From Microbes to Wittgenstein: levels of selection and the score of life

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus logico-philosophicus’, published in English in 1922 under the guidance of Bertrand Russell, is widely recognized as one of the main post-kantian approaches devoted to explore the possibilities of human knowledge of natural world. In theorem 4.0141, Wittgenstein compares music scores and gramophone (DVDs, in our times) with music. The order and qualities of the musical notes in the score, the grooves’ irregularities in the gramophone record, in summary, the ‘language’ from which music might be reproduced, is not music, but has an internal similarity with music. Much longer before the discovery of the genetic code, Wittgenstein’s theorem 4.0141 recalls the main structural feature of living organisms. The process of reading the score (genetic language) produces music (life); conversely, music can be converted, translated, by a ‘law of projection’ into a musical score, and from this again music might be reconstructed. Without internal similarities, these transitions between series of objects ‘that at first sight seem to be entirely different’ should be simply impossible. What might be common between the real world (life, music) and the imagined world of languages (genetics, music score)? ‘It is clear that however different from the real one an imagined world may be, it must have something –a form- in common with the real world’ (2.022). What it is common are forms. The key-formal feature of life (music, languages...) is its multi-level structure. Microbial adaptation to changing environments is a true tale, or a piece of music, determined by the hyper-complex multi-level combination of genetic sequences, mobile genetic elements, fragmented species and clonal complexes, a combination that acquires sense (is selected, evolves) in touch with particular ecological features. Our main epistemological task is to make compatible the knowledge of “internal structures of life” and life as an object in itself.

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