Chance and Necessity

This radical book by Nobel laureate Monod is an important intellectual event. Chance & Necessity is a philosophical statement whose intention is to sweep away as both false & dangerous the animist conception of man that has dominated virtually all Western worldviews from primitive cultures to those of dialectical materialists. He bases his argument on the evidence of modern biology, which indisputably shows, that man is the product of chance genetic mutation. With the unrelenting logic of the scientist, he draws upon what we now know (& can theorize) of genetic structure to suggest an new way of looking at ourselves. He argues that objective scientific knowledge, the only reliable knowledge, denies the concepts of destiny or evolutionary purpose that underlie traditional philosophies. He contends that the persistence of those concepts is responsible for the intensifying schizophrenia of a world that accepts, & lives by, the fruits of science while refusing to face its moral implications. Dismissing as "animist" not only Plato, Hegel, Bergson & Teilhard de Chardin but Spencer & Marx as well, he calls for a new ethic that will recognize the distinction between objective knowledge & the realm of values--an ethic of knowledge that can, perhaps, save us from our deepening spiritual malaise, from the new age of darkness he sees coming.PrefaceOf strange objects Vitalisms & animisms Maxwell's demons Microscopic cyberneticsMolecular ontogenesis Invariance & perturbationsEvolution The frontiers The kingdom & the darknessAppendixes