Eureka

Abstract concepts are materialized infrequently

The story with the “genome of happiness” and other psychogenetic finds of recent years ended with what it was supposed to end - the initial sensational results were not confirmed. This is the best suited to the current disappointed-hazardous attitude of society towards science: they say that its possibilities are fundamentally limited, in particular, the human soul is generally not subject to study by scientific methods.

In fact, the power or limitations of science have the same attitude to the problem of “genes of complex features” as the optical characteristics of glasses to the possibility of getting better to see an example of a good green devil. No device or method will help to explore what is not contained in the nature of the object of research, but is introduced into it by the subject. The very mass of the search and especially the abundance of the exclamations of "Eureka!" (with very vague, as it turns out, actual data) they show that we are dealing not just with a hypothesis, from beginning to end generated by individual intelligence. The very mentality of European natural science of the New Age pushed to search for fateful genes of scientists.

The most important feature of the latter was analytic: any study of the object begins with the separation of it (really or mentally) into some components. Thinkers of different countries and centuries thundered thunder and lightning, proving the irreducibility of the whole to the sum of parts and gloatingly register cases when this approach was destroyed by the object of research. However, for our plot, the division of the object of research is even more interesting into real parts, but into abstract characteristics, which are then thought as independent entities. Remember how the physicists painted an oscillatory circuit in a school textbook? Here we have a capacitor icon - this is the capacity of the entire contour, here is the solenoid - it is its inductance, but the resistor is ohmic resistance ... The trouble is not that such a consideration kills the integrity in the analysis of exactly races

It often justified itself and even turned out to be necessary. The trouble is that the idea of ​​an object as a set of independent and easily separated from each other has become familiar. The fact that it was not formulated anywhere, only made it invulnerable to reflection and criticism. In this sense, the open extension of the principle “one gene - one ail” is useful - formulated in an explicit form, he immediately discovered his doubtfulness.

However, he probably would never have been put forward, if not for two gigantic achievements of biochemistry. Once Moliere Dr. Diafoirus explained that opium lulls because it contains a “euthanus factor” - Virtus Dormitiva. For two centuries, an educated audience laughed over this tautological nonsense until it turned out that such virtus in poppy juice really contains (in fact, there are a whole bouquet there, virtus’s, but the most powerful morphine received the most fame), that it can be distinguished, cleaned, installed, the elemental composition, the structure of the molecule and even try So acts on a person. The lion's share of all biochemical studies (especially related to pharmaceuticals) over the past one and a half hundred years is the selection and study of the “active principles”. For a person who does not have a chemical education, all these seduxena and purgen are nothing more than abstract functions (“sedative”, “laxative”, “diaphoretic”, etc.), materialized in a convenient packaging.

And in the middle of our century, the second great victory of the approach of “materialized qualities” arrived: no more was allocated as a substance of heredity. It turned out that this is a complicated phenomenon, this abstract philosophical category in living