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STUFF VERSUS FLUX. “The opposition between things and processes as the ultimate constituents of reality is of course an ancient one. The Greek dictum panta rhei (‘everything flows’) encapsulates the Heraclitean doctrine of universal flux.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for this and next weekend focuses on a truly fascinating and unusual essay by Professors John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson, entitled ‘A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology’, or a viewpoint of process ontology, where life is a hierarchy of processes rather than of things. “There is no thing in biology (or, as Bohm would have it, in the world). Things are abstractions from an ever-changing reality. Reality consists of a hierarchy of intertwined processes. We remain strangely fixated on explanation in terms of static unchanging entities. Things are ‘precipitates’ of processes.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

Passageway near Girona cathederal. 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