.
independent types of factors. There can be no genetic factors without the environment, and there can be no environmental factors without an organism and its internal resources. Both are mutually related, so that we should avoid making a distinction between those two classes of contributing factors. From this, Oyama came to a different understanding of genetic information as developmental information. Developmental information itself has a developmental history. With reference to Gregory Bateson's [28] famous definition of information as ‘difference that makes a difference’, she explains: Genetic information ‘neither preexists its operations nor arises from random disorder. … Information is a difference that makes a difference, and what it “does” or what it means is thus dependent on what is already in place and what alternatives are being distinguished’ [25, p 3].
Genetic information, in the sense of developmental information, is itself'developmentally contingent in ways that are orderly but not preordained, and if its meaning is dependent on its actual functioning, then many of our ways of thinking about the phenomena of life must be altered’ [25]. Following this line of thought, biology's basic picture is being transformed.3
The program view assumed that the development of the complex organism we see in the biosphere depends on the existence of genetic information, which can be copied and reproduced from a template. It said that the generations do not transmit a small prototype or the adult structure to the next generation, and no supernatural intentions or forces are necessary for a comprehensive explanation of the development of a new generation. What is transmitted is a list of instructions for making that structure [29, p 2]). The systems view by contrast sees that in fact it is the entire cell that is reproduced, not only some lists of instructions. The cells reproduce not because the genome contains instructions for building it, but
‘because any inheritance involves passing on DNA and all the cellular and extracellular structures, processes, and materials necessary for its exploitation’ [25, p 77].
Information can therefore be seen in at least two different ways: either as something inherent in a pattern that is transmitted or as something that is itself a product of interactive dynamics. Accordingly, two different ontologies of living phenomena are put forward.
But they are not equivalent offers, from which we could choose one arbitrarily. There are today serious reasons for preferring the systemic approach. The most compelling of these comes from science itself.
If information for development is a product of interactive dynamics, it does not exist before the development of the system actually takes place. Developmental information continually emerges from the interactive dynamics of the cellular (or multicellular) system and – we need to allow this conclusion as well – continually fades away afterwards. In this sense, genetic information is contingent and ephemeral. DNA is an inert and relatively constant molecule, a source of stability for the system and highly important in many ways, but DNA is not the carrier of developmental information. We can say that the organism is essentially a self-informing system. The whole system develops and behaves regularly and predictably in many ways, but the regularity is not a result of a preexisting program.
This theoretical rereading of the molecular evidence in terms of systems cannot take away any of the empirical evidence that we have about the causal involvement of DNA sequences or mutations in the development of certain characteristics like diseases. The systems view, as I understand it, is not an argument against genomics, medical genetics or against DNA-related research in any way. The argument does not work on the level of experiments or empirical work, but on the level of the interpretation of the empirical evidence, which can be seen as plausible or implausible.
Who Is the Author of the Genetic Text?
The impact of the systems approach and of reinterpreting genetic information reaches beyond criticizing the genetic program metaphor. It contains also a critique of other metaphors that are used to explain the meaning of genomic information in terms of signs contained in DNA sequences: the book of life, the instruction book, the architecture plan, the blueprint, the text, and related ones, in other words all metaphors that work with a difference between signifier and signified and introduce a semantic relation between DNA as a ‘sign for’ and the meaning of this sign. Sign metaphors do not work within a systems approach because they presuppose that information for development preexists.
The assumption of preexisting meaning in organisms would also be difficult to defend from a hermeneutic point of view. Signs or compositions of signs (texts) that we use in language are not just prints on paper that can be copied or transformed by certain rules. Because they belong to language, texts are expressions of personal life. In contrast to spoken language, they are permanently fixed expressions of personal life. Language, as Gadamer puts it, is the universal medium of understanding, i.e. a medium in which the acts of understanding itself can occur [9, p 392]. If we have a text, we must assume a writer who transformed meaning into written signs, and there is a reader who transforms written signs back into meaning. Who and where is the writer of the genetic ‘text’? The genome is the product of evolution; nobody has ‘written’ it. Therefore, the text as a metaphor for explaining DNA must always be essentially flawed. It would be a non-written text, part of non-meant language. To seriously claim such a thing implies a conceptual confusion.
Metaphorically speaking, not biologically of course, we could say that in the framework of the systems approach that assumes that genetic information does not preexist development but is itself an emergent product of interactive dynamics, the body acts as something like ‘the author’ of the genetic information. I have myself used this way of speaking [14]. If genetic information as developmental information is composed from step to step as a result of the interactive dynamics in the cells, it is actually the body that brings about this information. This use of the metaphor of the body as author is nonetheless lopsided because the ‘bringing about’ of the text is certainly no intentional act. It is no act of speaking, but rather mindless, even if our body is not an object but an animated body, this sensible, living body we ourselves are. If we use this metaphor we must see its limits as well.
This holds true for all metaphors. We should not naturalize the metaphors. Often metaphors can be of great help in making sense of a natural phenomenon in a context where sense is not obvious.4 The metaphor tells a little story, it is a narrative in a nutshell, or, as Paul Ricoeur [31] has said (with reference to Beardsley), a miniature poem. Metaphors graft meaning from one discourse to another and sometimes also modify their meaning when they arrive within the new discursive context. Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart [32] speak of metaphors as messengers of meaning. The ‘author’ is such a metaphor of the body in relation to developmental genetic information: a messenger bringing meaning from the discourse about texts into the discourse about embodiment.
To regard the descriptive text as a text is not so far away from what the humanities (as the sciences of the texts) see as a text. Also regarding a historical text, the meaning that we understand is not necessarily the same meaning put into the text by the writer. The act of reading is interpretation. There is a convincing argument by Hans Georg Gadamer that the act of interpretation involves the reader in her or his proper cultural and social context as well. There is no interpretation without the active contribution of the interpreter, who has questions in mind, brings them to the case, questions which might differ considerably from those of the writer or other readers. A text brings something up, raises a subject; but it can only do this because of the interpreters’ participation [9, p 391]. The situation