Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

General problems of interdisciplinary research and common mechanisms 475
Considered from the standpoint of its activity, therefore, an ‘organized‘
structure has a way of functioning which is the expression of the transformations
characteristic of it. The word ‘function’ is usually applied to the rBle (sector of
activity or sector of functioning) played by a sub-structure in the functioning
of the total structure and, by extension, the action of the total functioning on
that of the sub-structures.
Any functioning involves production, exchange and balancing, that is, it
continually presupposes decisions or choices, information and regulation. The
result is that, even in the biological field as such, the very ideas of structure and
function carry with them the derived ideas of functional utility or value and
meaning.
In the first place, any function or functioning involves choices or selections
among the internal or external elements. Consequently an element can be said
to be useful when it enters as a component into the cycle of the structure, and
harmful if it threatens or interrupts the continuity of the cycle. But two sorts of
functional utility or ‘value’ must be distinguished:
I. Primary utility, that is, the utility of an internal or external element
(production or exchange) in relation to the structure concerned, but insofar as
this element has a qualitative effect on the production or preservation of the
structure as an organized form; for example, the utility of a food containing
calcium for bone preservation or the utility of a group of genes in a genetic
recombination likely to survive.
2. Secondary utility, related to the cost or gain stemming from the element
which is useful in sense I : cost of a transformation, of an exchange, etc., in its
functioning.
Consequently this distinction refers, on the one hand, to the relational or
formal aspect of the structures, hence to the structural aspect as such, and, on
the other hand, to the energetic aspect of the functioning. These two aspects are
of course inseparable, for there is no structure without functioning, and vice
versa. But they are different, for in any production and in any exchange it is
necessary to distinguish a) what must be produced or what must be acquired or
exchanged, having regard to the structures to be maintained or built up; and
b) what that production or exchange costs or earns having regard to the energy
available.
Yet another distinction should be made as we review these general principles
of biology capable of serving as a background for the analysis of the common
mechanisms peculiar to the various human sciences. This distinction relates to
the r61e of information, the latter being necessary for production, as it is for
exchanges and control:
I. Information can be immediate, when a stimulus identified at once provokes
a response forthwith, which means that spatio-temporal distance is abolished.
2. Information can, on the contrary, be mediate if there is an encoding in ac-
cordance with a fixed code and a decoding which occurs later (which means
that spatio-temporal distance is not zero). The genetic information stored in
germinal materials (deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA, whose code is made up of
sequences, as Watson and Crick discovered in 1953) is described in this way.