible forces. It explores the hardest problems: where does life come from, and how is it that thoughts seem to dance out of grey matter? This is a book that brings history and language to bear on contemporary science--an important thing in itself in an age where science sometimes looks set to obliterate the humanities."-- "Literary Review"

"The Restless Clock examines more than four centuries of debate over the extent to which living beings can be understood as governed by 'mechanism, ' and in the process it reorients our understanding of some of the most important themes and individuals in the Western canon during this period, including the thought of Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Lamarck, and Darwin, plus contemporaries such as Dennett, Dawkins, and Gould, among others. Riskin has written a work of tremendous intellectual scope and accomplishment."-- "Ken Alder, author of The Lie Detectors"

"The Restless Clock unravels the history of thinking about agency in the history of modern science so as to determine how mechanism and passivity became the dominant paradigm. In this expansive work--which draws on primary sources, correspondences between intellectual radicals, and archival materials from across the Western world--Riskin expertly demonstrates not only how the principle of passivity came to dominate modern science in the first place but also how this principle has influenced contemporary science. In taking on the problem of agency as supposedly banished from modern science, she compels us to think about how agency is actually essential in and to nature. Riskin captivatingly tells the story of this "centuries-long argument" over agency with the patience, precision, and the profound depth of explanation that history demands. The Restless Clock provides a much-needed investigation of how scientific understandings of material reality have been undergirded by historical understandings and calls for more deliberate historical analysis not only in scientific work, but also in critical analyses of scientific discourse and ideology. Such a work deepens our comprehension and awareness of the taken-for-granted ideologies that underpin modern science and, subsequently, the contemporary challenges posed to it by movements such as new materialisms. The Restless Clock will become a frequent reference for anyone interested in the matter of matter."-- "PopMatters"

"[A] magisterial book...[a] careful and learned study of agency...Riskin's book is one major intervention in a developing concern about agency."-- "Victorian Literature and Culture"

"[M]uch of the intellectual energy of the modern era has been devoted to figuring out whether the non-human world is alive or dead, active or passive, full of agency or wholly without it. Jessica Riskin's extraordinary book The Restless Clock tells that vital and almost wholly neglected story.... The body of powerful, influential, but now utterly neglected ideas explored in The Restless Clock might illuminate for many scientists and many philosophers a few of their pervasive blind spots. 'By recognizing the historical roots of the almost unanimous conviction (in principle if not in practice) that science must not attribute any kind of agency to natural phenomena, and recuperating the historical presence of a competing tradition, we can measure the limits of current scientific discussion, and possibly, think beyond them.'"
-- "Education & Culture: A Critical Review"

"[Restless Clock] illustrates not only how these machines inspired modern theories of life, but also how the language we use to describe them has important consequences....it helps us understand the backstory, and the world-altering consequences of language; it joins an important literature in calling for far greater vigilance in the metaphors we use to understand not only ourselves, but also our creations."-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"

"A wonderful contribution--and much needed corrective--to the history of European ideas about life and matter."-- "Evelyn Fox Keller, author of The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture"

"Among the many virtues of Riskin's book, perhaps the greatest is its tremendous scope, and its author's remarkable ability to handle all the periods, figures, and issues in it with equal mastery."-- "Journal of Modern History"

"An extraordinary achievement."-- "Inference"

"Astonishing. The Restless Clock...has seriously altered my understanding of the last five hundred years of intellectual and cultural history, and has significantly intensified my belief that the only truly theological account of modernity is one deeply immersed in the technological history of this past half-millennium."-- "The New Atlantis"

"At the heart of this scientific and cultural history is the concept of agency--the capacity to act--in nature. Riskin reveals how two distinct interpretations emerged from the mechanical Universe of the Enlightenment: Isaac Newton's passive version, reliant on a divine tinkerer; and Gottfried Leibniz's, which saw life as purposeful and 'self-transforming.' Riskin's investigation of this duality, by way of Renaissance automatons, the gestation of evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics, is engrossing and illuminating." -- "Nature"

"In The Restless Clock, Jessica Riskin brings a fresh view to the historical discourse around the use of mechanical metaphors in biological thought. Using agency as her theoretical starting point, Riskin traces a line through the last six centuries of biological thought with thorough evidence and analysis."-- "Isis"

"In this impressive cultural and intellectual narrative of the sciences of life and the techniques of mechanics, Riskin shows decisively how a richer and broader history of such sciences offers indispensable lessons for controversies surrounding agency and purpose in our understanding of the world. The Restless Clock explores fascinating projects launched by medieval churchmen and Renaissance artisans, enlightened philosophers and modern experimenters. It documents the construction of automata and experimentation in biology, the ambitions of Darwinism and of germ theory, the visions of cybernetics and of neurosciences. These stories reveal the power and importance of a tradition of living machines within the development of western sciences that has been strangely underestimated or dismissed. Its legacies today need just this kind of astute re-evaluation.

This book will become a central reference for many vital debates about the long history of life sciences and the possible futures of intelligent machines."
-- "Simon Schaffer, coauthor of Leviathan and the Air-Pump"

"In this original and masterful book, Riskin recounts how scientists, philosophers, artists, and mechanics have wrestled with the nature of vital entities on the page and canvas, in the workshop and in stone. Here among others are Vaucanson and Kant, Descartes, Leibniz, and Darwin, defecating ducks, talking heads, and robots--giving us both the unfamiliar and the familiar in a new light, presented with deft analysis in luminous prose."-- "Daniel J. Kevles, author of The Baltimore Case"

"In this rich, sweeping history, Riskin explores the dialectic between mechanistic models of nature from the mid-17th century forward. The author's main interest is in the notion of "agency" or purposefulness, which has been banned from scientific discourse by the dominant brute-mechanist paradigm; struggle between models, she argues, has been going on since modern science's inception and it influences debates today in the fields of evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. The work of luminaries such as René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Charles Darwin is discussed, as well as that of contemporaries including Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould. But there are also the lesser knowns: the clockmakers, court mechanics, artisans, and their fantastic assortment of gadgets, automata, and androids that stood as models for the nascent life sciences. Riskin's accounts of these automata will come as a revelation to many readers, as she traces their history from late medieval, early Renaissance clock- and organ-driven devils and muttering Christs in churches to the robots of the post-World War II era. Fascinating on many levels, this book is accessible enough for a science-minded lay audience yet useful for students and scholars."-- "Library Journal"

"Modern biology is essentially flawed. This is the stark message that underlies the whole of Jessica Riskin's intricately detailed, meticulously researched, and astonishingly wide-ranging book. . . . Thought-provoking and utterly engrossing."-- "H-Sci-Med-Tech"

"Recuperating the tradition of active mechanism--the vision of an animated yet material universe--Riskin demonstrates what a powerful challenge it poses to contemporary modes of thought that claim the authority of science. Ultimately, The Restless Clock offers nothing less than an alternative way of seeing the natural world, and being in it."-- "The Baffler"

"Riskin has written a lengthy, detailed, impressive monograph based on her concern over a vital paradox of science. The author begins by discussing the argument that some scientific ideas commenced with a model of nature as a clock, which God designed and produced. This argument appeared to be supported by clever automata, which medieval mechanics had developed in Christian churches. Soon there were objections to that model, and skeptics seemed to triumph with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection in The Origin of Species (1859). However, there are philosophers of science who still argue that Darwin's theory is an incomplete understanding of nature, and Riskin takes this claim very seriously. Highly recommended."-- "Choice"

"Riskin uses history as a way of thinking about the world, not just as a way of getting facts about the past right. She shows us the many ways in which scholars have sought to understand those parts of the world that are material, movable and predictable, and those that are characterized by agency, passions, chance, suffering and consciousness, as well as the tricky areas where they overlap. She mobilizes powerful examples from the history of the life sciences of where and how attempts at explaining these areas have succeeded and failed. Her journey takes us everywhere in the best possible way as she probes the limits of our efforts to explain--through science and through history--how the world works inside and outside the realm of our agency, purposes and reasoning."-- "Times Literary Supplement"

"Riskin's book begins with Descartes and automata and traces the development of ideas about what animates living things up to the present. Science long ago moved away from theories about a divine clockmaker, but Riskin says some of the ideas from that period persist in surprising form. In particular, she says, atheist philosophers and scientists who regard consciousness in purely mechanistic terms, are inadvertently borrowing a schematic that, in a different time, struck people as evidence of God."-- "Boston Globe"

"Riskin's book provides an excellent strictly chronological examination of the development of two strands of mechanistic thinking since the seventeenth century. In the course of doing so she provides accessible and clearly written introductions to the central ideas of philosophers and scientists who have engaged in mechanistic thinking. Moreover, Riskin's book is a treasure trove of information about the history of machines and automata. . . . A highly valuable, clearly written, and extremely informative contribution to the literature on mechanistic science and the history of machines and machine metaphors in the life sciences."-- "History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences"

"There is an inherent contradiction at the heart of modern science since its inception, and [The Restless Clock] tells this story beautifully. The exclusion of 'agency' from scientific explanations has paradoxically rendered the appeal to a 'divine engineer' necessary; Riskin argues in this compelling and wide-ranging account of the history of mechanism in biological thought. . . . nothing short of a historical 'tour de force' that sheds new light on the history of mechanism and on the rise of the modern scientific worldview. Thanks to its historical breadth and depth of analysis, Riskin's ambitious book will continue to invigorate scholarship in the field of history of (life) science for decades."-- "Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte: "

"This timeless fascination with the question of what it means to be living has been explored most recently be Riskin, a history professor at Stanford University. In her latest book, The Restless Clock, she moves past the previous theologically and philosophically grounded discussions and looks at these questions of autonomy through the lens of a historian....By putting forth these questions in the words of past intellectuals, Riskin engages the reader in evaluating these existential questions with respect to big-picture "processes" like evolution, artificial intelligence and epistemology."-- "The Tartan"

"Wide-ranging, witty, and astonishingly learned."-- "London Review of Books"

"The Restless Clock is a sweeping survey of the search for answers to the mystery of life. Riskin writes with clarity and wit, and the breadth of her scholarship is breathtaking."-- "Times Higher Education"

"Fascinating and important."--Tita Chico "Los Angeles Review of Books"

"Riskin's fascinating and lively book reframes the conventional narrative of the scientific revolution by tracing the passive and active strains in mechanistic philosophy. She convincingly demonstrates how the view of nature as inert passive matter was theologically based and that it contrasted with the view of nature as mechanical and active. The book made me rethink several assumptions I had about the history of what we now call biology and brought further nuance to contemporary debates about machine and organic intelligence."--Siri Hustvedt "The Guardian"

From the Publisher

"At the heart of this scientific and cultural history is the concept of agency—the capacity to act—in nature. Riskin reveals how two distinct interpretations emerged from the mechanical Universe of the Enlightenment: Isaac Newton’s passive version, reliant on a divine tinkerer; and Gottfried Leibniz’s, which saw life as purposeful and 'self-transforming.' Riskin’s investigation of this duality, by way of Renaissance automatons, the gestation of evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics, is engrossing and illuminating." 

Nature Lib

“[M]uch of the intellectual energy of the modern era has been devoted to figuring out whether the non-human world is alive or dead, active or passive, full of agency or wholly without it. Jessica Riskin’s extraordinary book The Restless Clock tells that vital and almost wholly neglected story…. The body of powerful, influential, but now utterly neglected ideas explored in The Restless Clock might illuminate for many scientists and many philosophers a few of their pervasive blind spots. ‘By recognizing the historical roots of the almost unanimous conviction (in principle if not in practice) that science must not attribute any kind of agency to natural phenomena, and recuperating the historical presence of a competing tradition, we can measure the limits of current scientific discussion, and possibly, think beyond them.’”
 

Education & Culture: A Critical Review

"There is an inherent contradiction at the heart of modern science since its inception, and [The Restless Clock] tells this story beautifully. The exclusion of 'agency' from scientific explanations has paradoxically rendered the appeal to a 'divine engineer' necessary; Riskin argues in this compelling and wide-ranging account of the history of mechanism in biological thought. . . . nothing short of a historical 'tour de force' that sheds new light on the history of mechanism and on the rise of the modern scientific worldview. Thanks to its historical breadth and depth of analysis, Riskin's ambitious book will continue to invigorate scholarship in the field of history of (life) science for decades."

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte:

"In this impressive cultural and intellectual narrative of the sciences of life and the techniques of mechanics,Riskin shows decisively how a richer and broader history of such sciences offers indispensable lessons for controversies surrounding agency and purpose in our understanding of the world. The Restless Clock explores fascinating projects launched by medieval churchmen and Renaissance artisans, enlightened philosophers and modern experimenters. It documents the construction of automata and experimentation in biology, the ambitions of Darwinism and of germ theory, the visions of cybernetics and of neurosciences. These stories reveal the power and importance of a tradition of living machines within the development of western sciences that has been strangely underestimated or dismissed. Its legacies today need just this kind of astute re-evaluation.

This book will become a central reference for many vital debates about the long history of life sciences and the possible futures of intelligent machines."

University of Cambridge Simon Schaffer

01/01/2016
In this rich, sweeping history, Riskin (history, Stanford Univ.; Science in the Age of Sensibility) explores the dialectic between mechanistic models of nature from the mid-17th century forward. The author's main interest is in the notion of "agency" or purposefulness, which has been banned from scientific discourse by the dominant brute-mechanist paradigm; struggle between models, she argues, has been going on since modern science's inception and it influences debates today in the fields of evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. The work of luminaries such as René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Charles Darwin is discussed, as well as that of contemporaries including Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould. But there are also the lesser knowns: the clockmakers, court mechanics, artisans, and their fantastic assortment of gadgets, automata, and androids that stood as models for the nascent life sciences. Riskin's accounts of these automata will come as a revelation to many readers, as she traces their history from late medieval, early Renaissance clock- and organ-driven devils and muttering Christs in churches to the robots of the post-World War II era. VERDICT Fascinating on many levels, this book is accessible enough for a science-minded lay audience yet useful for students and scholars.—Robert Eagan, Windsor P.L., Ont.

Library Journal