The Ontogeny of Information Quotes

“When the wrong question is being asked, it usually turns out to be because the right question is too difficult. Scientists ask questions they can answer. That is, it is often the case that the operations of a science are not a consequence of the problematic of that science, but that the problematic is induced by the available means.”
― Richard Lewontin, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution

“While, as was noted earlier, the genes (or natural selection, which is the answer to the inevitable question, Who made the genes?) are invested with Godlike qualities, ultimately it may be that God and the soul, as well as the genetic architect in the cell—the Holy Ghost, the ghost in the machine, and the ghost in the ghost in the machine, are all our own spectral likenesses, projected outward and inward to aid understanding. We explain order anthropomorphically”
― Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution

“But if, as has been argued in preceding chapters, genes do not create traits according to a plan written in their very structure, even by operating on conveniently available “raw materials,” if phenotypic characteristics arise only when sufficient interactants are present in the proper place and at the proper time, and if all these factors are therefore given comparable causal and formative significance, then defining heredity as the passing on of all developmental conditions, in whatever manner, is preferable to defining it by genetic information.”
― Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution

“Because mutual selectivity, reactivity, and constraint take place only in actual processes, it is these that orchestrate the activity of different portions of the DNA, that make genetic and environmental influences interdependent as genes and gene products are environment to each other, as extraorganismic environment is made internal by psychological or biochemical assimilation, as internal state is externalized through products and behavior that select and organize the surrounding world.”
― Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution