Evelyn Fox Keller (whom I cited yesterday) has long been one of my favorite philosophers. No small part of that attraction has been her critique of the search for "master molecules." As I put it here in the article I did on her for The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, a "master molecule" is
an isolated and transcendent command centre whose unidirectional commands account for the order of an otherwise chaotic or passive material. Against all such hylomorphism – which has been consistently gendered in Western culture and science (the active command centre figured as masculine and the passive or chaotic matter figured as feminine) – Keller points us to the study of the morphogenetic patterns of complex interactive systems, that is, to processes of immanent self-organisation across multiple levels.
So I was greatly interested in recently coming across these 2009 lectures, where Keller writes about a stage in the origin of life that falls between physical self-organization and cellular autopoiesis, what she calls "smart matter":
one transition (or discontinuity) of particular importance was the emergence of what I might call “smart matter,” or rather, smart molecules. Smart molecules are molecules that can both register (sense) signals in their environment and respond by changing their rules of engagement – e.g., allosteric molecules. I suggest that such molecules came on the scene somewhere over the course of the evolution of macro-molecules like DNA and proteins, and further, that their appearance was crucial to the subsequent evolution of living systems.
The theme of smart matter is also explored in Keller's contribution to Transformations of Lamarckism (MIT, 2011)
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