Chapter 2 1.2 The Triumph of Biological Logic

Nature has been feeding humans with her flesh and blood.In the earliest days, we got our food, clothing and shelter from nature.Afterwards, we learned to extract raw materials from her biosphere to create new synthetic materials of our own.And now, nature has opened her mind to us, allowing us to learn her inner logic. Clockwork-precise logic—that is, mechanical logic—can only be used to build simple devices.Really complex systems like cells, grasslands, economies, or brains (whether natural or artificial) require an authentic, non-technical logic.We now realize that there is no logic other than biological logic that will allow us to assemble a thinking device, or even a large-scale system that can function.

It's amazing how humans can take the logic of nature from biology and use it to make something useful.Although many philosophers in the past felt that humans could extract the laws of life and apply them to other fields, it was only recently that this idea became possible when computers and man-made systems were able to match the complexity of living organisms. verify.Exactly how much of life can be transformed remains an amazing mystery.So far, the traits that belong to living organisms but have been successfully transplanted into mechanical systems are: self-replication, self-management, limited self-healing, moderate evolution, and localized learning.We have reason to believe that many more traits will be artificially synthesized and transformed into new things.

When people input natural logic into machines, they also bring technical logic into life. The motivation behind bioengineering is the desire to control an organism sufficiently so that it can be improved.Domesticated animals and plants are examples of the application of technological logic to life.The fragrant roots of wild carrots have been carefully selected and cultivated by herb collectors for generations before they finally become sweet carrots in the vegetable garden; the breasts of wild cows are also selectively enlarged in an "unnatural" way to satisfy human needs. Not what Mavericks needs.So cows and carrots are as much a human invention as the steam engine and gunpowder.It's just that cows and carrots are more representative of what humans will invent in the future—products that are grown rather than made.

What genetic engineering does is like a cattle breeder selecting better breeding cattle.It's just that genetic engineers have used a more precise and powerful control method.While breeders of carrots and cows had to make selections based on lengthy natural evolution, modern genetic engineers can use directed artificial evolution to greatly speed up the process of species improvement through targeted design. The overlap between machines and life forms increases year by year.This biomimetic fusion is also reflected in the words. The meanings of the words "machine" and "life" continued to expand, until the day came when all complex structures were considered machines, and all self-sustaining machines were considered living.In addition to semantic changes, two specific trends are taking place: (1) artificial objects are becoming more and more like living things; (2) life is becoming more and more engineered.The veil between the organic and the man-made has been lifted, revealing both for what they are.In fact they are—and always have been—essentially the same.We know that in the field of biology there are concepts such as organisms and ecosystems, and the corresponding artificial objects include robots, companies, economies, computer circuits, and so on.So, how to name the soul shared by both?Since each system has the property of life, I collectively refer to these man-made or natural systems as "living systems".

In the following chapters, I will make a tour of this unified frontier of bionics.Many of the living systems I've described are "artificial"—that is, ingenious things made by humans.They really exist around us, not general theoretical empty talk.These living systems are complex and grand: a global telephone system, computer virus incubators, robotic prototypes, virtual reality worlds, synthetic animated characters, various artificial ecosystems, and computer models that simulate the entire planet. The wildness of nature is the main source of information for us to deeply understand living systems, and perhaps will be the most important source for in-depth understanding of living systems in the future.New experiments I'll be reporting on include assembling ecosystems, restoring biology, replicating coral reefs, exploring insect (bee and ant) ​​sociality, and building biospheres like the one I describe in the book's introductory Arizona Biosphere II. complex closed system.

The living systems studied in this book are profound and complex, involving a wide range of fields and huge differences.From these special large systems, I have extracted a set of unifying principles applicable to all large living systems, which I call "laws of God".This set of divine laws is the basic principle that all self-sustaining and self-improvement systems share. In the process of creating complex machines, human beings return to nature again and again to seek guidance.Therefore, nature is not just a biological gene bank with abundant reserves, which preserves some unavailable drugs for treating future diseases for us.Nature is also a "cultural gene pool" and a creative factory.Hidden in every anthill in the jungle is a living, post-industrial grandiose blueprint.Those birds and insects, those exotic flowers and plants, and those original human cultures that draw energy from these lives are all worthy of our care—not for anything else, but for the postmodernism they contain. metaphor.For the new biological civilization, destroying a grassland not only destroys a biological gene bank, but also destroys a treasure that contains various revelations, insights and models of new biological civilization.