James Baird wrote:
> There are
> > scientists who doubt that the gene-protein
> > mechanisms of the nucleus produce
> > a plan or blueprint of bodily structure.
>
> I must confess I'm lost here. Maybe I'm just too much
> of a Dawkinsian reductionist, but what else could it
> be? I mean, we start from a single cell, and grow
> into a complex organism - where else is the
> information going to come from, if not from the
> structures in that cell?
I know not a damn thing about genetics, but in the abstract your question is easily answerable: consider formal allegory.
You begin with A (a symbol) and the rest of the world and make A an allegory of B. But now in addition to the relation of A to the world and A to B, you have the relation of A to the relation of B to the world, also to the relation of B to the World and A, you have the relation of the new whole to the old whole, so you have C, but now you have the relatoin of D the relation of C to AB, the relation of E to the relations A/world, A/B/ AB/ World / the relations multiply to inifnity: Once a formal allegory is established there is no non-arbitrary way to stop the chain of significances. Moreover we have multiple infinities, for at each stage of the allegory a relationship between the allegory and the "world" affects the world, thus transforming retrospecively the original relationship between A and the world, thus triggering another cascade of relationships. Each additional element or relation in the whole triggers a new infiinity, itself a class of infinite classes.
Morover, while this process is seen most immediately in the case of complex formal allegories (e.g., Dante's *Comedy*); as soon as one becomes aware of it it is obvious that it characterizes all texts, even the simplest: e.g., "A is for Apple." As soon as one contemplates the statement, one must see it not only as an introductory proposition in English orthography but also (or else it would not illustrate anything) the assertion of a one-to-one relation (within a given context) of an arbitrary sign and the world of natural things (Apples). And .....
Cell 1 generates Cell 2, but that act of generation transforms the environment of Cell 1 to the environment of Cell1/Cell2, so a random factor will have been introduced into the creation of Cell 3 by Cell 1 and Cell 4 by Cell2, thus the original template (if there was one) no longer controls the new template, which in being enacted again transforms . . . .
I don't know a fucking thing about genetics, but I thought this would be fun.
Carrol