The Temporality of the Organism: Making-Past and the Genome as Merleau-Pontian Institution (original) (raw)

Abstract

Scientific advances challenge the reduction of genetic material to information that stands as determinate in advance of organisms and fully determines development. By critically analyzing recent insights about information and genes, I develop a new concept, of the genome not as given information, but an informative past that the organism itself engenders within temporally ongoing dynamics. Where autopoiesis conceives the organism as a material reciprocity of parts and wholes, I conceptualize it as reciprocally engendering temporalities of past, present and future. The informative genomic past thus hinges on the organism’s ongoing dynamics and history operating as what Merleau-Ponty calls institution.

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