Full name: Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology

Author: Jacques Monod Year: 1970 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Science, Philosophy, Non Fiction Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780394718255 0394718259

This radical book by Nobel laureate Monod is an important intellectual event. Chance and Necessity is a philosophical statement whose intention is to sweep away as both false and dangerous the animist conception of man that has dominated virtually all Western worldviews from primitive cultures to those of dialectical materialists. He bases his argument on the evidence of modern biology, which indisputably shows, that man is the product of chance genetic mutation. With the unrelenting logic of the scientist, he draws upon what we now know (and can theorize) of genetic structure to suggest an new way of looking at ourselves. He argues that objective scientific knowledge, the only reliable knowledge, denies the concepts of destiny or evolutionary purpose that underlie traditional philosophies. He contends that the persistence of those concepts is responsible for the intensifying schizophrenia of a world that accepts, and lives by, the fruits of science while refusing to face its moral implications. Dismissing as "animist" not only Plato, Hegel, Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin but Spencer and Marx as well, he calls for a new ethic that will recognize the distinction between objective knowledge and the realm of values--an ethic of knowledge that can, perhaps, save us from our deepening spiritual malaise, from the new age of darkness he sees coming. Preface Of strange objects Vitalisms and animisms Maxwell's demons Microscopic cybernetics Molecular ontogenesis Invariance and perturbations Evolution The frontiers The kingdom and the darkness Appendixes Similar books: A New Science of Life by Rupert Sheldrake Microcosmos by Lynn Margulis The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane The Vital Question by Nick Lane Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett What is Life? by Addy Pross On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson Signs of Life by Ricard V. Sole What Is Life? by Erwin Schrodinger Consilience by Edward O. Wilson Ontogeny and Phylogeny by Stephen Jay Gould On Natural Selection by Charles Darwin The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude E. Shannon The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark The Big Picture by Sean Carroll Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking