THE HEREDITARY ORDER: 

 GENETIC INFORMATION 



Birth of the Modern Concept 



' In the year 1835, Hegel published his well- 

 known Esthetic. I have a suspicion that a small fraction of the stu- 

 dents here could be somewhat unfamiliar with Hegel's Esthetic. 

 Whatever the case may be, in this fundamental book, among a 

 number of irrelevant remarks, irrelevant for us today, the problem of 

 life is pertinently discussed. 



The tree is a living reality, says the German philosopher. In its 

 germ the determinants exist as potentialities. Nothing is in the tree 

 which was not already in the germ, and yet in the germ one does 

 not see anything, even with the microscope. We can visualize the 

 determinants as existing in the germ as extremely simple forces. 



In 1864, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, in his Principles 

 of Biology, stated that in every organism the total of hereditary 

 properties is determined by distinct physiological units which 

 are formed by the assemblage of chemical units into immensely 

 complex compounds. Yet the most extraordinary biological intuition 

 was that of a physicist, Schrodinger. Starting from small molecules — 

 wrote Schrodinger in 1944 — it is possible to build large aggregates 

 without the dull device of repetition. In a complicated organic mole- 

 cule, every stone, every group of atoms, plays an individual role 

 not entirely equivalent to that of the others. The atoms forming a 

 molecule are united by forces of exactly the same nature as the 

 numerous atoms which build a true solid, a crystal. The most 

 essential part of a living being, the chromosomal fiber, presenting 

 the same solidity of structure as a crystal, may be called an aperiodic 



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