Biological [Bio-Logical]
extr...@hotmail.com
...the marriage of the born and the made. By extracting the logical
principle of both life and machines, and applying each to the task of
building extremely complex systems, technicians are conjuring up
contraptions that are at once both made and alive. This marriage
between life and machines is one of convenience, because, in part, it
has been forced by our current technical limitations. For the world of
our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the
world of the born to understand how to manage it. That is, the more
mechanical we make our fabricated environment, the more biological it
will eventually have to be if it is to work at all. Our future is
technological; but it will not be a world of gray steel. Rather our
technological future is headed toward a neo-biological civilization.
Nature has all along yielded her flesh to humans. First, we took
nature's materials as food, fibers, and shelter. Then we learned to
extract raw materials from her biosphere to create our own new
synthetic materials. Now Bios is yielding us her mind-we are taking
her logic.
Clockwork logic-the logic of the machines-will only build simple
contraptions. Truly complex systems such as a cell, a meadow, an
economy, or a brain (natural or artificial) require a rigorous
nontechnological logic. We now see that no logic except bio-logic can
assemble a thinking device, or even a workable system of any
magnitude.
It is an astounding discovery that one can extract the logic of Bios
out of biology and have something useful. Although many philosophers
in the past have suspected one could abstract the laws of life and
apply them elsewhere, it wasn't until the complexity of computers and
human-made systems became as complicated as living things, that it was
possible to prove this. It's eerie how much of life can be
transferred. So far, some of the traits of the living that have
successfully been transported to mechanical systems are: self-
replication, self-governance, limited self-repair, mild evolution, and
partial learning. We have reason to believe yet more can be
synthesized and made into something new.
Yet at the same time that the logic of Bios is being imported into
machines, the logic of Technos is being imported into life.
The root of bioengineering is the desire to control the organic long
enough to improve it. Domesticated plants and animals are examples of
technos-logic applied to life. The wild aromatic root of the Queen
Anne's lace weed has been fine-tuned over generations by selective
herb gatherers until it has evolved into a sweet carrot of the garden;
the udders of wild bovines have been selectively enlarged in a
"unnatural" way to satisfy humans rather than calves. Milk cows and
carrots, therefore, are human inventions as much as steam engines and
gunpowder are. But milk cows and carrots are more indicative of the
kind of inventions humans will make in the future: products that are
grown rather than manufactured.
Genetic engineering is precisely what cattle breeders do when they
select better strains of Holsteins, only bioengineers employ more
precise and powerful control. While carrot and milk cow breeders had
to rely on diffuse organic evolution, modern genetic engineers can use
directed artificial evolution-purposeful design-which greatly
accelerates improvements.
The overlap of the mechanical and the lifelike increases year by year.
Part of this bionic convergence is a matter of words. The meanings of
"mechanical" and "life" are both stretching until all complicated
things can be perceived as machines, and all self-sustaining machines
can be perceived as alive. Yet beyond semantics, two concrete trends
are happening: (1) Human-made things are behaving more lifelike, and
(2) Life is becoming more engineered. The apparent veil between the
organic and the manufactured has crumpled to reveal that the two
really are, and have always been, of one being. What should we call
that common soul between the organic communities we know of as
organisms and ecologies, and their manufactured counterparts of
robots, corporations, economies, and computer circuits? I call those
examples, both made and born, "vivisystems" for the lifelikeness each
kind of system holds.
In the following chapters I survey this unified bionic frontier. Many
of the vivisystems I report on are "artificial"-artifices of human
making-but in almost every case they are also real-experimentally
implemented rather than mere theory. The artificial vivisystems I
survey are all complex and grand: planetary telephone systems,
computer virus incubators, robot prototypes, virtual reality worlds,
synthetic animated characters, diverse artificial ecologies, and
computer models of the whole Earth.
But the wildness of nature is the chief source for clarifying insights
into vivisystems, and probably the paramount source of more insights
to come. I report on new experimental work in ecosystem assembly,
restoration biology, coral reef replicas, social insects (bees and
ants), and complex closed systems such as the Biosphere 2 project in
Arizona, from wherein I write this prologue.
The vivisystems I examine in this book are nearly bottomless
complications, vast in range, and gigantic in nuance. From these
particular big systems I have appropriated unifying principles for all
large vivisystems; I call them the laws of god, and they are the
fundamentals shared by all self-sustaining, self-improving systems.
As we look at human efforts to create complex mechanical things, again
and again we return to nature for directions. Nature is thus more than
a diverse gene bank harboring undiscovered herbal cures for future
diseases-although it is certainly this. Nature is also a "meme bank,"
an idea factory. Vital, postindustrial paradigms are hidden in every
jungly ant hill. The billion-footed beast of living bugs and weeds,
and the aboriginal human cultures which have extracted meaning from
this life, are worth protecting, if for no other reason than for the
postmodern metaphors they still have not revealed. Destroying a
prairie destroys not only a reservoir of genes but also a treasure of
future metaphors, insight, and models for a neo-biological
civilization.
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch1-a.html
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch1-b.html
ZerkonXXXX
> For the world of our own making has become so complicated ....
Oh my, our world is so complicated but....
> ......... bioengineers employ more precise and powerful control.
they have a handle on all of it, thank goodness or is it laws of god-ness?
Is it too obvious here to mention that bioengineering is now so driven by
profit and greed it is impossible to see a clear bottom line to it as a
beneficial applied science? In short, search: "GM Crops"
There is a persistent myth that capital 'S'cience and capital
'T'echnology are things that emerge from some White Light Cathedral of
blinding human brilliance which 'we', the onlookers, can only be dazzled
by and thankful for.
Here Kevin Kelly goes on about 'one soul', 'vivisystems', 'postmodern
metaphors' and a "neo-biological civilization but not one word given to
patent rights, sources of grant money, corporate and military involvement
in all of this which do make up, in part at least, the unifying
principles which he calls "laws of god".
This is an unfortunate yet now classic neglect which 'we' can no longer
afford. Dazzling visions of the near future obfuscate the reality of the
very here and now from which this future can only come. This is only bio-
logical.
John Jones
> Biological machine can feel and reproduce;
>
> ...the marriage of the born and the made. By extracting the logical
> principle of both life and machines, and applying each to the task of
> building extremely complex systems, technicians are conjuring up
> contraptions that are at once both made and alive.
Not so much conjuring with contraptions, but conjuring with failed
metaphors like "biological machine".