Epigenetics of Reproduction in Animals - Building the Most Complex Structure on Earth - page 58

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Epigenetics of Reproduction
in Animals

Newmann's Machines: Living Organisms Defy
Human Imagination

The Aristotelian concept of the soul as the essential distinction between living and
nonliving things dominated the European view of the nature of living organisms for
many centuries after antiquity. In the seventeenth century, French philosopher René
Descartes (1596-1650), within the framework of his dualist philosophy of mind and
body, developed the idea that the human body works like a machine and the organ-
ism's physiological functions can be explained as operating in a way mechanically
similar to clocks. In contrast with the Aristotelian view, Descartes believed that the
human body is governed by the same physical laws as animals, plants, and inor-
ganic matter, and saw the mind or soul as an exclusive attribute of human beings.
His reductionist concept that animals and human bodies are governed by the laws of
nature laid the theoretico-philosophical grounds for the scientific study of the living
world.
A century later, in 1748, his compatriot, the physician and philosopher Julien
Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) in L'homme machine (Man a Machine) further
swung the pendulum toward the materialist view of biology. He erased any distinc-
tion between living and nonliving matter, proclaiming that both obey the same natu-
ral laws. The human mind and body can be explained with the same natural laws.
Later, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection provided strong evolutionary the-
oretical support to La Mettrie's idea that still dominates the biological thought that
laws of physics and chemistry can explain all the functions of animals, including the
human mind.
The analogy of living beings as machines stimulated many scientists and
engineers to think of the possibility of building machines that could reproduce
themselves just as animals and plants do. In 1966, the Hungarian-American math-
ematician John von Neumann came up with the idea that it is logically possible to
build a self-operating and self-replicating machine ( von Neumann, 1966 ) capable of
manufacturing copies of itself when provided with parts. He called his computing
machine the “universal constructor.” In theory, his self-replicating machine could
function even under conditions of perturbation-induced changes in various param-
eters. Then, by using an installed program in a memory tape, it would assemble a
copy of its own and install and turn on a copy of the operating program in the daugh-
ter machine. The machine, thus, would enter a perpetual cycle of self-replication.