>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?
>From the living history of its species.
Do we really start as a single cell? True, we are rooted in the momentum that commences after the fertilization of that cell. But we are equally extensions of our parents. As Laurie Anderson says, "I was a Hershey bar in my father's back pocket." How far back does each of us go? Even our species is, in part, merely an extension of our primate ancestors. The whole point of evolution is that our true starting point is a community of proto-bacteria that probably didn't even have any DNA or protein because these things hadn't split off from RNA yet. We are truly old. Our memory stretches back very far. The reason our cells are fundamentally the same as all the cells of all the living things in the world is because we're all informed by our shared bacterial history. Our bodies are basically the same as other mammal bodies-- in both organ and limb types-- because our development is informed by our mammalian history. We humans develop human bodies, because our species-memory is alive in each of us.
It's no accident that the history of a living thing is itself alive. That's the meaning of life. We are the life of our own history, both personal and collective. We are informed by our history, not just from embryo to adult but all the way to the grave. To die is to lose touch with our history, when one's body is no longer connected to the ever-evolving species memory that had always informed it before. Death is when the body loses its mind.
There are two theories of life; August Weismann's germ-plasm and Alfred North Whitehead's organicism. The central explanatory feature of Weismannian theory is genetics, which is atomistic. Organicism, on the other hand, is holistic. Instead of bits of information being stored in genes, the body as a whole is informed according to the organizational plan of its species.
Over time, the "germ-plasm" of Weismann yielded to chromosomes, which yielded to DNA, which has now yielded to gene-protein interaction. Instead of being literally transmitted to the offspring by its parents, the instructions are merely implicit in the make-up of one's genes and proteins (all of which come from Mom). The blueprint begins to unfold only in the course of development. There is thus no longer a separation between "program" and "implementation." The program *is* its implementation. No doubt this is correct regarding all those traits which are determined in the nucleus of our cells. But what about the blueprint of the body, which is so much more than just how tall you are or whether your fingernails break easily? We are left with a blueprint which turns out to be nothing more than the finished product it's supposed to describe. Clearly, something is missing here. Enrico Coen has theorized that the key ingredient in this process is creativity. He notes that every species of flower, despite having the same "identity genes," develops its own unique manifestation of the sepal-petal-stamen-carpel sequence. Why? Because of the creativity inherent in the "master proteins" and "interpretive genes" which determine chemical reactions in its cells, not to mention their shape, motility, and division, etc. Since their actions are not entirely determined, they are able to exert their own creativity, much in the way an artist expresses his unique vision in a painting. What distinguishes a squirrel from a bat is not determined by the genes. Instead, a squirrel egg can only create a squirrel-- and a bat egg can only create a bat-- for the same reason that Rembrandt could only paint a Rembrandt, and Picasso could only paint a Picasso.
I'm not kidding.
Lacking a clear mechanism of development, Coen has turned to creativity, with every species on the order of a master artist. This is actually far closer in spirit to Darwin than "neo-Darwinian" (Weismannian) theory has ever been. Darwin, after all, explicitly rejected any possible atomistic (genetic) theory of development on the grounds that if one particular germ was altered, then the thing it determined would be ridiculously out of proportion to the rest of the body. His conclusion was on the grounds that there are no monsters. He believed that matter is intrinsically creative, and that new forms arise spontaneously from matter. This is genuinely insightful-- and one of the reasons Darwin could never be considered a Darwinist-- but it will never account for a theory of development, which is why his successors moved away from it.
Of course, there is creativity in our bones, but the crucial element Coen is searching for is not spontaneity but memory. Unlike creativity, memory can plausibly account for the fact that each embryo "knows" what kind of organism it's supposed to become. Making it up as you go along is just not going to cut it.
I don't know how seriously Coen's theory is taken among other Weismannians, and I'd certainly like to hear Dawkins' reaction. But I suspect that those who would reject his view have even less to offer themselves. At least Coen's willing to make a go of it. I don't see Dawkins trying to present a post-blueprint molecular theory of life or even so much as acknowledging that such a thing is obviously necessary if the materialistic school is to survive.
The organismic theory, after languishing in the boring mid-century, began to develop again in the late 70s. It was resurrected by Cambridge biochemist Rupert Sheldrake. In *A New Science of Life*, Sheldrake proposed an organismic theory which depended on resonance between an organism and all the past members of its species (thus providing the first precise definition ever of the word "species"). As the embryo develops, it resonates with the composite form of its species. But as its own structures begin to stabilize, the organism enters into self-resonance. That is, it develops personal memory (which for humans extends into conscious memory). Sheldrake calls this, "morphic resonance," which concerns the form of the organism in the same sense that electromagnetic resonance is based on the electrical charge of an object. Like electromagnetism, it also has a spatial (field) aspect.
Which brings us to the Platonistic theory of life. (That's right, if you take this one seriously-- as many biologists do-- there are actually three modern theories of life.) Morphic fields are standard fare in biology. In fact, all three theories utilize them in one way or another (though, for materialists, they are simply a useful explanatory device). Morphic fields can be mathematically described, and the numbers have been worked out for fields corresponding to numerous organic structures, most notably by Rene Thom and Brian Goodwin. For these theorists, morphic fields are eternal, mathematical entities which transcend the structures they govern. Thus when trilobites evolved into being, the fields that describe their bodies were not affected in the least, no more than they were when the trilobites departed this earthly realm. By contrast, Sheldrake's morphic fields continually evolve along with the species.
The relevant point here is that morphic fields can indeed be set to the score of mathematics, just like any other physical field.
The question boils down to this: When an emerging organism is informed as to its correct development, does that mean it's reading off a sequence of nucleic acids which encode this "information," or is it in resonance with similar forms from the past?
Both theories are problematic. Information does not exist except in the perception of an interpreter, and there's nothing of the sort in the nucleus of a cell, (which is why there's also no information in a computer). This dilemma seems insurmountable.
As to Sheldrake's "hypothesis of formative causation," how exactly could we be in resonance with something from the past? Isn't it over already? Well, not necessarily. The passage of time takes its toll on matter. But for the mind, time doesn't *pass* so much as it piles up. For matter, to proceed to the next moment is to evacuate the current one. For mind, the next moment is just tacked on to the last one. The older you get, the bigger your remembered mountain of moments gets. Of course, this notion could be falsified quite easily, and neurologists have been trying since the 50s to prove that memory is some sort of material recording, akin to a tape or a data bank. Yet they have failed to find any trace of memory in the brain. Perhaps that's because it's in the mind. The mind is the set of morphic fields associated with the brain. Just as the mind can be equated with morphic field, memory can be equated with morphic resonance. The organism resonates, not with matter from the past-- an absurdity-- but with the morphic field, or mind, associated with that matter, which cannot pass away in time because it's made of time.
I hope this answers your question.
Ted