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Refiguring Life
Refiguring Life begins with the history of genetics and embryology, showing how discipline-based metaphors have directed scientists' search for evidence. Keller continues with an exploration of the border traffic between biology and physics, focusing on the question of life and the law of increasing entropy.
In a final section she traces the impact of new metaphors, born of the computer revolution, on the course of biological research. Keller shows how these metaphors began as objects of contestation between competing visions of the life sciences, how they came to be recast and appropriated by already established research agendas, and how in the process they ultimately came to subvert those same agendas.
Refiguring Life explains how the metaphors and machinery of research are not merely the products of scientific discovery but actually work together to map out the territory along which new metaphors and machines can be constructed. Through their dynamic interaction, Keller points out, they define the realm of the possible in science.
Drawing on a remarkable spectrum of theoretical work ranging from Schroedinger to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Refiguring Life fuses issues already prominent in the humanities and social sciences with those in the physical and natural sciences, transgressing disciplinary boundaries to offer a broad view of the natural sciences as a whole.
Moving gracefully from genetics to embryology, from physics to biology, from cyberscience to molecular biology, Evelyn Fox Keller demonstrates that scientific inquiry cannot pretend to stand apart from the issues and concerns of the larger society in which it exists.
In a final section she traces the impact of new metaphors, born of the computer revolution, on the course of biological research. Keller shows how these metaphors began as objects of contestation between competing visions of the life sciences, how they came to be recast and appropriated by already established research agendas, and how in the process they ultimately came to subvert those same agendas.
Refiguring Life explains how the metaphors and machinery of research are not merely the products of scientific discovery but actually work together to map out the territory along which new metaphors and machines can be constructed. Through their dynamic interaction, Keller points out, they define the realm of the possible in science.
Drawing on a remarkable spectrum of theoretical work ranging from Schroedinger to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Refiguring Life fuses issues already prominent in the humanities and social sciences with those in the physical and natural sciences, transgressing disciplinary boundaries to offer a broad view of the natural sciences as a whole.
Moving gracefully from genetics to embryology, from physics to biology, from cyberscience to molecular biology, Evelyn Fox Keller demonstrates that scientific inquiry cannot pretend to stand apart from the issues and concerns of the larger society in which it exists.
160 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1995
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111 people want to read
About the author
Evelyn Fox Keller
39 books59 followersEvelyn Fox Keller (born 1936) is an American physicist, author, and feminist and is currently a Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Keller has also taught at New York University and in the department of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Keller received her B.A. in physics from Brandeis University in 1957 and continued her studies in theoretical physics at Harvard University graduating with a Ph.D. in 1963. She became interested in molecular biology during a visit to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory while completing her Ph.D. dissertation. Her subsequent research has focused on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science.
She is also on the advisory board of FFIPP-USA (Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace-USA), a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working in for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and just peace.
Keller received her B.A. in physics from Brandeis University in 1957 and continued her studies in theoretical physics at Harvard University graduating with a Ph.D. in 1963. She became interested in molecular biology during a visit to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory while completing her Ph.D. dissertation. Her subsequent research has focused on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science.
She is also on the advisory board of FFIPP-USA (Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace-USA), a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working in for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and just peace.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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October 26, 2022Very cool book, good place to start if you're interested in the history of biology in the 20th century.
There are great little nuggets of historical insight in the text. For example: embryology was traditionally practiced in Germany, while the US was the home of the new science of genetics. This fact had obvious significance for the ascendance of genetics after the first world war. After the second world war, many physicists turned to biology, where their mechanistic and reductionist impulses helped finish off any lasting remnants of organicist anti-reductionism in the life sciences.
Another good one: for decades the sperm was regarded as the really active 'masculine' force in conception, as opposed to the passive 'feminine' egg. Biological subdisciplines could then be coded as male or female: the sperm is basically all nucleus, all gene, so genetics took on the masculine position in biological explanation. The ovum is pure cytoplasm, by contrast -- cytologists are therefore interested in the inert, passive and feminine aspects of cellular life.
Keller also traces the history of Maxwell's Demon. It's ordinarily associated with thermodynamics and not biology, but when it was first formulated the idea was tied up with the problem of lifeforms as entities which are seemingly resistant to entropy. And this idea developed against the background of discoveries of cosmic and geological timescales in late Victorian England, and the realisation that the Sun would eventually die. In the face of anxieties about a universal tendency for systems to decay, degrade etc over long periods of time the idea that maxwell's demon resided in the organism could be celebrated as proof that life represented some kind of positive countervalue to entropy
The book also contains a very clear and lucid overview of how molecular biology displaced other disciplines in importance partly through its assumption of the vocabulary and associated conceptual apparatus offered by computer science. Genetics and embryology separated at this juncture -- partly because embryology could not reconcile itself with the language of code, information, signalling etc. and the reductionism to genetic factors.
Keller points out that you can read a biological paradigm off its choice of model organisms. E. coli is an adequate model when all you're interested in is DNA, RNA, ribosomes and proteins. (Jacob and Monod won their Nobel prize off the back of E. coli) But when developmental questions arise you have to turn to larger organisms, flies and so on (as happened in the 80s and onwards).
When the genetics-embyrology rapprochement came, it was because geneticists finally realised they had neglected the organism as that entity which all genetic causation is actually directed towards.
Now, in an ironic inversion of the earlier trend, developmental systems biologists are in fact invoking computational language to revive earlier organicist/vitalist notions of the organism through appeals to cybernetic models of inherited information, complexity, top-down signalling, emergence etc.
There are great little nuggets of historical insight in the text. For example: embryology was traditionally practiced in Germany, while the US was the home of the new science of genetics. This fact had obvious significance for the ascendance of genetics after the first world war. After the second world war, many physicists turned to biology, where their mechanistic and reductionist impulses helped finish off any lasting remnants of organicist anti-reductionism in the life sciences.
Another good one: for decades the sperm was regarded as the really active 'masculine' force in conception, as opposed to the passive 'feminine' egg. Biological subdisciplines could then be coded as male or female: the sperm is basically all nucleus, all gene, so genetics took on the masculine position in biological explanation. The ovum is pure cytoplasm, by contrast -- cytologists are therefore interested in the inert, passive and feminine aspects of cellular life.
Keller also traces the history of Maxwell's Demon. It's ordinarily associated with thermodynamics and not biology, but when it was first formulated the idea was tied up with the problem of lifeforms as entities which are seemingly resistant to entropy. And this idea developed against the background of discoveries of cosmic and geological timescales in late Victorian England, and the realisation that the Sun would eventually die. In the face of anxieties about a universal tendency for systems to decay, degrade etc over long periods of time the idea that maxwell's demon resided in the organism could be celebrated as proof that life represented some kind of positive countervalue to entropy
The book also contains a very clear and lucid overview of how molecular biology displaced other disciplines in importance partly through its assumption of the vocabulary and associated conceptual apparatus offered by computer science. Genetics and embryology separated at this juncture -- partly because embryology could not reconcile itself with the language of code, information, signalling etc. and the reductionism to genetic factors.
Keller points out that you can read a biological paradigm off its choice of model organisms. E. coli is an adequate model when all you're interested in is DNA, RNA, ribosomes and proteins. (Jacob and Monod won their Nobel prize off the back of E. coli) But when developmental questions arise you have to turn to larger organisms, flies and so on (as happened in the 80s and onwards).
When the genetics-embyrology rapprochement came, it was because geneticists finally realised they had neglected the organism as that entity which all genetic causation is actually directed towards.
Now, in an ironic inversion of the earlier trend, developmental systems biologists are in fact invoking computational language to revive earlier organicist/vitalist notions of the organism through appeals to cybernetic models of inherited information, complexity, top-down signalling, emergence etc.
January 4, 2021
The natural sciences pride themselves on their objectivity, on the importance of their research being contained in itself. Yet what research they do, and how they interpret it, is dependent on language and communication. It is therefore imperative that the humanities and social sciences analyze the proceedings of natural science. Fox Keller does that, but as the book shows, her approach is based on her original training as a physicist and biologist.
While the book suggests that it would deal with the metaphors of biology more broadly, it revolves around the dominance of genetics in the mid-20th century: Genetics maintained that the gene was both the base of life and the blueprint of its own reproduction, that it thus was the active part of the cell (and cytoplasma not). Thus, the gene was the most important and interesting thing to study. Consequently, embryology (which detailed the non-genotypical early development of an organism) was pushed aside (later those approaches were picked up again by developmental biology). However, this purported "gene activity" as the metaphor for what was going on in the organism proved elusive, and, by now, has been replaced by "gene activation" - giving the proteins in the cytoplasma an active role. The respective research that has been carried out from the 1970s on could have, however, been conducted much earlier (at least from the 1950s on the required knowledge and equipment existed) - yet, due to genetics' dominant metaphor, no biologist cared enough to do it.
Sadly, Fox Keller touches only briefly on the reasons for that: One, genetics was a discipline in which American biologists during the interwar years made great strides. They therefore pushed for their discipline to be recognized as the most important field of biology (against the German-dominated embryology). Two, genetics resonated with conceptions of the cell coding the gene-containing core as masculine and the cytoplasma as feminine. Ascribing an active and decisive role to the "masculine" part seems to have been attractive to the overwhelmingly male researchers.
I would have liked to see more of this connection between the scientific metaphors and the systems of thought at the time as well as the sociology of science. Incidentally, the best example is given by the author in the introduction: In the 1960s, conception was described in Sleeping Beauty-like metaphors of the sperm penetrating, overwhelming, awakening the egg, by the 1980s - with its more equal relationship expectations and changed gender roles - in the language of sperm and egg merging. These shifts in language have been accompanied by a shift in research interest as well: Whereas before chemical and mechanical explanations for sperm activity were sought, then the egg and its production of proteins or molecules to help this merger became interesting.
While the book suggests that it would deal with the metaphors of biology more broadly, it revolves around the dominance of genetics in the mid-20th century: Genetics maintained that the gene was both the base of life and the blueprint of its own reproduction, that it thus was the active part of the cell (and cytoplasma not). Thus, the gene was the most important and interesting thing to study. Consequently, embryology (which detailed the non-genotypical early development of an organism) was pushed aside (later those approaches were picked up again by developmental biology). However, this purported "gene activity" as the metaphor for what was going on in the organism proved elusive, and, by now, has been replaced by "gene activation" - giving the proteins in the cytoplasma an active role. The respective research that has been carried out from the 1970s on could have, however, been conducted much earlier (at least from the 1950s on the required knowledge and equipment existed) - yet, due to genetics' dominant metaphor, no biologist cared enough to do it.
Sadly, Fox Keller touches only briefly on the reasons for that: One, genetics was a discipline in which American biologists during the interwar years made great strides. They therefore pushed for their discipline to be recognized as the most important field of biology (against the German-dominated embryology). Two, genetics resonated with conceptions of the cell coding the gene-containing core as masculine and the cytoplasma as feminine. Ascribing an active and decisive role to the "masculine" part seems to have been attractive to the overwhelmingly male researchers.
I would have liked to see more of this connection between the scientific metaphors and the systems of thought at the time as well as the sociology of science. Incidentally, the best example is given by the author in the introduction: In the 1960s, conception was described in Sleeping Beauty-like metaphors of the sperm penetrating, overwhelming, awakening the egg, by the 1980s - with its more equal relationship expectations and changed gender roles - in the language of sperm and egg merging. These shifts in language have been accompanied by a shift in research interest as well: Whereas before chemical and mechanical explanations for sperm activity were sought, then the egg and its production of proteins or molecules to help this merger became interesting.
April 2, 2017
This book re-qualifies our understanding of the gene model of genetics. In most science and medical communication, we have portrayed genes as pieces of template code which drive features in a mechanical manner. The story, however, is much more complicated than this, and this is not just a story of science communication but one of the politics and business of science.
August 20, 2021
banger
March 14, 2012
Well written, very clear presentation of ideas and arguments. Much clearer than I dared to hope, and easy enough to get through. Didn't resonate with any of my previous readings to make me walk away with quivers of energy and ideas, but nice to have it in storage in case other links come up in future.
November 22, 2011
Read chapters 1 and 3
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews