Metabiology

Full Title or Meme

Metabiology is an attempt to merge cell genomics with the semantics found in the genome.

Context

Arturo Carsetti revisits a fundamental thesis enunciated by Henri Atlan which states that, on a biological level, "the function self-organizes together with its meaning" and connects this thesis which constitutes one of the cornerstones of the contemporary theory of self-organization, with Monod's intuition according to which Nature really appears as a tinkerer characterized by the presence of precise principles of self-organization. According to Carsetti, while, however, Monod had at his disposal as a general reference framework exclusively a syntactic information theory such as that developed by Shannon (a theory framed furthermore in a first-order Cybernetics), the presence, today, of innovative analysis tools such as those represented by the definition of a second order Cybernetics as well as by the development of a new type of relationship between information and meaning, offers the possibility for the leavening of that conceptual revolution increasingly referred to as metabiology. It is exactly in this context, that Carsetti places his proposal for the very definition of a new kind of scientific Realism, i.e. the enactive (or participatory) Realism.[14]