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Jessica Riskin , The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick . Chicago : The University of Chicago Press , 2016. Pp. 544. ISBN 978-0-226-30292-8 . $40.00 (hardback).
This is a book of enormous ambition and should be read not just by those interested in the relationship between the mechanical philosophy and the life sciences, but also by those interested in the way modern science has acquired its distinctive image and character in modern civilization. Riskin covers her topic from the Middle Ages through to Erwin Schrödinger's What Is Life? (1944), and beyond to Pixar's Inside Out (2015). Along the way, there are chapters on the earliest mechanical moving figures in medieval churches, the development of elaborate clocks with moving figures, hydraulic garden machinery, the earliest 'androids' in the seventeenth century, the first robots in twentieth-century fiction (but, disappointingly, no mention of Robbie or Marvin) and the development of cybernetics and artificial intelligence. These chapters in themselves would have made a highly useful book on perennial attempts to imitate life, but Riskin's real concern is to do much more than that. Her main concern is with the phenomenon of what she calls 'agency' in the natural world, and what she sees as the overriding concern of scientists through the ages to exclude this 'agency' from nature.
What she means by 'agency' is pretty clear, although it is by no means sharply and unequivocally established (perhaps deliberately). Essentially, she is interested in the way scientists (even those...