"The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been
written."--Michel Foucault
Nobel Prize-winning scientist François Jacob's The Logic of Life is a
landmark book in the history of biology and science. Focusing on
heredity, which Jacob considers the fundamental feature of living
things, he shows how, since the sixteenth century, the scientific
understanding of inherited traits has moved not in a linear, progressive
way, from error to truth, but instead through a series of frameworks. He
reveals how these successive interpretive approaches--focusing on
visible structures, internal structures (especially cells), evolution,
genes, and DNA and other molecules--each have their own power but also
limitations. Fundamentally challenging how the history of biology is
told, much as Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions did
for the history of science as a whole, The Logic of Life has greatly
influenced the way scientists and historians view the past, present, and
future of biology.