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Review
New Scientist 16 November 2002
Watson and Crick's elucidation of the structure of DNA in 1953 constituted a watershed of inestimable proportions in the history of biology. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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This book is a high quality scholastic effort. The author is an expert in the three different domains of scientific knowledge that are brought into play: biology (especially molecular genetics and developmental biology, which she knows through a thorough knowledge of the biological literature ); mathematical modelling (which she knows through training); and epistemology/philosophy of science (which I guess she acquired). The exemples are interesting, well chosen and thoroughly investigated. Neverteless, I have some mixed feelings about this book. It certainly is not an easy read, and it hardly is popular science (nor is it meant to be, I think). I was interested, because I am interested myself in the epistemological basis of what I'm doing (I am a medical doctor): I think that the least one can do is to reflect on the basis of one's own beliefs and critically examine the knowledge base one has learned at school (or university or whatever place people learn). It was that interest that kept me going on through the book, because it surely is not easy stuff. Nevertheless, although I am not directly involved in either molecular biology or developmental biology, the analysis presented here can easily be adapted to other subfields of biology and medicine.
So, for I guess the most critical evaluation of a book I can think of: Have I wasted my precious time reading this book? Certainly not.
The result is that this book is essentially a narrative of approximately the last century of the history of biology. In that regard, it does succeed somewhat at attempting to condense the efforts of 100+ years of biology into about 300 pages. That is why I gave it two stars.
However, as Keller is a MIT philosopher of science and also trained in theoretical physics, I had expected more analytic depth, and some kind of "edge" - some thesis or thread or some other kind of thematic reason for her to be telling us all this history. Even on the most fundamental question of biology, "what is life?", Keller equivocates, calling it "a historical question, answerable only in terms of the categories that we as human actors choose to honor, and not in logical, scientific or technical terms." (p.294) Indeed, she does not even mention Schrodinger's 1943 lecture, "What is Life?"
The chapters on AI/AL are quite weak, focusing heavily on cellular automata (she mentions Wolfram several times). These tinker-toy computer games are about as close to life as a simulation of an earthquake is to an actual earthquake, in my opinion. Keller, however, describes computer simulations as being part of the 'revitalized' mathematical biology program.
She recounts the 'original' mathematical biology program as the one primarily led by Rashevsky, but also mentions Waddington and Turing. I find it odd that she did not mention Robert Rosen at all, considering he continued on after Rashevsky. I admit I am an admirer of Rosen's works, but her failure to even mention him seems odd considering she devotes an overly large number of pages to Turing's addition to mathematical biology.
Further, had she read Rosen's _Essays on Life Itself_, she would see that mimetic attempts at creating life with computer simulations is utterly ill-conceived. But, then again, since Keller engages in no analysis anyway, I should not be surprised at this.
Finally, Keller claims she shares some similarity to the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright in believing that there is no set of universal laws of physics (and hence, in Keller's view, no universal set of laws of biology). Cartwright (who's books I admire) makes a good case for there being ontological reasons for this view (see Cartwright's _The Dappled World_). By contrast, Keller sees it as an epistemological problem, because the world is "irreducibly complex" and because of the "disunity of human interests". (p. 301) I think Keller misconstrues Cartwright completely when Keller contrasts her position with one alleging "an underlying incoherence" to the world. Cartwright never supposed, or proposed, 'incoherence' of nature in her writing; rather, Cartwright attempts to make sense of the ontological basis for the patchwork manner of physical laws.
The title _Making Sense of Life_ is misleading, for this book does no such thing, nor even attempts to cobble together an approach to doing so. It may be worthwhile as a history of efforts in biology, but even in that regard I'd prefer a polemic narrator, rather than this one.
Leduc thought that the appearance of forms resembling plants produced by osmotic effects in concentrated colloidal mixtures of inorganic salts had something to tell us about the emergence of life. Although he did not claim that these forms were actually living, some of his supporters were less restrained, and even during his lifetime Leduc became completely marginalized. A different fate awaited his near contemporary d'Arcy Thompson, whose famous book On Growth and Form has retained its appeal up to the present day. Keller is probably right, however, when she writes "yet, for all its fame, I suspect that few people today actually read On Growth and Form, and fewer still know what to make of it". Certainly, few of his admirers appreciate how far removed was his thinking from the neo-darwinism that dominates modern biology.
Keller's careful analysis of Leduc's and Thompson's ideas in the earlier part of the book is not, unfortunately, matched by an equally thorough examination of their successors in theoretical biology. Although she devotes several pages to the career of Nicolas Rashevsky, for example, she barely mentions Rashevsky's ideas, concentrating almost entirely on the political aspects of his career, describing how his early success in establishing a school of theoretical biology in Chicago collapsed in 1954 when his funding evaporated. More serious still, Keller ignores Robert Rosen completely -- mentioning him only in the notes at the end of the book, and then not as a major thinker in his own right but simply as Rashevsky's former student and the writer of his obituary. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, do not even rate the minimal recognition accorded to Rosen: their names are not mentioned, and neither is their theory of autopoiesis.
In the latter part of the book, therefore, Keller appears to have missed the opportunity to examine ideas of complexity and the importance of treating systems as systems rather than as no more than as collections of components. She takes modern "systems biology" (which is concerned more with complicatedness than with complexity) essentially at its practioners' own valuation; likewise with other trendy ideas like cellular automata, artificial life and so on.
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