Facebook X YouTube Instagram TikTok NetGalley
Google Books previews are unavailable because you have chosen to turn off third party cookies for enhanced content. Visit our cookies page to review your cookie settings.

Life Organic, The (Hardback)

The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics

Hobbies & Lifestyle > Science > Environmental & Earth Sciences

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9780822944669
Published: 13th January 2017
Casemate UK Academic

in_stock

£45.00


You'll be £45.00 closer to your next £10.00 credit when you purchase Life Organic, The. What's this?
+£4.99 UK Delivery or free UK delivery if order is over £40
(click here for international delivery rates)

Order within the next 10 hours, 47 minutes to get your order processed the next working day!

Need a currency converter? Check XE.com for live rates



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.

There are no reviews for this book. Register or Login now and you can be the first to post a review!

Other titles in University of Pittsburgh Press...