The book "Brave Genius" by Sean B Carroll is not about neuroscience, but I still thought I'd write a few lines about it here. It's a good read, and a mix of 20th century history, biography, philosophy and popular science on molecular biology. It follows the lives of the philosopher Albert Camus and the biologist Jacques Monod from their time in the French resistance during WWII, through their struggles with and break-up from communism (they both became strong opponents of the Soviet Union), to their respective successes and lives and tasks as public figures (both were Nobel prize winners, and seem to have been burdened by the obligations that followed).
One interesting aspect is how the philosopher and scientists borrowed from and inspired each other. When Camus criticized the dogmatism and tyranny of the Soviet Union he used arguments from Monod on the pseudo-science of the Soviet "geneticists"
Trofim Lysenko, who's backward theories hold back biological research in Soviet for decades. And likewise, when Monod got engaged in public affairs and wrote his best-seller
Chance and Necessity, he was influenced not only by his own discoveries of the expression of the genetic code into proteins, but also by Camus' work, primarily
The Myth of Sisyphus.
The quote "Each of science's conquests is a victory of the absurd" is from Monod (although he attributed it to a fictional Scottish philosopher). It seems
originally to have described a situation when a bacterium produced a useless enzyme (beta-galactosidase) in response to a substrate it could not metabolize (succinate). But it also fits well with his general ideas of life and science, which was
inspired again by Camus. Monod thought that the scientific genetic discoveries had made life itself absurd, since it was now possible to explain life without the need for a divine force. It was now obvious that humans had to deal with an eternal conflict: how to find meaning and value in a world where only humans themselves can create meaning and value.
-Niklas
