Volume 50, Number 7 · May 1, 2003
Science and Simplicity
By Richard C. Lewontin
Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines
by Evelyn Fox Keller
Harvard University Press, 388 pp., $29.95
Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
by Brenda Maddox
HarperCollins, 380 pp., $29.95
Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution
by Victor K. McElheny
Perseus, 363 pp., $27.50
DNA: The Secret of Life
by James D. Watson, with Andrew Berry
Knopf, 446 pp., $39.95
When asked to name, without reflection, the greatest scientific work that has ever been done, people who are themselves scientists will usually say 'Newton's Laws of Motion' or 'Einstein's Theory of Relativity.' Such answers are revealing of the image of ideal science with which we have been brought up, an image that has been of immense importance in the intellectual formation of working scientists. What we might call the 'Newtonian Ideal' in science is the formulation of some principle of great generality, if not universality, a law or small set of laws that applies at all times and in all places.
Review, 4696 words
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