A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller

I suspect the portrait drawn here is the most we shall ever learn about this remarkable woman. “A brilliant and completely convincing book. “It is the overall organization, or orchestration, that enables the organism to meet its needs.” (p. 136) For her, the discovery of transposition was above all a key to the complexity of genetic organization-an indicator of the subtlety with which cytoplasm, membranes, and DNA are integrated into a single structure. Fler bcker av Keller Evelyn Fox Keller Century of the Gene Making Sense of Life Cultures without Culturalism Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture.

Through her discovery of transposition she came to see that, rather than genes per se, “it is organized systems that function as units at any one time in development.” (p. I know them intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them.” … “I have learned so much about the corn plant that when I see things, I can interpret right away.” (p. I don’t feel I really know the story if I don’t watch the plant all the way along. Over and over again, she tells us one must have the time to look, the patience to “hear what the material has to say to you,” the openness to “let it come to you.” Above all, one must have “a feeling for the organism.” … “I start with the seedling. Her concern is to show how the selection process that occurs in the context of discovery limits what we come to know. In this well researched, beautifully written biography, Evelyn Fox Keller asks: “What enabled McClintock to see further and deeper into the mysteries of genetics than her colleagues?” McClintock’s answer is simple. Evelyn Fox Keller has documented how the masculine-identified public sphere and the feminine-identified private sphere have structured thinking in two areas of evolutionary biology: population genetics and mathematical ecology. In her lifelong study of heredity in corn Barbara McClintock achieved insights into hereditary patterns that were far ahead of her times. A Feeling for the Organism is the story of the rise, marginalization and rediscovery of Barbara McClintock and her crucially important work in cytology and.

A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller