Linking the Gene Ontology with Social Ontology: A Prolegomena to the Ontology of Personhood

摘要

The Gene Ontology captures information at a very small scale, namely:molecular function, biological process, and cellular components. At this level, the Gene Ontology project should be capable of developing a semantics for every relation of genomic data to protein synthesis to the biological processes that result. In essence, the Gene Ontology should be able to describe the complete biomechanical functioning of an organism. But what of the social ontological statuses of organisms, and the relations of individuals to their higher level functions? Can the Gene Ontology account for higher level activities of an organism (such as intentionality, rights, property relations, etc)? Without leaping to conclusions about whether higher level functions are in fact naturalistically based, we should develop a semantics to serve as a hypothetical bridge should genomics lead us in that direction.