Lifelines Life beyond the Gene [Paperback]

A distinct voice in the nature/nurture debate, Rose's series of essays are a response to the biological reductionism of Richard Dawkins's book, The Selfish Gene (OUP, 1990), which insists that all aspects of human life are in our genes, and everything arises as a consequence of natural selection. Rose argues that life depends on the elaborate web of interactions that occur within cells, organisms, and ecosystems, and in which DNA has but one part to play.

Preface
Credits
1. Biology, Freedom, Determinism
2. Observing and Intervening
3. Knowing What We Know
4. The Triumph of Reductionism?
5. Genes and Organisms
6. Lifelines
7. Universal Darwinism?
8. Beyond Ultra-Darwinism
9. Origin Myths
10. The Poverty of Reductionism
11. Envoi: Making Biology Whole Again
Bibliography
Index

Steven Rose, starting from his experience in the molecular biology of learning, has writen a guide book for coming to accept how things really are. He creates a new approach by what amounts to a Copernican coordinate transformation, that places the center not in a particle or a gene but in an organism. Thereby he complements the twin pillars of genetic and environmental determinism with a third pillar: the capacity of organisms to organize and direct their own trajectories. He establishes this principle at the start of his book and builds on it stepwise with brilliant commentary and lucid illustrations. Unlike complexity theory, this is not rhetoric. It is solid science come to maturity, that can profitably be absorbed alike by physicists, biologists, sociologists, and the general reader. --Walter Freeman, Professor of the Graduate School, University of California at Berkeley

Here are answers for those uncomfortable with the ultra-Darwinism and extreme reductionism that characterizes much of modern biological thought. Rose is one of a small but growing group of biologists who argues instead that we can only understand genes, celllS