Chet Raymo, “The Mundane And The Marvelous”

“The Mundane And The Marvelous”
by Chet Raymo

“It's striking how often authors of biology papers in ”Science” and “Nature” use mechanical metaphors. "Cellular machinery." "Molecular machines." "Molecular motors." "Replication mechanisms." "Mechanisms for maintenance of DNA integrity." And so on. Life as a machine. The metaphor has been ingrained in scientific thought since the 17th century, when a scientific revolution coincided with a time of mechanical innovation (perhaps not coincidentally).

The mechanical metaphor has some life in it yet. At least, no more fruitful metaphor has come along. But the metaphor is taking on on a new twist: not the 17th-century clockwork of gears and levers, but the silicon chip. A completely functional digital computer could be made out of gears and levers, but such a machine would be mammoth, cumbersome and slow. What goes on inside an electronic computer is closer in scale - size and speed - to what happens inside a living cell. Indeed, the computer has become an indispensable tool of molecular biologists. Only with computers can they begin to give visible representation to the chemical machinery of life. Witness that exquiste image of the foot-and-mouth virus I posted here not long ago.

Many people recoil from the mechanical metaphor for life. They cling to the notion that there is something magical, irreducible and transcendent about living organisms, something that will forever escape the grasp of the molecular biologists with their mechanical models of chemical structures.

Two things to keep in mind:

1) "Life is a machine" is only a metaphor. All understanding is metaphorical- in science, in poetry, even in theology. No one mistakes the gray-bearded man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for God, but Michelangelo's powerful metaphor evokes awe and understanding of something essential to the believer's idea of God. In science, too, we use the metaphors that most fruitfully advance our understanding.

2) The mechanical metaphor for life does not so much reduce the marvelous to the mundane as it elevates the mundane to the marvelous. "Mundane" comes from the Latin mundus, meaning "world." The more we understand the staggeringly complex molecular machinery of life, the more truly marvelous the world becomes.

I've been told more times than I can count: Think of life as a machine and you'll treat life as a machine. Think of the hummingbird at my bird feeder as a little lawn mower, and I'll treat it as a lawn mower. Well, no. I don't treat the hummingbird as a lawn mower. You have never heard about lawn mowers on this blog, but you have often heard about hummingbirds. What makes the hummingbird different from the lawn mower is not that the bird has an irreducible soul, but complexity. Even a single cell in the hummingbird is vastly more complex than a lawn mower.

It is the complexity of the hummingbird that commands my reverence and love, the amazing emergent majesty of it. My appreciation for the hummingbird's complexity is only enhanced by what I know about its metabolism, its aerodynamics, its biochemistry- in short, everything scientists have learned by application of the mechanical metaphor.

The idea of an irreducible soul is lovely, but it has led exactly nowhere in science. And before you say "So what?", ask yourself if you would prefer to live in a world without modern medicine. If your kid had foot-and-mouth disease, would you rather know about reducible viral biochemistry or irreducible souls?

Perhaps the nearest thing we have today to an adequate metaphor for life is the internet. We can talk about an ecology of the internet, the evolution of the internet, and perhaps even a metabolism of the internet, turning the tables, using biological metaphors for a technological artifact. The internet is a thing of almost organic complexity - Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere - and no one doubts that it is reducible to hardware and software. But make no mistake, scientific knowledge does not exhaust the hummingbird's meaning, any more than does the motor metaphor in Mary Oliver's poem "Hummingbird Pauses at the Trumpet Vine:" "...who doesn't want/ to live with the brisk/ motor of his heart/ singing/ like a Schubert..."

But what about that mechanical metaphor of Mary Oliver? "...the brisk motor of his heart/ singing/ like a Schubert..." It is probably also fair to say that if Oliver had not written those lines, they would never exist. Ever. Imagine writing: "...the hummingbird comes/ like a small green angel, to soak/ his dark tongue/ in happiness-" And here we have the difference between science and art. Even the greatest science- Darwin's theory of natural selection, say, or Einstein's theory of relativity- is inevitable. If Darwin hadn't done it, then someone else would have (indeed, someone else did, simultaneously). Likewise for Einstein. But those lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 16? Only Shakespeare...
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 "Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved."

It is the great strength of science that it relies on consensus. In Bacon's words, scientific understanding "is extracted...not only out of the secret closets of the mind, but out of the very entrails of Nature." Darwin or Einstein may have dreamed up their theories in the secret closets of their minds, but it was the collective measuring of their ideas against nature that makes natural selection and relativity reliable public knowledge. Out of the closets into the light.

When the hummingbird motor sings Schubert, we are invited to journey in the other direction: out of the light of common experience into the secret closet of a single, unmatchable, individual mind."

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

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