Word: monod
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That, in brief, is Monod's premise. And from it he builds an elegant philosophy, the "natural philosophy of biology," which bares the Secret of Life and which points out the inadequacies in the ideas, religions, and philosophies of western...
...Monod describes how scientific knowledge and the "law of objectivity" in science account for the origins of life, the evolution of the biosphere, the development of man, the development of the conscious and subconscious, and indeed for the creation of ideas, needs, and emotions. And all this--all this--is according to Monod based on purely random chance events of a biochemical nature which have occurred and are occurring within the natural biochemical systems that we are aware...
This argument is not simply a reduction of various observable phenomena into a petulant claim of "everything's science, after all." Rather, Monod's thesis combines an elaborate survey of biochemical interactions with a thorough and visionary analysis of their implications for the meanings of life...
...philosophies and religions with a basis of anthropocentrism, all histories backed by a belief in determinism--these are worthless, misleading and wrong if Monod's argument is believed. Man's position in nature is the result of pure random genetic accident; he, just like all other living beings, evolved the way he did by pure chance. Man's development and his histories similarly are neither mysterious nor predictable: they are, however, explicable: man's emotions and capacities have been predisposed, built into his chemical and genetic makeup, all by random molecular events...
...Jacques Monod, a Nobel Prize winner in Biology, helped formulate some of the original discoveries in molecular biology dealing with DNA replication and protein synthesis. More recent discoveries in the field have clearly illuminated the basic biochemical manner in which genetic materials are replicated and translated inside living tissue. Chance and Necessity reviews this information, describing the molecular structures in a fairly non-technical fashion. Monod hypothesizes how the nucleic acids might have originated as the information carrier molecule, suggests that the genetic code may have come into being purely randomly, and even suggests a mechanism for DNA-protein specificity...