Introduction

In 1970 the distinguished French biochemist, Jacques Monod, published a little book entitled Chance and Necessity. Along with his colleagues AndreLwoff and Frangois Jacob, Monod had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for groundbreaking work on the mechanisms of genetic replication and protein synthesis. To highlight the contrast between these two views of creativity we can return to the analogy between the living organism and the work of art. The artist's invention, in this view, does not end with the completion of his work, any more than it began with a preconceived idea of its final form. The meaning of the pattern, therefore, can be grasped only by an intuition that enters into it, or that follows its trails, rather than by an intellect that, in contemplating the finished work, attempts to reconstruct the puzzle from a solution.