What is “Biology Worthy of Life”?

by Steve Talbott

Editor’s Note: At the Nature Institute in Ghent, NY, Steve Talbott is quietly building a solid new book on the realities of biology—of our understanding of life. This comes as we contemplate a vast wave of extinctions and an increasingly shocking alteration in the planetary context for life. Here are a few thoughts from Steve’s pages to give you a sense of his goals.

Imagine that, as biologists, we accepted animals the way we all accept them outside the laboratory. That is, imagine that we regarded them, even for scientific purposes, as beings with their own intentions and meanings, their own sensed worlds, their own strivings and characteristic way of life—beings with whom we can enter into living relationships. Would this not be a revolution to outstrip all scientific revolutions? Would we not find ourselves wrestling scientifically with things we can, in any case, scarcely help believing? Not such an unhappy prospect!

After Crick and Watson unraveled the structure of DNA, molecular biologists were destined, so they thought, to understand organisms as physical mechanisms and nothing more. Instead, ever more sophisticated experimental techniques have been revealing organisms whose wisdom and subtlety, whose powers of development and adaptation, whose embodied insight and effective communication, and whose evolutionary ingenuity far outstrip our current capacities for comprehension. Yes, new molecular “mechanisms,” isolated from the organism as a whole, continue to be proclaimed daily. But when we restore these products of our one-sided methods to their living contexts, allowing them to speak their own meanings, what they actually show us is this: every organism is intent upon telling the eloquent story of its own life. Its living intentions govern and coordinate the lawful physical performance of its body, not the other way around.

No, you haven’t been informed about these developments in the pages of The New York Times or even Scientific American. Indeed, many biologists themselves lament that their unavoidable focus on the minutia of their own narrow research topics prevents their paying adequate attention to wider fields of discovery. But the reality now being proclaimed from the pages of every technical journal could hardly be more dramatic.

Perhaps the central truth is this: we human beings discover our conscious, inner capacities—our capacities to think and mean, to plan and strive—unconsciously and objectively reflected back to us from every metabolic process, every signaling pathway, every gene expression pattern in all the organisms we study. We are akin to these organisms in ways we have long forgotten. This matters in a world whose future has been placed in our hands. No form of life is alien to us.

You deserve to know what is going on — not via the heated and fruitless rhetoric of the science–religion wars, and not through vague references to vibrations, energy fields and quantum mysteries, but rather directly from the front lines of biological research. That’s what this project is about.

The most important thing

A great deal of my work on the “Biology Worthy of Life” project is now being distilled into a freshly written, book-length presentation I am calling Evolution As It Was Meant To Be—And the Living Narratives That Tell Its Story. This presentation now has its own home page. You will see there that several chapters are now available online. I will be uploading additional chapters on a more or less regular basis, one aim being to invite your criticism. There is also an overview of the book.

My hope is to create an eminently readable, compelling text, as free of technical jargon as possible. At the same time, I hope that professional biologists will be able to recognize the force of the strikingly unconventional positions being taken.

The organism and its evolution look dramatically different from the picture given in conventional textbooks once we accept what we all in fact cannot help knowing—namely, that every organism pursues its own purposes by means of its active capacities—capacities for developing and shaping its own body, sensing and responding to stimuli, repairing and healing, signaling and communicating. At every level of observation—and all the way down to its molecular structures and processes— the organism displays a plastic, adaptive power responsive to context. The essential elements of the organism are activities and dynamically maintained relationships, not static things.

Through its living activity, the organism speaks. That’s why biologists use terms such as information, code, message, signal, program, response, communication, and so on—all in order to express the language-like activity they can’t help trying to describe (even if they prefer to think in terms of computerized rather than living speech). And just as words and gestures carry many meanings, even opposite meanings, depending on their context, so it is with all the structures and processes of our cells, including our genes. The language of the organism is turning out to be vastly more complex, expressive, and nuanced than our old, mechanistic heritage ever led us to expect.

Every organism’s mastery of its own developmental processes could hardly be more obvious in its relevance to evolution. We routinely observe how a complex, multicellular animal creates radically different phenotypes1 within its own body. These cellular phenotypes are directionally achieved along differentiating cell lineages—and, at a more complex level, we can say something similar about tissue and organ phenotypes. Further, all these divergent types are stably and integrally bound together into the coherent life of one particular creature. And, finally, this creature as a whole proceeds through continual transformation from the earliest embryo onward—all while managing to preserve the unique qualitative substance and character of its kind as it persists and adapts through all the vicissitudes of its existence.

The entire drama of the germline2 has been rapidly revealing itself in recent years as a remarkable focus of the organism’s creative “attention.” Are we to believe, then, that this is the one cell lineage in which the organism’s normal, future-oriented activity goes silent? Or that, with all the organism’s expertise at producing, adapting, and stably maintaining diverse phenotypes even without changes in DNA sequence, it “refuses” to employ this expertise when it comes to the preparation of inheritances? Or that the power with which the organism conforms all its cells, tissues, and organs to a unified and integral whole adapted as far as possible to current conditions is a power lost to it in the management of its own germline?

It’s time we let organisms speak for themselves. That is the opportunity and responsibility of the new science of biology.

Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org) is Senior Researcher, The Nature Institute (natureinstitute.org) where his main project is Biology Worthy of Life (bwo.life) and he is completing a book Evolution As It Was Meant To Be (bwo.life/bk).

1 The observable characteristics in an individual resulting from the expression of genes; the clinical presentation of an individual with a particular genotype. [NCI Dictionary of Genetic Terms]

2 The germline is the egg and sperm cells that join to form an embryo. Germline DNA is the source of DNA for all other cells in the body.