Name: Making Sense of Life
ISBN: 9780674012509

Making Sense of Life

Publisher's description: What do biologists want? If, unlike their counterparts in physics, biologists are generally wary of a grand, overarching theory, at what kinds of explanation do biologists aim? How will we know when we have "made sense" of life? Such questions, Evelyn Fox Keller suggests, offer no simple answers. Explanations in the biological sciences are typically provisional and partial, judged by criteria as heterogeneous as their subject matter. It is Keller's aim in this bold and challenging book to account for this epistemological diversity--particularly in the discipline of developmental biology. In particular, Keller asks, what counts as an "explanation" of biological development in individual organisms? Her inquiry ranges from physical and mathematical models to more familiar explanatory metaphors to the dramatic contributions of recent technological developments, especially in imaging, recombinant DNA, and computer modeling and simulations. A history of the diverse and changing nature of biological explanation in a particularly charged field, Making Sense of Life draws our attention to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural components of what biologists mean, and what they understand, when they propose to explain life.

What Hacker News says

sethammonsDec 2021

For me, I had a lot of life changes, dramatically for the better, and it was hard. I recommend the book Transitions, Making Sense of Life's Changes. It helped me understand and think about change in a new way and to embrace the in-between when something ends before something else begins.

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jboynycAug 2019

I doubt there's much desire around here to argue the merits of gender studies in good faith. However, those proclaiming that gender scholarship doesn't get biology, I suggest you pick up Evelyn Fox Keller's excellent book Making Sense of Life (HUP, 2002) and allow yourselves to be surprised.

(Yes, Keller is a physicist, not a biologist. Those trying to belittle or dismiss what women's studies has accomplished will probably use that to disqualify her contribution...)

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jboynycMar 2014

A great book on the general context of what counts as an explanation in biology -- and, by extension, why the mathematical biological approach advanced by Turing never really caught on -- is presented in Evelyn Fox Keller's Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines (Harvard U.P., 2003). A short version of the argument is presented in this article from Project Syndicate: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/biology-s-clash-...

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