The Logic of Life

The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written.Michel Foucault Nobel Prizewinning scientist Franois Jacobs The Logic of Life is a landmark book in the history of biology and science. Focusing on heredity, which Jacob considers the fundamental feature of living things, he shows how, since the sixteenth century, the scientific understanding of inherited traits has moved not in a linear, progressive way, from error to truth, but instead through a series of frameworks. He reveals how these successive interpretive approachesfocusing on visible structures, internal structures (especially cells), evolution, genes, and DNA and other moleculeseach have their own power but also limitations. Fundamentally challenging how the history of biology is told, much as Thomas Kuhns Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for the history of science as a whole, The Logic of Life has greatly influenced the way scientists and historians view the past, present, and future of biology.