Chapter 7 of the Philosophy of Freedom (PoF), paragraph 20 discusses the internal contradictions within metaphysical realism (a variant of naive realism). One example of such thought is the mechanical nature of warmth (warmth as caused by the average velocity of atoms or molecules), which incidentally is still held by physics of today. Another, that Steiner mentions in passing without further explanation, is heredity.
This reference to heredity really caught my attention. Given all the wonders of today such as mapping the human genome, and gene splicing, I might be forgiven for thinking that bilogy's treatment of the cell can be unreservedly accepted. But then, I wondered, how would an adherent to monism (as advanced in PoF) re-think heredity, not by using the "invisible percepts" of metaphysical realism, but combining concepts to percepts.
The following is my first thoughts on these things. If others found this interesting, we can start an ongoing discussion here. This would give us a chance to activate our own thinking on a theme beyond the scope of PoF, with Steiner as our inspiration,but only our own thinking as our guide.
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Starting from the basis that all explanations for the world are to be found in what can be observed and the concepts our thinking brings to these observations, I thought to collect for myself some common place observations of the biological life. First one can certainly say that life comes from life. Every organism that one can follow through its life has had immediate forbearer(s), and does not simply ooze out from slime. Secondly, in the course of life of the individual, it eventually resembles its forebear in form and behavior. Puppies grow up to resemble their parents and act like them as well. Heredity tries to explain this resemblance.
Contemporary science explains heredity by first postulating the existence of minute packets of similar traits, called genes. Biology in the last 100 years has striven mightly to discover the physical location of genes and their mechanisms. Its bias was to look into the microscopic for the explanation of visible organism. From our various life sciences classes, I'm sure we are all familiar with idea that living tissue is made of unitary building blocks called cells. Much like the atom of physics, once thought to be indivisible or to harbor at most three subatomic particles: electron, proton, and neutron, but whose subatomic count by now has reached over a hundred subsubatomic particles, the cell, once thought to be fairly simple: cell wall, nucleus, and protoplasm, has been found to consist of a vast array of substructures, organs, control mechanisms.
The original notion of the gene also suggested that one gene would control one trait (Mendelson's pea plants come to mind). Today scientists know that multiple locations on the genetic code may affect the expression of a trait, and one location may affect multiple traits. And of course, we have Barbara McClintock's jumping genes (transposons) in which a segment of DNA may hop from one chromosome to another -- and this in a scheme that tells that the location of DNA segment has impact as well as the specific sequence of the segment itself.
Popular treatments of DNA describe the cell's DNA as a library with thousands of books containing the blueprints and chemical forumlae for all the structures and processes within the body. One is to imagine some intelligent agent (and whatever would that be??) able to hop from book to book finding the right page, the right sentence, and read it at the right time for exactly as long as necessary to create the necessary substance, hormone, protein, etc., and then stop reading! Of course this agent, in order to express a particular trait, might have to simultaneously read several books (or are there many such agents??). Of course, if it is reading a transposon, then somehow it has to know the new location of the book.
An additional complication is that there is not just one library (cell) in the body but millions. Although the DNA throughout the body is the same for each cell, not all cells' libraries are being used (cells are specialized in the materials they synthesize). But how does the DNA reader know when he is on call? How is communication maintained across the thousands of readers that are active? Keep in mind also that (I think) some 30% of DNA code is considered junk: damaged, malformed, or archaic, so as to be meaningless for sustaining the organism. So how does the DNA reader "know" all this and "know" how to communicate hundreds of thousands of cells away with some other part of the mechanism. How do messages get exactly where they are supposed to and only read by the proper agent and none other? Keep in mind that we would have to imagine this reader agent as only another biochemical molecule which by its nature can only respond to or act upon its immediate chemical environment,
It seems to me that biology, in its desire to explain the complexity and interconnectedness of the macroscopic organism by entering into the microscopic realms, has only revealed an equally complex world of percepts there. Yet the fundamental questions of control and coordination have not been solved, but only transposed (to the molecular realm). More percepts cannot replace the lack of unifying concepts.
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Ok, that is as far as I got, any takers?