Biochemical reductionism or obscurantist vitalism? — A new passage between scylla and charybdis
✍ Scribed by Stuart F. Spicker
- Book ID
- 104632659
- Publisher
- Springer Netherlands
- Year
- 1987
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 455 KB
- Volume
- 2
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0169-3867
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This remarkable and intellectually ambitious book-length essay is not a Festschrift, as the photograph of a young teacher and his even younger students -which appears on the cover/jacket of the book -might initially suggest. It is, nevertheless, a profoundly loving commemoration, some 37 years after the photograph of 1949, of a close friend, admired and respected teacher, renaissance and original intellect, and Nobel laureate (in 1969 for physiology or medicine), a man who, it is clear, with characteristic modesty, would not have taken himself to be "one of the sharpest and most versatile scientific intellects of our postmodern age," as Gunther Stent, who wrote the excellent introduction, appropriately describes his teacher.
By diligently completing and refining Max Delbruck's lectures of 1974-75 at Caltech, and producing a transcript and manuscript, Professor Stent and four of Delbriick's students and colleagues, with additional and competent assistance, provide the reader with a flawless publication through the good offices of Blackwell Scientific Publications, Inc. As a posthumous publication, the editors included many additional and helpful diagrams, charts, illustrations and references which were published subsequent to Delbriick's death on March 10, 1981, during his 75th year.
The essay is divided into 20 sections (corresponding, it appears, to the lecture series), and begins with an account of the evolution of the cosmos, the emergence of elementary life forms, the biological preconditions for perception, and a general discussion of the five-kingdom classification of life; the middle sections address the evolution of genomes and the appearance of homo sapiens sapiens. Delbriick then focusses on the emergence of the human brain, paying special attention to vision and the higher cognitive functions; this coherently culminates in his analyses of the higher-order concepts necessary for scientific theorizing -number, causa-Biology and Philosophy 2 (1987) 509-5 15.