Readers of the Book of Life

"The "chicken-and-egg" enigma of how genetic information and the body intermingle in "performing life" is a fascinating challenge for biology. The "Jurassic Park Fallacy" is a more traditional interpretation, stating that all the information necessary to build a body is present in DNA; the cell is but a "juke box" playing unambiguously what is in its genetic text and tuning the performance to the environment. Anton Markos suggests a complementary approach: to assume that living beings are endowed with a capacity analogous to a human reader, who is able to extract meaning from a given text, according to her or his personal experience and cultural background. Hermeneutics was developed in the humanities as a method to achieve understanding, in a given context, of texts, history, and artwork. The author takes living beings as hermeneutical interpreters of "texts" encoded in DNA." "This book should interest scholars in both biology and the humanities. To bring both kinds of reader to a common platform, the first part compares two problem-solving strategies: the "objectivist" approach common in natural sciences and hermeneutics as used in the humanities. The second part surveys aspects of the development of twentieth-century biology, also accentuating branches that never became part of today's mainstream. The third part reviews a large body of recent evidence, which can be interpreted in favor of the author's arguments."--Jacket.