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Seen in this light, then, is it really biology that is, in Monod’s words, “marginal,” “a tiny and very special part of the universe,” or is it rather the old physics? In 1944, Schro¨dinger suggested that it was the latter that might be the case. Today, fifty-five years later, that possibility continues to beckon and, indeed, with ever-increasing urgency. ” As I have said, open system behaviors look like phenotypes, but they are not forced, in any conventional sense, and certainly not in any Mendelian sense, even though they have “genomes” expressed in their parameters.

W. Timofe´e¨ff [Ressovsky] & K. G. Zimmer, Nachr. d. Biologie d. Ges. d. Wiss. Go¨ttingen, vol. , p. . ” The main impetus of that paper was what in those days was called target theory (treffertheorie ). It attempted to determine the cross section or physical size of “genes” by counting the number of mutations induced by standard doses of high-energy particles. It turned out (artifactually) that the answers obtained by such methods were of the order of molecular sizes. The stability arguments arose from attempts to understand or interpret these “target-theoretic” results.

Conversely, a reduction of one of these rare complex systems is merely an inverse rote operation of subtracting one, to get back the generic simple systems we presumably started with. Also presumably, these rote operations of adding and subtracting do not change the material basis of the systems themselves: sim-  Part I: On Biology and Physics ple systems are the same whether they are alone or whether they have been added into a larger one. , a context) in trying to understand a given one but must only invoke simpler subsystems, specifically those that manifest a complete independence of context in their properties and behaviors.