Marco Tamborini - Böcker

In the final decades of the twentieth century, the advent of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) offered a revolutionary new perspective that transformed the classical neo-Darwinian, gene-centered study of evolution. In _The Architecture of Evolution_, Marco Tamborini demonstrates how this radical innovation was made possible by the largely forgotten study of morphology. Despite the key role morphology played in the development of evolutionary biology since the 1940s, the architecture of organisms was excluded from the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis. And yet, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1970s and ’80s, morphologists sought to understand how organisms were built and how organismal forms could be generated and controlled. The generation of organic form was, they believed, essential to understanding the mechanisms of evolution. Tamborini explores how the development of evo-devo and the recent organismal turn in biology involved not only the work of morphologists but those outside the biological community with whom they exchanged their data, knowledge, and practices. Together with architects and engineers, they worked to establish a mathematical and theoretical basis for the study of organic form as a mode of construction, developing and reinterpreting important notions that would play a central role in the development of evolutionary developmental biology in the late 1980s. This book sheds light not only on the interdisciplinary basis for many of the key concepts in current developmental biology but also on contributions to the study of organic form outside the English-speaking world.**PRAISE**"Marco Tamborini’s book is a much-needed history of morphological thought in the twentieth century. It provides an engaging intellectual journey, leading us through biology, architecture, philosophy, engineering, mathematics, politics, and art. This is a highly original contribution that shows how the science of form emerged from an international and interdisciplinary enterprise." ~Maurizio Esposito, University of Lisbon, Portugal

Evolutionary algorithms that imitate nature to solve technical problems, synthetic DNA that turns plants into living data archives, and the use of autonomous machines inside living bodies are just a few examples suggesting that the boundaries between life and technology have become fundamentally blurred in the early 21st century.While the technologization of organisms has a longer history, an increasing biologization of technology can be observed today in bioinformatics, molecular biology, and other fields. This development is characterized by the crossing of disciplinary and methodological boundaries. It is becoming increasingly difficult to say where the boundaries between biology and technology, science and economics, and representation and intervention lie. In fact, organisms and technologies can no longer be thought of as ontologically distinctive entities. Rather, it seems that biological and technical systems are becoming increasingly interwoven and exchanging properties in the process. Against this backdrop, nature itself becomes more and more a construction kit and a resource for technological design and economic investment. Proposing the notion of “biohybrid objects” for complex systems consisting of natural and artificial components that not only imitate living beings but also share their basic principles, this edited volume explores the remarkable circulation of morphological knowledge between biology and technology.Bringing together innovative interdisciplinary contributions, the volume aims to provide insights on the emergence and nature of biohybrid objects from philosophy, epistemology, and science and technology studies.

This open access handbook aims to provide a definitive assessment of the historiography and the future of major themes and approaches within the history of the earth sciences, understood broadly.  The volume is intended for a broad range of readers, including graduate students, other scholars, and scientists, both familiar with and new to the history of the earth and environmental sciences.  Essays in the collection reflect on various problems in the study of the history of the earth sciences emphasizing crosscutting themes (such as economics, technology, politics, gender, etc.) and featuring innovative ways of framing historiographic perspectives.  Since scholarship in the history of science is increasingly becoming entangled with environmental, economic and bureaucratic, political, gender, and other historical approaches, the volume as a whole emphasizes the breadth and diversity of scholarship on the earth and environmental sciences.

Das vorliegende Buch zielt darauf ab, die verschiedenen Konzeptionen des „Menschen“, die eng mit der Produktion von anthropologischem Wissen in einem technowissenschaftlichen Umfeld verbunden sind, zu untersuchen.