The Information - James Gleick [148]
“What I am doing,” he says, “is emphasizing the potential near-immortality of a gene, in the form of copies, as its defining property.” This is where life breaks free from its material moorings. (Unless you already believed in the immortal soul.) The gene is not an information-carrying macromolecule. The gene is the information. The physicist Max Delbrück wrote in 1949, “Today the tendency is to say ‘genes are just molecules, or hereditary particles,’ and thus to do away with the abstractions.”♦ Now the abstractions returned.
Where, then, is any particular gene—say, the gene for long legs in humans? This is a little like asking where is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E minor. Is it in the original handwritten score? The printed sheet music? Any one performance—or perhaps the sum of all performances, historical and potential, real and imagined?
The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the air; nor grooves etched in vinyl or pits burned in CDs; nor even the neuronal symphonies stirred up in the brain of the listener. The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits.
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♦ He added: “Old terms are mostly compromised by their application in antiquated or erroneous theories and systems, from which they carry splinters of inadequate ideas, not always harmless to the developing insight.”
♦ In listing twenty amino acids, Gamow was getting ahead of what was actually known. The number twenty turned out to be correct, though Gamow’s list was not.
11 | INTO THE MEME POOL
(You Parasitize My Brain)
When I muse about memes, I often find myself picturing an ephemeral flickering pattern of sparks leaping from brain to brain, screaming “Me, me!”
—Douglas Hofstadter (1983)♦
“NOW THROUGH THE VERY UNIVERSALITY of its structures, starting with the code, the biosphere looks like the product of a unique event,”♦ Jacques Monod wrote in 1970. “The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it any wonder if, like a person who has just made a million at the casino, we feel a little strange and a little unreal?”
Monod, the Parisian biologist who shared the Nobel Prize for working out the role of messenger RNA in the transfer of genetic information, was not alone in thinking of the biosphere as more than a notional place: an entity, composed of all the earth’s life-forms, simple and complex, teeming with information, replicating and evolving, coding from one level of abstraction to the next. This view of life was more abstract—more mathematical—than anything Darwin had imagined, but he would have recognized its basic principles. Natural selection directs the whole show. Now biologists, having absorbed the methods and vocabulary of communications science, went further to make their own contributions to the understanding of information itself. Monod proposed an analogy: Just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an “abstract kingdom” rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas.
Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.♦
Ideas have “spreading power,” he noted—“infectivity, as it were”—and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people. The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry had put forward a similar notion several years earlier, arguing that ideas are “just as real” as the neurons they inhabit. Ideas have power, he said.
Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring