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.
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