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XXXXXXX The Language of Organisms The Language of Organisms by Steve Talbott The following is excerpted from two articles published in The Nature Institute’s online NetFuture newsletter (http://netfuture. org). The articles are also appearing as part of a larger series in the hardcopy journal, The New Atlantis (http://thenewatlantis. com). Please note that some statements in the text are offered only so that they can be qualified or revised in other parts of the articles which are not included here. This includes, for example, certain remarks about the “because” of reason and the “because” of physical science. Are you and I machines? Are we analyzable without remainder into a collection of mechanisms whose operation can be fully explained, starting from the parts and proceeding to the whole, by the causal operation of physical and chemical laws? It might seem so, judging from the insistent testimony of those whose work is to understand life. There is little doubt about the biologist’s declared obsession with mechanisms of every sort — “genetic mechanisms,” “epigenetic mechanisms,” “regulatory mechanisms,” “signaling mechanisms,” “oncogenic mechanisms,” “immune mechanisms,” “circadian clock mechanisms,” “DNA repair mechanisms,” “RNA splicing mechanisms,” and even “molecular mechanisms of plasticity.” The single phrase “genetic mechanism” yields about 25,100 hits in Google Scholar as I write, and seems to be rising by hundreds per month. But no cellular entity or process receives an exemption; everything has been or will be baptized a “mechanism.” In an informal analysis of the technical I have yet to find a single technical paper in molecular biology whose author thought it necessary to define mechanism or any of the related terms. 36 • being human papers I’ve collected for my current research, I found an average of 7.5 uses of mechanism per article, with the number in a single article varying from 1 to 32. The figure goes even higher when you throw in cognate forms such as mechanistic and machine. The odd thing is that I have yet to find a single t echnical paper in molecular biology whose author thought it necessary to define mechanism or any of the related terms. If the meaning is supposed to be obvious, then presumably we should read the words in a straightforward and concrete way — as indeed seems to be required in the case of molecular machines, which unashamedly projects the human machine shop onto the molecular level. Other usages, however — causal mechanism and mechanistic explanation are examples — evidently convey little more than an idea of physical lawfulness or causation, as when Zaidi et al. (2007) refer to “mechanistic insights into maintenance of cell phenotype through successive cell divisions.” Many nuances of meaning are possible, of course, but whatever the withheld definitions may turn out to be, no one will dispute me when I say that the intertwined notions of mechanism and physical law intimately coinhabit the minds of biologists today and are held to be keys for understanding organisms. But here is the greater curiosity: the same biologists rely on an equally pervasive and utterly different terminology — so different and yet so seemingly inescapable as to demand, from any thoughtful researcher, some sort of reconciliation with the language of mechanism. What Changes at Death? Anyone whose pet dog has died knows the difference between a living animal and a dead one. Biologists surely know this, too, although (strangely enough!) the difference between life and death does not often figure explicitly in the
technical literature presuming to characterize living creatures. You might even think there is something slightly embarrassing about the subject. But, looked at in the right way, the biological literature nevertheless tells us what the biologist knows about the matter. And it’s a great deal, even if he would prefer not to admit what he knows. Think first of a living dog, then of a decomposing corpse. At the moment of death, all the living processes normally studied by the biologist rapidly disintegrate. The corpse remains subject to the same laws of physics and chemistry as the live dog, but now, with the cessation of life, we see those laws strictly in their own terms, without anything the life scientist is distinctively concerned about. The dramatic change in his descriptive language as he moves between the living and the dead tells us just about everything we need to know. No biologists who had been speaking of the behavior of the living dog will now speak in the same way of the corpse’s “behavior.” Nor will they refer to certain physical changes in the corpse as reflexes, just as they will never mention the corpse’s responses to stimuli, or the functions of its organs, or the processes of development being undergone by the decomposing tissues. Essentially the same collection of molecules exists in the canine cells during the moments immediately before and after death. But after the fateful transition, no one will any longer think of genes as being regulated, nor will anyone refer to normal or proper chromosome functioning. No molecules will be said to guide other molecules to specific targets, and no molecules will be carrying signals, which is just as well because there will be no structures recognizing signals. Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary. The corpse will not produce errors in chromosome replication or in any other processes, and neither will it attempt error correction or the repair of damaged parts. More generally, the ideas of injury and healing will be absent. Molecules will not recruit other molecules in order to achieve particular tasks. No structures will inherit features from parent structures in the way that daughter cells inherit traits or tendencies from their parents, and no No biologists who had been speaking of the behavior of the living dog will now speak in the same way of the corpse’s “behavior.” one will cite the plasticity or context-dependence of the corpse’s adaptation to its environment. It is a worthwhile exercise: try to think in all these ways about the corpse. You will immediately come up against your experience of the distinction between the dog and its remains, between a strictly physical process and a living performance. Nor need you be ashamed of your experience; the most disciplined biologist, whatever his theoretical inclinations, is leaning very much on the same meanings and distinctions you are apprehending. Words such as those cited above, after all, are woven into the decisive explanatory matrix of virtually every contemporary paper in molecular biology — but not in papers dealing with the physical sciences. Sometimes, in fact, the biologist’s language may reach beyond your own intuitions, as when two researchers say that living organisms not only “issue an integrated response to current conditions” but also “make limited predictions about future environmental changes,” leading to the hope that, with current tools, we can gain “insights into the thought processes of a cell.” The same two researchers speak of signaling networks as the “perceptual components of a cell,” responsible for “observing current conditions and making decisions about the appropriate use of resources — ultimately by regulating cellular behaviour” (Hyduke and Palsson 2010). Or you can go back to Barbara McClintock’s Nobel Prize address, when she surmised that “some sensing mechanism must be present ... to alert the cell to imminent danger.” In the future we should try to “determine the extent of knowledge the cell has of itself, and how it utilizes this knowledge in a ‘thoughtful’ manner when challenged” (McClintock 1983). But even without references to thought and perception, it’s clear that biologists cannot open their mouths without employing a language of recognition and response, of first issue 2011 • 37
Page 1: The Nature Institute: Growing Holis
Page 4 and 5: From the Editor There’s much more
Page 6 and 7: Contents FEATURES 6 Discovering a G
Page 8 and 9: 6 • being human
Page 10 and 11: Discovering a Genius: Rudolf Steine
Page 20 and 21: The “Class of 1861”: Rizal, Tag
Page 22 and 23: The Search for Humanity in Contempo
Page 32 and 33: The Radical Re-Visioning of Psychol
Page 34 and 35: The Radical Re-Visioning of Psychol
Page 36 and 37: The Nature Institute: Growing Holis
Page 40 and 41: XXXXXXX The Language of Organisms i
Page 42 and 43: XXXXXXX The Language of Organisms T
Page 44 and 45: Money and Social Transformation Mon
Page 47 and 48: What’s Happening in the Rudolf St
Page 49 and 50: healthy social boundaries as a basi
Page 51 and 52: The least common model Large presen
Page 53 and 54: Like other commentators, Tantillo s
Page 55 and 56: The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistic
Page 57 and 58: Though he does not acknowledge Barf
Page 59 and 60: While Naydler frequently urges a fo
Page 61 and 62: The latest turning of the gyre, the
Page 63 and 64: arrival. Iphigenia is laid on the a
Page 65 and 66: New Members of the Anthroposophical
Page 67 and 68: Members Who Have Died Helen Angerma
Page 69 and 70: Being Human in the 21st Century We
Page 71 and 72: etween the concept of animal and hu
Page 73 and 74: life between birth and death. And i
Page 75 and 76: something karmic. But suppose you o
Page 77 and 78: produces from out of the ego? They
Page 79 and 80: So we see the coming of the Christ
Page 81 and 82: News & Events The Vision of Rudolf
Page 83 and 84: to a different one. It is good to p
Page 85 and 86: Camphill is a worldwide movement of
Page 87 and 88: the Hagens Recording Studio on Harr
Page 89 and 90:
theme of the conference, “The Tru
Page 91 and 92:
to be continued over time. The co-w
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upon which the city was built. We f
Page 95 and 96:
Library Annotations by Judith Solei
Page 97 and 98:
Immunology: Self and Non-Self from
Page 99 and 100:
young man who learns of a dreadful
Page 101 and 102:
first issue 2011 • 99
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