Chapter 1: The New Biology
15 - The Twentieth Century
The vivid blue waters of Crater Lake fill the cone of an ancient volcano in southern Oregon, along the crest of the Cascade Range. The rich blue comes from the scattering of sunlight in the lake’s tremendous depths, nearly two thousand feet, and the purity of its water, which it receives entirely from rainfall and snowmelt. Today it remains largely as it was when a prospector stumbled onto it in the spring of 1853, a natural wonder of the North American landscape. The five-mile expanse of the lake’s surface still mirrors piney slopes thick with ferns and wildflowers, marmots, bears, and deer, as golden eagles glide overhead. That is due in no small part to its being one of the national parks declared during the tenure of Theodore Roosevelt, the first U.S. president elected in the twentieth century.
A tireless outdoorsman, hunter, naturalist, and explorer, Roosevelt came to office in 1901 and remained a champion of nature throughout his eight-year term. Building on the efforts of groups like the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society, he saw to the creation of five national parks, of reserves for moose and bison, and of over fifty bird refuges. He was also deeply involved in forestry issues, wrote extensively about his observations of nature, and in 1908 held the first National Conference on Conservation at the White House.
Roosevelt was emblematic of a coming shift. Until the twentieth century, the science of biology had been shaped primarily by the machine metaphor. As the new century progressed, that model would give way to another view of how living systems work. This involved an opening outward of awareness, a seeing beyond the narrow confines of those simple 1 + 2 = 3 linear connections. In the age-old tension between figure and ground, between parts and wholes, Roosevelt’s broader scope meant focusing a little less on individuals and more on their environments, less on the figure and more on the ground. This mirrored a rising tendency in physics, biology, psychology, and other fields—a trend toward looking at things in context. With that also came a turning away from Descartes’ old program of reductionism and clockwork logic.
The struggle between the machine metaphor and the ecological view of nature would test the finest minds of the coming century, and to some extent continues even now. Mechanistic theory still guides our economic system, and by extension steers the worldwide industrial culture it supports. The machine metaphor informs much of what we see as common sense, too, affecting our lives in constant ways. But the leading edge of science has moved on. Where once biology was viewed as a big machine, we now know it involves concepts like self-organization, emergence, coevolution, and succession. In our understanding of life today, matter and energy don’t just link mechanically; they flow through food chains and webs, cycling by way of myriad feedback loops that interlink in fluid, endless, metabolic networks in search of homeostasis—of that elusive sweet spot between impulse and restraint, competition and cooperation, chaos and order. Just as the machine age once took shape and direction from the machine metaphor, the twentieth century would see a new world forming on these notions.
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