Here we have here the latest (hopefully last) version of the prologue to my book-length treatise The Demeaning of Life, now entitled Biocomplexity: The Third Infinity. I posted the formerly hopefully-last revision in 2021. It's been very important to me to “get this right.” ◦◦◦◦◦ The subtitle, I should explain, refers to seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher Rene Pascal’s positioning of humankind between two infinities—the infinitely small and the infinitely large. Others have subsequently proposed a “third infinity”—the infinitely complex, as encountered in nature. ◦◦◦◦◦ This is a significant rewrite of the opening to what started out as a lengthy essay, began in 2012. (If I may say so, it’s much improved.) The subject? Wellll…it’s complicated. In ten-words-or-less, it’s about The Meaning of Life. More to the point, I draw attention to the notion that the whole of life—the “phenomenon” of living matter—is in serious need of reappraisal. Fact of the matter is, no one really knows what life is…much less, how it got started, why it works so well and why there’s so much of it. With time’s passage, science has come to rely almost exclusively on truly astonishing technologies. But as we probe deeper and deeper into what were once rank mysteries, biology has veered away from its original focus—the study of living organisms—turning into almost a sub-branch of both chemistry and physics. With ever-greater attention on minutiae, driven by data mass collection, biologists have gradually lost sight of the bigger picture. Their findings have revealed that the degree of complexity and sophistication we see throughout nature can no longer be viewed as a product of randomness and chance. Natural selection is not the sole driver of evolution. And no one has the slightest clue about how life began in the first place. Drafts of chapters I’ve posted previously explore these things and more, adding layers to my argument that the entire field of biology is in need of a reboot. ◦◦◦◦◦ From the last paragraph of this prologue: “With an approach emulating Darwin’s Origin of Species, this work too boils down to ‘one long argument,’ bringing together a range of up-to-date information and evidence from many scientific fields as fodder for thoughtful speculation. Its objective: to present an alternative way of looking at the natural world.”
The reality of organic systems is vastly untidy. If only their parts were all distinct, with specific functions for each! Alas, these systems are not like machines. Our human minds have as little intuitive feeling for organic complexity as they do for quantum physics.
Randolph Nesse
SCIENCE MAY WELL BE HUMANITY’S all-time greatest innovation, extending our perception of the observable universe beyond what we can see and touch to encompass the infinitely small and inconceivably distant. In the broadest sense, science is nothing more than a process of inquiry, a means of explaining events in the physical world based on natural causes. We need reminding from time to time that science as we know it has been around for just a few hundred years—not long at all, particularly in light of the prodigious achievements of cultures that existed for millennia prior to sixteenth-century Europe’s Scientific Revolution. And while most of us have a solid sense of what science is, it can still be hard to put into words. In fact, how the word “science” is defined has been subject to endless debate, as are its origins. (Scholars still debate matters like Who deserves more credit for ushering in the modern era, Bacon or Newton?)
Science’s so-called modern era took shape early in the nineteenth century. By that time, all its professional institutions and conventions and arcane terminology were well established. Then, things took off in earnest. In less than two centuries ordinary human beings accomplished astonishing feats, aided in large part by the development of incredibly powerful mechanical and optical devices—sophisticated tools that allowed their inventors to peer into the micro-world, probe the far reaches of space, and pry apart atoms. As of today, nuclear physicists have identified scores of exotic subatomic particles, with no end in sight. Microscopes with electromagnets instead of glass lenses use beams of electrons to reveal cellular structures two billionths of a meter across. At the other end of the spectrum, a space telescope in stable orbit around the sun a million and a half kilometers distant—four times from here to the Moon—transmits digital information back to Earth’s surface where it can be converted into false color-enhanced photographic images. Among these are stunning photos of deep space— barely discernible portions of the heavens containing literally hundreds of galaxies, many of which resemble fuzzy stars—so distant they appear to our eyes as they would have looked shortly after the Big Bang. To upcoming generations, monumental endeavors like these will simply be taken as part of their natural technological birthright.
Humankind’s entire stock of scientific learning is a product of boundless curiosity and a preternatural inventiveness. Today, the fruits of our most advanced technologies, many of which were developed over mere decades, are widely available to the unwashed masses—some of them things our great grandparents could never have even imagined. (My mother’s mother, born just before the first airplane flight, watched men walk on the moon from her easy chair.) Life in the twenty-first century makes it hard to fathom just how far we’ve come—how much our species has changed since a band of arboreal primates emerged from a forest somewhere in East Africa, squinting in the harsh glare at the edge of their first New World. Now, thanks to descendents of those mythical proto-humans, we have digitalized-everythings at our beck and call. Human ingenuity appears to be almost limitless. Fitbits, “smart” homes, and the omnipresent pocket sized everything-device. Satellite-guided tractors…drones all shapes and sizes, driverless vehicles. How is it even possible that in just a few million years—minutes, in geologic time—bipedal apelike creatures went from crafting crude stone implements to fabricating microchips and reusable rocket ships? Amazing. Yes, and it was the gift of one invention in particular—science—that brought all these things within reach. But there’s another side to the story: when you step back and examine the sum total of human learning, the library of a million minds, certain topics stand out by way of being stubbornly resistant to scientific investigation. A few of the more striking examples:
“Missing” mass. Atomic matter—the stuff our world is made of—accounts for a mere five percent of the universe’s mass-energy. The other ninety-five percent consists of unknown, undetectable forms of “dark” matter and “dark” energy.
Life’s origins. Scientists[1] are nowhere close to explaining how life sprang into existence, notwithstanding the buoyant claims of writers and pundits who habitually assure the public that answers to this age-old mystery are at hand. Competing theories based on little more than surmise and wishful thinking are treated as established fact. Attempts to create artificial life have gone nowhere, but—ditto the confident claims.
Human consciousness. Despite steady progress in areas such as the mapping of brain circuits, measuring their activity, and pinpointing the mechanics of memory storage, consciousness remains an enduring mystery—perhaps the deepest riddle of all.
Life science, in general. There are countless loose ends that await clarification. To name just a few: Origin stories. Developmental pathways. We still don’t understand the basic nature of biological form and pattern (for instance: why fingers and toes come in threes, fours, or fives but never sevens). Major evolutionary processes are still under debate; many people would be shocked to learn that there’s still no widespread consensus regarding focal issues such as how species diverge—or, for that matter, what constitutes a species. Or whether the species concept itself is still even relevant.
These issues share a common thread. Namely: the “problem” of biological complexity. Problem? What problem? Thanks in part to an escalating capacity to generate mountains of electronic data, researchers find that with each passing year their work grows more exacting, with a distinct trend toward narrow focus on arcane minutiae—concerning things whose significance only top-level experts can fully appreciate. The latest findings of cellular biologists and biochemists reveal degrees of sophistication and intricacy their predecessors never anticipated. Incredible as it may seem, leading life scientists of the mid-1800s believed cells to be little more than shapeless, unstructured containers filled with water or slime. Even today our grasp of the most basic cellular functions is a work in progress. There’s still much to learn about the ways individual cells interact with their neighbors, how they coordinate their roles and duties…about the timing of cell division and the mechanics of cell migration during embryonic development. As we delve ever deeper into these and other core processes, new complexities are revealed. The same is true at macroscopic scales. And then there’s life’s vast web of intertwined relationships. This omnipresent…what to call it?…feature? property? condition?...of life being one big tangled knot sets biology apart from other natural sciences like chemistry and astronomy and geology. Of course, each branch of science has its own thorny problems—things that dog researchers, that seem to defy explanation. Physicists, for instance, are forced to accept that whatever it is matter ultimately consists of will forever remain beyond the realm of experimentation. As for biology: all efforts to locate the place where chemistry, physics, and that inscrutable “spark of life” converge have thus far proven fruitless, showing that the entire discipline still lacks rock-solid footing. Where does the study of life actually begin?
In biology, analogy and metaphor have proven to be effective tools for explaining difficult topics. By providing a connection with familiar experience, analogies make complicated matters easier to understand. Take this well-known simile, in use since at least the middle ages: Organisms are like wonderful machines. Beyond question, thinking of living things as elaborate machines helps paint a clearer picture of their multipart structures and linked systems. When students learn that cells are miniature factories or the brain is like a computer, things begin to make more sense. But many people take the analogies literally, insisting that organisms are machines. Others believe this mindset downplays the extraordinary complexity all life forms exhibit; after all, our most advanced machinery pales in comparison to the workings of the humblest mud-dwelling microbe.
The net result of all this—the great scientific success stories, the ascendency of technology, a widespread belief that science’s lingering mysteries will eventually be resolved—has had a strange sort of numbing effect. Vital natural processes (a perfect example being the ceaseless, rhythmic beating of our hearts) go unnoticed in much the same way that we learn to tune out distracting noises. The sheer sophistication of things like flight feathers, knee joints, seed pods, and snail shells are simply taken for granted, seldom eliciting the wonderment they so richly deserve. Ditto, with intangible wonders like photosynthesis, the citric acid cycle, and blood clotting. Our days are already full to overflowing; no one has the time and energy it takes to be dazzled by run of the mill miracles at every turn. And so it is that most of us, at some point, make an unconscious decision to ignore what is painfully obvious: that this all-natural phenomenon we call “life” is an exceedingly mysterious affair, stranger than we can even begin to imagine.
Anyone with a high school biology class behind them knows how incredibly complex the subject can be. One thing not taught in biology classes, even college level courses, is that we’re still in the dark when it comes to unraveling the mystery of what this thing called life actually comprises—what life is. To be sure, scientists have a firm grasp on how organisms are put together and how they work, right down to the activities of specific biomolecules. On the other hand, there are still major gaps in our understanding of the most basic life functions. Answers to some of biology’s leading questions are still locked in black boxes. How does organic order arises from chaos? How in the world does a fertilized egg manage to turn into an adult-anything? What does the organism itself represent as an entity? Clearly, we have much yet to learn. Things as yet unimagined.
There’s one way we can increase our overall understanding of life—one that doesn’t require research and experimentation. It’s a simple matter of semantics; specifically, how language shapes our worldview—how manners of speech, words, and those words’ subtle shades of meaning affect the transmission of complicated ideas. This is a topic that doesn’t receive near the attention it deserves, partly due to being somewhat outside science’s normal purview. As I’ve tried to make clear, the provisional character of all biological matters (exceptions to almost every rule being the rule) provides ample openings for misinterpretation and false impressions. The organism-as-machine analogy, for instance, demonstrates how metaphorical language impacts the way we perceive living things and life in general. Mechanistic analogies omit subtle distinctions and thus narrow perception of what living things are capable of, which in turn affects the sort of questions we ask and how to approach them. These effects are amply demonstrated by the now-omnipresent use of computer idiom, with references to hardware versus software, or such-and-such being hard-wired. For a people whose lives inextricably revolve around digital devices, it’s natural to fall back on such versatile terms. But these terms have no analogues in nature and fall short in terms of characterizing how living things actually move through their worlds. Not only that, but silicon-based jargon inadvertently encourages viewing fabulous living organisms not just as machines, but as preprogrammed automatons that run on binary code.
So it can come as a bit of a shock when one discovers that our still-evolving understanding of living nature is being held back by little more than current patterns of thought and simple linguistic issues. What I’m aiming for here is nothing less than a sweeping reassessment of how we view life in its entirety, a project that will call for imaginative ideas, novel concepts and the technical language to match.
Right off, we need a term, a word, to express an elemental life principle that has never achieved proper recognition. This being: All living things—all their entangled internal systems and intimate associations with things both living and nonliving—are under the sway of a decentralized, whole-organism coordinating agency. The nature of this shadowy, all but indescribable influence is something that may be better grasped at something closer to an intuitive level than a wholly intellectual one. What I’m referring to falls in the realm of the ineffable. As such, it can’t be measured, quantified, or classified…can’t be studied in isolation, centrifuged, or grown in a Petri dish. In fact, its effects aren’t even discernible in biochemical or physiological processes. Neither are they observed in cellular activities nor apparent in individual organisms or groups of organisms. So how can this idea/precept…this nebulous biological law be conveyed in simple terms?
First, the thing requires some sort of formal designation—a name. ”Shared organismal intelligence,” though apt, is too awkward. “Life-logic“ is one possible candidate. Call it what you will—so long as it isn’t “life force” (more on this later). But we have to call it something before a productive dialogue can even begin. To that end: life, in the sense of being not just natural phenomenon but a vast, entwined wholeness, will from here on be rendered LIFE—all-caps, bold—to underscore LIFE’s singular nature…its one-great-big-thing-ness. (Lowercase “life” will be used hereafter in the usual sense, e.g., referring to ordinary life-processes as well as organisms and life forms in general.)
Next in line is tackling that swept-under-the-rug “problem” of biological complexity. At issue here is something that goes beyond living nature’s pervasive, multi-level, downright baroque intricacy. Think of it as an additional, not layer, but added dimension of convolution. This…hyper-complexity, should be viewed as a thing unto itself—a life-feature. Coming to grips with biological complexity will prove crucial to a fuller understanding of what LIFE is and what it signifies. Equally important is this: Using ordinary laws of chemistry and physics, LIFE organizes and manipulates inert matter in such a way that it comes alive. Formal recognition of this fundamental capacity to generate order from chaos as a LIFE-defining property is essential. A shared recognition of this feature will free us up to break new ground, conceptually. LIFE‘s penchant for organization and complexification, one of nature’s most distinctive endowments, has long been in need of a name. To that end, from here on we’ll refer to its noun form as “biocomplexity”—a term intended to convey not just the sort of lavish complexity inherent to living matter but LIFE‘s innate tendency to complexify. Think of biocomplexity as one of LIFE ‘s signature features, a capacity that its very existence hinges on.[2]
Every scientific field goes through adjustment phases and occasional course corrections, sometimes momentous. As we gain a deeper understanding of LIFE, new terms will materialize as need arises, leaping into common usage virtually overnight—words and phrases with just the right tenor and tone to complement more nuanced views. A revitalized biological lexicon will shift focus from mechanism and information processing to address some of LIFE’s hard to pin down, qualitative aspects. At present, for example, we lack terms that could help illuminate borderline-taboo subjects like the intentional actions—actual behaviors—exhibited by plants, cells, microbes and even viruses. And, returning to the notion of a “decentralized coordinating agency,” consider the fact that investigators have been unable to locate—in any type of life form—a centralized command center that governs the whole organism. Indeed, biologists are just beginning to come to grips with the idea that every developmental or regulatory influence is subject to further regulation, also regulated—a seemingly infinite regress with no vertical hierarchy, no “higher” or “lower,” nothing that can be said to be in charge. Inexorably, changes in the language of biology will begin to reflect this new level of awareness. Old terms will be modified or redefined.
Biology’s future will see other changes, including the introduction of new principles, theories, and hypotheses that have what might be called a different “flavor.” For instance, some proposals will be couched in language that speaks to LIFE’s hitherto unapproachable paradoxes. Similar to what we see playing out today in the field of cosmology, working theories will be derived from impossible-to-prove inferences—inferences that, nonetheless, agree with observation. In the life sciences, a comparable approach may well shed some light on long-standing problems. And, as we see in modern cosmology, biology will find itself edging toward that uncomfortable place where science and metaphysics begin to mingle. Controversy and discord will be rife. And, as always, progressive change will be met with staunch resistance. Anticipating the coming challenges, celebrated twentieth-century microbiologist Carl Woese wrote in 2004, “A future biology cannot be built within the conceptual superstructure of the past. The old superstructure has to be replaced by a new one before the holistic problems of biology can emerge as biology’s new mainstream.”
Before we begin, a final nod to what science is and how it works. A reminder, as it were.
In order to describe or explain natural phenomena, scientists formulate theories. These theories are then subjected to tests—experiments—that can establish their validity by way of a logical, step by step process. (Tests must be such that others can reproduce them to verify previous results.)
Scientific theories seek accurate representations of reality, not final answers. Nothing in science is forever settled—not even those things we’re most certain of. There are no irrefutable scientific facts, only suppositions presumed to be valid until proven otherwise.
I’ll be taking on a few deeply ingrained suppositions—accepted truths whose veracity is seldom questioned. In that light, I invite readers to approach this material in the spirit of open scientific inquiry, which simply asks that we 1) remain open to the possibility that things we believe may not be true, or at least may be an incomplete picture and 2) that we be willing to modify long-held views. While these venerable axioms may seem self-evident, it needs to be emphasized that humans—like all animals—are creatures of habit, mental as well as behavioral, continually subject to influences that impact the way we think and perceive. Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis:
Our outlooks shape what we see and how we know. Any idea we conceive as fact or truth is integrated into an entire style of thought, of which we are usually unaware…. [T]he dominating inhibitions that determine our point of view…affect all of us, including scientists. All are saddled with heavy linguistic, national, regional, and generational impediments to perception.
With an approach emulating that of Darwin’s Origin of Species, this work comprises “one long argument,” bringing together a broad array of up-to-date information and evidence from diverse scientific fields as fodder for imaginative speculation. Its objective: to present a wide-ranging but complementary set of viewpoints that, taken together, give readers a big-picture perspective that can open doors to seeing life in a new way—to envision the phenomenon of life as this thing I’ve termed LIFE.
[1] When speaking of scientists in this fashion—that is, in a collective sense—I’m alluding to an amorphous group of knowledgeable experts whose perception of the material world is shaped by a scientific viewpoint. In making broad reference to “scientists,” I do so simply to avoid excessive qualification and awkward verbiage.
[2] As of 1999, biocomplexity was formally recognized as a discrete area of study examining “properties emerging from the interplay of behavioral, biological, chemical, physical, and social interactions that affect, sustain, or are modified by living organisms, including humans.”
