Chapter 1: The New Biology
3 - The New Biology
Just as there is no clear definition of life there can be no precise definition of the new biology. But how important it is can be seen in how many different fields it’s affecting at once. They range from microscopic realms to vast global systems. At the deepest levels, for instance, biocentric methods are guiding the assembly of molecules into a range of materials and structures, including synthetic human chromosomes and artificial muscles and bone. The military has developed battle armor based on insect carapaces, and “bioskins” are being “grown” to filter biological-warfare agents and as self-repairing surfaces for space probes.
In robotics, swimming robofish teach ships the natural tricks of propulsion, roboflies carry communications gear, and designers have adapted bird wingtips to planes and penguin contours to racing bikes. There are now tiny, primitive robots that can reproduce. Meanwhile, life-size robotic legs will soon walk like real legs, computerized eyes have already helped the blind to see, and there are important new developments in haptics—remote touching.
Computers, the pivotal tool in the shift to a new biology, are getting smarter as scientists learn to model them on the brain’s neural patterns and structures. They now enliven robots that teach themselves how to navigate the world. The effort to develop emotional computers has birthed a series of biotoys, like dolls that interact with people in increasingly lifelike ways.
Artificial intelligence has opened the way to new fields of research—with names like “emergence,” “self-organization,” “complexity.” They center on the growth of virtual life forms that compete, reproduce, and evolve inside computers and on the Web. With “virtual worlds” a new interactive realm has also established itself there, a stable and enduring 3-D electronic reality in which the sole inhabitants are “avatars,” prosthetic extensions of human operators. Online Web conferences like the annual Biota now promote the birth and release of artificial life forms.
The complexity and interactivity that give rise to Web-based worlds are a central element in all complex systems, living ones, too. Our failure to understand ecological connections in nature has led to many of the problems facing us today. By challenging a global agriculture modeled on machine age logic, the new biology enters the outside world in force. Can grazing increase productivity of the land? Can farmers learn from prairies? Can forests save their nurse logs?
In all these fields there is a movement toward organic ways and means. The same is true for where and how we live. Urban ecology reintegrates communities and nests them more skillfully into natural systems, to mend the fracturing that came with modern subdivisions. State-of-the-art computer programs create virtual-reality urban models that twenty-first-century planners will use to track the flow of energy and materials through real cities. Materials will cycle and recycle through products designed for disassembly. In industrial ecosystems the waste products from one factory serve as raw material for another, just as in nature waste from one organism is food for another. A global effort now aims to convert the industrial world to hydrogen power, a key fuel in living cells and fuel cells.
Some of these changes may look expensive compared with our current system. That’s a false comparison. Our current system uses unrealistic pricing; it’s based on a machine age model that externalizes much of the real cost incurred. Today we call such externalized costs pollution. To new biologists they’re a form of inefficiency. Cutting-edge schools of economic thought now show how an economy is not a big machine, as our present model holds. It’s more like an ecosystem, with myriad interlocking feedback loops and a rough metabolism within limits. Powerful new computers now make it possible to model those dynamics, and to create money that mimics natural energy flows.
Democracies mirror the feedbacks in a natural system via their many cultural feedbacks, which serve to maintain a healthy society. By looking to nature we see the importance of keeping those feedbacks clear and accurate. The corporate distortions of media feedback that have come with consolidation and deception, voter feedback by corrupt campaign financing, and scientific feedback via the funding of biased research, all impede the vitality of culture. Restoring the credibility of those feedbacks is a key to cultural evolution.
The new biology heralds fundamental change. But that just makes it equal to the machine age. Its superiority lies in how, even as it brings great change, it integrates smoothly and at every level with nature. Human culture first emerged from hunting into farming, which then gave rise to cities, which in turn produced our industrial world. The new biology marks the start of yet another phase. In virtually every field of human endeavor—from materials science to robotics, from artificial intelligence to artificial life, and from Web-based worlds to farming, community planning to industry, and economic theory to democratic processes—the logic of ecology is morphing into social forms.
As with any major shift, all this can breed resistance. The machine age has enormous vested interests; much of the world’s economic infrastructure today is based on it. Beyond that, over time we’ve also taught ourselves to think like machines. This means narrow, linear logic and a mechanistic mind-set often guide how we appraise new options. And because the new biology is so fundamental, there are dangers, too, dangers we’d be wise to keep in mind. Still, doing things as nature does them can mean real progress, not only for humans and the society we depend on, but for the natural systems that our society depends on.
Coming at the end of a turbulent century, and at the dawn of a millennium, the rise of nature into culture is real news. The quality of the minds the new biology attracts, the rapid growth and excitement it generates, its broad influence as a unifying concept, and its potential for reshaping culture all suggest we’re at the brink of a historic transformation.
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