The Underscore Archives

On 21 Jan 2008, at 11:02, Oliver Humpage wrote:

> on 21/1/08 10:56, Christian Wach at needle at haystack.co.uk wrote:
>
>> Was IMing a friend who's watching Dawkins and Venter speak at a  
>> conference this morning and apparently Dawkins was saying "that we  
>> can now print someone's genome in a book and in a thousand years  
>> take that info and re-create the organism it belongs to"
>
> Yeah, but what you have to remember is that Dawkins is an arse who  
> can talk quite incredible stuff-that-comes-out-of-arses sometimes.

E-prime, Oliver. E-prime. ;)

> Not saying the above isn't factually accurate, but as so often with  
> Dawkins it assumes that an organism *is* its DNA, and hence  
> somewhat misses the point.

Yeah, I agree. I have no great dislike of the reductionist argument,  
but it does miss the experience that there's magic afoot - regardless  
of whether it's an imaginary epiphenomenon or not.

> Congrats, btw...

Cheers,

Christian