Twenty books and open a foreword for a new biology
Emilio Cervantes and other
Adebar, 2009. 179 pp. 10 euros.
Emilio Cervantes, head of the CSIC Institute of Natural Resources and Agricultural Biology of Salamanca, is the coordinator of this work in ten English scientists discussed twenty-seven books in search of a interdisciplinary biology, conscious of their budgets and not reductionist. Biology that, as mentioned by Professor Max Sandin (one of the contributors to the volume), see in nature "so complex, so alive, so beautiful and so powerful as Lamarck saw" and can thus "begin to treat it with the respect it deserves." Neo-Darwinism, suggests Sandin, "considers the phenomenon of life as sordid, a nature in which there is room for everyone and populated by selfish individuals (who seek only to 'his own inetrés') as a constant competition between organisms in which the relationship with the environment is directed by random changes and in which only the 'fittest' have the right to life. " One of the reasons encourage authors of this collective work is, indeed, the need for a post-Darwinian biology.
The first three books discussed are indeed works of philosophy, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault and Karl Popper, which help to realize that science is a process of continuous transformation, which depends on cultural factors and leading to conjecture useful but not irrefutable certainties. Foucault, for example, makes clear that any approach to the study of biology and nature, for example, the natural history of the authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is much more related to the work of linguistics and economics of his time with the work of Cuvier and Darwin in the nineteenth century.
The second part consists of reviews of seven books and old to help us understand the historical context of emerging contemporary biology, such as classical Buffon, Lamarck and D'Arcy Thompson. The third part analyzes seven books and more contemporary interest, including key works of Maturana and Varela, Lynn Margulis and Maximo Sandin and a scathing work of Fernando Vallejo, biologist, writer and director of Colombian origin (Mexican citizen): The Darwinian tautology and biology assays. The last sections address ten other books, with specialized, on evolution, zoology and biochemistry.
This work contains certain statements that may be too blunt, but it represents an original effort to broaden the horizon and the sense of contemporary biology. Although the authors are aware that archiespecialización and excessive reliance on technology "seem to have banished the possibility of a big questions whose answers removed the foundations of biology." The new biology that calls the book dares to acknowledge the mystery and beauty of nature's most than usual. In fact, Emilio Cervantes said that "life goes beyond its experimental study" and that the mechanisms we observe in the laboratory need not be the same that occur in nature: "Biology is the science of life, but ... life, unpredictable and indefinable as water escapes from the basket of science. "
Jordi Pigem
0 comments:
Post a Comment