Título del libro: What Is Life? On Earth And Beyond
Título del capítulo: Precellular evolution and the origin of life: Some notes on reductionism, complexity and historical contingency
ANTONIO EUSEBIO LAZCANO ARAUJO;
Autores externos:
Idioma:
Inglés
Año de publicación:
2017
Resumen:
The secular description of life phenomena that has shaped contemporary biology is one of the most remarkable accomplishments of the freethinking atmosphere of the Enlightenment. It is a major intellectual watershed that permeates the scientific and philosophical treatises written from the start of the nineteenth century onwards, and is echoed in a masterly fashion in Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus, published anonymously in 1818 by the young Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. In some of the most gripping pages of the book, Dr. Viktor Frankenstein exposes the dead body of the creature he has completed by sewing up bits and pieces of corpses illegally obtained, to the thunderbolts that break up the night sky during a tempest. Soon a lightning strike hits the conductors and, as the electricity travels downwards and reaches the inert body, it starts to move and becomes alive. The rabbi Loew ben Bezalel animated the Golem in Prague using religious invocations, but Dr. Frankenstein achieved the forbidden by bringing back to life the dead by making use of electricity, a purely physical force. Few novels reflect in such an extraordinary manner the scientific developments of their times. After many years of experimentation on the effects of electricity on severed frog legs in Bologna performed with the help of his wife Lucia Galeazzi, in 1791 Luigi Galvani published his Commentary on the Effects of Electricity on Muscular Motion, summarizing the observations that had led him to hypothesize on the existence of an animal electric fluid that originated in the brain and traveled through nerves and muscles. Galvani was not a necromancer but a child of the Enlightenment. Like many of his contemporaries, he avidly explored philosophy, mathematics and science, and the fascination that his observations awoke both among his colleagues and the lay public is a clear indication of the gradual but inexorable abandonment of metaphysical causes as naturalists and philosophers alike turned to physical explanations that shook the idea of a vital force (Lazcano, 2008). © Cambridge University Press 2017.
Entidades citadas de la UNAM:
ISBN:
9781316809648
Editorial:
Cambridge University Press Nombre de la publicación:
Precellular evolution and the origin of life: Some notes on reductionism, complexity and historical contingency
Página inicial:
75
Página final:
94
