Reply to Jacob and Colebunders

Jacob and Monod: From Operons to EvoDevo

As Francois Jacob tells it, one afternoon in September 1958, just back from New York, he walked into Jacque Monod’s office at the Pasteur Institute in Paris; he believed he had something exciting to discuss. But he found an unimpressed Monod brusquely dismissive. Tired from his flight, Jacob quickly gave up and went home to bed. The next day he returned re-energized and found an altogether more...

Jacob " Evolution and Tinkering " ( 1977 ) , by Francois Jacob

In his essay "Evolution and Tinkering," published in Science in 1977, François Jacob argues that a common analogy between the process of evolution [4] by natural selection [5] and the methods of engineering is problematic. Instead, he proposes to describe the process of evolution [4] with the concept of bricolage (tinkering). In this essay, Jacob does not deny the importance of the mechanism of...

Jacob Ross

How is what an agent ought to do related to what an agent ought to prefer that she does? More precisely, suppose we know what an agent’s preference ordering ought to be over the outcomes of performing the various courses of action open to her. Can we infer from this information how she ought to act, and if so, how can we infer it? One view (which, for convenience, I will call ‘actualism’) is th...

The Authors’ Reply

Francois Jacob (1920-2013)

François Jacob studied bacteria and bacteriophages at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1965, Jacob won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine [3] with André M. Lwoff and Jacques L. Monod for their work on the genetic control of enzyme synthesis. Jacob studied how genes [4] control and regulate metabolic enzymes in the bacterium Escherichi...