Of Seeds and Forms
摘要
Regulation of gene expression is an example how sources of information (“seed”) cooperate at the level of structures (“forms”) building the specific Appearance of both Closures. Virtual information implemented in DNA is made available through a dynamic structure (e.g., enhancers) comprised of hundreds of specimens of proteins and RNA. Another system of protein “writers, readers, and erasers” attends to further, very subtle settings of this epigenetic regulatory system. The result is precise timing and adjustment of cellular and supracellular processes, structures, and regulations, from cell cycle, cellular structure, embryogenesis, up to nuptial ornaments and flowering. After drawing some analogies from our experience with human spoken and written language, we return, in the last section to communicative and collective memory of the living, with its remembering, amnesia, anamnesis, serendipity, skews…—in short to processes that shape the world of all of us living beings. The role of “horizontal” transfer of information (genetic or else) and introgressions by interbreeding between lineages also plays a role in evolution.