The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Michael Polanyi *
Life’s
Irreducible Structure
Live mechanisms and
information in DNA are boundary conditions with a sequence of boundaries above
them
Science, New Series, 160 (3834)
June 21, 1968, 1308-1312.
If all men were exterminated, this would not affect
the laws of inanimate nature. But the
production of machines would stop, and not until men arose again could machines
be formed once more. Some animals can
produce tools, but only men can construct machines; machines are human
artifacts, made of inanimate material.
The Oxford Dictionary describes a machine as
“an apparatus for applying mechanical power, consisting of a number of
interrelated parts, each having a definite function.” It might be, for example, a machine for sewing
or printing. Let us assume that the
power driving the machine is built in, and disregard the fact that it has to be
renewed from time to time. We can say,
then, that the manufacture of a machine consists in cutting suitably shaped
parts and fitting them together so that their joint mechanical action should
serve a possible human purpose.
The structure of machines and the working of their
structure are thus shaped by man, even while their material and the forces that
operate them obey the laws of inanimate nature. In constructing a machine and supplying it
with power, we harness the laws of nature at work in its material and in its
driving force and make them serve our purpose.
This harness is not unbreakable; the structure of the
machine, and thus its working, can break down. But this will not affect the forces of
inanimate nature on which the operation of the machine relied; it merely
releases them from the restriction the machine imposed on them before it broke
down.
So the machine as a whole works
under the control of two distinct principles. The higher one is the principle of the
machine’s design, and this harnesses the lower one, which consists in the
physical-chemical processes on which the machine relies. We commonly form such a two-leveled structure
in conducting an experiment; but there is a difference between constructing a
machine and rigging up an experiment. The
experimenter imposes restrictions on nature in order to observe its behavior
under these restrictions, while the constructor of a machine restricts nature
in order to harness its workings. But we
may borrow a term from physics and describe both these useful restrictions of
nature as the imposing of boundary conditions on the laws of physics and
chemistry.
Let me enlarge on this. I have exemplified two types of boundaries. In the machine our principal interest lay in
the effects of the boundary conditions, while in an experimental setting we are
interested in the natural processes controlled by the boundaries. There are many common examples of both types
of boundaries. When a saucepan bounds a
soup that we are cooking, we are interested in the soup; and, likewise, when we
observe a reaction in a test tube, we are studying the reaction, not the test
tube. The reverse is true for a game of
chess. The strategy of the player
imposes boundaries on the several moves, which follow the laws of chess, but
our interest lies in the boundaries - that is, in the strategy, not in the
several moves as exemplifications of the laws. And similarly, when a sculptor shapes a stone
or a painter composes a painting, our interest lies in the boundaries imposed
on a material, and not in the material itself.
We can distinguish these two types of boundaries by
saying that the first represents a test-tube type of boundary whereas the
second is of the machine type. By
shifting our attention, we may sometimes change a boundary from one type to
another.
All communications form a machine type of boundary,
and these boundaries form a whole hierarchy of consecutive levels of action. A
vocabulary sets boundary conditions on the utterance of the spoken voice; a
grammar harnesses words to form sentences, and the sentences are shaped into a
text which conveys a communication. At
all these stages we are interested in the boundaries imposed by a comprehensive
restrictive power, rather than in the principles harnessed by them.
Living Mechanisms Are Classed with
Machines
From machines we pass to living beings, by remembering
that animals move about mechanically and that they have internal organs which
perform functions as parts of a machine do - functions which sustain the life
of the organism, much as the proper functioning of parts of a machine keeps the
machine going. For centuries past, the
workings of life have been likened to the working of machines and physiology
has been seeking to interpret the organism as a complex network of mechanisms. Organs are, accordingly, defined by their
life-preserving functions.
Any coherent part of the organism is indeed puzzling
to physiology - and also meaningless to pathology - until the way it benefits
the organism is discovered. And I may
add that any description of such a system in terms of its physical-chemical
topography is meaningless, except for the fact that the description covertly
may recall the system’s physiological interpretation - much as the topography
of a machine is meaningless until we guess how the device works, and for what
purpose.
In this light the organism is shown to be, like a
machine, a system which works according to two different principles: its
structure serves as a boundary condition harnessing the physical-chemical processes
by which its organs perform their functions. Thus, this system may be called a system under
dual control. Morphogenesis, the process
by which the structure of living beings develops, can then be likened to the
shaping of a machine which will act as a boundary for the laws of inanimate
nature. For just as these laws serve the
machine, so they serve also the developed organism.
* The author is a former Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and Emeritus
Professor of social studies at the University of Manchester, where he had
previously held the Chair of Physical Chemistry. His present address is 22 Upland Park Road,
Oxford, England. This article is an
expanded version of a paper presented 20 December 1967 at the New York meeting
of the AAAS. The first half of the
article was anticipated in a paper published in the August 1967 issue of
Chemical
and Engineering News.
A boundary condition is always extraneous to the
process which it delimits. In Galileo’s
experiments on balls rolling down a slope, the angle of the slope was not
derived from the laws of mechanics, but was chosen by Galileo. And as this choice of slopes was extraneous to
the laws of mechanics, so is the shape and manufacture of test tubes extraneous
to the laws of chemistry.
The same thing holds for machine-like boundaries;
their structure cannot be defined in terms of the laws which they harness. Nor can a vocabulary determine the content of
a text, and so on. Therefore, if the
structure of living things is a set of boundary conditions, this structure is
extraneous to the laws of physics and chemistry which the organism is
harnessing. Thus the morphology of
living things transcends the laws of physics and chemistry.
DNA Information Generates Mechanisms
But the analogy between machine components and live
functioning organs is weakened by the fact that the organs are not shaped
artificially as the parts of a machine are. It is an advantage, therefore, to find that
the morphogenetic process is explained in principle by the transmission of
information stored in DNA, interpreted in this sense by Watson and Crick.
A DNA molecule is said to represent a code - that is, a linear sequence
of items, the arrangement of which is the information conveyed by the code. In the case of DNA, each item of the series
consists of one out of four alternative organic bases [1]. Such a code
will convey the maximum amount of information if the four organic bases have
equal probability of forming any particular item of the series. Any difference in the binding of the four
alternative bases, whether at the same point of the series or between two
points of the series, will cause the information conveyed by the series to fall
below the ideal maximum. The information
content of DNA is in fact known to be reduced to some extent by redundancy, but
I accept here the assumption of Watson and Crick that this redundancy does not
prevent DNA from effectively functioning as a code. I accordingly disregard, for the sake of brevity,
the redundancy in the DNA code and talk of it as if it were functioning
optimally, with all of its alternative basic bindings having the same
probability of occurrence.
Let us be clear what would happen in the opposite
case. Suppose that the actual structure
of a DNA molecule were due to the fact that the bindings of its bases were much
stronger than the bindings would be for any other distribution of bases, then
such a DNA molecule would have no information content. Its codelike
character would be effaced by an overwhelming redundancy.
We may note that such is actually the case for an
ordinary chemical molecule. Since its
orderly structure is due to a maximum of stability, corresponding to a minimum
of potential energy, its orderliness lacks the capacity to function as a code. The pattern of atoms forming a crystal is
another instance of complex order without appreciable information content.
There is a kind of stability which often opposes the
stabilizing force of a potential energy. When a liquid evaporates, this can be
understood as the increase of entropy accompanying the dispersion of its
particles. One takes this dispersive
tendency into account by adding its powers to those of potential energy, but
the correction is negligible for cases of deep drops in potential energy or for
low temperatures, or for both. We can
disregard it, to simplify matters, and say that chemical structures established
by the stabilizing powers of chemical bonding have no appreciable information
content.
In the light of the current theory of evolution, the codelike structure of DNA must be assumed to have come about
by a sequence of chance variations established by natural selection. But this evolutionary aspect is irrelevant
here; whatever may be the origin of a DNA configuration, it can function as a
code only if its order is not due to the forces of potential energy. It must be as physically indeterminate as the
sequence of words is on a printed page. As
the arrangement of a printed page is extraneous to the chemistry of the printed
page, so is the base sequence in a DNA molecule extraneous to the chemical
forces at work in the DNA molecule. It
is this physical indeterminacy of the sequence that produces the improbability
of occurrence of any particular sequence and thereby enables it to have a
meaning - a meaning that has a mathematically determinate information content
equal to the numerical improbability of the arrangement.
But there remains a fundamental point to be
considered. A printed page may be a mere
jumble of words, and it has then no information content. So the improbability count gives the possible,
rather than the actual, information content of a page. And this applies also to the information
content attributed to a DNA molecule; the sequence of the bases is deemed
meaningful only because we assume with Watson and Crick that this arrangement
generates the structure of the offspring by endowing it with its own
information content.
This brings us at last to the point that I aimed at
when I undertook to analyze the information content of DNA: Can the control of
morphogenesis by DNA be likened to the designing and shaping of a machine by
the engineer? We have seen that
physiology interprets the organism as a complex network of mechanisms, and that
an organism is - like a machine - a system under dual control. Its structure is that of a boundary condition
harnessing the physical-chemical substances within the organism in the service
of physiological functions. Thus, in
generating an organism, DNA initiates and controls the growth of a mechanism
that will work as a boundary condition within a system under dual control.
And I may add that DNA itself, is such a system, since
every system conveying information is under dual control, for every such system
restricts and orders, in the service of conveying its information, extensive
resources of particulars that would otherwise be left at random, and thereby
acts as a boundary condition. In the
case of DNA this boundary condition is a blueprint of the growing organism [2].
We can conclude that in each embryonic cell there is
present the duplicate of a DNA molecule having a linear arrangement of its
bases - an arrangement which, being independent of the chemical forces within
the DNA molecules, conveys a rich amount of meaningful information. And we see that when this information is
shaping the growing embryo, it produces in it boundary conditions which,
themselves being independent of the physical chemical forces in which they are
rooted, control the mechanism of life in the developed organism.
To elucidate this transmission is a major task of
biologists today, to which 1 shall return.
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Some Accessory Problems Arise Here
We have seen boundary conditions introducing
principles not capable of formulation in terms of physics or chemistry into
inanimate artifacts and living things; we have seen them as necessary to an information content in a printed page or in DNA, and as
introducing mechanical principles into machines as well as into the mechanisms
of life.
Let me add now that boundary conditions of inanimate
systems established by the history of the universe are found in the domains of
geology, geography, and astronomy, but that these do not form systems of dual
control. They resemble in this respect
the test-tube type of boundaries of which I spoke above. Hence the existence of dual control in
machines and living mechanisms represents a discontinuity between machines and
living things on the one hand and inanimate nature on the other hand, so that
both machines and living mechanisms are irreducible to the laws of physics and
chemistry.
Irreducibility must not be identified with the mere
fact that the joining of parts may produce features which are not observed in
the separate parts. The sun is a sphere,
and its parts are not spheres, nor does the law of gravitation speak of
spheres; but mutual gravitational interaction causes the parts of the sun to
form a sphere. Such cases of holism are
common in physics and chemistry. They
are often said to represent a transition to living things, but this is not the
case, for they are reducible to the laws of inanimate matter, while living
things are not.
But there does exist a rather
different continuity between life and inanimate nature. For the beginnings of life do not sharply
differ from their purely physical-chemical antecedents. One can reconcile this continuity with the irreducibility
of living things by recalling the analogous case of inanimate artifacts. Take the irreducibility of machines; no animal
can produce a machine, but some animals can make primitive tools, and their use
of these tools may be hardly distinguishable from the mere use of the animal’s
limbs. Or take a set of sounds conveying
information; the set of sounds can be so obscured by noise that its presence is
no longer clearly identifiable. We can
say, then, that the control exercised by the boundary conditions of a system
can be reduced gradually to a vanishing point. The fact that the effect of a higher principle
over a system under dual control can have any value down to zero may allow us
also to conceive of the continuous emergence of irreducible principles within
the origin of life.
We Can Now Recognize Additional Irreducible
Principles
The irreducibility of machines and printed
communications teaches us, also, that the control of a system by irreducible
boundary conditions does not interfere with the laws of physics and
chemistry. A system under dual control
relies, in fact, for the operations of its higher principle, on the working of
principles of a lower level, such as the laws of physics and chemistry. Irreducible higher principles are additional
to the laws of physics and chemistry. The principles of mechanical engineering and
of communication of information, and the equivalent biological principles, are
all additional to the laws of physics and chemistry.
But to assign the rise of such additional controlling
principles to a selective process of evolution leaves serious difficulties.
The production of boundary conditions in
the growing fetus by transmitting to it the information contained in DNA
presents a problem. Growth of a
blueprint into the complex machinery that it describes seems to require a
system of causes not specifiable in terms of physics and chemistry, such causes
being additional both to the boundary conditions of DNA and to the
morphological structure brought about by DNA.
This missing principle which builds a bodily structure
on the lines of an instruction given by DNA may be exemplified by the
far-reaching regenerative powers of the embryonic sea urchin, discovered by Driesch, and by Paul Weiss’s discovery that completely dispersed
embryonic cells will grow, when lumped together, into a fragment of the organ
from which they were isolated [3]. We see an integrative power at work here,
characterized by Spemann. and
by Paul Weiss as a “field” [4], which
guides the growth of embryonic fragments to form the morphological features to
which they embryologically belong. These guides of morphogenesis are given a
formal expression in Waddington’s “epigenetic landscapes” [5]. They
say graphically that the growth of the embryo is controlled by the gradient of
potential shapes, much as the motion of a heavy body is controlled by the
gradient of potential energy.
Remember how Driesch and his
supporters fought for recognition that life transcends physics and chemistry,
by arguing that the powers of regeneration in the sea urchin embryo were not explicable
by a machinelike structure, and how the controversy has continued, along
similar lines, between those who insisted that regulative (“equipotential”
or “organismic”) integration was irreducible to any
machinelike mechanism and was therefore irreducible also to the laws of
inanimate nature. Now if, as I claim,
machines and mechanical processes in living beings are themselves irreducible
to physics and chemistry, the situation is changed. If mechanistic and organismic
explanations are both equally irreducible to physics and chemistry, the
recognition of organismic processes no longer bears
the burden of standing alone as evidence for the irreducibility of living
things. Once the “field”-like powers
guiding regeneration and morphogenesis can be recognized without involving this
major issue, I think the evidence for them will be found to be convincing.
There is evidence of irreducible principles,
additional to those of morphological mechanisms, in the sentience that we ourselves
experience and that we observe indirectly in higher animals. Most biologists set aside these matters as unprofitable
considerations. But again, once it is
recognized, on other grounds, that life transcends physics and chemistry, there
is no reason for suspending recognition of the obvious fact that consciousness
is a principle that fundamentally transcends not only physics and chemistry but
also the mechanistic principles of living beings.
Biological Hierarchies Consist of a
Series of Boundary Conditions
The theory of boundary conditions recognizes
the higher levels of life as forming a hierarchy, each level of which relies
for its workings on the principles of the levels below it, even while it itself
is irreducible to these lower principles. I shall illustrate the structure of such a
hierarchy by showing the way five levels make up a spoken literary composition.
The lowest level is the production of a voice; the
second, the utterance of words; the third, the joining of words to make sentences;
the fourth, the working of sentences into a style; the fifth,
and highest, the composition of the text.
The principles of each level operate under the control
of the next-higher level. The voice you
produce is shaped into words by a vocabulary; a given vocabulary is shaped into
sentences in accordance with a grammar; and the sentences are fitted into a
style, which in turn is made to convey the ideas of the composition. Thus each level is subject to dual control: (i) control in accordance with the laws that apply to its
elements in themselves, and (ii) control in accordance with the laws of the
powers that control the comprehensive entity formed by these elements.
Such multiple control is made
possible by the fact that the principles governing the isolated particulars of
a lower level leave indeterminate conditions to be controlled by a higher
principle. Voice production leaves
largely open the combination of sounds into words, which is controlled by a
vocabulary. Next, a vocabulary leaves
largely open the combination of words to form sentences, which is controlled by
grammar, and so on. Consequently, the
operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing its
particulars on the next-lower level. You
cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics; you cannot derive grammar from a
vocabulary; a correct use of grammar does not account for good style; and a
good style does not supply the content of a piece of prose.
Living beings comprise a whole sequence of levels
forming such a hierarchy. Processes at
the lowest level are caused by the forces of inanimate nature, and the higher
levels control, throughout, the boundary conditions left open by the laws of
inanimate nature. The lowest functions
of life are those called vegetative. These
vegetative functions, sustaining life at its lowest level, leave open - both in
plants and in animals - the higher functions of growth and in animals also
leave open the operations of muscular actions. Next, in turn, the principles governing muscular
actions in animals leave open the integration of such actions to innate
patterns of behavior; and, again, such patterns are open in their turn to be
shaped by intelligence, while intelligence itself can be made to serve in man
the still higher principles of a responsible choice.
Each level relies for its operations on all the levels
below it. Each reduces the scope of the
one immediately below it by imposing on it a boundary that harnesses it to the
service of the next-higher level, and this control is transmitted stage by
stage, down to the basic inanimate level.
The principles additional to the domain of inanimate
nature are the product of an evolution the most primitive stages of which show
only vegetative functions. This
evolutionary progression is usually described as an increasing complexity and
increasing capacity for keeping the state of the body independent of its
surroundings. But if we accept, as I do,
the view that living beings form a hierarchy in which each higher level
represents a distinctive principle that harnesses the level below it (while
being itself irreducible to its lower principles), then the evolutionary sequence
gains a new and deeper significance. We
can recognize then a strictly defined progression, rising from the inanimate
level to ever higher additional principles of life.
This is not to say that the higher levels of life are
altogether absent in earlier stages of evolution. They may be present in traces long before they
become prominent. Evolution may be seen,
then, as a progressive intensification of the higher principles of life. This is what we witness in the development of
the embryo and of the growing child - processes akin to evolution.
But this hierarchy of principles raises once more a
serious difficulty. It seems impossible
to imagine that the sequence of higher principles, transcending further at each
stage the laws of inanimate nature, is incipiently present in DNA and ready to
be transmitted by it to the offspring. The
conception of a blueprint fails to account for the transmission of faculties,
like consciousness, which no mechanical device can possess. It is as if the faculty of
vision were to be made intelligible to a person born blind by a chapter
of sense physiology. It appears, then,
that DNA evokes the ontogenesis of higher levels, rather than determining
these levels. And it would follow
that the emergence of the kind of hierarchy I have defined here can be only
evoked, and not determined, by atomic or molecular accidents. However, this question cannot be argued here.
Understanding a Hierarchy Needs “from-at” Conceptions
I said above that
the transcendence of atomism by mechanism is reflected in the fact that the
presence of a mechanism is not revealed by its physical-chemical topography. We can say the same thing of all higher
levels: their description in terms of any lower level does not tell us of their
presence. We can generally descend to
the components of a lower level by analyzing a higher level, but the opposite
process involves an integration of the principles of the lower level, and this
integration may be beyond our powers.
In practice this difficulty may be avoided. To take a common example, suppose that we have
repeated a particular word, closely attending to the sound we are making, until
these sounds have lost their meaning for us; we can recover this meaning
promptly by evoking the context in which the word is commonly used. Consecutive acts of analyzing and integrating
are in fact generally used for deepening our understanding of complex entities
comprising two or more levels.
Yet the strictly logical difference between two
consecutive levels remains. You can look
at a text in a language you do not understand and see the letters that form it
without being aware of their meaning, but you cannot read a text without seeing
the letters that convey its meaning. This
shows us two different and mutually exclusive ways of being aware of the text. When we look at words without understanding
them we are focusing our attention on them, whereas, when we read the words,
our attention is directed to their meaning as part of a language. We are aware then of the words only subsidiarily, as we attend to their meaning. So in the first case we are looking at the
words, while in the second we are looking from them at their meaning:
the reader of a text has a from-at knowledge
of the words’ meaning, while he has only a from awareness of the words
he is reading. Should he be able to
shift his attention fully toward the words, these would lose their linguistic
meaning for him.
Thus a boundary condition which harnesses the principles of a lower level in the service of a new, higher level establishes a semantic relation between the two levels. The higher comprehends the workings of the lower and thus forms the meaning of the lower. And as we ascend a hierarchy of boundaries, we reach to ever higher levels of meaning. Our understanding of the whole hierarchic edifice keeps deepening as we move upward from stage to stage.
1311
The Sequence of Boundaries Bears on Our Scientific Outlook
The recognition of a whole sequence
of irreducible principles transforms the logical steps for understanding the
universe of living beings. The idea,
which comes to us from Galileo and Gassendi, that all
manner of things must ultimately be understood in terms of matter in motion is
refuted. The spectacle of physical
matter forming the basic tangible ground of the universe is found to be almost
empty of meaning. The universal
topography of atomic particles (with their velocities and forces) which,
according to Laplace, offers us a universal knowledge
of all things is seen to contain hardly any knowledge that is of interest. The claims made, following the discovery of
DNA, to the effect that all study of life could be reduced eventually to
molecular biology, have shown once more that the Laplacean
idea of universal knowledge is still the theoretical ideal of the natural
sciences; current opposition to these declarations has often seemed to confirm
this ideal, by defending the study of the whole organism as being only a
temporary approach. But now the analysis
of the hierarchy of living things shows that to reduce this hierarchy to
ultimate particulars is to wipe out our very sight of it. Such analysis proves this ideal to be both
false and destructive.
Each separate level of existence is of course
interesting in itself and can be studied in itself. Phenomenology has taught this, by showing how
to save higher, less tangible levels of experience by not trying to interpret
them in terms of the more tangible things in which their existence is rooted. This method was intended to prevent the
reduction of man’s mental existence to mechanical structures. The results of the method were abundant and
are still flowing, but phenomenology left the ideal of exact science untouched
and thus failed to secure the exclusion of its claims. Thus, phenomenological studies remained
suspended over an abyss of reductionism. Moreover, the relation of the higher
principles to the workings of the lowest levels in which they are rooted was
lost from sight altogether.
I have mentioned how a hierarchy controlled by a
series of boundary principles should be studied. When examining any higher level, we must
remain subsidiarily aware of its grounds in lower
levels and, turning our attention to the latter, we must continue to see them
as bearing on the levels above them. Such
alternation of detailing and integrating admittedly leaves open many dangers. Detailing may lead to pedantic excesses, while
too-broad integrations may present us with a meandering impressionism. But the principle of stratified relations does
offer at least a rational framework for an inquiry into living things and the
products of human thought.
I have said that the analytic descent from higher
levels to their subsidiaries is usually feasible to some degree, while the
integration of items of a lower level so as to predict their possible meaning
in a higher context may be beyond the range of our integrative powers. I may add now that the same things may be seen
to have a joint meaning when viewed from one point, but to lack this connection
when seen from another point. From an
airplane we can see the traces of prehistoric sites which, over the centuries,
have been unnoticed by people walking over them; indeed, once be has landed,
the pilot himself may no longer see these traces.
The relation of mind to body has a similar structure. The mind-body problem arises from the
disparity between the experience of a person observing
an external object - for example, a cat - and a neurophysiologist observing the
bodily mechanism by means of which the person sees the cat. The difference arises from the fact that the
person observing the cat has a from-knowledge of the bodily responses evoked by
the light in his sensory organs, and this from-knowledge integrates the joint
meaning of these responses to form the sight of the cat, whereas the neurophysiologist,
looking at these responses from outside, has only an at-knowledge of them,
which, as such, is not integrated to form the sight of the cat. This is the same duality that exists between
the airman and the pedestrian in interpreting the same traces, and the same
that exists between a person who, when reading a written sentence, sees its
meaning and another person who, being ignorant of the language, sees only the
writing.
Awareness of mind and body confront us, therefore,
with two different things. The mind
harnesses neurophysiological mechanisms and is not determined
by them. Owing to the existence of two
kinds of awareness - the focal and the subsidiary - we can now distinguish
sharply between the mind as a “from-at” experience and the subsidiaries of this
experience, seen focally as a bodily mechanism. We can see then that, though rooted in the
body, the mind is free in its actions - exactly as our common sense knows it to
be free. The mind itself includes an
ascending sequence of principles. Its
appetitive and intellectual workings are transcended by principles of
responsibility. Thus the growth of man
to his highest levels is seen to take place along a sequence of rising
principles. And we see this evolutionary
hierarchy built as a sequence of boundaries, each opening the way to higher
achievements by harnessing the strata below them, to which they themselves are
not reducible. These boundaries control
a rising series of relations which we can understand only by being aware of
their constituent parts subsidiarily, as bearing on
the upper level which they serve.
The recognition of certain basic impossibilities has
laid the foundations of some major principles of physics and chemistry;
similarly, recognition of the impossibility of understanding living things in
terms of physics and chemistry, far from setting limits to our understanding of
life, will guide it in the right direction. And even if the demonstration of this
impossibility should prove of no great advantage in the pursuit of discovery,
such a demonstration would help to draw a truer image of life and man than that
given us by the present basic concepts of biology.
Mechanisms, whether man-made or morphological, are
boundary conditions harnessing the laws of inanimate nature, being themselves
irreducible to those laws. The pattern
of organic bases in DNA which functions as a genetic code is a boundary
condition irreducible to physics and chemistry. Further controlling principles of life may be
represented as a hierarchy of boundary conditions extending, in the case of
man, to consciousness and responsibility.
1. More precisely, each item consists of one out of four
alternatives consisting in two positions of two different compound organic
bases.
2. The blueprint carried by the DNA molecule of a particular
zygote also prescribes individual features of this organism, which contribute
to the sources of selective evolution, but I shall set these features aside
here.
3.
See P. Weiss, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sc!.
U.S.
42, 819 (1956).
4. The “field” concept was first used by Spemann
(1921) in describing the organizer; Paul Weiss (1923) introduced it for the
study of regeneration and extended it (1926) to include ontogeny. See P. Weiss, Principles of Develop ment (Holt,
New York, 1939), P. 290.
5. See, for example, C. H. Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes (Allen & Unwin, London, 1957), particularly the graphic explanation of “genetic assimilation” on page 167.
6. See, for example, M. Polanyi, Amer. Psychologist 23 (Jan. 1968) or The Tacit Dimension (Doubleday,
New York, 1967).
1312