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Biology of Wonder
Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science
Andreas Weber
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eBook - ePub
Biology of Wonder
Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science
Andreas Weber
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About This Book
The disconnection between humans and nature is perhaps one of the most fundamental problems faced by our species today. The schism between us and the natural world is arguably the root cause of most of the environmental catastrophes unraveling around us. However, until we come to terms with the depths of our alienation, we will continue to fail to understand that what happens to nature also happens to us.
In The Biology of Wonder author Andreas Weber proposes a new approach to the biological sciences that puts the human back in nature. He argues that feelings and emotions, far from being superfluous to the study of organisms, are the very foundation of life. From this basic premise flows the development of a "poetic ecology" which intimately connects our species to everything that surrounds usâshowing that subjectivity and imagination are prerequisits of biological existence.
The Biology of Wonder demonstrates that there is no separation between us and the world we inhabit, and in so doing it validates the essence of our deep experience. By reconciling science with meaning, expression and emotion, this landmark work brings us to a crucial understanding of our place in the rich and diverse framework of life-a revolution for biology as groundbreaking as the theory of relativity for physics.
Dr. Andreas Weber is a German academic, scholar and author. He is a leader in the emerging fields of "biopoetics" and "biosemiotics," and his work has been translated into several languages and published around the globe.
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PART ONE:
Cells with Aspirations
Cells with Aspirations
In this section I describe my great longing for nature when I was young. I was stubbornly convinced that there had to be more in it than perfectly functioning parts. I tell how as a student of the life sciences I despaired over the fact that nearly no biologist could positively explain life, and I will take you with me on the journey to finally discover that we are able to ask the question of what life is, and that some fresh ideas about it greatly change our view of reality. What we will discover sheds a whole new light on biology. It shows that many qualities, which we intimately know in ourselves, and which science for a long time had thought to be existing only in humans, already influence how cells bring themselves forth. A cell does not have consciousness. But feeling, inwardness and value are crucial principles of the phenomenon of life. The drive to selfhood and subjectivity can exert physical powers. How can it be possible that already the simplest being is not a machine? On the next pages I will describe this new sentient physics of the cell.
CHAPTER 1:
The Desire for Life
I am the toad. / And carry the diamond.
â Gertrud Kolmar
Have you ever looked into a toadâs eyes? They are big and round, like dark waters. But their iris, which centers around the black pupilâs opening, has a golden color.
Donât be afraid. Just come closer. Look right into the toadâs eyes. Then you will see how these tiny jewels expand into space. Their interior consists of myriads of shiny folds, microscopic canyons and mountains, above which sparkle lost stars. The toad responds to our gaze with the nightâs sky.
You say that this isnât important? That a toad is an animal and our view of it is uninteresting? Maybe you even find it ugly? Wait a moment. Look again. Look again, as I have done. Youâll see that something responds to your gaze. That something exists on the other side, which is no âthing,â no mere matter. Something that lives.
I tried for many university semesters to find out what that something is. I tried to find out about life. As a student I dissected frogs in old-style German seminar rooms. I cloned bacteria in crowded labs. I sieved minuscule worms from the muddy flats of the German sea shores to find out about the living. I even graduated with a diploma. But nonetheless I always felt as if something was lacking. As if we, the researchers, the modern scientists, were overlooking something crucial when we observed plants and animals. As if we were blind to what had sparked our interest in living beings in the first place. As if callously disrupting the integrity of a complex apparatus would reveal its secrets and reveal that they are no secrets after all, but âin realityâ only links in a mechanical chain reaction.
I have spent my life searching for lifeâs nameless âsomething.â I have finally found it â because science itself has rediscovered it after centuries in which researchers were determined to ignore what they could have seen all the time, were it not for their self-imposed duty to be objective. Maybe I have also found it again because I always wanted my feelings to correspond to my thoughts. Everything started many years ago with the toad. Or, to be more precise, it started with a whole pond full of amphibians, full of diverse species.
It was one of those silvery gray days at the end of the winter in northern Germany. Brown, bristly hedges framed the small road wending through the bare fields that lay motionless under the transparent air. It was so cold that the wind hurt my ears as I rushed along on my bicycle. But already a certain warmth had settled in the atmosphere in all the gray colors that had subsisted from the long winter, some ineffable promise that had drawn me out into nature.
I was 14 then. School was out and I was pedaling through the fields to one of the small ponds that was hidden behind a sparse path of reeds, in the broken shadow of elm and beech trees and hazelnut bushes. Some of these were not much bigger than puddles in which the winterâs moisture had gathered and now hesitantly started to sparkle. In its small ponds the country opened its eyes to the sky. I went to one modest body of water that often was the destination of my solitary bike trips. I had been here with a couple of friends when it had still been winter. Mara Simon was among them, a tall blond girl with an ironic wit who barely talked to me. Only a few weeks ago we had been skating here. Then, the pond was covered with a massive layer of transparent ice. I had been watching the water weeds beneath it like in an enchanted aquarium, a world silent and in peace. Walking home through a quickly falling dusk, we had been telling each other the scariest horror stories we could remember. I was hopelessly in love with Mara, but she did not notice me. When she had been dashing over the ice I had tried to outrun her. Every time I caught up she threw back her head with its blond pageboy haircut and flung me a scornful smile with which I knew I had to content myself for the coming days.
Now, some weeks later, the frozen surface had completely melted without a trace of ice. The pond had completely changed its aspect. I let my bike drop into the withered grass and bowed down to the water. When I looked closely I could see that its smoothness was not complete, its mirror not perfect. The black marble of the surface cracked again and again. It sprang open and formed bubbles like under an endlessly slowed-down rain. The surface crackled and sent tiny waves to the shore where I was kneeling. It seemed as if some mysterious effervescence sparkled out, some enigmatic ingredient of life that I did not understand.
I lay down on my belly and crept closer to the water. When I pushed my arms forward beyond the muddy waterline the liquid enveloped my wrists with icy force. An abrupt movement inside the pond made me pause. Mud rose from the bottom and slowly sank back. I stared through the water.
Then I saw the animal. Nearly unnoticeably, it took off from the muddy bottom and went up in the water like a slender elongated balloon, stabilizing its course with its four plump legs and straight tail. With its snout it pierced the surface and sent a flat wave over the pond. It gasped for air â and sank back. I saw that its lower side shone bright orange. A serrated comb was waving on its back and on its tail, like on a fairy-tale dragon.
My heart leapt. The depth of nature had suddenly opened, here on an unadventurous school day in late winter, in the twilight of the northern German plains. The creature before me silently drifted through the water, rising so slowly as to be nearly standing still. I discovered a second animal, than another one. They came upward and inhaled some air, then fell back into their floating state. Through the water I saw their eyes, which gazed through me but which nonetheless sucked me into them. In these magic crystal balls, life was trembling. The longer I stared into the liquid space before me the more strongly it expanded until finally it seemed to me that in the silent stare of the animals, the water itself was looking at me.
After a long while I got myself together, stood up and cut myself loose from the animalsâ gaze. Some days later I bought an amphibian guidebook. The animals were newts, Triturus vulgaris, and the dragonâs comb on their backs belonged to their spring wedding dress. I could not know then that I would never see them here again.
INWARDNESS WE CAN TOUCH
I was a child then. Or rather, I was at the age when I was supposed to slowly morph out of my childhood. But I was slow. The others changed drastically. They started to ask their parents for small mopeds. Soon I was meeting them with their scraggly arms and helmets that seemed far too big for their meager bodies as they darted along on their brand new ZĂŒndapps and Hondas. They squatted on their machines in front of the schoolyard, together with some cooler and older dudes. They smoked. It was a group to which I had no access. Mara Simon was now one of them.
For a while, I was growing out of childhood but not into adult life. I grew into nature. I was 15 and had rented a tiny garden close to the housing development that our narrow townhouse was part of. It was a triangular patch of earth between a sandy parking lot and a barleyfield. In the afternoon, when the others met to have a smoke and chill out, I was kneeling in my vegetable beds, sowing lettuce and borage and pulling out couch grass or goutweed between young carrots.
Nonetheless, my path did cross Mara Simonâs one more time. It was a sunny Wednesday afternoon. I was pushing a wheelbarrow along the road. It was loaded full of pig manure for my garden, which a local farmer had sold me for the absurdly expensive sum of 50 deutsche mark. I had spent all my savings on it. Mara appeared on her bike when I crossed the street, her whitish blond hair swaying in the wind, her cheeks red and radiant. I quickly looked down at myself: worn-out corduroy trousers, boots smudged with manure. I held my breath. When Mara zoomed past I tried to capture her eyes with a helpless look. But she looked past me. Her gaze was as closed as if made of bullet-proof glass. In the evening I wrote her a letter. She responded with a red felt pen. âFor me other boys have the right of way,â it read, politely implying some relation between my vehicle fully loaded with dung and the ZĂŒndapp mopeds of her usual companions.
I often pedaled to my pond in the height of this summer, not knowing it was the last one I would spend there. When the water-weeds and algae grew, the newts began to expertly hide themselves. I could not spot them any more. But Iâd discovered a couple of fat common toads and marvelled at how the wiry males in the water embraced the females, who were nearly bursting with eggs. The males emitted such an air of comfort on their fleshy rafts. I listened to the brown frogsâ low growling. I sat still at the shore and watched how their golden eyes reflected the sun. Just before winter I moved away with my family. I never saw the small pond again.
I had found a home here for one summer season, a home among the animals, with their simple needs and their forthright expressions of these needs. I had a home here, but what it offered was not forgetful salvation. It gave me some wordless understanding of the bigger drama I was part of. It did not console me about Mara, but it did situate that emotion within a larger constellation of feelings. I started to learn then that nature is not a place that shields us from feeling; rather, it is a refuge where we can experience our true emotions. Plants and animals help us discover significant things about ourselves. In them, we find our own inwardness.
With an indulgent laugh, we have always allowed dreamers and poets to experience nature in this way. But we never took it too seriously. Since my own adolescent experiences, however, I have encountered many serious people â not just romantics and dreamy children â who regard such feelings as the center of gravity for life itself. Science itself has come to the paradoxical realization that it can no longer reject emotions and values if it wants to understand life. In this new light, I can now explain my experiences from those distant summer days. But it has taken some time.
For centuries, philosophers and scientists have been working in the opposite direction. Historically, scienceâs goal had been to decode the cosmos made by God, to discover the universal laws which keep the particles of matter in their appointed circuits, like the idea of gravity explained the starsâ trajectories. The first biologists in the 18th and 19th centuries zealously approached nature as I did in that year at the pond: enthusiastically lusting for novelty, for fresh impressions, for exuberance. Within a few decades, those early scientists discovered and described hundreds of thousands of species, classified dozens of habitats and gave birth to the sciences of morphology, biochemistry and physiology.
In this first biological research boom, physical science established the benchmark standards according to which the young science of biology was to be measured. The living world was to be experienced with all senses. Empirical inquiry required nothing less. But the conceptual framework presupposed a mechanical system. The French philosopher René Descartes had declared that living beings were nothing but more or less complicated machines, and so the task of the naturalists swarming out into nature was simply to make an inventory of the sheer diversity of these mechanical devices. Still, many biologists did not give up what they felt to be the crucial questions of life.
These were the very questions that had lured me into the outdoors that faraway spring and summer. I, too, wondered: What distinguishes animate from inanimate matter? What transforms the billions of particles and hundreds of thousands of chemical bonds into an organism with such a complicated form â and why exactly one like this? Why is a baby, at only five months, able to discriminate between a machine and a living being without even a moment of hesitation? That summer I lay at the bank of my pond and brooded over enigmas that for a long time had been the central problems of biology.
This fascination never left me. When, a couple of years later, I started my science studies, I was confronted with a rude realization: biology claimed it had already found answers to all these questions. But its answers looked totally different from what I had imagined. Biologists had clearly borrowed the conceptual models developed by the physical sciences. The primary tenet for understanding life was to study the component parts of dead matter that comprised living machines. After the synthesis of evolutionary theory and genetics beginning in the 1940s, biologists completely disregarded the importance of feeling and the experience of inwardness. For them these dimensions were mere subjective illusions and sentimental reminiscences whose purpose could be easily explained by a Darwinian calculus: feelings are obviously natureâs way of inducing individuals to behave in ways that generate the most possible offsprings carrying oneâs own genes. Any other picture was considered unscientific, and for many, still is. To call scientistsâ work unscientific in public is the ultimate stigma in our society, not totally unlike accusing their work of being âbourgeoisâ in the 1950s Soviet Union, earning them a oneway ticket to the gulag.
Most biologists, I came to understand during my undergraduate studies, still try to comprehend organisms within the conceptual framework used by physicists to explain the universe in Sir Isaac Newtonâs time â as a system built of separate entities that each predictably respond to external forces and obey eternal, unchanging laws. The âgolden ageâ of the life sciences was entirely focused on discovering the biological counterparts of these eternal physical laws. Charles Darwin discovered the law of selection, which affects organisms in the same way as gravity affects planets. Gregor Mendel discovered the law of heredity, the biological equivalent to the law of the conservation of mass. James Watson and Francis Crick found the genetic code, the meta-law that ordains how specific organisms are constructed. In principle, it seems, these laws are thought to provide everything that is needed for the universe to generate a living being â and their careful application therefore in principle can lead us to generate organisms from scratch (as synthetic biologists are now attempting).
Biology in the course of the 20th century became a prima donna among the sciences. It offered, at least in principle, the knowledge necessary to create life. At the moment, this pretension has shifted to the field of synthetic biology, with its massive allocation of academic research power to the material reconstruction of life forms and their functions, and also with its potential of doing hip stuff and creating unexpected novel life forms in makeshift kitchen labs with DIY enzyme kits. The science of life has superseded physics as the most exciting research frontier. This shift is also due to the fact that physics, after centuries of technological success, has been stuck in a research morass, trying to sort through the many unresolved enigmas left by Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, among others. Physics stopped being only the mathematical description of a causal lawful universe and became complicated, difficult to understand, but utterly interesting. Biology, however, just worked. In general relativity theory, space, time and observers are entangled, and there are no objective points of reference any more. In quantum theory even the spatial and temporal separations of events cease to be. Everything that is, was and will be, is connected to everything else. In biology, however, organisms have become as predictable as atoms had been in an outdated physics, guided by eternal and external laws.
Even though biology has triumphed as the preeminent science of the second half of the 20th and the first decades of the 21st centuries, it has not yet hosted any really important theoretical or empirical revolutions, as the physical sciences did. That is not to deny that biologists have amassed a mountain of knowledge enabling them to probe deeply into the inner functioning of organisms. With startling speed, researchers have now decoded genomes for everything from E. coli and barley to mice and mammoths to man. Unfortunately, they are still imprisoned in the Newtonian frame of mind. In the course of their translation frenzy, geneticists have had to admit that the simple linearity of the one gene, one function model, which Watson and Crick proposed, is not how DNA works. Genes mostly do not have only one function, but several, which themselves depend on many external factors and the general condition of the cell. This has meant that no disease can be successfully eliminated by genetic means alone. At the same time, biological explanations for human behavior that view feelings and actions as results of supposed genetic behavioral modules remain very much disputed. And the theories that sociobiology has proposed to explain our behavior â for instance, that a woman is averse to adopting the children of strangers because they do not carry her genes â are at best ad hoc and far-fetched speculations.
Biology, still captive to the Newtonian model of physics, has been treading water. In some respects its situation resembles that of physics a century ago, when it declared with smug certainty that all of the big problems about matter had been solved, leaving only minor calculations to be done.
Recently, though, everything has changed. Frustrated by the inability of traditionalists to answer many large, open questions, some daring biologists have started to renounce the central dogmas of their science. They not only want to find greater personal creative space, they recognize that more and more novel empirical findings in biology simply cannot be explained by mainstream teachings.
The late American biologist Lynn Margulis, for instance, proved that the great diversity of shapes and forms of all higher organismsâ cells had not come about by fierce competition and natural selection but by the symbiotic fusion of simpler precursors. Biosemioticians like the Estonian Kalevi Kull, the Dane Jesper Hoffmeyer and the Italian Marcello Barbieri have introduced a particular version of relativity into biology. They no longer view DNA as a machine code to execute the binary orders of a genetic blueprint but rather as a musical score that the...