Lifelines: life beyond the gene

New York: Oxford University Press (2003)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In Life Beyond the Gene, Steven Rose offers a theory of life which insists that we as humans -- and indeed all living creatures -- create our own futures, though in circumstances not of our own choosing. Placing the organism at the center of life, Rose confronts the ideology of reductionism and ultra-Darwinism, with its insistence that all aspects of human life from sexual preference to infanticide, political orientation to violence, male domination to alcoholism, are in our genes and are the inevitable consequences of natural selection. These claims, Rose asserts, are not only socially naive, but fundamentally misunderstand the active and irreducible nature of living processes. Rose argues that life depends on the elaborate web of interactions that occur within cells, organisms, and ecosystems, in which DNA has one part to play. From early in their development, living organisms have to be capable of quasi-independent existence while growing to maturity. If we are to understand life, we must recapture an understanding of the entire living organism and its trajectory through time and space. Rose calls these trajectories lifelines. Provocative and incisive, Life Beyond the Gene provides a compelling response to those enthusiasts of the gene who would deny the complexity of life.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Rose's homeodynamic perspective is not an alternative to neo-darwinism.A. J. Wells - 1999 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (5):911-912.
Lifelines: biology beyond determinism.Steven Peter Russell Rose - 1998 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes.Denis Noble - 2008 - Oxford University Press.
The science of life as seen through rose-coloured glasses.Mike Anderson - 1999 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (5):886-887.
The Conception of Life in Synthetic Biology.Anna Https://Orcidorg Deplazes-Zemp - 2012 - Science and Engineering Ethics 18 (4):757-774.
Species, Genes, and the Tree of Life.Joel D. Velasco - 2010 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (3):599-619.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
41 (#339,849)

6 months
2 (#668,348)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

The Naturalizing Error.Douglas Allchin & Alexander J. Werth - 2017 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 48 (1):3-18.
Dialectics, Complexity,and the Systemic Approach.Poe Yu-ze Wan - 2013 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (4):411-452.
What Is a Philosophical Tendency?Ted Stolze - 2015 - Historical Materialism 23 (4):3-38.
The Case for Natural History.Heather King & Marianne Achiam - 2017 - Science & Education 26 (1-2):125-139.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references