Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines

The first part of the book details the efforts by Stephane Leduc to create lifelike forms from chemicals in the early twentieth century, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's studies of the physical basis of growth and form, and the ideas of Nicholas Rashevsky and Alan Turing concerning the application of mathematics to biology. [...]readers will need to know what Claude Shannon's concept of "information" was to understand how it might relate to the idea of genetic information, and they will need to realize that the references to "E. B. Wilson" in two chapters refer to two individuals, Edwin Bidwell Wilson in chapter 3 and Edmund Beecher Wilson in chapter 7. Keller does not mention Kuhn, but everything in her book, from her analysis of linguistic ambiguity to her ending plea for "explanatory pluralism," is a challenge to Kuhn's concept of the scientific paradigm. Because natural and social scientists still embrace Kuhn's ideas, it would be instructive if Keller were to make explicit the implications of her observations for Kuhn's thesis and to show scientists why his model may not hold, at least in the world of molecular biology.