Transformation, Discontinuity, Metalanguage

Life on Earth began some three or four billion years ago with a protein text embedded in the progenote, the ancestor of all cells. Its first major transformation was an act of information: the emergence of an organism that could perpetuate itself and evolve through the communication of its form and formal variations from generation to generation — biogenesis. The second major transformation, some 300–odd million years ago, occurred when ‘there emerged an organism that for the first time in the history of the world had more information in its brains than in its genes’.1 That transformation involved a radical morphogenesis, a revolution in the differentiation of the nervous system (itself a language) that separated it from the alimentary system and centralized its power. The third major transformation was the development, within the last million years or so, of the human brain, a structure that now has created more information exterior to itself, in human culture, than it could ever contain within its own boundaries. This last transformation involved a morphogenesis that, when its various aspects are taken together, was not only radical but singular.