Part 3 of Naval’s recent discussion series with David Deutsch.
A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome [the set of all the genes of an organism], should be able to reconstruct the environmental circumstances that did the carving. In this sense the DNA is a coded description of ancestral environments.
—In The Living Wild , Art Wolfe (2000)
(from David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity)
The organism is a key to decoding its environment.
I ran across this interview with physicist David Deutsch, with his thoughts on Brexit. A lot of great stuff here on resilience, error correction, individualism vs. collectivism, Karl Popper, and Britain’s first-past-the-post system.