Sociobiology and the Information Metaphor

Abstract

One focus of “the sociobiological debate” has been the issue of genetic determinism. I argue that the debate has suffered from an inadequate epistemological foundation for language invoking the information metaphor. Talk, which purports to be purely descriptive about genetic codes, blueprints, and programs actually acquires its meaning by extension from talk about human agency, involving such prescriptive notions as intention and conscious purpose. Following Nagel, I analyze the concept of a biological program in terms of the role of programs in goal-directed systems. The most significant implications of the analysis are that: (i) a program is a relation between a physical structure (DNA) and a goal-directed system which it “controls”, so that the same program (DNA), embedded in different biological systems, can have different “meanings”; and (ii) programs are always “programs for stability”, so that there are no “biological programs for change”. This concept of a biological program is applied to questions of degrees of genetic determinism in order to shed some light on the “nature-nurture” controversy.