Readers of the Book of Life : Contextualizing Developmental Evolutionary Biology

The "egg-and-hen" engima - how the genetic information and the body intermingle in "performing life" is a challenge for biology. The "Jurassic Park Fallacy" is a more traditional interpretation, stating that all the information necessary to build a body is present in DNA; the cell is but a "juke box" playing unambiguously what is in its genetic text, and tuning the performance to the environment. A. Markos suggests a complementary approach: to assume living beings as endowed with a capacity analogous to a human reader, who is able to extract meaning from a given text, according to her/his personal experience and cultural background. Hermeneutics was developed in the humanities as a method to achieve understanding, in a given context, of texts, history, and artwork. The author takes up living beings as hermeneutical interpreters of "texts" encoded in DNA. This interpretation is based on the experience of the cell (cell lineage, species), and negotiated with present environmental cues.