Chet Richards

In Organic Design, chart 15, Boyd gives a definition of “Orientation”:

Orientation is an interactive process of many-sided implicit cross-referencing projections, empathies, correlations, and rejections that is shaped by and shapes the interplay of genetic heritage, cultural tradition, previous experiences, and unfolding circumstances.

In this definition, he identifies the five elements of Orientation that appear in his OODA “loop” sketch that he drew some 10 years later (”analyses and synthesis” denotes the many-sided implicit cross referencing). People shouldn’t get too hung up on these. Boyd doesn’t define any of them; he’s just enumerating the elements that seemed to him to bear on how we perceive the dynamic (unfolding) nature of the universe. But no matter what set you choose, a person’s genetic heritage has some influence on Orientation (which explains, among other things, why I don’t play in the NBA).

In a very interesting article in the New York Times this week, Carl Zimmer reports on new research on how our genetic heritage determines our development. People have always thought that organisms with identical DNA, as in clones and identical twins, should come into the world physically identical. The environment will affect them after birth, but their physical make-up should be the same.

Turns out that this isn’t true. E. coli, for example, reproduce by fission, splitting in two and giving each descendant a copy of the ancestor’s DNA that is virtually always identical to the other’s and to the ancestor’s. However the behavior of the clones can differ significantly, including in their resistance to antibiotics (remember, these individuals are genetically identical).

Research suggests that noise within the cellular machinery itself is responsible for this strange phenomenon. That is, the clones have the same DNA, but other factors within the cell introduce a measure of randomness in how the genes are expressed.

As Zimmer concludes:

At the very least, E. coli’s individuality should be a warning to those who would put human nature down to any sort of simple genetic determinism. Living things are more than just programs run by genetic software. Even in minuscule microbes, the same genes and the same genetic network can lead to different fates.

Boyd never, as far as I know, espoused any form of genetic determinism (hence the other blocks in Orientation). In fact, anything that increases the variety of responses available to an organism or group, without unduly increasing the time required to switch between them, is good.