![]() ![]() ![]() Mukherjee does not mention that human reproduction is a cooperative fusion of cellular selves - the fertilized cell or zygote is made from two people - and the embryo-fetus is partly a genetic foreigner to the pregnant person. In this “holistic” model, the sum is more than its parts. ![]() ![]() Members of the French Montpellier school, however, proposed no supernatural ingredient but rather a functional, relational, dynamic biology that could not be reduced to its elements. Mukherjee advances the conventional view that vitalists proposed a divine ingredient as the source of animation. The author covers the debates that raged in the 18th and 19th centuries between mechanists, who understood nature as a machine reducible to its discrete parts (reductionism), and vitalists who argued that this sum did not suffice to explain life. Although Mukherjee’s cell saga is not strictly chronological, he summarizes its early history in the first part of the book, including the invention of the microscope in the late 16th century and its most famous users: Robert Hooke, the author of “Micrographia ” (1665), who gave the cell its name, and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who spotted living creatures, “animalcules,” under the magnifying lenses he had made. ![]()
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