Of course. The point is that the term "genetic engineering" has a connotation of precision and control. In reality, you're never in control, even when it works every time. Milking goats for silk has far more in common with milking goats for milk than with any kind of actual engineering that has ever existed. Engineering involves static structure, even computer engineering, which is the cleanest and most mathematically determined form of engineering every devised.
>You simply have to rely on the fact that, once you get something to work
>once, it will continue to work that way. This is the reliance on
>predictability you mention above. And organisms are predictable. A
>fertilized human egg implanted into the womb will always yield a human baby
>(never a puppy or a chicken or a gold coin). You might not understand
>exactly why it works out that way, but it is clear that it does.
But why? Why does the organism do its own thing every time? We know the answer with machines. It's a bunch of mechanisms. It's all determined by the physical and chemical properties of its constituent parts. Bodies have exactly the same set of properties, but in their case these properties don't appear to determine development or behavior. On this we all agree. We need something that could conceivably provide form to these organic entities. Whatever it is, it's guaranteed to involve some kind of memory, because the form stays roughly the same, generation after generation. The fatal error of neo-Darwinian biology was to assume that memory is inherited, in material form, via the sex cells of parents. It was thought to be half from the man and half from the woman. We now know that inheritance is far more influenced by the mother, because she provides the proteins that express some genes over others. But as a whole this process doesn't explain much. It just tells us something about individuation. Genes influence the kinds of characteristics that distinguish one person from another. That's it. We understand how the theme gets varied from body to body, but we don't understand what the theme itself is. If it's not molecularly determined, then perhaps, as Enrico Coen claims (in *The Art of Genes*) it's a function of molecular creativity, with each species bearing its own unique thematic expression. So now it's not the mnemonic properties of DNA that make it so central to development but its creative element. The memory of how to build the body is not passed down. What's passed down is not mechanistically programmed to produce the correct organism. Instead the egg gets creative, and simply "knows" its own true, inner expression. This is the depths to which materialistic philosophy has sunk in the field of biology.
Coen, like most scientifically literate people, has so fetishized DNA that it doesn't occur to him that once genes are stripped of memory, then regardless of whatever other properties we acribe to them, they no longer have explanatory powers. Only memory, matter-based or not, can explain anything.
>Just because you don't know how a machine works in every respect doesn't
>make it any less a machine.
But why assume a body is a machine in the first place?
>As far as embryonic development is concerned, I'm sure it is true that the
>entire trajectory from fertilized egg to realized organism is not encoded
>in the DNA. But that doesn't mean that there is some extra-material force
>involved.
If we are shaped directly by our past-- rather than through the medium of genes and master proteins-- then this "extra-material force" is none other than our own bodies, but as they were, not as they are. What makes an organism alive, as opposed to a rock, is that its past is alive. What lives in an organism is not atoms but its own past, holistically shaping itself in the present. As to developing organisms, form arises from the composite memory of all the individuals of that species ever to have lived. We can entertain this possibility-- and clear up a stupefying array of heretofore insoluble problems-- only if we drop the materialist assumption.
>The reason for the materialist assumption is that you simply can't study
>anything without making that assumption.
Really? What exactly is this assumption, anyway? Must we assume that everything that happenes is a function of contact mechanics? Because that is the basic idea. In the 17th century, no one questioned the fact that the whole scientific view of the world would collapse utterly if contact mechanics were ever to be thrown into doubt as the absolute expression of causality in God's universe. Newton took a big chance in dismissing the aether and proclaiming gravity as a property of matter which works at a distance. Yet materialism survived, and it survived further assaults on its character. Soon we had various kinds of fields, which are made of space rather than particles. We got electromagnetic resonance, which is based on the frequencies of electrically "charged" particles. Then we got interchangability of matter with energy, as well as nice little tricks like nonlocality and the fundamental undefinability of matter. We've even got particles with no weight (neutrinos) and weight with no particles (dark matter). Yet as soon as we ascribe to matter the property of self-resonance over time, then the whole discussion is pushed permanently beyond the bounds of scientific reasoning. We're not even allowed to discuss it.
>Let's assume there is some other non-materialist explanation for how
>organisms develop, and for how the mind works. What might that be?
My guess is that the mind is the brain over time as well as space. It's non-materialist only in the sense that "matter" is that aspect of existence which is confined exclusively to the current instant of time.
>>Matter is weird.
>
>And so weird phenomenon can be explained via materialism.
And so *any* phenomenon, weird or not, *cannot* be explained via materialism. If we can't explain matter, how does matter explain anything else?
Ted