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This eloquent and profoundly radical book
by Nobel laureate Jacques Monod is an intellectual event
of the first importance. It has already been a phenomenal
best seller in France, where its impact has been likened
to that which followed the formulation of existentialism;
it has been the subject of extensive commentary throughout
the world; and translations into virtually every major language
are in preparation.
Chance and Necessity is a philosophical
statement whose explicit intention is to sweep away as both
false and dangerous the "animist" conception of
man that has dominated virtually all Western world views
from those of primitive cultures to those of the dialectical
materialists.
Monod bases his argument on the evidence
of modern biology, which shows, indisputably, that man is
the product of chance genetic mutation. With the unrelenting
logic of the scientist, he draws upon what we now know of
genetic structure (and on what we can theorize) to suggest
an entirely new way of looking at ourselves. He argues that
objective scientific knowledge, the only knowledge we can
rely on, denies the concepts of destiny or evolutionary
purpose that underlie traditional philosophies; and he contends
that the persistence of those concepts is responsible for
the intensifying schizophrenia of a world that accepts,
and lives by, the fruits of science while refusing to face
its momentous moral implications. Dismissing as "animist"
not only Plato, Hegel, Bergson, and Teilhard de Chardin
but Spencer and Marx as well, Monod calls for a new ethic
that will, at last, recognize the distinction between objective
knowledge and the realm of values -- an ethic of knowledge
that can, perhaps, save us from our deepening spiritual
malaise, from the new age of darkness that he sees coming.
Jacques Monod, together with Andre Lwoff
and Francois Jacob, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965
for elucidating the replication mechanism of genetic material
and the manner in which cells synthesize protein.
Dr. Monod is now the director of the
Pasteur Institute in Paris, whose Cellular Biochemistry
Service he created in 1954 and directed thereafter. He was
appointed a professor at the College of France in 1967,
and he is a foreign member of both the Royal Society and
the National Academy of Sciences.
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