ABSTRACT
The Theory of General Biology has always been clear that we were not so deeply interested in the theory of any particular biological phenomenon for its own sake, but mainly in so far as it helps to a greater comprehension of the general character of the processes that go on in living as contrasted with non-living systems. This general character can, of course, scarcely be profitably discussed in complete abstraction, and these volumes, including the present one, contain many papers which deal in considerable detail with particular biological processes. The microstates of biological systems must eventually be describable in terms of molecules and energy, since that is how we describe all micro-states in material systems. The ‘structures mediating global simplicity’ which we have to search for in the theory of general biology are, then, perhaps profitably to be compared with languages; based on the primary biological disjunction between genotype and phenotype as the analogue of symbol-symbolized.
