But since individual
cells are not ‘subjects’, the protolinguistic contrast of ‘intersubjective’ and
‘objective’ is inappropriate here.
However, we can make
an analogous distinction.
As we argued, what
distinguishes the intersubjective from
the objective in the material experience of an organism are the exterior behavioural tokens that identify interior ‘senser-sensings’ as fellow
‘subjects’.
By the same token, the exterior protein expressions that identify interior genes (alleles)
distinguish the ‘me-&you’ domain from everything else.
In this case, the ‘me-&-you’ domain is
that of interactions between cells containing instances of the same genome: those of the embryo.
As Dawkins (2004: 345) explains, the main
contrast during development is between cells of the embryo and cells of the
mother, with the latter gradually giving way to the former:
In the very early embryo, a cell needs to ‘know’ where it lies along two main dimensions: for and aft (anterior/posterior) and up-down (dorsal/ventral). What does ‘know’ mean? It initially means that a cell’s behaviour is determined by its position along chemical gradients in each of the two axes. Such gradients necessarily start in the egg itself, and are therefore under the control of the mother’s genes, not the egg’s own nuclear genes … The original gradients set up by the maternal genes give way to new and more complex gradients set up by the embryo’s own genes.