substance of the program, the DNA, by introducing variations, while
copying it) (Antoine Danchin, The Delphic Boat, 256,emphasis in the
original).Epigenesis (the process through which the organism is generated
through successive passages of cellular replication and specification)
can be described as a process of executing a programme inscribed in
the genetic text. But as much as an information technology based on
epigenesic reading might be possible, we must not forget that in this
case information is specified and developed through biotic matter (pro-
teins, the environment, material causality).
This means that the information contained in the genetic code is not
enough to explain life because the organism’s development occurs in
environmental conditions that singularize it.
Information, as the algorithm of infinite possible processes, is a pure
relationship while life is a concrete becoming; it is the specification of
information through the causal materiality of unpredictable processes.
Information does not die. It is a pure relation while life tends toward
death as the dispersion of information in time.
The event is the material decaying of information. The DNA does
not suffice to create bios.
Information is but a part of the process of the organism’s specification,
and the alphabetical metaphor of heredity thus reveals itself to be some-
thing more than a simple metaphor.
Embryonic cells can be compared to a row of computers that operate
in parallel and exchange information with each other. Each cell con-
tains the same genome and thus the same written program. But it can
verify a quantity of different states, and the program directs its develop-
ment along different alternative paths, depending on the combination
of flowing information that the cell has in its memory and following
the current environmental signals that it receives.
On a certain semiotic and biotic plane, they cannot function without
each other. And this plane is what Deleuze and Guattari call the Body
without Organs.
How can writing create a world? Biologists are asking this today, as
do all those who are studying the relation between DNA information
sequences and the development of the cell in an organism.The role of the coding process is to make the transfer from a chemical
world in which, broadly speaking, the objects (in this case segments
of DNA) can be regarded as exploring only one dimension of space,102 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_10_cha09.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 102