The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics

✍ Scribed by Erik L. Peterson

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 352
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

As scientists debated the nature of life in the nineteenth century, two theories predominated: vitalism, which suggested that living things contained a “vital spark,” and mechanism, the idea that animals and humans differed from nonliving things only in their degree of complexity. Erik Peterson tells the forgotten story of the pursuit of a “third way’ in biology, known by many names, including “the organic philosophy,” which gave rise to C. H. Waddington’s work in the subfield of epigenetics: an alternative to standard genetics and evolutionary biology that captured the attention of notable scientists from Francis Crick to Stephen Jay Gould. The Life Organic chronicles the influential biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, and biochemists from both sides of the Atlantic who formed Joseph Needham’s Theoretical Biology Club, defined and refined “third way” thinking through the 1930s, and laid the groundwork for some of the most cutting-edge achievements in biology today. By tracing the persistence of organicism into the twenty-first century, this book also raises significant questions about how we should model the development of the discipline of biology going forward.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The First Generation of Organicists

2. Needham’s Revival of Mechanism

3. Socrates and the Principia Biologæ

4. The Tipping Point

5. Waddington and the Organizer

6. The Original Theoretical Biology Club

7. Large Plans versus the Ultimate Littleness of Things

8. As Many Opinions as There Are Men

9. “Off in all directions like an expanding universe”

10. Mechanism Reduced to Molecules

11. The Lysenko Morality Tale and the Epigenetic Landscape

12. Ernst Mayr, Neo-Darwinism, and Beanbag Genetics

13. History of Science Is Written by the Laureates

14. The 1960s Reincarnation of the Debate

15. The Conventional Wisdom of the Dominant Group, or COWDUNG

Conclusion: A Third Way after Waddington?

Epilogue: Is Modern Epigenetics Organic?
Notes

Bibliography

Index

✦ Subjects

History & Philosophy;Science & Math