Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science. The Restless Clock examines the history of this principle, banning agency, in the life sciences. It also tells the story of dissenters embracing the opposite idea: that agency is essential to nature. The story begins with the automata of early modern Europe, as models for the new science of living things, and traces questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among many others. Mechanist science, Jessica Riskin shows, had an associated theology: the argument from design, which found evidence for a designer in the mechanisms of nature. Rejecting such appeals to a supernatural God, the dissenters sought to naturalize agency rather than outsourcing it to a “divine engineer.” Their model cast living things not as passive but as active, self-making machines. The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This history promises not only to inform such debates, but also our sense of the possibilities for what it means to engage in science—and even what it means to be alive.
...MoreReview Peter Dear (2017) Review of "The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick". American Historical Review (pp. 1171-1173).
Review Victor D. Boantza (2018) Review of "The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick". Metascience: An International Review Journal for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science (pp. 59-62).
Essay Review Edward Jones-Imhotep (2020) Review Essay: The Ghost Factories: Histories of Automata and Artificial Life. History and Technology (pp. 3-29).
Review Sune Holm (2018) Review of "The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick". History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (p. 60).
Review Roger Smith (2017) Review of "The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (pp. 395-397).
Review John Henry (2017) Review of "The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick". British Journal for the History of Science (pp. 345-346).
Review Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (2016) Review of "The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick". Ambix: Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (pp. 348-350).
Book
Jessica Riskin;
(2015)
A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick
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Article
Lorenzo Bianchi;
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Rorario tra Naudé e Bayle
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Book
Merlin, Francesca;
(2013)
Mutations et aléas: le hasard dans la théorie de l'évolution
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Nolan, Lawrence;
(2011)
Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate
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Thesis
Tombs, George;
(2003)
Man the Machine: A History of a Metaphor from Leonardo da Vinci to H. G. Wells
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Thesis
Abou-Nemeh, Samar Catherine;
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Nicolas Hartsoeker's Systeme of Nature: Physics by Conjecture and Optics by Design in Early Modern Europe
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Book
Amanda Jo Goldstein;
(2017)
Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life
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Fabrizio Baldassarri;
(2018)
Descartes’ Bio-Medical Study of Plants: Vegetative Activities, Soul, and Power
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Book
Smith, Justin E. H.;
(2011)
Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life
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Article
Des Chene, Dennis;
(2005)
Mechanisms of Life in the Seventeenth Century: Borelli, Perrault, Régis
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Chapter
Smith, Justin E. H.;
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Descartes and Henry More on Living Bodies
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Chapter
Smith, Justin E. H.;
(2010)
“As Long as There Are Squirrels There Will Be Dancing Machines”: Leibniz on Biological Species
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Book
Duchesneau, François;
(2010)
Leibniz: le vivant et l'organisme
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Article
Gayon, Jean;
(2010)
Sexual Selection: Another Darwinian Process
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Book
Sutter, Alex;
(1988)
Göttliche Maschinen: Die Automaten für Lebendiges bei Descartes, Leibniz, La Mettrie und Kant
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Patrick Armstrong;
(2019)
Alfred Russel Wallace
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Article
Kathryn Tabb;
(2016)
Darwin at Orchis Bank: Selection after the Origin
(/isis/citation/CBB704610076/)
Article
Jenkins, Bill;
(2015)
Henry H. Cheek and Transformism: New Light on Charles Darwin's Edinburgh Background
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Article
Egerton, Frank N.;
(1976)
Darwin's early reading of Lamarck
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Book
Agustí Camós Cabeceran;
(2021)
La Huella de Lamarck en España en el Siglo XIX
(/isis/citation/CBB874294977/)
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