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Steve Johnson wrote:
So what entails the organization? The genome + the environment? That particular question is THE question. How do these systems spontaneously form? How do atoms coalesce and self-organize? My father's answer to that question was; "Nobody knows." He said that the epistemology of complex systems tells us nothing about their ontology, and he was investigating their epistemology. All he would venture to say was that "It is the nature of this universe to do so (spontaneously self-organize into ever more complex systems)." As far as the genome goes... he was uncharacteristically harsh on
what a waste of money it was to focus on mapping the genome. He felt it was
setting science back at a time when we can scarcely afford to wait to expand our
notions of how systems are what they are and how we approach learning about
them. That's not to say that genes aren't important, but they are not all there
is to making an organism. He used the example of protein folding to show that
genes only code for the protein sequence, but in order for the protein to become
active, it has to fold into a "tertiary" shape, which proteins in living systems
spontaneously do. But how? That's the kind of thing that needs looking into. The
shape has to be exactly right or it won't be able to do what it's supposed to
do. What guides this process? Even the genetics of an organism at the cell
level... how do they arrange themselves in order to reproduce? That's apparently
not coded for. And how does the mitochondrial DNA fit in? What specifies
the intracellular communication system? And what is "junk DNA" (sequences of
code that don't seem to encode anything)? Science has more questions than
answers and yet we're busily engineering the genetics of all sorts of organisms,
including microbes. Pretty scary!
One of the applications of my father's work that needs a whole lot
more research is to try and figure out what information is encoded into our
"internal predictive models". I'm hoping that launching BioTheory will spur some
of that kind of research over the next couple years. I've been puzzling over it
myself and I've got quite a list put together so far, which will be in my paper.
I think that knowledge about these internal models is going to be important for
our survival as a species over the course of this century.
Judith
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