Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism (Hardcover)

by Steven Rose (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
For most laypersons, Darwin's theory of evolution equals survival of the fittest, with one species gaining ascendancy over another in nature's brutal war of attrition. For most biologists, however, evolution is far more complicated. Advanced studies in genetics have given rise to the theory of evolution on a genetic scale, with "selfish genes" battling for supremacy within organisms. Taken to its most extreme, species themselves become almost incidental to the genetic warfare that rages within them. Other biologists take a less narrow view of evolution, believing that many factors--both genetic and environmental--affect how an organism evolves; in Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism, author Steven Rose comes firmly down on this side of the argument.

Rose, a biochemist, specializes in how memory works, and his book includes some fascinating information about the influence of chemistry in the development of our bodies. So delicate is the balance of DNA chemistry and environment, in fact, that Rose finds the periodic announcements that scientists have "found" a gene responsible for sexual orientation or criminal behavior, for example, to be outrageous and downright dangerous. Simple answers to complicated processes worry him, which may be why he strenuously attacks the genetics-as-destiny stance championed by such well-known scientists as Richard Dawkins.

From Library Journal
Rejecting genetic reductionism and biological determinism as adequate explanations in the life sciences, neuroscientist Rose argues that understanding and appreciating an organism (including humans) requires focusing on its unique lifeline, i.e., its developmental trajectory over space and throughout time. Going beyond the ultra-Darwinism of Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, and Edward O. Wilson (among others), Rose emphasizes the creative interaction between any complex life form and its dynamic environment. He pays special attention to the origin of life, discoveries in genetics, and the application of universal Darwinism. Although a materialist, Rose stresses that the gene is neither the only nor the final key to comprehending the complexity and development of an organism. Therefore, he concludes that epistemological diversity is necessary to understand and appreciate the ontological unity of evolving nature. As an alternative viewpoint in modern biology, this book is recommended for all large natural history collections.?H. James Birx, Canisius Coll., Buffalo, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (December 4, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195120353
• ISBN-13: 978-0195120356
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,210,655 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Argues against reductionism in biology, May 1, 2001

By	Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

We are not objects. We cannot be defined by our genes. It is only through an understanding of our developmental history in interaction with our environment that we can hope to know who we are.

Thus Steven Rose, molecular brain biologist and staunch foe of reductionist biology, has called upon the metaphor "lifelines" to describe our "trajectory" through time and space. We are processes. Furthermore, we are not passive processes, tossed hither and yon through life by a blind watchmaker and the dictates of our selfish genes, but active participants, helping to shape our destinies as we go along. We are to some significant degree "self-created." Rose writes: "The central property of life is the capacity and necessity to build, maintain and preserve itself, a process known as autopoiesis" (p. 18). On page 6, he opines, "We are...the products of the constant dialectic between the biological and the social."

Rose also points out that our ability to perform experiments in the real world is limited; how even the most dedicated and thorough scientist in the field can only hope to observe a sampling of the behavior of the animals he or she is watching; how the variables in the real world are so very, very many; and how our attempts to control them can actually result in a falsification of the environment we want to observe. He argues convincingly that the hard sciences, especially physics, have yielded to reduction simply because they are not anywhere near as complex as biology.

Consequently I was very impressed with this book for the first 174 pages or so. Then came the chapters on evolution. Suddenly Rose unaccountably loses his objectivity and his reasoned tone and starts inventing straw men, one he calls "sociobiology" and puts these macho words in its mouth: "Males and their sperm compete, females and their ova quiescently await their fate" (p. 198).

Oops, have I picked up the wrong book? Could this be some rad fem polemic intent on winning some political point? This claim that sociobiologists think that females "await their fate" is particularly startling since on the previous page Rose writes that "Darwin's view was that, by and large, it is the female of the species that does the choosing." Rose then mocks the idea that there might be universal standards of beauty (that would be politically incorrect, no doubt). But the truth is, that while people can and do differ in details, a young, healthy, well-proportioned ("symmetrical," if you will) woman is recognized as attractive in any culture that I have ever heard of. On the next page (199) he makes fun of the idea that human females may choose males with resources ("the Porsche and the Rolex") adding that "wealth is no measure of genetic fitness...nor is there much evidence that its possession results in a greater number of offspring."

Rose knows this is fatuous. It is universally recognized that females across cultures prefer men of means. Why would a reasonable woman, given a choice, choose a poor, ineffective, unsuccessful man, to one who has the ability to help her provide for her children? Rose allows that sexual selection "may be--probably is--an important mechanism...but...we should not let its enthusiasts blind us to the more obvious explanations for the complexity of human sexual arrangements." Those "enthusiasts" are, one presumes, misguided sociobiologists. (Perhaps Rose would like to be regarded as a biology "enthusiast.") And just what are those "more obvious explanations"? Rose does not say.

He goes on to altruism but doesn't mention the handicap principle from Zahavi, Amotz and Avishag. The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle (1997), which I recommend that he read. This principle accounts for some acts of altruism by showing that such acts are the advertising of one's ability to others, in particular members of the opposite sex, and are therefore adaptive. He closes the section with a story about "two human sociobiologists" who thought that they had demonstrated that parents who both voted Conservative were more likely to send their child to a private school. Oh boy, and I might find two biologists who voted Liberal who were therefore more likely to send their child to a non-denominational school. As Rose's esteemed colleague, Steven Jay Gould likes to say, "So what?"

Rose begins the next chapter by asserting that "ultra-Darwinism" has "a metaphysical foundation" that includes the premise that "the purpose...of life is reproduction." I don't know who these "ultra-Darwinians" are but most experts on evolution tend toward the idea that "purpose" is an anthropological idea inconsistent with evolutionary theory.

So why is this book reasonable and fair three quarters of the way through and then suddenly we come upon prejudicial attacks against nonexistent bogeymen? It's the same old problem: a personal agenda. No matter how expert one may be, if the subject strays to the area of one's prejudices there is the chance that one may suddenly become as fair and objective as a radio talk show host.

What Rose wants to save us from is determinism, particularly genetic determinism. He thinks that determinism in biology or psychology may lead to the justification of some discredited ideas from eugenics. I don't agree. I think we can safely bury eugenics and such delusions as I.Q. and racial significance. The ghosts of the past are scary and we should be on watch, but we don't have to discredit the insights and accomplishments of sociobiology and/or evolutionary psychology by falsely associating them with those old, tired delusions.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book, December 10, 2005

By	Bao Pu (Canada) - See all my reviews

I found this book an enlightening book of biology and the current reductionistic philosophy now in vogue. Includes an interesting study of the history of science and its paradigms. Here's a quote:

Being and becoming
Living organisms exist in four dimensions, the three of space and one of time, and cannot be 'read off' from the single dimension that constitutes the strand of DNA. Organisms are not empty phenotypes, related one-to-one to particular patterns of genes. Our lives form a developmental trajectory, or lifeline, stabilized by the operation of homeodynamic principles. This trajectory is not determined by our genes, nor partitioned into neatly dichotomous categories called nature and nurture. Rather, it is an autopoietic process, shaped by the interplay of specificity and plasticity. In so far as any aspect of life can be said to be 'in the genes', our genes provide the capacity for both specificity -- a lifeline relatively impervious to developmental and environmental buffeting -- and plasticity -- the ability to respond appropriately to unpredictable environmental contingency, that is, to experience. This autopoletic interplay is in some senses captured by that old paradox of Xeno -- the arrow shot at a target, which at any instant of time must be both somewhere and in transit to somewhere else. Reductionism ignores the paradox and freezes life at a moment of time. In attempting to capture its being, it loses its becoming, turning processes into reified objects. This is why reductionism always ends by impaling itself on a mythical dichotomy of materialist determinism and non-material free-will. Autopoiesis, self-construction, resolves these paradoxes. (p. 306)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Argument for Complexity, February 25, 2007

By	David B Richman (Mesilla Park, NM USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Lifelines: Life beyond the Gene (Paperback)

There has been a general argument going on for several years in biology over deterministic reductionism (as exemplified by sociobiology and evolutionary psychology) and its implications (actually the restarting of an argument that has flared up every so often over the last few hundred years at least!) Unfortunately almost all of the participants are given to overstatement and polemical diatribes when deriding their opponents (an unfortunate human habit, perhaps adaptive in providing the derider with more progeny?}

Steven Rose, a Professor of Biology at Britain's Open University, jumped into this debate in 1998 with his "Lifelines", which I have just gotten around to reading. The first part in indeed very engaging. In fact I pretty much agree with both Rose and Ernst Mayr ("Toward a New Philosophy of Biology") that reduction of an organism to the level of molecules only tells part of the story. Indeed, James Watson's view that "there is only one science, physics: everything else is social work" and his insistence that organismic biology was a waste of time stimulated E. O. Wilson to develop sociobiology in order to save some part of organismic biology at Harvard!

Rose goes on to expand on Theodosius Dobzhansky's thought that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" by adding both the history of the earth and the history of biological thought as well, a grouping of which I heartily approve. If you do not understand how we got to this point in the scientific dialog, you really cannot understand the debate!

An example of one contentious argument developed in this book is that of the effects of sexual selection on human reproductive success. Rose's point (in chapter seven) that rich men are not automatically reproductively successful is not without foundation, but must also be compared to the success in this area by very rich men such as Kings and Sultans, who were successful enough to get large harems and thus produce large numbers of offspring. It simply may not work as well today because rich men are not as often allowed the luxury of obtaining a huge number of wives (but see the Sultan of Brunei!) Many modern rich men may have substituted money for sex as their main preoccupation! However, from a purely genetic point of view, at least some rich men may be unfit to produce viable progeny. Also social custom, such as the killing of siblings as possible rivals (as was notorious in the Ottoman Empire) and female infanticide (common in China and India) can mitigate that success. Finally wealth does not guarantee successful child rearing! It might also be noted that in most countries large families often were poor ones! Poor people needed more hands to do the work and might have 20 children by one or more wives! On top of everything else, we have no idea how humans behaved in the Pleistocene! Behavior is not fossilized! As usual things are more complicated then we might think, whatever the "apparent" tendency!

Unfortunately, Rose starts to use the term ultra-Darwinist in Chapter eight. While his points are well taken, I do wish that both sides of this essentially unprovable argument would cease and desist in their name-calling. Such tactics remind me of creationists' characterizing of all evolutionists as Satan-loving, God-hating, moral relativists who have no scruples and are trying to ruin our society! Because of the use of "ultra-Darwinist" I dropped Rose's book to four stars.

As a field biologist I have always been impressed with the complexity of ecosystems and organisms. I also like solid data for every claim in a theory, if at all possible. I sometimes think that these preferences are what separates those who believe in the complexity of nature and those who seem to require a simple system that can be easily understood! Rose has said essentially "It's not that simple," and I am inclined to agree, although I also understand the need to try and model nature to make it more understandable. Let's just not confuse the model or the hypothesis for the real thing!

An engaging book to read, along with those of Gould, Dennett, Mayr, Dawkins, and Wilson. However, I would take no one's word that the final definitive book has been writen on the subject!