Book ID: CBB978602426

The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016)

unapi

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.

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Reviewed By

Review 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). unapi

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). unapi

Essay Review Edward Jones-Imhotep (2020) Review Essay: The Ghost Factories: Histories of Automata and Artificial Life. History and Technology (pp. 3-29). unapi

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). unapi

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). unapi

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). unapi

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). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB978602426/

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Authors & Contributors
Smith, Justin E. H.
Baldassarri, Fabrizio
Merlin, Francesca
Jenkins, Bill
Riskin, Jessica
Goldstein, Amanda Jo
Concepts
Mechanism; mechanical philosophy
Biology
Natural philosophy
Evolution
Botany
Philosophy
Time Periods
17th century
19th century
18th century
Early modern
Renaissance
21st century
Places
Great Britain
Europe
Netherlands
Spain
Italy
France
Institutions
University of Edinburgh
Académie des Sciences, Paris
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