Department of Psychology, John Jay College City University of New York, 445 West 59 Street, New York, NY 10019, USA.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2010;32(2-3):401-23.
A comparison is made between Biologos, the "language of language" that predominates in current infocentric biology, and Logos, the classic bringer of form to chaos. The immaterial information on which Biologos is based is seen to bear intriguing similarities to just the sort of disembodied formative powers that an aggressively materialist biology has long derided. I address these issues by meeting a (perhaps only hypothetical) charge that my own work is in some sense vitalist, first with the usual flat denial, then with a countercharge. My third move is a nontraditional one, meant not as capitulation or acquiescence, but as an acknowledgement that the terms of this debate, never clear, continue to be remarkably ill-defined. The question of how best to think about development, or epigenesis--the process whereby organisms come into being--remains a legitimately contested and difficult one.
将当前以信息为中心的生物学中占主导地位的“语言的语言”Biologos 与经典的将形式带入混沌的 Logos 进行比较。基于无形信息的 Biologos 与长期以来被激进唯物主义生物学嘲笑的无形形成力量具有有趣的相似之处。我通过回应（也许只是假设的）指控来解决这些问题，即我的工作在某种意义上是活力论的，首先是通常的断然否认，然后是反驳。我的第三个举措是非传统的，不是投降或默许，而是承认这场辩论的条件从未明确过，仍然非常模糊。如何最好地思考发育或发生——生物体形成的过程——仍然是一个合法的有争议和困难的问题。
