The Hereditary Mechanism
Table of Contents
The Classical Physicist’S Expectation Is Wrong
An organism and all the biologically relevant processes that it experiences must:
- have an extremely ‘many-atomic’ structure
- be safeguarded against haphazard, ‘single-atomic’ events attaining too great importance.
The ’naive physicist’ tells us, is essential, so that the organism may, so to speak, have sufficiently accurate physical laws on which to draw for setting up its marvellously regular and well-ordered working.
How do these conclusions, reached, biologically speaking, a priori (that is, from the purely physical point of view), fit in with actual biological facts?
At first sight one is inclined to think that the conclusions are little more than trivial.
30 years ago, a biologist could say that, although it was quite suitable for a popular lecturer to emphasize the importance, in the organ- ism as elsewhere, of statistical physics, the point was, in fact, rather a familiar truism.
For, naturally, not only the body of an adult individual of any higher species, but every single cell composing it contains a ‘cosmical’ number of single atoms of every kind. And every particular physiological process that we observe, either within the cell or in its interaction with the environment, appears - or appeared thirty years ago - to involve such enormous numbers of single atoms and single atomic processes that all the relevant laws of physics and physical chemistry would be safeguarded even under the very exacting demands of statistical physics in respect of ’large numbers’; this demand I illustratedjust now by the Yn rule.
Today, we know that this is wrong.
Small groups of atoms, much too small to display exact statistical laws, do play a dominating role in the very orderly and lawful events within a living organism.
They have control of the observable large-scale features which the organism acquires in the course of its development, they determine important characteristics of its functioning; and in all this very sharp and very strict biological laws are displayed.