ABSTRACT
What does this idea of separable leaves amount to? Scientifically, of course, the idea doesn't work. This language reflects an unusable view of genetics, so-called ‘bean-bag genetics’ of the crudest kind: one gene, one characteristic. From the metaphorical angle too, the implications of these pictures are not encouraging. The idea of improving books by splicing in bits of other books is not seductive because in books, as in organisms, ignoring the context usually produces nonsense. Nor is the parallel with the chemical elements, which is more seriously meant, any more hopeful. Of course it is true that atomic scientists did, up to a point, confirm the alchemists’ suspicion that it was possible to break the boundaries between elements. They broke them at Los Alamos and Hiroshima and on a number of other occasions since, for instance at Chernobyl. But these events did not generate any general recipe for breaking them safely and successfully. Nor did researchers discover that the elements evince any general progress toward ultimate perfection, either in gold or in Homo sapiens.
