Moss - What genes cant do - 2003 (522929), страница 17
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No matter how improbable, the possibility that the clock could suddenly go wrong (in reverseeven) always remains in the background. The means by which the clockusually keeps proper time are the order-from-order principles of theclockwork.Drawing on Planck’s distinction between “dynamical” and “statistical” laws, Schrödinger asserts that “Clockworks are capable of functioning ‘dynamically’, because they are built of solids, which are kept inshape by Heitler-London forces, strong enough to elude the disorderlytendency of heat motion at ordinary temperature” (p. 91).Dynamical processes are the achievement of some form of organization which, for all intents and purposes, behave as if they were atabsolute zero; that is, they behave as if random thermal motion were nota factor. The working clock at room temperature functions as if it wereat absolute zero inasmuch as thermal fluctuations are rendered irrelevantThe Rhetoric of Life and the Life of Rhetoric61to the macroscopic dynamics of the system.
Life too is an order-fromorder system, but whereas the order-from-order principle of the clock isknown to the clockmaker, the order-from-order principles of life are yetto be determined. This order, in the first instance for Schrödinger, mustbe the result of a solid—the aperiodic crystal—being withdrawn fromthe disorder of heat motion.
Life must then acquire its ability to eludeor overstep the degradative forces of heat motion through what, in effect,will come to be called a “translation” of the order of the aperiodic crystalto that of the dynamics of the cell (and beyond).Schrödinger’s vision is powerful and recognizably influential but it isbased on certain hypothetical (presumably empirical) assumptions thatshould not escape our notice. For Schrödinger the “game of life” is aboutevading the entropic decay inevitably associated with the statistical interactions of thermal physics.
The idea of dynamic self-organization arisingout of statistical interactions—that is, order arising from out of disorder, the very battle cry of the apostles of nonequilibrium thermodynamics—is exactly what Schrödinger denies. Indeed, it is just because the seatof biotic order must thereby be secured through its removal from theheat flux of the cell and, owing to its innertness, its exclusion from thebiotic dynamics of the cell that its characterization as a code-scriptpresents itself as apropos. It is exactly because the aperiodic crystal issecured and sequestered from the hurley-burley of chemical dynamics,in this more ethereal notion of a code, that the idea of a “translation”from the code of the crystal to the chemistry of the cell would seem tofollow.2 Now beyond the holus-bolus assumption of equilibrium thermodynamics (which is bedrock for Schrödinger and will be discussedlater, especially in relation to Stuart Kauffman’s work) there are alsomore discrete assumptions and/or assertions to which Schrödinger’s viewcan be held empirically accountable.Is the aperiodic crystal of the chromosome really the unique bastionof molecular order in the cell? Does all expression of ongoing order trulyderive from it? If not, then what are the other sources of ongoing orderand what is the nature of the relationships between them? Does theaperiodic crystal itself depend for its stability on other sources of cellular order, or is it truly foundational? These questions must be answerable in a fairly unequivocal way for Schrödinger’s strong characterization62Chapter 2of the self-executing code-script to be ultimately justified.
Chapter 3 willaddress these matters in detail.Getting a GraspIn his discussion of Schrodinger’s book and its impact on biology, rhetorician and post-modern science critic Richard Doyle (1997) examined aprogression of metaphors in Schrodinger’s text that he characterizedas “slippage.” The organism for Schrödinger becomes replaced by itsphenotypic “pattern,” and the phenotypic pattern, in turn, is replacedby its code-script.
Unlike Doyle, I have endeavored to reconstructfrom Schrödinger’s text an argument on behalf of the hereditarycode-script metaphor that is rationally compelling given the adequacy ofcertain associated assumptions and hypotheses. I would thus preferto target the charge of slippage (if slippage can be the stuff of accusations) not so much at Schrödinger as at those who have subsequentlyembraced and/or celebrated the self-executing code-script metaphorwithout considering under what set of assumptions it is warranted to doso.
So stated, Olby (and so many others) become the culpable parties.To attempt to put forward such a distinction is certainly to take a stepin the direction of making that which I referred to earlier as a subtextmore explicit. I am under no illusions about the possibility of anchoringsome piece of knowledge in rhetoric-free prose, but I will not therebygrant that nothing remains but a battle of the tropes. What “relativizes”the power of the phrase to a larger context of reasons and thus mitigatesits autonomy, is the teleological framework of a problem-solving orientation.
Slippage is an evocative and appropriate description of much ofthe discourse dynamics that have led to shallow and confused talk aboutgenes as texts. What has slipped is the metaphor or trope, such as codescript, from out of a context in which the conditions of its warrant canbe judged—i.e., in which it can be held accountable—to one in which itappears to be self-sufficient. What gives slippage its normative bite is thesense of something dropping out its proper place, the place in whichit participates in some form of normal functioning, where it allows“things” to work.
The normativeness of slippage presupposes a teleological framework.The Rhetoric of Life and the Life of Rhetoric63An example of slippage can be found within Schrödinger’s text. Onearea in which Schrödinger already anticipated a challenge to his positionis that associated with multicellularity. Schrödinger had asserted thatorganisms are dependent on single or double copies of their aperiodiccrystals, yet multicellular organisms have single or double copies in eachof very many (1014 in a grown mammal, he suggests) cells. From the pointof view of a whole metacellular organism there is a question of orderfrom-order versus order-from-disorder on an entirely different level. Cellbiologists subsequent to Schrödinger have in fact routinely found a greatdeal of cell-to-cell heterogeneity, which raises the specter of order arisingfrom out of disorder at a higher level of analysis, i.e., that on the orderof a unified organism and its disparate and heterogeneous cellular constituents.
It would appear that organismal order may then require a different kind of explanation, one which cannot be physically accountedfor on the basis of the solid-state structure of chromosomes, because awhole realm of disorder lies between the chromosome and the organismas a whole. Schrödinger’s comment, more “poetic than scientific” by hisown admission, serves only to place what was and continues to be anintriguing problem even further from the reach of reason:Since we know the power this tiny central office has in the isolated cell, do theynot resemble stations of local government dispersed through the body, communicating with each other with great ease, thanks to the code that is common toall of them? (p.
84)In this case, Schrödinger does not provide any independent argumentsat all but rather insinuates the accepted presence of one metaphor, thatof a “tiny central office,” and builds on it by a kind of associative logicof the image, a notion of the constituent body, governed by an interlocking network of local offices which communicate with one anotherby means of a code that we should now take as a given, not as a hypothesis. Schrödinger’s trope, which ascribes governing agency to the inertaperiodic crystal by metaphorical inference, does not readily lend itselfto inspiring new research programs concerned with cell-to-organismachievements of order, but it has nonetheless proven to be Teflon-coated.The rhetorical progeny of Schrödinger’s metaphor slip into variouspublic media expositions of heredity, carrying the image of a detached,and thus preformed, genetic determinism with them.64Chapter 2Gamow’s TranslationIn discussing Schrödinger’s solution to the problem of biological organization, the notion of translation as already been broached.
By placingthe locus of biological order on the side of a code-script embedded inthe entropy-resistant calm of the solid state, Schrödinger’s model beggedfor some transitional principles with which to bridge the chasmbetween code-script calm and the moving parts of the cell. Translationas such does not become an important theme until after Watson andCrick characterize the structure of DNA, but then it does it so veryquickly. The impact that cybernetics, information theory, and linguisticshad during the postwar environment of the early 1950s on the receptionand interpretation of the new molecular biology has become the topic ofrecent scholarship (Kay 2000).
George Gamow, a Russian émigré physicist, science popularizer, and military strategist, responded immediatelyto the Watson and Crick paper by approaching the relationship betweenDNA structure and protein synthesis as a cryptanalytic problem(Kay 2000). It was as a problem in the cryptanalytic breaking of a codethat the transition between code-script and metabolism implicit inSchrödinger’s book became explicitly about translation. Cryptanalysiswas not new but it was in the midst of being transformed by Shannon’sinformation theory and by the rise of the computer. As Kay has perceptively pointed out:[It was] the simultaneous transportation of cybernetic and informational representations into both linguistics and molecular biology in the 1950s that propelledthe striking analogies between the two fields.
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