"It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection"
About this Quote
Wilkins is doing something quietly radical here: stripping life of its romance and then rebuilding its mystery out of logistics. The sentence reads like a lab memo, but it’s actually a manifesto for the molecular era. “Exact copies” isn’t just a technical requirement; it’s the precondition for anything we recognize as biology rather than chemistry with good PR. Without fidelity, you don’t get heredity, you don’t get selection, you don’t even get a stable “organism” long enough to call it one.
The rhetoric works because it ties three huge ideas into a single causal chain: development (“growth”), origins (“life could not originate”), and evolution (“natural selection”). That’s not a throwaway list; it’s a bid to make replication the master key that unlocks all three. The subtext is a rebuttal to hand-wavy vitalism and to any account of evolution that treats variation as the star of the show. Variation matters, but only atop a platform of sameness. Natural selection can’t “perpetuate” anything if inheritance is a smear.
Context matters: Wilkins is speaking from inside the DNA revolution, when the question wasn’t whether genes existed but how they could be physical objects with reliable behavior. Postwar biology was becoming information science by other means. You can hear the emerging cybernetic metaphor: copying, error, disorder. “Disorder” nods to entropy without naming it, implying that life’s trick is not defying physics but budgeting against it. Accuracy isn’t perfection; it’s survival-grade redundancy. The line foreshadows modern anxieties too: once life is defined by copyability, control over copying becomes power.
The rhetoric works because it ties three huge ideas into a single causal chain: development (“growth”), origins (“life could not originate”), and evolution (“natural selection”). That’s not a throwaway list; it’s a bid to make replication the master key that unlocks all three. The subtext is a rebuttal to hand-wavy vitalism and to any account of evolution that treats variation as the star of the show. Variation matters, but only atop a platform of sameness. Natural selection can’t “perpetuate” anything if inheritance is a smear.
Context matters: Wilkins is speaking from inside the DNA revolution, when the question wasn’t whether genes existed but how they could be physical objects with reliable behavior. Postwar biology was becoming information science by other means. You can hear the emerging cybernetic metaphor: copying, error, disorder. “Disorder” nods to entropy without naming it, implying that life’s trick is not defying physics but budgeting against it. Accuracy isn’t perfection; it’s survival-grade redundancy. The line foreshadows modern anxieties too: once life is defined by copyability, control over copying becomes power.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|
More Quotes by Maurice
Add to List
