JM: Who was the person who did the interesting work on the eye and the PAX-6 gene; I forgot.

NC: Walter Gehring.

JM: Gehring in Switzerland. That kind of work might throw quite a different kind of light on the question of how a system that had Merge built into it . . .[C]

NC: His work is extremely interesting; and basically, what he shows – I don't have any expert judgment, but it seems to be pretty well accepted – is that all visual systems (maybe even phototropic plants) seem to begin with some stochastic event that got a particular class of molecules into a cell – the rhodopsin molecules that happen to have the property that they transmit light energy in the form of chemical energy. So you have the basis for reacting to light. And after that comes a series of developments which apparently are very restrictive. There's a regulatory gene that seems to show up all over the place, and the further developments, according to his account, are highly restricted by the possibilities of inserting genes into a collection of genes, which probably has only certain physical possibilities . . .

JM: the third factor . . .

NC: . . . yes, the third factor, which gives you the variety of eyes. That's very suggestive; it's quite different from the traditional view.

JM: Does it have any bearing on language?

NC: Only that it suggests that there is another system that seems to have powerful third factor effects.