{"id":1192,"date":"2004-05-10T13:05:38","date_gmt":"2004-05-10T17:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1192"},"modified":"2004-05-10T13:05:38","modified_gmt":"2004-05-10T17:05:38","slug":"greater-than-some-of-its-parts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1192","title":{"rendered":"Greater than some of its parts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Lewontin’s 1992 book The Doctrine of DNA<\/span><\/a> is one that I reread every couple of years, discovering new things. The tone of weary omniscient scepticism grated on me for some years, but no longer does. After all, he was right to point out the limitations of the human genome project, and his rightness becomes more apparent every year.<\/p>\n\n

There are two reasons for these limitations. The first is that the genome in itself does not predict very much about the organism. We need all sorts of extra-sequential information for that, as well as the rules by which that information is interpreted by the cell. You may, if you wish, see these rules as themselves contained in the genome. That doesn’t affect the argument. If you haven’t unpacked the rules, you can’t make sense of the information, and you certainly can’t discover what the rules are by studying the genome itself.<\/p>\n\n

The second point is more general. Somewhere in Lewontin’s Marxism, there is a point about meaning, or about holism, which Dan Dennett and Sydney Brenner, seem to be approaching from different directions. Here’s Lewontin:<\/p>\n\n

“It is not that the ‘whole is more than the sum of its parts’. It is that the properties of the parts cannot be understood except in their context in the whole.
\nParts do not have individual properties in some isolated sense, but only in the context in which they are found. ‘The theory of human nature that searches for that nature in the products of genes in individuals and the limitations of individuals caused by those genes, or in the properties of an external world that are fixed and that cannot be altered except in a destructive way, misses the whole point.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Compare this to Sydney Brenner, from my book,<\/a> arguing against ’emergence’:<\/p>\n\n

“The real thing I’m against now is this idea of emergent phenomena. Seems to me very mystical: they say that if you mix things that get to a certain level of complexity, then you get emergent properties. That’s to try to say the whole is more than the parts but, in fact, the whole is the sum of the parts and their interactions, that’s all; and our job is to find the interactions. Then we could compute the behaviour of the system.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

The crucial point here is the mapping between “properties” and “interactions”. Lewontin’s point, it seems to me, could be rephrased as saying that the properties of something are the sum of its interactions with the world. A property is a prediction of behaviour under certain circumstances. This kind of functional definition is pure Dennett. I did have a page reference and quote to back that up, but the book got tidied away … Get Lewontin from the library instead, and read that.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Lewontin’s 1992 book The Doctrine of DNA <\/span>is one that I reread every couple of years, discovering new things. The tone of weary omniscient scepticism grated on me for some years, but no longer does. After all, he was … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}