Text and Context in Biology

Biologists of the twentieth century have generally adhered to a socalled reductionist theory of vital phenomena. One of their objectives has been to effect a linguistic result: to use only concepts and methods borrowed from the physico-chemical sciences in their descriptions and explanations of biological phenomena, allowing a rigorous, quantifiable and experimentally controllable approach. The reductionist thesis is in fact double: an ontological thesis of the applicability of the laws of the inanimate world to vital phenomena and a linguistic thesis of the possibility of using physico-chemical concepts to constitute a clear, coherent and unequivocal language, a scientific language par excellence. This is to ascribe to biological language a closely guarded and to prohibit the multiple collusions with universes of reference other than the physico-chemical one, those other universes that delight lovers of literature, where pleasure emanates from the resonance with multiple networks of meaning which the literary text opens and where the richness of what the reader brings often constitutes the richness of the reading. Within biological language, there are several borrowed terms that retain various meanings simultaneously, preserve the richness of their original contexts and have been kept more or less consciously just for that reason. I will demonstrate this with an example from the history of modern biology, more particularly-though not exclusively-from immunology. Even the most determined reductionist can play with the contexts at his disposal in a part of his memory just as the reader

Biology · Computational biology · Evolutionary biology · Gene · Artificial Immune Systems Applications · Gene Regulatory Network Analysis · Genetics · Paleontology