The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity

Betty Spillmann

ISBN 10: 0691000425 / ISBN 13: 9780691000428

Published by Princeton University Press, 1993

About this Item

In The Logic of Life Francois Jacob looks at the way our understanding of biology has changed since the sixteenth century. He describes four fundamental turning points in the perception of the structure of living things: the discoveries of the functions of organs, cells, chromosomes and genes, and DNA.

Seller Inventory # CIN0691000425VG

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691000425
• ISBN 13: 9780691000428
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

“The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written.”―Michel Foucault

Nobel Prize–winning scientist François Jacob’s The Logic of Life is a landmark book in the history of biology and science. Focusing on heredity, which Jacob considers the fundamental feature of living things, he shows how, since the sixteenth century, the scientific understanding of inherited traits has moved not in a linear, progressive way, from error to truth, but instead through a series of frameworks. He reveals how these successive interpretive approaches―focusing on visible structures, internal structures (especially cells), evolution, genes, and DNA and other molecules―each have their own power but also limitations. Fundamentally challenging how the history of biology is told, much as Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for the history of science as a whole, The Logic of Life has greatly influenced the way scientists and historians view the past, present, and future of biology.

About the Author

François Jacob (1920–2013) was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1965 and was one of the world’s leading molecular biologists.