Generation by Matthew Cobb

Page 226; "Understanding the process of generation as we know do would have impossible 350 years ago. The very concepts we use to explain inheritance and genetics - transmission, information, programme, code - are the product of the electronic age and were consistenly applied to understanding generation only after they widespread adoption in the early years of computing around the Second World War. Although a seventeenth-century scientist would have understood what code was, the idea that egg and sperme each contain information to make a new organism, and this genetic code was the essential thing transmmited from generation to generation, would have been so much technobabble.
There is an intriguing corollary to all this: computers are currently the most advanced form of our ability to manipulate matter, and concepts such as information, programming and feedback loops are an integral part of modern attemps to model and explain bilogical phenomena. Today it is impossible to imagine anything richer and unforeseeable technological developments, this approach will no doubt seem quaint and naive. The future will prove the we have a vision that is limited by the boundaries of our scientific imagination, which in turn is largely determined by our social conditions, by the way production is organised and in particular by our technology"



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