Category: Uncategorized

CONSEQUENTIAL SHIFT. “The move from substance ontology to process ontology has many interesting biological consequences. The various structures that an organism exhibits are not really fixed, but are instead continuously maintained by a large number of carefully regulated processes, which endow them with their relative stability.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

BEYOND DARWIN’S TANGLED BANK. “Ecological communities or consortia, such as biofilms, holobionts, and super-organisms, are not collections of relatively autonomous things but deeply entangled meshes of interdependent processes. This entanglement can make it extremely difficult to establish unequivocally the boundaries of a biological individual, or even to determine how many individuals we are dealing with in a particular situation. This is why ecological relations are best seen as an intertwining of processes.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

FAILURE OF REDUCTIONISM. “One of the key implications that Weiss drew from this is that a cell ‘can never be defined in terms of a static inventory of compounds, however detailed, but only in terms of their interactions’. What we perceive as an organism (e.g. a frog) at any given moment represents only a cross section, or time slice, in the unfolding of the persistent process it instantiates.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

Country loaves in Catalonia. View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends looking at biology as a set of processes rather than a set of things. There is a sea change going on in the bigger context, from quantum physics all the way through biology to geology, namely, that things, and events or processes, are deeply entwined and interconnected; the idea of doing a chemical reaction in a test tube to replicate the origin of life in the early Earth is now seen as ridiculous, because it ignores geochemical and geophysical influences, which are messy and complicated. Take anything out of its embedded context and it is an artifice. View in LinkedIn

GENES DO NOT ACT ALONE. “DNA does not ‘self-replicate’, as it is sometimes claimed, but is completely dependent for its replication on the participation of an intricate molecular ‘machinery’. To think of replication, and by implication of reproduction, as analogous with copying is to abstract away the causality and materiality of the connection between parent and offspring, reducing this connection to an essentially informational relation.” (Noble: genes aline do nothing.) https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

BEYOND REPLICANTS. “Biological reproduction— unlike photocopying, in which only a re-production of information is required— involves a degree of material continuity between the original and the descendant. Indeed, in the replication of DNA, new double helices are partially constituted from the material of the old double helices. Treating replication as copying has the inadvertent consequence of diverting attention from the causal process that generates it.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

DENIS NOBLE REVISITED. “What these genomic activities indicate is that, far from there being a one-way control of the cell by the genome, as is still sometimes imagined, the genome is in constant two-way interaction with its cellular context and beyond. The persistence of both, in fact, depends on their interrelations. In short, where once we saw a genome as a set of discrete units or things mechanically controlling their wider environment, now we see interactions of a complex dynamic entity with its even more complex surroundings.” (The Music of Life). https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn