Description
Book SynopsisAddresses a shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations
Trade Review“
Growing Explanations registers the profound shift in many domains of science—from chaos theory to functional genomics—giving epistemological priority to complex and emergent phenomena. Anyone interested in the nature of contemporary science, especially the central role of the computer, will find this a fascinating read.”—Angela N. H. Creager, Princeton University
“M. Norton Wise has orchestrated a volume of cutting-edge work exploring the sea change in contemporary models of explanation fueled by advances in computation, simulation, and the new sciences of complexity. The authors illustrate how, across a wide spectrum of disciplines, new strategies based on ‘growing explanations’ to understand the emergent behaviors of systems constructed from the bottom up are replacing the traditional ‘reductionist’ credo of explaining complex phenomena in terms of simple entities. An important and timely volume for anyone interested in science studies.”—Timothy Lenoir, author of
Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific DisciplinesTable of ContentsIntroduction: dynamincs all the way up / M. Norton Wise 1
Part I Mathematics, physics, and engineering
Elementary particles? `
1. Mirror symmetry: persons, values, and objects / Peter Galison 23
Nonlinear dynamics and chaos
2. Chaos, disorder, and mixing: a new fin-de-siecle image of science? / Amy Dahan Dalmedico 67
3. Forms of explanation in the catastrophe theory of Rene Thjom: topology, morphogenesis, and structuralism / David Aubin 95
Coping with complexity in technology
4. From Boeing to Berkeley: civil engineers, the cold war, and the origins of finite element analysis / Ann Johnson 133
5. Fuzzyfying the world: social practices of showing the properties of fuzzy logic / Claude Rosental 159
Part II The organism, the self, and (artificial) life
Self-Organization
6. Marrying the premodern to the postmodern: computers and organisms after World War II / Evelyn Fox Keller 181
Immunology
7. Immunology and the enigma of selfhood / Alfred I. Tauber 201
8. Immunology of AIDS: growning explanations and developing instruments / Ilana Lowy 222
Artificial Life
9. Artificial life support: some nodes in the Alife ribotype / Richard Doyle 251
10. The word for world is computer: simulating second natures in artificial life / Stefan Helmreich 275
11. Constructing and explaining emergence in artificial life: on paradigms, ontodefinitions, and general knowledge in biology / Claus Emmeche 301
Afterword 327
Contributors 333
Index 337
