Anti-Chance: A Reply to Monod's Chance and Necessity

By E. Schoffeniels

Anti-Chance: A Reply to Monod's Chance and Necessity is a critique of Jacques Monod's essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology. It explores the concepts of chance and necessity, central themes of Monod's work, and specifically whether life is the result of coincidence of diverse independent chains of causality or, on the contrary, whether it obeys the more fundamental concept of chance as proposed by the Danish School of physicists. Questions such as the chance or the inevitability of it all, the sites and sizes of the knowledge gaps and as to whether they will be filled with physics and chemistry on the one hand or seasoned with metaphysics on the other, are examined. This book is comprised of 10 chapters and begins with reflections on biology and the argument that biology can only enrich itself by abandoning a teleological or finalist mode of thought. The discussion then turns to probabilities of chance, with emphasis on three different mechanisms of the intervention of chance. Subsequent chapters focus on the link between thermodynamics and biological order; the basis for a theoretical biology and 14 propositions to which the fundamental attributes of cells can be reduced; the molecular basis of instinct; and the relationship between speech and consciousness. The applicability of cybernetics to biological systems and their component metabolic cycles is also considered, along with the structure of chance. This monograph will be of interest to scientists in fields ranging from biology and natural philosophy to physics, chemistry, and physiology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Jul 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483135892

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Reviews for Anti-Chance

[thornton37814 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Beckett's short stories display his affection for the run-on paragraph. Some paragraphs went on for pages. Overall I enjoyed his short stories more than other work sampled by the author. In the title story, Beckett opens with a cemetery scene--something to which I as a genealogist could relate. Of course, I chided him for not recording all the tombstone information on his first visit, but his purposes in visiting graveyards are different than mine. The story then relates the story of his encounter with the first woman he thought to marry. "Enough" was a little more sexually vulgar than my reading comfort level. "From an Abandoned Work" started off nicely and then got weird. I would classify "Imagination Dead Imagine" and "Ping" as experimental works. They go beyond the bounds of traditional literature. "Ping" reads like what you are seeing on a screen followed by the "ping" sound and the notation in seconds. Definitely a bit strange to read. "Not I" is a monologue featuring "Mouth", with performance rights managed by the Dramatists Play Service. The speech is broken, as if one is only hearing bits and snatches. I'm not exactly certain what to call "Breath." It's only a one page work and is rather strange. I certainly see why Beckett's experimentation earned him a Pulitzer, but overall, his work doesn't appeal to me.