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Mechanistic explanations of biology are comforting; being bodies ourselves,
we like to think that we can mend ourselves as easily as we mend our machines.
Long before serious genome research began, however, the physicist Walter
Elsasser realised that since even the operations of single cells are too complex
for computation, any causal (“genes-up”) explanation of organisms will falter.
In a new introduction to his landmark Reflections on a Theory of Organisms,
Harry Rubin admires a scientist ahead of his time, and a sobering message whose
moment has surely come. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press, £13,
ISBN 0801859700.