A Critique of Pure (Genetic) Information

8 Chapter 1
do it. The most vituperative purveyors of the neo-Darwinian shibboleth
are, it turns out, in closest agreement with contemporary creationists
when it comes to the “as-if-by-intelligent-design” character of life. Aristotle,
by contrast, and epigenesists ever since, have endeavored to explain
life-forms not as artifacts designed from without but as self-organizing,
“autopoietic,” 5 ends-unto-themselves.
The Antinomies of Early Modern Preformationism and Epigenesis
The advent of an explanatory crisis in biology brought forth by the new
science and metaphysics of the seventeenth century was not immediate.
Descartes, in particular, had no difficulty imagining that epigenesis, and
even spontaneous generation, could occur simply on the basis of the new
laws of matter in motion. Subsequent Cartesian mechanists, however,
could no longer countenance the possibility of adapted form arising
spontaneously from an unorganized nature newly construed as essentially
passive. They offered, in place of epigenesis, a theory of preformation
consistent with a deistic theology. In their view the embryos of
all the organisms which would and could ever be had come into existence
with the creation of the world and its first creatures, as so many
Russian dolls, fully formed miniatures nested and encased one inside the
other. Subsequent generations were deemed to “evolve” from the old on
the basis of the purely mechanical unfolding and elaboration, the inflating
really, of parts already in place.
Theories of epigenesis made a comeback during the eighteenth century,
inspired by the example of Newton’s discovery of gravitational force.
The success of Newtonian physics meant that the natural sciences could,
and did, countenance causes of action beyond the mechanics of direct
collision. Where “Cartesian matter” lacked the wherewithal to become
self-organized, “Newtonian matter” by contrast could yet contain some
new principle, some vital force, which could account for self-organizing
epigenesis (Farley 1974, Roe 1981). New epigenesists seeking to discover
just such an organizing force aspired to become the Newton of natural
history.
Eighteenth century attempts at addressing the problem of how nature
could produce complex, adapted life-forms thus oscillated between two