Author: Francois Jacob
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 16th 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.
