Biology of Wonder_ Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science ( PDFDrive.com )

highly complex and intelligent, not simple and mechanical. They are
certainly not ticking molecular clocks whose genetic software acts as a
kind of remote control. Experiments have long shown that body features
such as fur coats and leaf surfaces self-organize without needing any
genetic instructions. Biological order arises “for free,” as the complexity
researcher Stuart Kauffman has famously stated. 1
This idea is widely confirmed by observations from developmental
genetics. Certain embryonic growth centers unfold somewhat
independently of DNA “instructions.” Once set into action, observe
developmental researchers Gerard Odell and Gerald von Dassow, an
embryonic growth center does not obey genetic orders but rather
interacts with them, transforming certain impulses in ongoing
development according to its particular situational needs. Embryonic
regulation circuits, the authors hold, are “robust” in respect to their
physical and genetic environment. 2 In the new perspective these
scientists are beginning to establish, cells appear to be units of will,
purposeful agents. Their most important feature is the fact that they
consistently renew themselves and bring forth all the parts they consist
of. They literally create themselves. Cells show a breathtaking
perseverance. They really will do anything to ensure their continued
existence. In their steady exchange of matter with their surroundings
they do not resemble inert machines in any way. They spiral upward in a
continuous dialogue with the hereditary material, but they are not
directed or governed by their genes. DNA is a scaffold for the flesh, not
its blueprint. The body must “read” the genes. It must make sense of
them, interpret them and integrate them into its own logic of selfmaintenance,
as Harvard University developmental biologists Marc
Kirschner and John Gerhart observe. 3
THE LAWS OF DESIRE
It was this autonomy that had given me so much deep pleasure that
summer, alone at my pond. Completely oblivious, the animals floated in
their water. They were a part of it and still so markedly unique and selfsufficient.
Their clumsy rising and sinking, their grotesque dragon-like
appearance — the newts were worlds in themselves. They were
independent centers of life. They made me understand what Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn might have had in mind when he wrote in The Gulag