The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick - Jessica Riskin [epub]

Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science.

The Restless Clock examines the history of this principle, banning agency, in the life sciences. It also tells the story of dissenters embracing the opposite idea: that agency is essential to nature. The story begins with the automata of early modern Europe, as models for the new science of living things, and traces questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among many others. Mechanist science, Jessica Riskin shows, had an associated theology: the argument from design, which found evidence for a designer in the mechanisms of nature. Rejecting such appeals to a supernatural God, the dissenters sought to naturalize agency rather than outsourcing it to a “divine engineer.” Their model cast living things not as passive but as active, self-making machines.

The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This history promises not only to inform such debates, but also our sense of the possibilities for what it means to engage in science—and even what it means to be alive.

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Review

"The Restless Clock is a sweeping survey of the search for answers to the mystery of life. Riskin writes with clarity and wit, and the breadth of her scholarship is breathtaking."

(Times Higher Education)

“In this rich, sweeping history, Riskin explores the dialectic between mechanistic models of nature from the mid-17th century forward. The author's main interest is in the notion of "agency" or purposefulness, which has been banned from scientific discourse by the dominant brute-mechanist paradigm; struggle between models, she argues, has been going on since modern science's inception and it influences debates today in the fields of evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. The work of luminaries such as René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Charles Darwin is discussed, as well as that of contemporaries including Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould. But there are also the lesser knowns: the clockmakers, court mechanics, artisans, and their fantastic assortment of gadgets, automata, and androids that stood as models for the nascent life sciences. Riskin's accounts of these automata will come as a revelation to many readers, as she traces their history from late medieval, early Renaissance clock- and organ-driven devils and muttering Christs in churches to the robots of the post-World War II era. Fascinating on many levels, this book is accessible enough for a science-minded lay audience yet useful for students and scholars.”

(Library Journal)

"At the heart of this scientific and cultural history is the concept of agency—the capacity to act—in nature. Riskin reveals how two distinct interpretations emerged from the mechanical Universe of the Enlightenment: Isaac Newton’s passive version, reliant on a divine tinkerer; and Gottfried Leibniz’s, which saw life as purposeful and 'self-transforming.' Riskin’s investigation of this duality, by way of Renaissance automatons, the gestation of evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics, is engrossing and illuminating."

(Nature)

"Riskin’s book begins with Descartes and automata and traces the development of ideas about what animates living things up to the present. Science long ago moved away from theories about a divine clockmaker, but Riskin says some of the ideas from that period persist in surprising form. In particular, she says, atheist philosophers and scientists who regard consciousness in purely mechanistic terms, are inadvertently borrowing a schematic that, in a different time, struck people as evidence of God."

(Boston Globe)

"This timeless fascination with the question of what it means to be living has been explored most recently be Riskin, a history professor at Stanford University. In her latest book, The Restless Clock, she moves past the previous theologically and philosophically grounded discussions and looks at these questions of autonomy through the lens of a historian....By putting forth these questions in the words of past intellectuals, Riskin engages the reader in evaluating these existential questions with respect to big-picture “processes” like evolution, artificial intelligence and epistemology."

(The Tartan)

"The Restless Clock examines more than four centuries of debate over the extent to which living beings can be understood as governed by 'mechanism,' and in the process it reorients our understanding of some of the most important themes and individuals in the Western canon during this period, including the thought of Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Lamarck, and Darwin, plus contemporaries such as Dennett, Dawkins, and Gould, among others. Riskin has written a work of tremendous intellectual scope and accomplishment."

(Ken Alder, author of The Lie Detectors)

"In this impressive cultural and intellectual narrative of the sciences of life and the techniques of mechanics, Riskin shows decisively how a richer and broader history of such sciences offers indispensable lessons for controversies surrounding agency and purpose in our understanding of the world. The Restless Clock explores fascinating projects launched by medieval churchmen and Renaissance artisans, enlightened philosophers and modern experimenters. It documents the construction of automata and experimentation in biology, the ambitions of Darwinism and of germ theory, the visions of cybernetics and of neurosciences. These stories reveal the power and importance of a tradition of living machines within the development of western sciences that has been strangely underestimated or dismissed. Its legacies today need just this kind of astute re-evaluation.

This book will become a central reference for many vital debates about the long history of life sciences and the possible futures of intelligent machines."
(Simon Schaffer, coauthor of Leviathan and the Air-Pump)

"In this original and masterful book, Riskin recounts how scientists, philosophers, artists, and mechanics have wrestled with the nature of vital entities on the page and canvas, in the workshop and in stone. Here among others are Vaucanson and Kant, Descartes, Leibniz, and Darwin, defecating ducks, talking heads, and robots—giving us both the unfamiliar and the familiar in a new light, presented with deft analysis in luminous prose."

(Daniel J. Kevles, author of The Baltimore Case)

“A wonderful contribution--and much needed corrective--to the history of European ideas about life and matter.”

(Evelyn Fox Keller, author of The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture)

About the Author

Jessica Riskin is professor of history at Stanford University and author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment, also published by the University of Chicago Press.