The Tinker's Accomplice. How Design Emerges from Life Itself
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Author(s): J. S. Turner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674023536
Format: hardback
282pp
Price: £18.95, $27.95, €23.80
Review Date: 03 April 2007
Review: The thesis of this book is that organisms are designed not so much as the result of natural selection of particular genes, but because agents of homeostasis build them that way. [Homeostasis is the property of an open system, especially a living organism, to regulate its internal environment to maintain a stable, constant condition, by means of multiple dynamic equilibrium adjustments, controlled by interrelated regulation mechanisms.] The agents work by constructing environments upon which the precarious and dynamic stability that is homeostasis can be imposed – the result is ‘design’. The author begins by exploring the basic problems of design, introducing the Bernard machine, which is an agent of homeostasis that builds a new environment and imposes homeostasis on it. He goes on to explain how the Bernard machine imparts design to living systems, looking at particular systems, such as arterial trees, bones, and the epithelium, The last part of the book, more philosophical in nature, explores the intentionality and purposefulness in evolutionary biology and discusses what place design might have in a comprehensive theory of evolution.