http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51f48WufrGL._SX292_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
I attach the book.
Find time to read this classic book-length essay by French Nobel Prize-winning biologist, Jacques Monod. It was a landmark popular science literature when it was published in 1970, but its philosophical view holds true today as it did then.
Some quotes from the book:
“… man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.”
…[mutations] constitute the only possible source of modifications in the genetic text, itself the sole repository of the organism’s hereditary structures, it necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition — or the hope — that on this score our position is likely ever to be revised.
(Chance and Necessity, p. 112)
“Everything comes from experience; yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.”
Monod is famous as a founding scientist of molecular biology. With his colleague, Francois Jacob, they came up with a model in 1950s of how expression of genes is controlled, for which they won the Nobel prize in 1965.
Enjoy the reading!
Ops!!! the file is too big to upload. Download it from this link(pdf):
http://monoskop.org/images/9/99/Monod_Jacques_Chance_and_Necessity.pdf