miguel’s Reviews > The Dialectical Biologist > Status Update

"The tubercle bacillus became the cause of tuberculosis, as opposed to, say, unregulated industrial capitalism, because the bacillus was made the point of medical attack on the disease. The alternative would be not a “medical” but a “political” approach to tuberculosis and so not the business of medicine in an alienated social structure."

"Remember that conditions change and that the conditions necessary to the initiation of some process may be destroyed by the process itself. Remember to pay attention to real objects in space and time and not lose them utterly in idealized abstractions. Remember that qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated."

"The large-scale computer models of systems ecology do not fit under the heading of holism at all. Rather they are forms of large-scale reductionism: the objects of study are the naively given “parts”—abundances or biomasses of populations. No new objects of study arise at the community level. (...) We agree with its critics that this approach has been generously supported and singularly unproductive." sí

"a leading molecular biologist expressed (...) if the complete sequence of (...) DNA were known (...), it would be possible (...) to compute the organism. But that is surely false, because an organism does not compute itself from its DNA. The organism is the consequence of a historical process (...); at every moment gene, environment, chance, and the organism as a whole are all participating" está muy bien este libro

"Like modern bourgeois social thought, modern evolutionary thought denies history by assuming equilibrium."