Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos - Paperback

by Donna Jeanne Haraway (Author), Scott F. Gilbert (Foreword by)

Acclaimed theorist and social scientist Donna Jeanne Haraway uses the work of pioneering developmental biologists Ross G. Harrison, Joseph Needham, and Paul Weiss as a springboard for a discussion about a shift in developmental biology from a vitalism-mechanism framework to organicism. The book deftly interweaves Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigm change into this wide-ranging analysis, emphasizing the role of model, analogy, and metaphor in the paradigm and arguing that any truly useful theoretical system in biology must have a central metaphor.

Author Biography

Donna Haraway is perhaps our most advanced scientific storyteller. She locates the myths, metaphors, and tropes that underlie a technologically companionable physical world. Without abandoning scientific method--in fact, by embracing it in its fullest applicability--she exposes and also celebrates our scientific narratives as our clan story. In the process she 'outs' our most fundamental distinctions and unexamined paradoxes: nature/culture, wild/domesticated, molecular/organic, animal/human, body/gender, et al. Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields is the first chapter of Haraway's epic tale of Western science. When she names it 'metaphors that shape embryos, ' it should be clear that embryos also shape her metaphors, for she brilliantly illuminates the origin and dependence of each in each other. Donna Haraway is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department, University of California, Santa Cruz.