I sometimes think of a “self” as a conceptual collage. Like a pieced quilt ideas grow into each other, the edges seamed to make something that works as a whole. For someone like me, many of those “pieces” come from books.

I’m not going to list those but I’ve just added another.

I’ve been reading (on and off) Chance & Necessity by Jacques Monod. It was suggested to me by a reader here (Thanks!) and trusting her assessment I added it to my rather full current reading list.

I love science, and in particular chemistry and biology, so a book such as Monod’s was pretty much destined to be a good one for me. But this book!

I suppose what is so compelling for me about the book is not really the appeal to choice, or chance (as an explanation for our existence) or even reason, but rather the ideas that connect the shape of complex molecules and information. It’s that concordance of material expression and information; it feels like a rhizome growing at a high rate of speed down in the dark of my mind.

Here’s another oddity: for some reason this connects with Bachelard’s book on domestic space. Why that should be so I don’t yet know, at least not consciously. Apart from the two authors’ cultural commonalities, there seems little reason to connect them, but they are contiguous pieces in this developing “quilt” of mine. I know that somehow.

The idea that the nature of noncovalent chemical bonds and their energy potential underlies more gross forms as well as macromolecular structure itself as information–it tumbles my mind around with the implications.

In a section talking about the apparent contradiction between the idea of the genome “entirely defining” the function of a protein, and the idea that the expressed shape of a manifested protein has “surplus” information – this is it I think, the thing that messes with my mind.

He explains this apparent contradiction through chance in the form of environmental conditions.

A careful and detailed scrutiny of the mechanisms of molecular epigenesis disposes of this objection. The enrichment of information evidenced in the forming of three-dimensional protein structures comes from the fact that genetic information (represented by the sequence) is expressed under strictly defined initial conditions (aqueous phase, narrow latitude of temperatures, ionic composition, etc.). The result is that of all the structures possible only one is actually realized. Initial conditions hence enter among the items of information finally enclosed within the globular structure. Without specifying it, they contribute to the realization of a unique shape by elimitating all alernative stuructures, in this way proposing – or rather, imposing – an unequivocal interpretation of  potentially equivocal message.

The implications!

I popped over to the web and looked up a few reactions to Monod’s book. Of the  ones I saw, the majority were from religious fellows and Oh! they did not like the book. Not surprised. Essentially, should the biology/chemistry be correct, (Monod was a Nobel Laureate) macromolecular materially encoded information is the necessary engine by which matter comes to express sentience. Oh so very cool.

It does have a downside though. It makes me want to go back to school to take more degrees, but this time in science. And I just don’t have the requisite number of years it would take me to catch up on all the stuff I don’t know.

Meh.