GENES
IN DYNAMIC
CONTEXT

The Watery
Origins of
Biological
Diversity

By Alan Rayner

Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath

 

 

 

ARE YOU THINKING STRAIGHT?

OR ROUNDABOUT?

As was recognized in the ‘deep relativity’ of Henri Poincaré, reality is primarily non-linear.

Space is a ‘dynamic inclusion’, both enveloped by and enveloping everything, not an empty ‘infinite outsider’ surrounding INDEPENDENT material objects. All form is primarily ‘wave form’, a co-dynamic reciprocity of inner phase and outer phase coupled through inter-phase (dynamic boundary). ‘One’ (content) is inseparable from and cannot change without simultaneously and reciprocally changing ‘Other’ (context). All evolution is co-evolution, the dynamic attunement of content with context. Life forms are not Newtonian Bodies, but rather dynamic embodiments of the space that they both include and are included within.

 

 

EMBODIED WATER FLOWS

Correspondingly, as energetically open systems, all life forms are necessarily at least to some extent indeterminate (dynamically bounded) and in communication with their neighbours and surroundings. As a result of their growth or movements, these forms incorporate and interact with their surroundings in dynamic contexts through which they traverse, excavate and follow interconnected, riverine paths of least resistance. Here, the physical properties of water as a receptive medium for energy assimilation and transfer, and the way the configuration of this medium depends on the permeability, deformability and continuity of its retaining boundaries, are key to the diversity and versatility of life patterns.

 

DYNAMIC INFORMATION

Organisms are not discrete Universal Turing Machines processing digital information. DNA is not transmitted ‘on its own’ from ‘one generation to the next’, but flows through a continuum of watery space that ultimately includes even ‘extinct’ ancestors. DNA is not ‘information in itself’, which means the same anywhere, but rather gives and is given meaning through its dynamic relation with protein in the contextual medium of water retained within boundaries of variable deformability, permeability and continuity. And this meaning can change with context, just as the meaning of words in this sentence can change in the context of other words and spaces and sentences. And context lies inseparably both within and around the boundaries of organic life forms, as we know them on Earth, as embodied water flows responding to and producing change, like a river that both shapes and is shaped by landscape.

 

 

INFORMATION AS RELATIONAL SURFACE/INTER-PHASE BOUNDARY

So, what, actually is ‘information’ in a dynamic context? Is it something self-contained that is transmitted as discrete ‘signals’ between source and receiver, as per the ‘information theories’ of Shannon and Wiener? Or is it more ‘context-dependent’, more ‘gestural’, more ‘wavy’, as envisaged in the communication theory of Denis Gabor, inventor of holography?

In the latter case, information does not ‘pre-exist’, but rather emerges through the dynamic attunement of inner phase with outer phase. It is no more and no less than the dynamic inter-phase boundary, or relational surface that gives shape (i.e. in-forms) to both inner and outer space, like the banks that mediate the relation between a river’s stream and catchment.

 

 

FUTURE POSSIBILITIES

So, what might this ‘roundabout’ or ‘INCLUSIONAL’ (cf ‘rational’) way of seeing offer for our future biological, chemical and mathematical understanding of the diversity of life and its evolution?

Most fundamentally, it changes the way we understand change. No treatment that attempts to fix or ignore context whilst changing content, in effect by excluding space or regarding boundaries as stationary limits, can hope, in itself, realistically to represent change. Space is what provides POSSIBILITY for change, and as change occurs, so the shape of spatial possibility also changes. Change is autocatalytic.

More specifically, inclusionality changes the way we might ask questions or provide explanations on the basis of our biological and chemical knowledge.

FOR EXAMPLE:

As soon as the pivotal significance of boundaries as ‘dynamic fulcra’ mediating the relationship between inner and outer space phases is appreciated, attention can focus on how the ‘holeyness’ of these boundaries influences their permeability, deformability and continuity. It then becomes possible to appreciate the distinction between ‘informed holes’ or spaces, incorporated during boundary generation, and ‘exformed holes’ associated with degeneration, death and decomposition. The fundamental role of the availability of reducing and oxidizing power in generative and degenerative processes can then in turn be appreciated. And, from the point of view of genetic information, the co-evolutionary attunement of relational surface between DNA and protein (as opposed to adaptation of one to the other) in a watery medium is seen as an inescapable consequence of life. To quote Barry Commoner: "DNA did not create life; life created DNA". Space is vital to life, in all its rich heterogeneity of watery form.

 

Oashiss

(oil painting on board by Alan Rayner, 1998)

This painting depicts the vitality and unpredictability of the partnership between DNA and water, the informational content and the contextual waterways, of living systems. A riverine snake, with DNA markings, guards a water-hole in a desert of sand particles blown into waves. Pebbles at the edge of the water, modelled on the "stone cells" ("sclereids") that make pears gritty, are separate, yet intra-connected via their cores. A goat skull and a fish out of water show the effect of exposure to dryness. How do we react to the snake? Do we attempt to control and predict its movements? Do we recoil from it? Do we relate ourselves to it? Which of these reactions promises most, or most threatens our quality of life?

 

Future Present

(oil painting on canvas by Alan Rayner, 2000)

The gift of life lies in the creative infancy of the present, whence its message connecting past with future is relayed through watery channels that spill out and recombine recreatively outside the box, re-iterating and amplifying patterns over scales from microscopic to universal. Maybe we should get out of the box and WET OUR GENES!