Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos Read Online Free PDF

atomism. Newton appeared to know the difference between mysticism and science and kept his alchemy and theology neatly separated from his scientific and mathematical writings. He even went so far as to defend his scientific findings from those who thought that he was advocating new occult forces: “These Principles I consider, not as occult Qualities, supposed to result from the specifick Forms of Things, but as general Laws of Nature, by which the Things themselvesare form’d; their Truth appearing to us by Phænomena, though their Causes be not yet discover’d . ”
    The mechanical philosophy and the new atomism compelled scientists during the scientific revolution to look ever more closely at the living world, and advances in optics provided new instruments for the search of the “atoms” of nature. The microscope was invented in the late 1500s in the Netherlands by two Dutch spectacle makers, Zacharias Janssen and his son Hans. Improvements to the microscope were completed by Galileo (1609) and Cornelius Drebbel (1619). In 1614, Galileo observed that flies had “fur.” Others observed mites and studied the structure of a fly’s eye. The most famous early book on microscopic observations was Hooke’s Micrographia of 1665. Robert Hooke (1635–1703), a master experimenter, used his homebuilt microscope to look at everything from flees to “gravel” in urine. The early microscopists discovered what Hooke called “small machines of nature,” from the legs of flees to single-celled animals. Hooke was the first to see cells in cork. The first animal cells, red blood cells, were discovered shortly thereafter by Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), but neither he nor Hooke realized that these cells were the smallest units of all living beings.
    Hooke and his contemporaries discovered that life was a wondrous menagerie of mechanisms, from the smallest “animalcules” to the body of a human. The search for smaller and smaller units continued for over two hundred years, leading to the cell theory in the mid-1800s. For Hooke and his fellow microscopists, the mechanical philosophy compelled them to look carefully at the components of living beings. What they saw confirmed their mechanical view of life. Observing the growth of mold, Hooke noted: “I must conclude, that as far as I have been able to look into the nature of this Primary kind of life and vegetation, I cannot find the least probable argument to perswade me there is any other concurrent cause then such as is purely Mechanical.”
L’homme machine
     
    Some people just don’t know when to shut up.
    Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751), Brittany native, medical doctor, and radical Enlightenment philosopher, certainly didn’t ( Figure 1.2 ).When his first venture into philosophy, A Natural History of the Soul (1745), was burned in Paris for its impiety, he followed with an attack on the less-than-competent physicians of France. Having thoroughly upset both the medical and the religious establishments, he fled to Holland. Then, in 1747, he continued his attacks with The Vengeful Faculty , against the physicians, and Man a Machine ( L’homme machine ), against the priests. Holland was no longer safe, and La Mettrie found refuge at the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin. The Prussian king loved the French and the Enlightenment, and you couldn’t be more Enlightenment than La Mettrie.

     
    FIGURE 1.2. Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Another laughing materialist philosopher, although unlike Democritus, he has no beard.
     
    What had La Mettrie written in L’homme machine that so upset his contemporaries?
    After receiving his medical doctorate from the University of Rheims, La Mettrie had served as medical officer to the French Guards and participated in a number of bloody battles. Through this experience, he developed a profound distaste for the slaughter of war and saw what savagery and injury could do to the human mind. He came to realize