Back to Darwin and Marx (was: Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism (fwd))

Frances Bolton (PHI) fbolton at chuma.cas.usf.edu
Mon Aug 24 06:52:34 PDT 1998


Steven Rose's book is highly recommended for anyone interested in a Marxist account of microbiology. I reviewed it in S & S--don't know if it's been published yet. The book is a $30.00 hardcover, but it's available in the Oxford U. Press catalogue on sale for $9.95. If you want to order it, the item # is 512035-3. Oxford's phone # is 1-800-230-3242.

Frances

Lifelines : Biology Beyond Determinism by Steven Rose http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195120353/darwinanddarwini/

Chapter One: Biology, Freedom, Determinism now available online at http://www.human-nature.com/books/lifelines.html

"But to study, to interpret, to understand, to explain and to predict? These are the tasks of myth-makers, magicians and, above all today, of scientists, of biologists. I am of this last category. We seek not to lose the visions provided by writers and artists, but to add to them new visions which come from the ways of knowing that biology, the science of life, opens up. These ways can show beauty also below the surface of things: in the scanning electron microscope's view of the eye of a bluebottle as much as in the flowering of a camellia; in the biochemical mechanisms that generate usable energy in the minuscule sausage-shaped mitochondria that inhabit each of our body cells, as much as in the flowing muscles of the athlete who exploits these mechanisms.

How are we to understand these multitudes of organisms, these orders-of-magnitude differences in space and time encompassed by the common definition of living forms? Humans are like, yet unlike, any other species on Earth. We have had to learn to adapt to, domesticate, subordinate, protect ourselves from or exist harmoniously with a goodly proportion of the other creatures with which we share our planet. And in doing so, to make theories about them. Every society that anthropologists have studied has developed its own theories and legends to account for life and our place within it, to interpret the great transitions that characterize our existence; the creation of new life at birth and its termination at death. In most societies' creation myths, a deity imposes order upon the confused mass of struggling life. Although our own society is no exception, we now phrase things differently, claiming to have transcended myth and replaced it with secure knowledge. For the last three hundred years, Western societies have built on and transcended their own creation myths by means of scientia, the organized investigation of the universe, made possible within the rules and by the experimental methods of natural science, and with the aid of powerful instruments designed to extend the human senses of touch, smell, taste, sight and sound."

Human-Nature.com http://www.human-nature.com



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