Karl Popper and the Two New Secrets of Life: Including Karl Popper's Medawar Lecture 1986 and Three Related Texts

This book is a delight as well as a profound contribution to biology. The delight is in the clear and succinct language as well as the biography of Popper in the adventure of his life from pre-war Vienna and England as well as his peregrinations with postwar geography and ideas. Some short bios of other philosophers and biologists, especially those of the Theoretical Biology Club around WWII also add to the colorfulness of the buildup part of the book. But it is the thoroughly researched exposition of Popper as a philosopher of biology that is quite astounding. Niemann was able to pull together sources to be able to print Popper’s Medawar lecture of 1986 for the first time. The short version is that Popper built a third theory of evolution (1 Genesis, 2 Darwinian evolution as passive evolution) by acknowledging the necessary activity of life/ organisms to gain solutions to problems (increase probable expectations) — active Darwinism. The book builds to the key concept of “propensities”, which are the probabilities built into the physical world as very distinct from the subjective probabilities used in probability theory to measure our predictions. Chemical reactions of life are presumed to collect propensities that are almost never determinate but have composite propensities in their chemical structures toward certain outcomes. Jointly the activity of organisms in trial and error for more reliable expectations and the propensities and their changing to be stronger expectations complement the passive “selection” of given genetic variants.The book was enjoyable as well as very rewarding to Popper’s sketches of important concepts. It is relevant that the author is a chemist. I strongly recommend.

Without doubt the most important book about and from Karl Popper since years...HJN is a great explainer. Darwin revisited. As usual from HJN: a lot of work went into this book. The result is this masterpiece.What is so important about this book? First of all, it shows that Popper had a new theory about how evolution works. And one of the things Niemann does is show that all the newest research points in one direction: that Popper was right. If that doesn't make this an important book, I don't know what could ever make a book important.

At least the snippets of Popper biography were good ish

It is a really discovering of a new Karl Popper fully engaged in biology and evolution

Absolutely fascinating story based on a previously unpublished lecture by Popper to the Royal Society. Popper spotted two major problems with neo-darwinism. He called it Darwinism in the title of the 1986 lecture on which this book is based, but he clearly meant neo-darwinism. (Darwin was never a neo-darwinist). The first is the distinction between active causation by organisms compared to the passive causation by their genes, which leads to the idea of genes as followers rather than leaders in evolution. The second is the realisation that the discovery of reverse transcription was a far more serious blow to the central dogma of molecular biology than was acknowledged at the time. Niemann is a clear expositor of Popper's lecture and how it fits with he work on the logic of scientific discovery.

Without doubt the most important book about and from Karl Popper since years...HJN is a great explainer. Darwin revisited. As usual from HJN: a lot of work went into this book. The result is this great work.What is so important about this book? First of all, it shows that Popper had a new theory about how evolution works. And one of the things Niemann does is show that all the newest research points in one direction: that Popper was right. If that doesn't make this an important book, I don't know what could ever make a book important.

Not sure what you have in mind when you ask me how I intend to "use the product". Any account of the uses of monographs would either be exceedingly short, or could.be itself a monograph. This one was very interesting, and a reminder of the range of Popper`s interests, and that he continued to flourish till late in life.

Especially interesting because it includes the first ever publication of Popper's 1986 (First) medawar lecture.