I am writing this as a half serious half snark exercise. I feel a bit frivolous since my doctor found me cancer free yesterday.
I read The Hot Zone when it first came out and this quote struck me:
Nature has interesting ways of balancing itself. The rain forest has its own defenses. The earth's immune system, so to speak, has recognized the presence of the human species and is starting to kick in. The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by the human parasite.
The commentator makes it even more interesting:
In this quotation, the author suggests that the earth is a victim of an infection in the same way that Charles Monet is a victim of Marburg and Nurse Mayinga is a victim of Ebola Zaire. In this scenario, human beings are the parasitic organisms with a constant drive to "replicate", while viruses such Ebola and AIDS are serving as the earth's protective antibodies. Preston points out that human beings are, in some ways, just as harmful to the planet as these emerging viruses are to human beings. Although The Hot Zone is twenty years old, Preston's argument is particularly relevant in this age of global warming and overpopulation.
Because I practice a special brand of science and have a book that suggests that we are in a situation of our own creation that is doing us in, the quote resonates with my thinking very well. If you are interested, read on below and I'll explain.
I work with a version of complexity theory that goes back to the 1950s and the Rashevsky school of mathematical biology at the University of Chicago. Rashevsky's student, Robert Rosen, developed an approach to complex systems that has not been matched to this day.
Rosen used category theory to develop an abstract model of a system that could be used to answer the question that Erwin Schrödinger was not able to answer because he posed it incorrectly. His book: What Is Life? uses the question as its title. For myriad reasons I will not go into here it is an ill posed question and therefore unanswerable.
I published a paper which was the talk I gave when I replaced Rosen as a featured speaker at the International Society for the Systems Sciences annual meeting in 1999. It was enititled:ROBERT ROSEN: THE WELL POSED QUESTION AND ITS ANSWER-WHY ARE ORGANISMS DIFFERENT FROM MACHINES?
Abstract
The question "What is life?" has been around for some time. There is an impressive list of great minds that tackled the question. In spite of this, it never has been answered in any definitive way. Robert Rosen, a student of Nicholas Rashevsky and a product of the Mathematical Biology program at the University of Chicago started one line of research that grappled with the question in the late 1950's. It is worth examining the progression, which lead Bob Rosen to realize that he was dealing with a poorly posed question and that when rephrased, the question had an earthshaking answer.
The answer was earthshaking not so much due to its information content but more so due to the process by which it was answered. This process and its really revealing ramifications will be the subject of this review. It is no easy task to try to say these things in Bob Rosen's stead, and you will suffer from having to hear a surrogate. On the other hand, to see beyond where anyone has seen before has often necessitated standing on the shoulders of giants.
What we will examine here is the entire epistemological basis for modern science. We will examine it with a view that, in itself, is a product of that very examination. And, thus, from the onset, we will be forced to stop every step of the way in order to remind ourselves that what we are doing is only effective if it is changing even as we do it.
Why so bold a goal? Because anything short of that easily and deceptively lapses back into well worn tracks even if dressed to seem new and different. What Robert Rosen discovered had that effect on him, and, as he wrote and spoke over the years, it began to have an effect on some of us. The path we are about to traverse is very difficult. It was even more difficult for Bob, for as he saw, he had to communicate what he saw. This is difficult enough with new ideas even when they nicely extend the ideas upon which they are built. It is far more difficult when the new ideas radically change that perspective.
Now we will move on to the subject at hand. The role of the machine metaphor in science goes back to Descartes. Newton and those who followed built it into what has become modern science. The success of this world-view was so great that it became as strong as any of the other belief structures we might identify as religions. In this case, however, science was to liberate us from superstition and myth and to give us a basis for evaluating those things that were to be candidates for truth.
Hence physics dealt with the fundamental laws of nature and chemistry and biology were to use these laws to deal with specific applications of the general laws physics discovered. In other words, the relation of physics to biology, in particular, is that of the general to the special. Rosen was able to see that, in fact, this was a prison for our thought and an extreme handicap to our understanding. It was a legacy of the machine metaphor. How could this be? It is so because the world of the machine is a "simple" world. Its laws and inhabitants are simple machines or mechanisms. What if the objects in chemistry and biology are not that simple? Then we must reduce them to subunits that are. By this reductionist path we will learn all that there is to learn about the real world. Robert Rosen discovered that this approach was a dead end! He discovered that when the reduction is performed, something real and necessary is lost and in a way which made it unrecoverable. This profound realization turned the ontology of our world upside down! It isn't the atoms and molecules that are at the hard core of reality, it is the relations between them and the relations between them and things called processes which are at the core of the real world!
There is much to this discovery and we will only be able to have a taste of it. In that tasting we will examine the modeling relation that is the key to our own ongoing examination of what we are doing as we do it! We will examine the alternative to a mechanistic world, a world of processes and causes. A world ever changing and yet a world more rational than the sterile world of machines. Finally, we will utilize this new way of seeing to repose the question about life and answer it.
The method Rosen used was to construct models that could be encoded using category theory mappings of causality. He used these to show that a fundamental partition in the universe of discourse was demonstrable. On one side were a category he named "organisms" and the other "machines". They were distinct because of an essential property all organisms have and no machine can have. That property is the closure within the system of loops of efficient cause. That is, organisms entail themselves.
The processes he abstracted from organisms were metabolism and repair. Using the category theory reasoning he developed for this purpose, he showed that given certain properties common to all living systems these led to a third process he called replication. The existence of replication closed a causal loop and the system was self entailed.
I soon was able to see that our earth system could be modeled by this same metabolism-repair system and found a justification for the Gaia hypothesis. This got me into lots of trouble but I stand by it to this day.
So back to the Ebola quote. The quote took on special meaning for me when I looked at it from his perspective. The earth system has the ability to repair itself and to replicate function in the way Rosen posited for all organisms. As we see our insults to its system countered in ways we never imagined I feel vindicated for my far out view of it as an organism.
My book with Jim Coffman builds on these ideas. It is time for a paradigm shift. In fact it is long overdue. In that context the Ebola quote has profound meaning.