The Biologist's Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature, and Nature
V. N. Alexander
Posthumous Books · AI-narrated by Anya (from Google)
headphones
Audiobook
7 hr 46 min
Unabridged
family_home
Eligible
info
text_to_speech
AI-narrated
reportRatings and reviews aren’t verified Learn More
Want a 30 min sample? Listen anytime, even offline.
Add
About this audiobook
A secular redescription of teleology, the study of purpose. As 20th century geneticist J. B. S. Haldane famously quipped, “Teleology is like a mistress to the biologist; he dare not be seen with her in public but cannot live without her.” Teleology is the study of the purposes of nature. As a scientific discipline, it began its celebrated decline in the 17th century, with the birth of modern empiricism, and continued to plummet apace the rise of the Enlightenment, Darwinism, and quantum mechanics. Those who continued to think nature could be purposeful were primarily spiritualists, artists, or madmen, who credited the guidance of gods, muses, or fate.But could a wholesale rejection of teleology be an overreaction? Is there something in the idea, as Haldane implies, that we need? Drawing on her experiences as a complexity theorist, novelist and art-theorist, Victoria N. Alexander examines the history and practices of teleology, the study of purpose, in nature as well as in human behavior. She takes us “inside” paradoxically purposeful self-organizing entities (which somehow make themselves without having selves yet to do the making), and she shows us how poetic-like relationships—things coincidentally like each other or metaphoric and things coincidentally near each other or metonymic—help form organization where there was none before. She suggests that it is these chance language-like processes that result in emergent design and selfhood, thereby offering an alternative to postmodern theories that have unfairly snubbed the purposeful artist. Alexander claims that what has been missing from the general discussion of purposefulness is a theory of creativity, without which there can be no purposeful action, only robotic execution of inherited design. Thus revising while reviving teleology, she offers us a secular, non-essentialist conception of selfhood as an achievement that can be more than a momentary stay against the second law.
About the author
V. N. Alexander works on emerging concepts in science and encourages interaction between the sciences and the literary arts. She earned her Ph.D. in 2002 in English at the Graduate Center, City University New York and did her dissertation research in teleology, evolutionary theory, and self-organization at the Santa Fe Institute, the premier center for the study of the complexity sciences. Her honors in art-science research include a Rockefeller Foundation Residency (Bellagio, Italy), a Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women Fellowship, two Art & Science Lab Residencies (Santa Fe), the Alfred Kazin Award for Best Dissertation (Graduate Center, City University NY) and a Fulbright Grant at ITMO University in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Rate this audiobook
Tell us what you think.
Listening information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
