I am deeply interested in the notion of mechanism as a basis of understanding of biological systems, of living systems. My personal goal is the effective construction of a physical self-replicating machine that exhibits variation in succeeding generations. I offer that the involvement of natural selection is entirely separate from the generation of variation; these two phenomena are the yield of entirely different origin. That is, the generation of variation is not directly the yield of natural selection (the influence accumulates over time), just as natural selection is not directly the yield of variation (the test of suitability comes post generation of variants; natural selection acts only on that which is generated).
So, to reorganise the forgoing thoughts, natural selection is a mechanism, and it seems reasonable that variation is also a mechanism. Strongly does life appear to be mechanistic. A central part of life is heritability, and the mechanics of DNA replication, repair, and transcription are the tools of that heritability. If indeed mechanism is reasonably applied to genetics, then there must be a corresponding formal system, much as physics has formal systems that correspond to the phenomena that are of interest to physicists.
Is biological genetics a formal system of description? Is it a formal system created by the action of natural selection?
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