Genes and Pixels

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Notes

notes

1.  Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000) 1.

2.  Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life and Other Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1956). Delbrück's paper on “mutagenesis” (written in collaboration with Zimmer and Timofeeff in 1935) was contained in previous editions of this book (see note 5). Schrödinger talks of the “size of a gene” (29) and says that “the most essential part of a living cell – the chromosome fibre – may suitably be called an aperiodic crystal” (3). See also Graeme K. Hunter, Vital Forces: The Discovery of the Molecular Basis of Life (London: Academic Press, 2000), who mentions Delbrück's interest in the crystallization of tobacco mosaic virus (224ff.).

3.  Pangenesis is called the process according to which acquired characteristics are transmitted in the form of particles called ‘gemmules’ from the body cell to germ cells.

4.  August Weismann, Das Keimplasma: eine Theorie der Vererbung (Jena: Fischer, 1892). Cf. p. 12: “Keimplasma welches in den Keimzellen enthalten ist und welches nie neu gebildet werden kann, und sich immer nur von der Keimzelle, aus der ein Bion entsteht, in direkter Continuität auf die Keimzellen der folgenden Generation überträgt.” Weismann's theory has been called the first theory of genetics.

5.  The idea that Schrödinger's “hereditary crystal” could contain the “riddle of life” has been suggested by Delbrück in the aforementioned essay (n. 2 above) characteristically entitled: “Preliminary Exposition on the Topic ‘Riddle of Life’.” Schrödinger, on the other hand, insists that he does “not intend to explain life” (What is Life 49). 

6.  François Jacob, Of Flies, Mice, and Men, trans. Giselle Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998) 4.

7.  William M. Gelbart, “Databases in Genomic Research,” Science 282, 1998: 660. Quoted from Fox Keller 67.

8.  Deleuze and Guattari took into consideration Bergson's ideas about the role of duration within evolution. This duration was supposed to yield insight into evolution's dynamic and non-mechanic aspect. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’Anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux (Paris: PUF, 1980). Bergson (in Henri L. Bergson, L’Evolution créatrice [Paris: Alcan, 1907]) pointed out that “notre pensée, sous sa forme purement logique, est incapable de se représenter la vraie nature de la vie, la signification profonde du mouvement évolutif” (vi). Bergson also expressed an interest in Weismann's theory of the germ-plasm which he wished to direct towards open systems which permit a “creative evolution” involving all “genetic energy” (cf. 26ff.). See also Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999) 40: “For Bergson what is transmitted is not simply the physico-chemical elements of the germ-plasm but also the vital energies and capacities of an embryogenesis and morphogenesis that allow for perpetual invention in evolution.”

9.  See Kant's preface to the 2nd edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1929) 20, where Kant characterizes the method of scientists examining nature:

a light broke upon all students of nature. They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining. (German: Werkausgabe [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974] Bd. III, 23)

10.  Cf. Friedrich W.J. Schelling, Texte zur Kunst (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982) 6. Still today, organicist philosophies linked to ecological worldviews seem to represent late responses to these Kantian attempts of atomizing the world.

11.  Cf. Friedrich W.J. Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaften in Schriften von 1794–1798 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchhandlung, 1967) 336ff.

12.  While physics and chemistry deal, in principle, with static elements, biology was from the beginning confronted with “living,” organic structures. If we suppose that, historically, scientific examinations developed from simple – original – problems, to problems manifesting more complex constellations that need to be explained, biology turns out to be the science that undertook the decisive shift from empiricism to rationalism.

13.  Johann W. von Goethe, “Analyse und Synthese” in Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Wegener, 1960) Bd. 13, 50.

14.  Goethe, “Morphologie (1817)” in Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Wegener, 1960) Bd. 13, 55–56.

15.  Cf. Johann W. von Goethe's Maximen und Reflexionen (Munich: DTV, 1963): “Wem die Natur ihr offenbares Geheimnis zu enthüllen anfängt, der empfindet eine unwiderstehliche Sehnsucht nach ihrer würdigsten Auslegerin, der Kunst” (22). Goethe's conception comes amazingly close to Bergson's attempts to interpret evolution in less static terms – attempts that have been developed by Deleuze and, more recently, by Ansell Pearson. The latter summarizes Bergson's ideas on the subject of evolution as the conviction

that the schema of life and evolution we confer on this organized individual body is necessarily decided by our perception that always cuts into matter distinct bodies, in which, and on account of the interest of action, “generals and individuals determine one another by a semi-artificial operation entirely relative to our future action on things..” (L’Evolution Créatrice 227; Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life 42)

16.  I (in agreement with Granger) understand “existentiality” here as a state of the self in which the self is aware of its own position within the world. This world is composed of concrete beings and not of abstractions. Sartre and Camus were interested in the kind of awareness of existence provoked by profound emotional experiences leading towards the discovery of the self's own position within a concrete world. If we understand “existence” in such an “existentialist” way, we are inclined to describe it as necessarily linked to an “actuality.”

17.  Gille-Gaston Granger, Le Probable, le possible et le virtuel. Essai sur le rôle du non-actuel dans la pensée objective (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1995) 14.

18.  Bergson comes here closer to the truth since his model of creative evolution is held together by a kind of “virtual harmony” that cannot be grasped as something concrete (a gene, a virtual Reality) but as “vitality.” See Germinal Life 44.

19.  Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993) 95.

20.  The fact that teachings of the Raëlian sect combine gene-technology and spirituality in such a self-evident way in order to create a “religion of the gene” must be considered as characteristic of any “worldview” of bio-genetics.

21.  Again, Keith Ansell Pearson's interpretation of Bergson expresses very similar ideas, when he writes: “from the perspective of the virtual whole, life can be conceived as ceaseless play between limited inventions of complex living systems, such as organisms and species, and the desire of the impulse of life or ever renewed vitality” (Germinal Life 49).

22.  A part of the “dream-sphere,” of the vertigo linked to all human dreams that try to dream the secret of nature as well as the secret of culture, is still sticking to the phenomenon of bio-genetics. This becomes particularly clear with regard to the spread of popular bio-genetic devices like “cloning.” What is a clone at the moment it appears as an “I” that is at the same time a “non-I”? Normally, you can encounter yourself only in dreams (or in some kind of constructed virtual reality). A world of genes, clonable at will, is, in fact, a virtual reality in which neither the “I” nor the “Other” exists. The lack of any “in-between” between humans, the lack of any response from a possible Other (because the Other is I) makes this world appear dreamlike or, more precisely, “virtual.”