@madrush:
In my loose research from the references found in the Posthumanity thread, I came across The Poetics of DNA by Judith Roof. Though less on the mathematical, it has some connections to our CCafe discussion. Chapter 2 “Genesis” and Chapter 3 “Flesh Made Word” do not have any further references to biblical codes, but interesting connections nonetheless. The book is a study behind the current culture’s use of language and metaphors to place DNA as the new ‘code.’
Book, Chapter 2-3 Summary by author (with 2-3 highlighted)
This book examines how modes of identifying and describing
the DNA gene function in contemporary culture to allay fears about
changes in order and the logics of systems and to rewrite the truth of
humanity in safe and conservative terms. There are two basic arguments.
First, the ways we think of DNA and genes are themselves the logical
product of centuries of thought. DNA isn’t what it is because that is
what it is. Rather, the emphasis on structure and function attached to
our understandings of DNA are the capping response to several centuries
of reductionism and dialecticism. Second, the analogies derived
from DNA’s position as a structural answer to questions of life and
deployed to describe and explain DNA genes are also metaphors that
import particular compensations or remedies for the cultural fears excited
by the discovery of DNA and other systemic ways of thinking.
The ways we conceived of DNA and genes in the second half of the
twentieth century are not only an effect of a history of thought that
ends up with the idea of structure as an answer in itself, they also perpetuated
this notion of structure at the very moment they imported
alternative ideas of system and complexity.
The following chapters trace and analyze the sets of ideas that
have come into play in attempts to present DNA genes to the general
public, demonstrating how apparently simple analogies convey complex
sets of ideas that respond to contemporary anxieties and interests. The
second chapter, “Genesis,” traces the conceptual family tree of the DNA
gene, showing how the gene is the “natural” heir to a mid-twentiethcentury
convergence of structuralism and reductionism. Following several
trails of thought from the Greek philosophers to the more recent
inventors of cybernetics, psychoanalysis, and systems theory, the second
chapter suggests that if there hadn’t been such a thing as a DNA gene, we
would have contrived it anyway, since the DNA gene is the point at which
many long-lived ideas about the order of the universe converge. It argues
that our conceptions of the DNA gene as the secret of life are already
conditioned by our ideas about language and binary modes of organizing
knowledge. It also argues that the forms our understandings of DNA
take are themselves already the defensive and compensatory adoption of
the more familiar forms of structuralism such as a code or language in
the face of the more threatening epistemologies of the equally contemporaneous
(but much less conventional) systems theory, which might have
provided a more accurate and less exploitable set of genetic concepts.
Chapter 3, “Flesh Made Word,” examines the uses and effects of
textual metaphors such as the book of life, the code, the blueprint, alphabet,
or recipe employed to describe DNA, suggesting that these textual
metaphors produce a continued sense of human control and agency over
genetic processes and provide the conceptual basis for turning genes into
property via patents. They also enable structural fantasies that override
far more complex ideas of system, complexity, chaos, and other ways to
understand the interrelation of phenomena.
Thanks @achronon for another stimulating session and for allowing me to attempt to cruise at your pace…like a toddler triking behind his father’s car as he leaves for work…