Restless Clock - A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things TickPaperback
Restless Clock - A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things TickPaperback Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not…
Specifikacia Restless Clock - A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things TickPaperback
Restless Clock - A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things TickPaperback
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. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true.
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. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. 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,