[-empyre-] Poetics of DNA II

["sdv@krokodile.co.uk" <sdv@krokodile.co.uk>]

  Jim/all

I'd like to explore some of what you've said a little further so:
"Interpersonal neurobiology assumes that the brain is a social organ
that is built through experience. Through interdisciplinary exploration
it seeks to discover the workings of experience-dependent plasticity,
or the ways in which the brain is constructed by experience..."
(Cozolino The Neuroscience of Human Relationships).  What Cozolino goes
onto argue is that in addition to the data from neuroscience and
psychology, interpersonal neurobiology uses research from
psychoanalysis, ethology, comparative anatomy, genetics and evolution.

What this more complex position implies is that if the science is taken
properly into account we are already accepting that except at a level
which is non-human, as much to do with bacteria as with humans and
other mammals, the understanding of DNA as equivalent to a binary code
is not meaningful. It's not that you cannot understand DNA as code,
it's just that it's not terribly useful in itself.  Your
example of a DNA sequence resulting in a fixed trait, my favorite
example of this is the non-scientific discovery of "the gay gene" - the
very concept exists as a consequence of well documented and understood
social prejudices. A prejudice which invents a research programme that
in turn invents a gene that only has meaning as a consequence of the...

Is it not the case then that a trait is a code because it is a social 
construct ?  What this implies in relation to the signifier/signified 
relation is that a given trait is always arbitrary, because its very 
existance is always already social. It's always a construct, a 
conventionalism and never as that idiot Pinker imagines something 
real... With genetics we know that DNA cannot exist in a meaningful 
sense without RNA. So to discuss DNA even at the molecular level is 
meaningless since  it oversimplifies the genetic system.  What you 
propose with the Von Neumann machine, the nand gate, is an attempt to 
avoid the level of complexity that Cozolino requires us to accept in the 
above, a singularity that we could place in an equivalent chain of 
concepts to the ones i extracted from Cozolino's work.
<>

If this appears twice it's because of empyre's dislike of HTML email 
formats, a constraint which I missed at the beginning of this...

best
steve