Re: [-empyre-] Poetics of DNA II

[Nicholas Ruiz III <editor@intertheory.org>]

Yes, this is what is at stake in Dawkins' concept of
the meme...and behavioral geneticists further
establish the ambiguity between the two, genetic code
and ideas.  Genetic correlations have been found in
behavior exhibiting ranging extremes of religiosity,
conservatism, authoritarianism, harm avoidance,
control, aggression and alienation...for more on this,
see:

Lisabeth F. DiLalla, Behavior Genetics Principles:
Perspectives in Development, Personality and
Psychopathology (2004)...in particular, pp.73-104

Nick


--- Judith Roof <roof12@comcast.net> wrote:

> What Jim suggests here is interesting in that all
> language may not be  
> representation (and representation is not only
> language).  But  
> implicit here is the possibility of a different way
> of thinking about  
> the kinds of elements that might operate in the
> scale of the  
> biological (neither "natural" nor necessarily
> material) as well as  
> the ways they might operate.  If computers can
> evacuate language so  
> that it no longer functions as a mode of
> miscommunication (in the  
> sense that language conveys both more and less than
> whatever it could  
> "mean"),  and if chemicals can connote (i.e., mean
> more than they do  
> or inflect that meaning into other processes), then
> our notion of  
> what biology might consist of could be radically
> enlarged to include  
> both the operations of computer language and the
> excesses and  
> approximations of other sign systems.  In the same
> way that theories  
> of information have enlarged conceptions of the
> material, so  
> detaching concepts of language and code from the
> field of the  
> signified potentially expands the operational value
> of language (of  
> any kind) as a biological factor--and not just an
> effect of  
> biological processes.
> 
> i think.