Volume 36, Number 7 · April 27, 1989
The Science of Metamorphoses
By Richard C. Lewontin
Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology
by Philip J. Pauly
Oxford University Press, 252 pp., $24.95
Topobiology: An Introduction to Molecular Embryology
by Gerald M. Edelman
Basic Books, 240 pp., $21.95
The history of biology is the history of struggles over the difference between the animate and the inanimate. Natural philosophy, through the Renaissance, and folk wisdom for a much longer time, saw the entire natural world as a single interconnected system in which radical transformations of qualities of both living and nonliving things were entirely credible. It was not merely that one inanimate kind of substance could, by alchemical transformation, be made into another, or that a vain boy could become a flower, but that the inanimate and the animate were interchangeable. Men could be petrified and marble statues turned to warm flesh in the embrace of their admirers. Papal staves put forth leaves, while moldy cheese and rags bred forth mice.
Review, 4811 words
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