Biology and the riddle of life /

Birch's central proposition is that though biology has done well to explain the objective, mechanistic aspects of life, it has been unable or unwilling to deal with the subjective aspects. Such questions have largely been left to philosophers. Birch (Univ. of Sydney, emeritus) confronts the impression that modern biology has answered or is near answering all there is to be known about life, calling for a "radical extension" of the biological sciences away from the model of mechanism to that of organism. Such an approach would view organisms not as objects but as subjects. A purely physical view of nature and life will remain deficient, he argues, until we infuse it with the subjective, or what Alfred North Whitehead called "the philosophy of organism." Biology and the Riddle of Life makes a significant contribution to the emerging idea that individual entities from molecules to social systems should be thought of not as solid matter but as events and processes. Such a view of the world would lead, Birch argues, to a naturalistic understanding of God far different from the current interventionist, supernatural view of most religions. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals, including philosophers. S. Hollenhorst; University of Idaho