The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick

Riskin, Jessica. The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2016. "544 pages | 9 color plates, 51 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2016."[1]

A richly illustrated, copiously annotated fulfillment of the promise of the subtitle, indexed, with over 60 pages of bibliography.

Starts with "Introduction: Huxley's Joke, or the Problem of Agency in Nature an Science." Not much of a joke, but a mild mocking of the idea that some "vitality" gives life by asking if the qualities of water come from "aquosity" (p. 1) or can eventually, in theory, be accounted for totally by the chemistry of H₂O. See for the key background idea that "the core paradigm of modern science" is a mechanistic view that "describes the world as a machine — a great clock, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century imagery — whose parts are made of inert matter, moving only when set in motion by some external force [...]": passive and without agency (p. 3).

Chapters

1. Machines in the Garden
2. Descartes among the Machines
3. The Passive Telescope or the Restless Clock
4. The First Androids
5. The Adventures of Mr. Machine
6. Dilemmas of a Self-Organizing Machine
7. Darwin between the Machines
8. The Mechanical Egg and the Intelligent Egg
9. Outside In
10. History Matters

From the publisher's extended blurb: Contrary to the orthodox scientific view discouraging anthropomorphism and assigning agency to material nature and the vast majority of living beings,

[...] Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science.

The Restless Clock examines the history of this principle, banning agency, in the life sciences. It also tells the story of dissenters embracing the opposite idea: that agency is essential to nature. The story begins with the automata of early modern Europe, as models for the new science of living things, and traces questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among many others. Mechanist science, Jessica Riskin shows, had an associated theology: the argument from design, which found evidence for a designer in the mechanisms of nature. Rejecting such appeals to a supernatural God, the dissenters sought to naturalize agency rather than outsourcing it to a “divine engineer.” Their model cast living things not as passive but as active, self-making machines.

The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. [...][2]

Chapter 1: Relevant here primarily for its extended discussion and illustration of of late Medieval and Renaissance (or "Early Modern") automatons of various sorts: complex, ingenious clocks and miniature mechanical theaters, hydraulic engines, etc. for a wide group. Note well that along with these popular devices could go a denial of a division between mechanical and living in that the more sophisticated automata could be experienced as "lively" in more than a figurative sense.

RDE, finishing, 28Feb21