Showing papers by "Evelyn Fox Keller published in 2009"

Organisms, Machines, and Thunderstorms: A History of Self-Organization, Part Two. Complexity, Emergence, and Stable Attractors

Abstract: Part Two of this essay focuses on what might be called the third and most recent chapter in the history of self-organization , in which the term has been claimed to denote a paradigm shift or revolution in scientific thinking about complex systems. The developments responsible for this claim began in the late 1960s and came directly out of the physical sciences. They rapidly attracted wide interest and led to yet another redrawing of the boundaries between organisms, machines, and naturally occurring physical systems (such as thunderstorms). In this version of self-organization, organisms are once again set apart from machines precisely because the latter depend on an outside designer, but——in contrast to Kant9s ontology——they are now assimilated to patterns in the inorganic world on the grounds that they, too, like many biological phenomena, arise spontaneously.

What Does Synthetic Biology Have to Do with Biology

Abstract: This article examines the historical roots of synthetic biology, highlighting the multiple meanings and understandings of the term. Synthetic biology as it is used today refers to an especially wide range of endeavors, embodying an equally wide range of aims, and having correspondingly various relations to the activities generally included in the discipline of biology. To address the question of what synthetic biology has to do with biology, this article illustrates some of the ways in which the entanglement of synthetic biology as the epitome of technoscience and synthetic biology as an alternative, artificial biology plays out in three different examples of synthetic biology—one current and two historical.

Knowing As Making, Making As Knowing: The Many Lives of Synthetic Biology

Abstract: The ways in which the various activities of synthetic biology connect to those of conventional biology display both a multiplicity and variety that reflect the multiplicity and variety of meanings for which the term synthetic biology has been invoked, today as in the past. Central to this variety, as well as to the connection itself, is the complex relationship between knowing (understanding, representing) and making (constructing, intervening) that has prevailed in the life sciences. That relationship is the focus of this article. More specifically, my aim is to explore the different assumptions about how knowing is related to making that have prevailed, implicitly or explicitly in the various activities—now or in the past—subsumed under the name synthetic biology.

It Is Possible to Reduce Biological Explanations to Explanations in Chemistry and/or Physics

Abstract: Despite all the dramatic successes we have witnessed in recent years in unraveling the physics and chemistry behind biological phenomena, we still have a very long way to go. The most fundamental question of what is the difference between living and nonliving matter remains unanswered. Unlike most physical and chemical systems, living systems must—at the very least—be endowed with function, a concept that to this day remains indispensable to biology, yet is effectively missing from the vocabulary of physics and chemistry. Accordingly, we need an account of the evolution of function out of simple physical and chemical dynamics which we do not as yet have. Nevertheless, I retain a guarded optimism: we are, I believe, moving closer to answering this basic question. Yet doing so, I argue, requires fundamental transformations in the conventional approaches of both physics and chemistry.

Rethinking the Meaning of Biological Information

Abstract: Throughout the history of molecular biology, the primary meaning of biological information has been taken from the image of a word-based linguistic code. I want to argue that the metaphor of such a code does not begin to capture either the variety or the richness of the processes by which nucleotide sequences inform biological processes. Current research demonstrates that nucleotide sequences inform not only development but also heredity and evolution, and they do so in all sorts of ways. Even though they do not exhaust the varieties of biological information employed in these processes, I claim that the power of DNA sequences to inform these processes is richer and perhaps far greater than the conventional understanding of genetic information permits, indeed richer than what any of our images of simple linguistic codes or of senders and receivers permits. Rather than a tape in a Turing machine or a message or signal sent through the generations, DNA is first and foremost a physicochemical structure with a range of potential uses by the physicochemical arsenal of biological cells that is so large as to expose the poverty of our most familiar metaphors. Recognition of this fact leads us to conclude that DNA is both more and less than we thought—more because it carries both symbolic and non-symbolic information and less because accepting that fact undermines its radical distinction from other biological molecules.