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

2100 Pages·2017·9.24 MB·English

by  Riskin

The Restless Clock
The Restless Clock
A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over
What Makes Living Things Tick
Jessica Riskin
The University of Chicago Press
CHICAGO & LONDON
Jessica Riskin is professor of history at Stanford University and author of Science in the Age of Sensibility:
The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment, also published by the University of Chicago
Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by Jessica Riskin
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30292-8 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-22630308-6 (e-book) DOI:
10.7208/chicago/9780226303086.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Riskin, Jessica, author.
The restless clock : a history of the centuries-long argument over what makes living things tick /
Jessica Riskin.
pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-30292-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-22630308-6 (ebook) 1. Vitalism. 2.
Mechanism (Philosophy) 3. Life (Biology) 4. Science—Philosophy. I. Title.
Q175.32.V65R57 2016
147—dc23
2015019941
Published with the support of the Susan E. Abrams Fund ♾ This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
For Madeleine and for Oliver, my vis viva, my pouvoir de la vie
In German, the name for the balance of a clock is Unruhe—that is to say disquiet. One could
say that it is the same thing in our body, which can never be perfectly at ease: because if it
were, a new impression of objects, a little change in the organs, in the vessels and viscera,
would change the balance and make these parts exert some small effort to get back to the best
state possible; which produces a perpetual conflict that is, so to speak, the disquiet of our
Clock, so that this appellation is rather to my liking.
—G. W. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais (1704) Now, to make the comparison of a watch better
suited to a living body and less imperfect, one must compare the exciting cause of organic
movements with the spring of the watch; and consider the supple containing parts as well as
the essential fluids contained by them as the works of the movement of the instrument in
question. Then one can see, first of all, that the spring (the exciting cause) is the essential
motor, without which, in fact, everything would remain inactive, and that its variations in
tension must cause variations in the energy and rapidity of the movements.
—J.-B. Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique (1809) Let us analyse the motion of a real clock
accurately. It is not at all a purely mechanical phenomenon. A purely mechanical clock
would need no spring, no winding. Once set in motion, it would go on forever. A real clock
without a spring stops after a few beats of the pendulum, its mechanical energy is turned into
heat. This is an infinitely complicated atomistic process. The general picture the physicist
forms of it compels him to admit that the inverse process is not entirely impossible: a
springless clock might suddenly begin to move, at the expense of the heat energy of its own
cog wheels and of the environment. The physicist would have to say: The clock experiences
an exceptionally intense fit of Brownian movement.
—E. Schrödinger, What Is Life? (1944)
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Huxley’s Joke, or the Problem of Agency in Nature and Science
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
Plates
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Figures
Figure 1.1 Pilgrim souvenir of the Rood of Grace, fourteenth century
Figure 1.2 Automaton Magi on the Piazza San Marco clock
Figure 1.3 Strasbourg astronomical clock, engraving by Isaac Brunn
Figure 1.4 Etching of the Stanza dei Venti, Villa Aldobrandini, by Giovanni Battista Falda
Figure 1.5 Isaac De Caus, Grotto of Neptune
Figure 1.6 Isaac De Caus, menacing owl and frightened birds
Figure 1.7 Isaac De Caus, Grotto of Galatea
Figure 1.8 Athanasius Kircher’s rendition of a camshaft
Figure 2.1 Portrait of René Descartes by Franz Hals
Figure 2.2 Illustration of the mechanism of sensation from Descartes’s Traité de l’homme
Figure 3.1 Christiaan Huygens’s drawing of a spring balance for a watch, 1675
Figure 3.2 Rendition of the eye as camera obscura, from Johann Zahn, Oculus artificialis
Figure 3.3 Christopher Wren’s depiction of a brain from Thomas Willis’s Cerebri Anatome, and
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s drawing of a dog’s uterus
Figure 3.4 The nerves of the trunk, from Thomas Willis’s Two Discourses concerning the Souls of
Brutes, and the organ at King’s College, University of Cambridge
Figure 3.5 Portrait of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, after a painting by Bernhard Francke
Figure 3.6 The nervous system of a silkworm, from Jan Swammerdam, Book of Nature
Figure 4.1 Faune jouant de la flûte, statue by Antoine Coysevox
Figure 4.2 The Flutist, the Piper, and the Duck, from Vaucanson’s Mécanisme du fluteur automate
Figure 4.3 Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Chess-Playing Turk, from Windisch, Lettres sur le joueur
d’echecs de M. de Kempelen
Figure 4.4 The Jaquet-Droz Musicienne
Figure 4.5 The Jaquet-Droz Dessinateur
Figure 4.6 A much-reproduced rendition of Vaucanson’s Duck and one of a mysterious set of
photographs, labeled “Pictures of Vaucanson’s Duck received from Dresden”
Figure 4.7 Maillard’s artificial swan
Figure 4.8 Athanasius Kircher’s design for a speaking figure, from Oedipus Aegyptiacus
Figure 4.9 The abbé Mical’s pair of discoursing heads
Figure 4.10 Joseph Faber’s talking head advertised as Barnum’s “Euphonia”
Figure 5.1 Adolf Von Menzel, Die Tafelrunde, a dinner hosted by Frederick II at Sanssouci Palace
Figure 6.1 Lamarck’s chart of species-transformation from Philosophie zoologique
Figure 6.2 Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, lithograph by Louis-Léopold Boilly
Figure 6.3 Giovanni Aldini’s electrical antics with corpses, from Essai théorique, and Andrew Ure
galvanizing the corpse of an executed murderer, from Figuier, Merveilles de la science
Figure 7.1 Page from Darwin’s secret transmutation notebook of 1837, Notebook B.
Figure 7.2 The results of pigeon-fancying, from Darwin, Variation of Animals and Plants
Figure 8.1 An earlobe mutilation from August Weismann’s “Supposed Transmission of Mutations”
Figure 9.1 Sylvia Field as Helena and Albert Van Dekker as Radius, a robot, in a scene from the
stage production of R.U.R. and a robot uprising from the stage production of R.U.R.
Figure 9.2 Early robot cartoon from Life (1923) and Westinghouse’s Mr. Televox in the New York
Times (1927)
Figure 9.3 Westinghouse’s Mr Televox
Figure 9.4 Eric the Robot, from the Illustrated London News
Figure 9.5 Ross Ashby’s Homeostat, from “The Electronic Brain,” Radio-Electronics
Figure 9.6 One of Grey Walter’s electromechanical tortoises, Elmer and Elsie
Figure 9.7 Norbert Wiener with his tropism machine, the Moth/Bedbug
Figure 9.8 Claude Shannon with his mouse, Theseus
Plates
Plate 1 Sketch of an automaton she-devil by Giovanni Fontana
Plate 2 Automaton devil from the collection of Ludovico Settala
Plate 3 Männleinlaufen (Parade of little men) on the Frauenkirche clock, Nuremberg
Plate 4 Automaton Franciscan monk attributed to Juanelo Turriano, c. 1560
Plate 5 Close-up of the Jaquet-Droz Musicienne’s hands
Plate 6 The Jaquet-Droz Ecrivain
Plate 7 Portrait of Julien Offray de La Mettrie by Georg Friedrich Schmidt
Plate 8 Erotic pocket watch with automaton birds and musicians on the dial plate and concealed
erotic automaton scene by Henry Capt
Plate 9 Cog the robot