Chapter 1: The New Biology
2 - Pulse
A pulse is a sign of life. All living systems answer to a beat. In the future, in ways we’ve only begun to see, our culture and technology will take up that beat—and with it the energy cascades, feedback cycles, and other dynamics that drive evolution.
A pulse is also a seedhead, carrier of the design for a new generation. For two centuries in the industrial West, culture has carried to each new human generation a message of faith in machines, and in the narrow cause-and-effect logic they represent. We’ve even learned to think in mechanical terms. But just as plants can evolve and release seeds better adapted to their settings, the seeds of a more advanced culture are today being sown. Using lessons drawn from nature, a new generation of designers, scientists, engineers, academics, farmers, philosophers, city planners, business leaders, and public officials from every continent is quietly, and with no common plan, creating a global revolution.
The culture that now surrounds us and shapes us was itself shaped by the machine age. Its success is without precedent, but it’s becoming clear that machines as we know them are just a subset of biology, and a primitive one at that. The great leap in knowledge that created them, and that spread them across the planet, was no more than a halting first step out of the murk of history.
The machine age is about to meet a superior challenge. This doesn’t mean the end of technology. There will be more of it now than ever. But our best innovations will no longer be like those that sparked the industrial revolution. In the future they will increasingly be like living things. Not life in the traditional sense, but a biology that has been consciously crafted by humans—a new biology.
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