Chance and Necessity: Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology Penguin Press Science: Amazon.co.uk: Jacques Monod, John Maynard Smith: Books

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A classic of science writing, this text remains a statement of Darwinian natural selection as a process driven only by "chance and necessity" of purpose or intent.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Must read for all Dawkins fans, 2 Feb 2006

By	Andrew Dalby "ardalby" (oxford) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you have read Richard Dawkins books then you will be familiar with the the territory that this book covers. But this is the word of neodarwinism from the mouth of a world renowned molecular biologist. Monod is maybe not as readable as Dawkins but here he presents the molecular case for neo-darwinism. He even introduces the idea of memes.

This book was revolutionary in France and caused an intellectual shake-up in the foundations of biology when it was written in 1970 (six years before Dawkins put pen to paper). It changed the way people think about biology and marked the beginning of the unstoppable growth of reductionist thinking.

Now thirty years later no sensible biologist can think in such a molecular reductionist way and most of what was believed is now looking increasingly shakey but this historically shows the arguments of the molecular neo-darwinists and illustrates their total lack of comprehension of the enormity of the complexity of biological systems. More than this in the book you can read the unpleasant social consequences of this kind of thinking as Monod hints at the need for eugenics and the weakening of human genetic strength because of our protection of those who would have been removed by natural selection in the past.

Unfortunately what he does not see is that natural selection created a system that can defy Darwinian criteria and actually follows something closer to Lamarck - that the traits are actually directly passed on from one generation to the next. This is why we created writing, culture etc. This is much more efficient than the Darwinian approach which would take sometime to acheive Shakespeare! We are not just our genes we are a system and we live on a planet that is a system. While I agree you cannot hope to understand the system without doing the reductionist science you must also look at it in a joined up way.

He says holism only tries to look at the whole and cannot predict anything but he is deliberately misrepresenting it. From a philosophical view-point it is the question is the whole more than the sum of the parts. The answer is almost certainly yes but not for some super-natural theistic reason but for common sense. A car is not just all the parts that must be put together. I can get all the components and put them in a heap and they will not go very far. They have to be put together in the right order as a system. They all have relationships that need to be built. This is true with biology. While the genes and genomes describe the parts we now have to understand the relationships and so reductionism cannot succeed on its own.

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An absolute classic. The 'Brief history' of biology., 11 Feb 1999

By A Customer

Monod's book did for biology what 20 years later Hawking's book (A brief history of time) did for cosmology. Although published first in 1970 it reads as fresh and insightful today as it must have then.With amazing prescience he introduced all the topics that led to evolutionary sociobiology , Dawkins theory of memes and Dennett and Ruse's books on the philosophy of Darwinism, while explaining molecular genetics and cellular biochemistry better for the general reader than anyone before or since. The philosophical digressions are a delight. One finishes this short essay feeling enlightened and exhilarated. Of course his bleak and austere conclusion caused outrage amongst theists and has provoked at least one book length attempted refutation - Ward's 'God Chance and Necessity'. A comparison of the two shows that Monod wins hands down. Theists these days are reduced to intellectually bankrupt assertions like denying evolution or claiming that the basic physical constants of physics prove intentionality of a creator. Read Monod to see how self defeating these ideas are.