We are embedded in our trash - there is no easy way to leap beyond it and build a utopia without garbage, to address the contradiction between the world's limited resources and our seemingly unlimited ability to manufacture trash. its production is rooted in survival, represented in every culture, and magnified by economic success. To purge the earth of garbage would be to destroy our own reflection.
- John Knechtel, Trash
Ernst Mayr might have first enunciated the new notion of "programmed purposiveness." In a November 1961 paper entitled "Cause and Effect in Biology: kinds of causes, Predictability, and Teleology Are Viewed by a practicing Biologist," he adopted Pittendrigh's term, but offered a key precision:"it would seem useful to rigidly restrict the term teleonomic to systems operating on the basis of a program of coded information." This was a particularly from the functioning of a program that appeared prior to the purpose: in other words, purpose is here a descriptive rather than a prescriptive notion. This is exactly in tune with cybernetic redefinition of purpose as programmed purposiveness, and as such it had a crucial consequence for the ontology founding the research program of molecular biology: it enshrined the metaphor of DNA qua program.
" Genetic regulation is not carried out by proteins only, but rather by very complex networks where noncoding RNAs. (i.e., transcribed but not translated DNA sequences) play the key parts." Now, you guessed it: noncoding RNA are the transcripts of formerly considered junk DNA.
