November 17, 2010

Everything does everything to everything

What we are finding is that at the molecular level the organism is so dynamic, so densely woven and multidirectional in its causes and effects, that it cannot be explicated as living process through strictly local investigations. When it begins to appear that, as one European research team puts it, “everything does everything to everything,” the search for “regulatory control” necessarily leads to the unified and irreducible functioning of the cell and organism as a whole — a living, metamorphosing form within which each more or less distinct partial activity finds its proper place.

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