The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity

“The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written.”―Michel Foucault

Nobel  Prize–winning scientist François Jacob’s 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 approaches―focusing on  visible structures, internal structures (especially cells), evolution,  genes, and DNA and other molecules―each have their own power but also  limitations. Fundamentally challenging how the history of biology is  told, much as Thomas Kuhn’s 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.