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Biologist Gerald Edelman (1929-2014) was born in America. His early work concentrated on the study of immunology and he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1972 for his work leading to the understanding of the antibody’s chemical structure. [Listeners: Ralph J Greenspan; date recorded: 2005]
TRANSCRIPT: I would add that to the problem of complexity because indeed it is complex. And the reason that it's complex fascinates me because it's something that just goes a bit against the grain, doesn't it, in science? What you want from science is a kind of certainty, right? But if someone says to you, 'Well, wait a minute, what you have to have in biological system is degeneracy.' Let me explain that, because it won't work otherwise. Even evolution wouldn't work because you'd have too many mutants that are lethal. What is degeneracy? Well, degeneracy is what you see very clearly in the genetic code. You know that the code is a triplet code – there's the letters G, C, A, T, okay, and they base-pair à la Watson and Crick. Fine. Now you realize that the third, that there are 64 code words, and if you take out the three stop codons there are 61 code words for 20 L amino acids. So that means there are too many code words if you will on a one-one basis, and so what do you see? You see that the third position of every code word, every triplet, can be replaced by any one of the letters and it doesn't matter, in general. That means, say, to make 100 amino acids of particular protein sequence I need 300 nucleotides, roughly 3100 different possible chains can be made that all specify the same darn amino acid sequence. A truly degenerate situation. Well, what Joe Gally and I and in our conversations with you have developed is this idea that at practically every level of biology you see degeneracy, even up to the ambiguities of language. So my challenge to anyone who says otherwise is to go as follows: supposing you were just born with ordinary algebra and not with the capacity for language as we know it – natural language. Well, if... if you were born and could speak that language what would you say? You'd say (-B + -v(B² + 4AC)) ÷ 2A, the discriminant of a quadratic equation. I'd say, 'Write a poem', and he say (-B + -v(B² + 4AC)) ÷ 2A. You would not, in effect, really be able to deal with what's involved in poetry – namely, a huge richness of implication and reference.
