deodands

Making Sense of Life

Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of Life

One of those books that expresses things you knew but couldn't express. Plus a whole lot more that I didn't know (and some that I didn't read because I had to take it back to the library, but I will have another go at it soon).

Fox Keller argues, with scholarship and the force of personal experience, that there are good reasons that working developmental biologists are uninterested in D'Arcy Thompson, Turing, and the mathematical biology project, and those reasons are not technical ignorance. It's because the nature of what counts for an explanation differs between the mathematically and the biologically trained.

A couple of quotations:

D'Arcy Thompson is sometimes claimed as the father of mathematical biology, but as is so often the case with the granting of retrospective paternity, such claims may have more to do with legitimization than actual kinship.

The voice of a woman has been there:

Anyone who has observed encounters between experimental biologists and theoretical physicists (or applied mathematicians) will surely have noticed the bristling of the biologists when faced with the discplinary hubris of physicists that is so familiar on their own turf as to go unnoticed. Elsewhere, however (Is there an organism in this text?, pp273-290 of PR Sloan, ed, Controlling our destinies, Notre Dame, 2000) I have argued that misunderstanding and frustration typical of such encounters is not due only to hubris but also to deep differences in understanding between the two disciplines regarding, first, the nature of theory, and, second, its relation to practice.