Introduction

In the Western religious tradition, God created the world by bringing order to chaos. By imposing form on inchoate matter, he acted according to a convention that was very old indeed, one that separated form from matter and considered true essence to reside in the former. (Interestingly enough, "form" is cross-referenced to "universals" in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) This separation of form from matter underlies and unites all the versions of the nature-nurture antithesis that have so persistently informed our philosophical and scientific approaches to the phenomena of life. That it is not a necessary one is evidenced by studies of creation myths from other cultures (G. Bateson, 1972; Long, 1963).

Those who have argued over the origin of ideas and of biological beings have usually agreed that form in some sense preexists its appearance in minds and bodies. They have only disputed the method and time of its imposition. Most solutions to the puzzle of how form arises, therefore, including the most recent biological dogma, have incorporated the assumption that form is to be explained by pointing to a prior instance of that very form. To the extent that this is true, they are of limited value in answering questions about origins and development. Whether it is God, a vitalistic force, or the gene as Nature's agent that is the source of the design of living things and that initiates and directs the unfolding of the design thus matters little to the structure of the argument. Nor are the problems inherent in such a notion lessened by the use of a succession of metaphors, such as genetic plans, knowledge, and programs, to serve these cognitive and intentional functions.

In an increasingly technological, computerized world, information is a prime commodity, and when it is used in biological theorizing it is granted a kind of atomistic autonomy as it moves from place to place, is gathered, stored, imprinted, and translated. It has a history only insofar as it is accumulated or transferred. Information, the modern source of form, is seen to reside in molecules, cells, tissues, "the environment," often latent but causally potent. It is thought to enable these molecules, cells, and other entities to recognize, select, and instruct each other, to construct each other and themselves, to regulate, control, induce, direct, and determine events of all kinds. When something marvelous happens, whether it be the precise choreography of an "instinctive" behavior or the formation of an embryonic structure, the question is always, Where did the information come from? Was it already in the animal or the developing tissue, or did it have to be put in through learning or perhaps some embryological organizer? Was selection or instruction responsible? Is this a phylogenetic or an ontogenetic adaptation? (Was the information acquired by the species or must it have been acquired through individual experience?) The ease with which extreme nature and nurture positions are parodied ensures that no one will stand behind either straw man. No one really argues, that is, either that livers and ideas are literally in the cell or that organisms are devoid of structure, pristine pages on which anything at all may be written (and even a page has structure!). Or, to put it in negative terms, no one contends that either developmental conditions or the genes are totally irrelevant to development. Any locution that dissociates one from the straw man even minimally, however, seems to offer protection from criticism. "Encoded potential" and "biological constraints," then, allow everyone to return to work, the pesky conceptual issues behind them, peace apparently restored.

But conceptual issues are not detachable from empirical ones. They are there whenever one decides what to count as data, interprets them, draws theoretical or practical inferences from them, and frames the next research question in terms of a particular method. Meanwhile disagreement is not truly resolved, even though a generally interactionist vocabulary is rapidly becoming universal. The failure of this shared vocabulary to resolve old conflicts is significant; I suggest the reason is that ways of thinking about form, constancy, and change have been left largely undisturbed. (See presentations by, and commentary on, Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1979.) At present, all that needs to be pointed out is that these exchanges often suggest, whatever the other philosophical biases of the speaker, a "preformationist" attitude toward information: it exists before its utilization or expression. Some views allow assembly of information from a variety of sources, but this in turn implies that it exists in several loci before being collected;such views thus perpetuate the mistake while seeming to correct it. In addition, information is conceived to be a special kind of cause among all the factors that may be necessary for a phenomenon, the cause that imparts order and form to matter. The alternative to such a preformationist attitude toward form is not a classical epigenetic one. Not only did this traditionally require that order arise from chaos, an unsatisfactory solution at best, but it often posited a vitalistic force as well, to effect the recurrent miracle. This brings us full circle to the preexisting form, this time ready to inform the formless rather than simply waiting to unfold. Instead, it is ontogenesis, the inherently orderly but contingent coming into being, that expresses what is essential about the emergence of pattern and form without trapping us in infinite cognitive regress (where was the pattern before it got here?). A proper view of ontogeny, however, that doesn't simply resolve into one of the old ones, requires that the idea of ontogenesis apply not only to bodies and minds, but to information, plans, and all the other cognitive-causal entities (more on this phrase in the next chapter) that supposedly regulate their development. Developmental information itself, in other words, has a developmental history. It neither preexists its operations nor arises from random disorder. It is neither necessary, in an ultimate sense, nor a function of pure chance, though contingency and variation are crucial to its formation and its function. Information is a difference that makes a difference (G. Bateson, 1972, p. 315), and what it "does" or what it means is thus dependent on what is already in place and what alternatives are being distinguished.

If information (along with its terminological and conceptual variants) is developmentally contingent in ways that are orderly but not preordained, and if its meaning is dependent on its actual functioning, then many of our ways of thinking about the phenomena of life must be altered. Development can no longer be explained as a combination of translated information from the genes (to make innate features) and...