Demons of Darwintology

 Interview Origins & Design 17:2 Marcel-Paul Schützenberger: The Miracles of Darwinism Marcel -Paul Schutzenberger Marcel-Paul Schützenberger Introduction Until his death, the mathematician and doctor of medicine Marcel-Paul Schützenberger (1920-1996) was Professor of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Paris and a member of the Academy of Sciences. [See "From the Editors" for additional biographical information.] In 1966, Schützenberger participated in the Wistar Symposium on mathematical objections to neo-Darwinism. His arguments were subtle and often misunderstood by biologists. Darwin's theory, he observed, and the interpretation of biological systems as formal objects, were at odds insofar as randomness is known to degrade meaning in formal contexts. But Schützenberger also argued that Darwin's theory logically required some active principle of coordination between the typographic space of the informational macromolecules (DNA and RNA) and the organi...