Can I read Chance and Necessity : an Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology on EtoBox?

Chance and Necessity : an Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology by Jacques Monod is a philosophy book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Chance and Necessity : an Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology about?

Chance and Necessity: Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (French: Le Hasard et la Nécessité: Essai sur la philosophie naturelle de la biologie moderne) is a 1970 book by Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod, interpreting the processes of evolution to show that life is only the result of natural processes by "pure chance". The basic tenet of this book is that systems in nature with molecular biology, such as enzymatic biofeedback loops can be explained without having to invoke final causality. Monod starts the preface of the book by saying that biology is both marginal and central. He goes on to explain that it is marginal because the living world is only a fraction of the universe. Monod believes the ultimate aim of science is to "clarify man's relationship to the universe" (Monod, xi) and from that reasoning he accords biology a central role. He goes on to state that he does not intend to make a thorough survey of modern biology but rather to "bring out the form of its key concepts and to point out their logical relationships with other areas of thought...it is an avowed attempt to extract the quintessence of the molecular theory of the code" (Monod, xiii). Monod stress

Who reads Chance and Necessity : an Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology?

Author

Jacques Monod

Publisher

Random House USA Inc; Vintage Books

Published

1972

Language

EN

ISBN

9780394718255

Category

philosophy

Subjects

Fiction, Social Science, Biology

Rating

4.13 / 5 (257 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-13