Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life
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Since antiquity, philosophers and engineers have tried to take life’s measure by reproducing it. Aiming to reenact Creation, at least in part, these experimenters have hoped to understand the links between body and spirit, matter and mind, mechanism and consciousness. Genesis Redux examines moments from this centuries-long experimental tradition: efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to understand living beings by comparison with inanimate mechanisms.Jessica Riskin collects seventeen essays from distinguished scholars in several fields. These studies offer an unexpected and far-reaching result: attempts to create artificial life have rarely been driven by an impulse to reduce life and mind to machinery. On the contrary, designers of synthetic creatures have generally assumed a role for something nonmechanical. The history of artificial life is thus also a history of theories of soul and intellect.Taking a historical approach to a modern quandary, Genesis Redux is essential reading for historians and philosophers of science and technology, scientists and engineers working in artificial life and intelligence, and anyone engaged in evaluating these world-changing projects. British Journal for the History of Science "These eclectic essays will entertain and educate. . . . This volume can be recommended to anyone interested in the history of artificial-life research, and the history of the life sciences more broadly."— Jacob Stegenga
List of Contributors ixList of Illustrations xiiiAcknowledgments xviiIntroduction: The Sistine Gap Jessica Riskin 1ConnectionsThe Imitation of Life in Ancient Greek Philosophy Sylvia Berryman 35The Devil as Automaton: Giovanni Fontana and the Meanings of a Fifteenth-Century Machine Anthony Grafton 46Infinite Gesture: Automata and the Emotions in Descartes and Shakespeare Scott Maisano 63Abstracting from the Soul: The Mechanics of Locomotion Dennis Des Chene 85The Anatomy of Artificial Life: An Eighteenth-Century Perspective Joan B. Landes 96EmergenceThe Homunculus and the Mandrake: Art Aiding Nature versus Art Faking Nature William R. Newman 119Sex Ratio Theory, Ancient and Modern: An Eighteenth-Century Debate about Intelligent Design and the Development of Models in Evolutionary Biology Elliott Sober 131The Gender of Automata in Victorian Britain M. Norton Wise 163Techno-Humanism: Requiem for the Cyborg Timothy Lenoir 196Nanobots and Nanotubes: Two Alternative Biomimetic Paradigms of Nanotechnology Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent 221CreatingInsight: Gestalt Theory and the Early Computer David Bates 237InteractionsPerpetual Devotion: A Sixteenth-Century Machine That Prays Elizabeth King 263Motions and Passions: Music-Playing Women Automata and the Culture of Affect in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany Adelheid Voskuhl 293An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater Stefan Helmreich 321Booting Up Baby Evelyn Fox Keller 334Body Language: Lessons from the Near-Human Justine Cassell 346Index 375
