Profil senescenta – Markoš Anton (2018)

The author is a biologist, and this book presents a selection of his Czech texts from 2008 to 2017; it follows a similar collection, Profile of a Graduate (2008). Here, the reader will find excerpts from books he has written or contributed to, forewords to translations he has participated in, and also shorter occasional texts. The unifying theme of these diverse contributions is the quest to understand the living, to find the characteristics that distinguish life from non-life. Natural science usually avoids anthropomorphisms, as they hinder an objective approach to the phenomena studied – which biology also strives for, at the cost of neglecting some manifestations of life. However, science is not the only source of knowledge, and so in the case of manifestations of life, there is often tension between the views of scientists and, for example, philosophers, historians, and similar – from the perspective of natural science – 'non-scientists'. In an effort to bridge this tension, the author dares to approach the living also from the perspective of human experience: living beings, with whose experience of the world and survival in the world we have – it cannot be helped – the greatest experience. The most important link is history and its interpretation by evolutionary biologists and historians on one side, and individual forms of life on the other.