Refiguring Life begins with the history of genetics and embryology, showing how discipline-based metaphors have directed scientists' search for evidence. Keller continues with an exploration of the border traffic between biology and physics, focusing on the question of life and the law of increasing entropy. In a final section she traces the impact of new metaphors, born of the computer revolution, on the course of biological research. Keller shows how these metaphors began as objects of contestation between competing visions of the life sciences, how they came to be recast and appropriated by already established research agendas, and how in the process they ultimately came to subvert those same agendas. Refiguring Life explains how the metaphors and machinery of research are not merely the products of scientific discovery but actually work together to map out the territory along which new metaphors and machines can be constructed. Through their dynamic interaction, Keller points out, they define the realm of the possible in science. Drawing on a remarkable spectrum of theoretical work ranging from Schroedinger to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Refiguring Life fuses issues already prominent in the humanities and social sciences with those in the physical and natural sciences, transgressing disciplinary boundaries to offer a broad view of the natural sciences as a whole. Moving gracefully from genetics to embryology, from physics to biology, from cyberscience to molecular biology, Evelyn Fox Keller demonstrates that scientific inquiry cannot pretend to stand apart from the issues and concerns of the larger society in which it exists.

Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (Wellek Library Lectures)

Science & Math

KELLER, EVELYN FOX

Biological Sciences

Columbia Univ. Pr.

Refiguring Life

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Columbia University Press

Shares information based on lectures given in 1993 about the traffic in scientific research between metaphors and machines, between software and hardware, between language and science, and about the normal process of scientific exchange.

Why are objectivity and reason characterized as male and subjectively and feeling as female? How does this characterization affect the goals and methods of scientific enquiry? This groundbreaking work explores the possibilities of a gender-free science and the conditions that could make such a possibility a reality. Keller’s book opens up a whole new range of ideas for anyone who cares to think about the history of science, that is, the history of the modern world. . . Let us be glad to be in times when such a sparkling, innovative. . . book can be produced, a book to start all of us thinking in new directions.”Ian Hacking, New Republic A brilliant and sensitive undertaking that does credit not only to feminist scholarship but, in the end, to science as well.”Barbara Ehrenreich, Mother Jones This book represents the expression of a particular feminist perspective made all the more compelling by Keller’s evident commitment to and understanding of science. As a lively and important contribution to the scholarship of science, it will undoubtedly stimulate argument and controversy.”Helen Longino, Texas Humanist Provocative arguments, presented with authority.”Kirkus Reviews Consistently thoughtful, provocative, and interconnected. . . A well-made book that will be useful in upper-level undergraduate and graduate women’s studies, philosophy, and history of science.”E.C. Patterson, Choice Written with grace and clarity, [this book] will stand as an important contribution to feminist theory, to the sociology of knowledge and to the continuing critique of the established scientific method.”Lillian B. Rubin A powerful book.”Jessie Bernard

Reflections on Gender and Science

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Yale University Press

This groundbreaking work explores the possibilities of a gender-free science and the conditions that could make such a possibility a reality.

Yale

Why are objectivity and reason characterized as male and subjectively and feeling as female? How does this characterization affect the goals and methods of scientific enquiry? This groundbreaking work explores the possibilities of a gender-free science and the conditions that could make such a possibility a reality. Keller’s book opens up a whole new range of ideas for anyone who cares to think about the history of science, that is, the history of the modern world. . . Let us be glad to be in times when such a sparkling, innovative. . . book can be produced, a book to start all of us thinking in new directions.”Ian Hacking, New Republic A brilliant and sensitive undertaking that does credit not only to feminist scholarship but, in the end, to science as well.”Barbara Ehrenreich, Mother Jones This book represents the expression of a particular feminist perspective made all the more compelling by Keller’s evident commitment to and understanding of science. As a lively and important contribution to the scholarship of science, it will undoubtedly stimulate argument and controversy.”Helen Longino, Texas Humanist Provocative arguments, presented with authority.”Kirkus Reviews Consistently thoughtful, provocative, and interconnected. . . A well-made book that will be useful in upper-level undergraduate and graduate women’s studies, philosophy, and history of science.”E.C. Patterson, Choice Written with grace and clarity, [this book] will stand as an important contribution to feminist theory, to the sociology of knowledge and to the continuing critique of the established scientific method.”Lillian B. Rubin A powerful book.”Jessie Bernard

What do biologists want? If, unlike their counterparts in physics, biologists are generally wary of a grand, overarching theory, at what kinds of explanation do biologists aim? How will we know when we have "made sense" of life? Such questions, Evelyn Fox Keller suggests, offer no simple answers. Explanations in the biological sciences are typically provisional and partial, judged by criteria as heterogeneous as their subject matter. It is Keller's aim in this bold and challenging book to account for this epistemological diversity--particularly in the discipline of developmental biology. 
 In particular, Keller asks, what counts as an "explanation" of biological development in individual organisms? Her inquiry ranges from physical and mathematical models to more familiar explanatory metaphors to the dramatic contributions of recent technological developments, especially in imaging, recombinant DNA, and computer modeling and simulations. 
 A history of the diverse and changing nature of biological explanation in a particularly charged field, Making Sense of Life draws our attention to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural components of what biologists mean, and what they understand, when they propose to explain life.

Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines

Harvard University Press

In a book that promises to change the way we think and talk about genes and genetic determinism, Evelyn Fox Keller, one of our most gifted historians and philosophers of science, provides a powerful, profound analysis of the achievements of genetics and molecular biology in the twentieth century, the century of the gene. Not just a chronicle of biology’s progress from gene to genome in one hundred years, The Century of the Gene also calls our attention to the surprising ways these advances challenge the familiar picture of the gene most of us still entertain. Keller shows us that the very successes that have stirred our imagination have also radically undermined the primacy of the gene―word and object―as the core explanatory concept of heredity and development. She argues that we need a new vocabulary that includes concepts such as robustness, fidelity, and evolvability. But more than a new vocabulary, a new awareness is absolutely crucial: that understanding the components of a system (be they individual genes, proteins, or even molecules) may tell us little about the interactions among these components. With the Human Genome Project nearing its first and most publicized goal, biologists are coming to realize that they have reached not the end of biology but the beginning of a new era. Indeed, Keller predicts that in the new century we will witness another Cambrian era, this time in new forms of biological thought rather than in new forms of biological life.

The Century of the Gene

What do biologists want? If, unlike their counterparts in physics, biologists are generally wary of a grand, overarching theory, at what kinds of explanation do biologists aim? How will we know when we have "made sense" of life? Such questions, Evelyn Fox Keller suggests, offer no simple answers. Explanations in the biological sciences are typically provisional and partial, judged by criteria as heterogeneous as their subject matter. It is Keller's aim in this bold and challenging book to account for this epistemological diversity--particularly in the discipline of developmental biology.
In particular, Keller asks, what counts as an "explanation" of biological development in individual organisms? Her inquiry ranges from physical and mathematical models to more familiar explanatory metaphors to the dramatic contributions of recent technological developments, especially in imaging, recombinant DNA, and computer modeling and simulations.
A history of the diverse and changing nature of biological explanation in a particularly charged field, Making Sense of Life draws our attention to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural components of what biologists mean, and what they understand, when they propose to explain life.

A biography of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist explains her work in genetics and traces her long unheralded career as a research scientist.

A feeling for the organism: The life and work of Barbara McClintock

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

W.H.Freeman

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by KELLER, EVELYN FOX. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by KELLER, EVELYN FOX

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by KELLER, EVELYN FOX. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (Wellek Library Lectures)

Refiguring Life

Refiguring Life

Reflections on Gender and Science

Reflections on Gender and Science

Reflections on Gender and Science

Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines

The Century of the Gene

Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines

A feeling for the organism: The life and work of Barbara McClintock