A Critique of Pure (Genetic) Information

98 Chapter 3
is still a central challenge. It is well established that the compartmentalization
of the cell in general and of its messenger RNA—the legacy of
the maternal egg cell—is extremely influential in setting early development
along a certain course. That this organization is not merely the
product of nuclear inheritance but also significantly of structural inheritance
is directly addressed by Grimes and Aufderheide (1991) in their
extensive review of the subject:
The highly organized cytoplasm of a metazoan egg, therefore, cannot be solely
the consequence of direct nuclear gene activity. Given the background of information
from the Cliophora, one would predict that structurally heritable information
systems must be present in addition to direct nuclear (genic) control
systems in the metazoa. The ciliated protozoa are a group of organisms that have
made exceptional use of the posttranslational, ‘epigenetic’ systems that contribute
to the localization of gene products ...Processes homologous, or at least
analogous, to the directed assembly and directed patterning seen in ciliates are
also functional in metazoa, and are of fundamental developmental significance
(p. 67).
Order from the Inheritance of Self-Sustaining Dynamics and/or the
Emergence of Self-Sustaining Order for “Free”
The Global View
In his contribution to a fiftieth anniversary retrospective of Schrödinger’s
What is Life?, Stuart Kauffman (1995) points out that the force of
Schrödinger’s argument was based on the assumptions of equilibrium
thermodynamics held by “most physicists of his day.” Macroscopic
order, in this view, is attributable to “ averages over enormous ensembles
of atoms or molecules . . . not to the behavior of individual molecules.”
At equilibrium the predictability of the location of the
components in a system in relation to one another is very weak except
for the case of those atoms that are held together in a crystalline array.
If given the presuppositions of equilibrium statistical physics and asked
to account for the stability of complex life-forms through and across generations,
then it would follow that some form of solid-state structure,
i.e., a crystal, and an aperiodic one to make it more interesting, must be
involved. But life is not an equilibrium phenomenon, and so-called
dissipative far-from-equilibrium systems are not only capable of sus-