My attention was caught by this reference to the Rev. Dawkins:
“The river of my title,” says Dawkins, “is the river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues: a river of abstract instructions for building bodies, not a river of solid bodies themselves. The information”—say, the eternal “family face” of which Hardy speaks, “Projecting trait and trace / Through time to times anon”—”passes through bodies and affects them, but it is not affected by them on its way through.”
It flows through time, not space? Surely he jests. DNA is material, is it not? It therefore must occupy space, right? After all, as he goes on to say, it "passes through bodies," which are also material and occupy space. I realize he is differentiating between DNA itself and the information it transmits. But that is precisely the problem. There is no information without the DNA that transmits it, or, if there is, we are no longer talking materialism.
Stephen Strauss, "author of a chapter on metaphor and DNA," says "We need a satisfactory metaphor for DNA":
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126965.800-we-need-a-satisfactory-metaphor-for-dna.html
Thanks, Dave, for that link. Mr. Rine's metaphor is both striking and apt: "DNA: the web that spins the spider."
ReplyDeleteAnd Mr. Wilson quite properly registers his demurral at the language used by the right Rev. Dawkins. He asks a good question, doesn't he? How do we find the right language to distinguish the "information for building bodies" from the "bodies" themselves, when that information also always "inhabits" the bodies and is "embodied" in them (in the form of genes)? And still there must be some way to make a provisional (or pragmatic) distinction, as the bodies common to any given species are "mortal," whereas the "information" for "building them" is somehow not quite fully mortal, as it passes from body to body. (Or anyway, the information is extremely less mortal: we have to count on the possibility of extinctions). The "family face" of homo sapiens to which Hardy refers in "Heredity" is some 100,000 to 130,000 years old, I believe, as we now reckon it. Each of our three-score years and ten constitutes, at this writing, about .00058% of that. The point, I take it, is to find language to express the ratio in a useful way. Dawkins' distinction between the one (i.e., the information) moving through Time and the other (i.e., the bodies) moving through Space is not quite adequate, as Frank Wilson points out. The metaphor breaks down somewhere. And in theory, insofar as I understand it, anyway, Hardy is extravagant in saying that "the eternal thing in man" that is "heredity" will never "heed" the "call to die." Anyway, Dawkins is more careful in this passage from "The Selfish Gene," where he hedges the bet:
The "gene," he says, "leaps from body to body down the generations, manipulating body after body in its own way and for its own ends, abandoning a succession of mortal bodies before they sink in senility and death. The genes are the immortals, or rather, they are defined as genetic entities that come close to deserving the title" (page 34, 2nd ed.; my emphasis).
The basic distinction Dawkins tries to make reminds me of the one textual scholars often make between the "text" of a poem and the "work" itself; the latter can be "embodied" in book after book after book, while the former is a "physical" matter of ink and paper (or, in this digital age, sometimes 1's and 0's, or whatever we now speak of). And yet as any textual scholar knows, we can't entirely extricate the "work" from its "texts" (which often contain "mutations," accidental and otherwise), despite the practical utility of the distinction for editors.
Mark