SOME scientific issues affect us so deeply that they live on, significant and
unresolved, in the cultural springs of meaning that are our stories and myths.
Trying to extract lessons from these sources is difficult. Yet they feed
people’s perceptions of science, and the tension between these and the official
ideology of science are real and present, demanding attention.

In Frankenstein’s Footsteps, Jon Turney tries to extract lessons
from some great examples of popular culture, a task he undertakes with insight,
scholarship and courage.

Turney begins by identifying Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a modern
myth because of its enduring popularity and its capacity for endless variation
in different genres—books, plays, films—that continue to excite the
public imagination. Shelley’s remarkable piece of Gothic literature belongs
within the tradition of the Faust legend, but its modernity is evident: there is
no supernatural agency involved in Victor Frankenstein’s achievement of
constructing a creature from parts of cadavers and then bringing it to life. It
is all done with the natural forces of physics and chemistry. Shelley
anticipates our contemporary surgical practices and mechanistic attitudes to
repairing and improving the body.

But what gives Frankenstein its particular contemporary relevance is the
prominence given to biology as the science that most seriously threatens human
culture and values. Victor Frankenstein is a seeker of knowledge for its own
sake, embodying the Utopian tradition of pure science practised by the detached
observer, with no thought for the consequences. Let this irresponsible
scientific curiosity loose on life itself, and there will be trouble. And the
contemporary spin? Combine this curiosity with the possibility of making large
amounts of money from applications of biological knowledge in medicine and food
production and we have a potentially demonic scenario of which people have
reason to be fearful.

Turney gives a detailed account of how early experimental biology reflected
many of the elements of the Frankenstein story before bursting those boundaries
and progressing onwards to the brave new world in which we now live. Staging
posts on the way were Claude Bernard’s 19th-century experimental medicine based
on vivisection, the work of Jacques Loeb at the Rockefeller Institute early this
century on the chemical creation of life through artificial parthenogenesis, and
the genetic studies of Thomas Morgan’s group at Columbia University that led
Hermann Muller to formulate a eugenic programme based on the ultimate control of
life via genes.

All these developments provoked reactions: from the Victorian
antivivisectionist movement, from the many American newspapers concerned about
the reduction of life to pure mechanism, and in plays such as Karel Çapek’s
R. U. R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots. This radical piece of Czech theatre,
which introduced the word “robot” into the English language in 1920, was a
worldwide sensation. By combining the themes of artificially created human
beings with the production line, Çapek succeeded in bringing both science and
industrial methods into critical focus.

However, in Britain, the 1920s and 1930s saw a remarkable clutch of thinkers
wrestling with these issues—among them J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell,
Joseph Needham and the biologist Julian Huxley. Out of this intellectual
hothouse came the most influential and devastating scientific critique of all,
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).

Huxley’s famous novel rests on the conviction, which he shared with his
biologist brother, that it is only by means of the sciences of life that the
quality of life can be radically changed—in this instance into the
dystopian society that it describes with such chilling scientific precision.

The intimate relationship between science and the state envisaged in Huxley’s
novel was not realised until after the Second World War. At that point biology
began moving at breakneck speed, with the discovery of the “secret of life” in
the form of the DNA double helix, and the revolution in molecular biology that
has led to today’s genetic engineering of plants and animals.

Paralleling these advances were the development of control over reproduction
through in vitro fertilisation, and the prospect of designer babies through
genetic screening and gene manipulation. There was a brief respite from the rush
to control life in the mid-1970s, when molecular biologists in the US agreed to
a self-imposed moratorium on recombinant DNA research, following this with
stringent safety precautions on experimental procedures. Max Perutz, the Nobel
prizewinning biologist, issued warnings about the dire consequences of in vitro
fertilisation, and there were unheeded calls for a moratorium on ethical
grounds.

Turney has to pick and choose his examples from the flood of recent
biological developments, but his narrative maintains continuity and makes for a
gripping, if terse and disturbing, read. For example, we do now face our own
brave new world: the prospect of cloned humans, essentially as anticipated in
Huxley’s novel.

But there are other biological nightmares, not described by Turney. Food
plants have been genetically engineered to produce anticancer drugs, which are
then extracted and marketed. But genes do not stay where they are put. They move
from one crop and species to another via viruses, soil bacteria, fungi and
insects. Crops can thus become genetically polluted with anticancer genes so
that food is contaminated with drugs that inhibit the normal growth of
cells—anti-food, in fact. Horizontal gene transfer, as it is called, can
spread genes from genetically engineered plants to other species, with quite
unknown consequences. We urgently need another moratorium, this time on
commercial releases of manipulated plants and a public inquiry into the
legitimate and safe uses of genetic engineering.

Turney ends by deploring the polarisation of the debate between the advocates
of scientific and technological progress and those who call for constraint,
urging that we find ways of selecting, from the huge ensemble of technologies on
offer, the ones we feel comfortable with. But after such a powerful exposition
of the problem, this is a weak conclusion. Might it not be that continuing
public anxiety about the practice and applications of science should be read as
a correct diagnosis of a pathology in the type of science we pursue, which
demands the separation of facts from values, of truth from ethics, of knowledge
from feeling?

The training of a scientist splits the human being in two, resulting in a
deep cultural neurosis that is accurately described in the Frankenstein story.
Do we not need a new science that specifically acknowledges and cultivates
qualities, values and intuitive understanding together with quantities, facts
and analytical knowledge?

I know many people are now seeking this integrated form of learning that is
linked to sustainable living, which is why we are now offering a master’s degree
in holistic science (See Forum, 30 May) with these aims at Schumacher College
in association with Plymouth University. Turney’s book will be on our reading list.

IT’S hard to imagine doing science any differently from the way we do it now.
Perhaps this is not surprising. Orthodox science has given us a very impressive
set of theories and facts about the world whose validity is evident every time
we switch on a light or travel by jet.

The power of this approach to knowledge lies in reducing complex systems to a
set of component parts—such as the genes of an organism—that can be
manipulated to produce organisms with different properties, as in genetic
engineering. But this is precisely where the method runs into problems:
organisms are so complex that it isn’t possible to predict what will happen when
you put a gene from one species into another.

Here we see the need to understand organisms as coherent, self-organised
wholes whose health can be seriously violated by a reductionist science of
parts. We don’t seem to have any systematic method of developing such a holistic
understanding of organisms, or of other complex systems such as communities and
ecosystems.

Yet within our own tradition there is actually a different way of doing
science that is precisely focused on the investigation and understanding of
coherent wholes. This was explored in the 18th century by Johann von Goethe,
best known as Germany’s greatest literary genius even though he regarded his
scientific studies as his most important work. His insights are explored in two
recent books: The Wholeness of Nature by Henri Bortoft,
Floris, ÂŁ16.99, ISBN 0863152384 and Goethe on Science by J
Naydler, Floris, ÂŁ9.99, ISBN 0863152376.

Misunderstood for centuries as misguided and in conflict with “real” science,
Goethe’s scientific method is now being revealed as different and complementary.
Whereas current science focuses on mathematical analysis and the quantification
of nature, Goethe’s approach emphasises holistic understanding of natural
phenomena and includes not just quantities but also qualities in their
description.

This extends our understanding of nature to include the full range of our
experiences and feelings rather than cutting off science at quantities and
denying the value of subjective experience.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD believed that an “intelligent person is one who can hold
two contradictory ideas in mind simultaneously”. Using this criterion, Rudolf
Raff scores highly in his book The Shape of Life. Data on evolutionary
patterns has been flowing in at an accelerating rate from research as disparate
as gene sequencing, interpretation of fossil records, and comparative
embryology, and anyone trying to make sense of it needs to be able to cope with
paradoxes. As Raff says: “An accounting for human evolution that began as
ineluctable has ended up as ineffable.” Acceptance of apparent impasses on the
way to future enlightenment is a great strength of the book.

The perspective that informs every aspect of this work is Darwinism, that is,
biology as an essentially historical science whose main aim is to redescribe
evolution in terms of a few scientifically understood processes and forces.

Raff aims to extend the Darwinian synthesis, particularly by reintegrating
developmental processes into the evolutionary narrative. In doing so, he
maintains a historical perspective that is well informed and informative,
recognising the fundamental contributions of the 19th-century pioneers who
articulated the problems with which we are still struggling—Georges
Cuvier, Etienne Geoffroy, Karl von Baer and Richard Owen. He also takes on board
the 20th-century biologists such as Thomas Morgan, Gavin de Beer and Conrad
Waddington who made significant attempts at a synthesis of genetics with
development and evolution. What is new is the data.

What, for example, are we to make of the fossil images revealed in the
sandstone at Ediacara in the Flinders Range of South Australia? They were part
of a worldwide distribution of soft-bodied animals about 600 million years ago
whose nature still defies description in relation to known species. Were they
segmented bottom-dwellers like flattened, fan-like worms? Or were they
frond-like symbionts containing photosynthetic microorganisms, attached by their
“heads” to the seafloor and looking like algae? Then there was the extraordinary
diversification of animals during the Cambrian period between 550 and 500
million years ago, an “explosion” in geological time, but long enough for a
stunning variety of bewildering body plans to emerge.

The mystery arises from a comparison of this diversity of basic body plans,
or phyla, with the pattern of later evolution, where diversification was
confined to the few surviving phyla. All modern phyla derive from the 5 per cent
of species that survived the dramatic extinctions during the Permian between 300
and 250 million years ago. Instead of repeating the Cambrian pattern, the great
variety of species that emerged as life bounced back from the brink was
restricted to the few types of organism that we know today, such as sponges,
corals and jellyfish, unsegmented and segmented worms, molluscs, arthropods,
starfish and sea urchins, fishes, amphibians and higher vertebrates, including
us.

What caused this sudden constraint on possibilities? Raff is gnomic about
this: “Profound change within conserved body plan points obscurely, but
powerfully, to a richer role for the interplay between development and evolution
than we have suspected.” We need, he says, “to understand the integration of
variation and selection with developmental mechanisms that translate genetic
information into body plan”. Yes, indeed.

Raff reminds us that when plants occupied the land about 400 million years
ago they ramified into new phyla such as mosses, horsetails, ferns and seed
plants. These phenomena point to the differences of intrinsic organisational
properties that characterise different types of organism, rather than the
consequences of random variation and natural selection acting on plastic
bodies.

Molecular sequencing techniques have made it possible to plot the
evolutionary histories of organisms by comparing nucleotide base sequences in
highly conserved parts of genomes. These include the sequences which code for
basic cell machinery such as ribosomes and mitochondria. We can measure the
historical distance between species by observing how the genes coding for these
components have changed.

Then we can address question about the evolutionary relationships between
groups such as segmented worms and arthropods. Because these two groups share a
basic body plan of segments, taxonomists classified them together on
morphological grounds as the Articulata. Gene sequencing does not support this
view. This leaves us without a consensus on how to organise the evolution of
segmented animals coherently, which in Darwinian terms means identifying their
common ancestor.

But however the lineages are arranged, some degree of convergent evolution
must have occurred: the same character appears to have arisen independently in
different lineages. To account for this in Darwinian terms, we would have to
show that adaptation to particular habitats has forced this convergence. This is
highly implausible for characteristics as fundamental as those that are shared
by annelids and arthropods. It implies that there are properties intrinsic to
animal development that act as “attractors” for particular patterns such as
segmentation, just as the laws of physics and chemistry act to limit the range
of patterns in the non-living world.

This is where developmental biology begins to emerge as a “third force” in
evolution, alongside genes and natural selection. Raff still sees convergent
evolution as a problem rather than accepting that it requires a significant
shift of emphasis in explanations.

The problem becomes acute in a phenomenon which Raff has himself studied
extensively. Within any major group of animals, such as insects or vertebrates,
there is a stage of embryonic development at which the diverse species bear a
striking resemblance to one another. Among vertebrates, salamander, chick and
human embryos are remarkably alike at the stage when all the major organs have
formed. Looking rather like fish, they share characteristics such as a prominent
head and spinal cord, gill pouches and a tail—to mention only external
structures.

It now appears that the phenomenon is essentially developmental. Different
members of a group can diverge from one another in early development, but if
they share a common body plan as adults this requires that they converge on a
basic form characteristic of the group during their development. Again we face a
problem of convergence that relates to how organisms are made, not to genes or
to natural selection. Raff proposes a general conceptual scheme to explain
this.

Early embryos are organised according to general spatial features such as
head-to-tail and inner-outer axes, while size of egg, yolk content and
extraembryonic structures can all vary greatly. Embryos are modularised at later
stages: their bodies consist of modules (developing limbs, eyes and so on),
which can vary significantly. But in between, as the modules are emerging within
the body axes, organisation demands convergence. Why, we do not yet know.

There is plenty about genes in this book, how they act in development and
their patterns of evolution, which have turned out to be much more constrained
than expected. Again, where do these constraints come from? They seem to be
closely connected with constraints on development, but how the causal patterns
flow remains to be elucidated. So what emerges from this lucid, thoughtful and
intelligent report is that development holds promising and intriguing clues to
solutions of evolutionary paradoxes. We just don’t yet know how to formulate a
new biology in these terms. What we have is still life with paradoxes.

In August 1966, the eminent biologist C. H. Waddington organised the first of a series of meetings to discuss theoretical biology. As well as biologists, he invited physicists, mathematicians, linguists and philosophers to consider how to develop a conceptual structure for the task of understanding biological phenomena. Waddington had never been satisfied that genes and natural selection were sufficient to explain evolution. He felt that deeper forces were at work, something to do with the dynamics of organisms and their evolution that would provide a glimpse of an underlying order in living nature, and which would allow us to articulate our deep affinities with natural process.

Among those who attended the meetings were Ernst Mayr, John Maynard Smith, Lewis Wolpert, René Thom and David Bohm. Another was Stuart Kauffman. Nearly thirty years later, Kauffman has written At Home in the Universe, a book that articulates significant aspects of Waddington’s intuition. Its scope is enormous and the conceptual versatility displayed is dazzling. The writing has an infectious enthusiasm that carries you through thickets of technical description, computer modelling and interpretation of results to a garden of order within the tangled undergrowth of modern empirical biology.

Kauffman found the key to this garden in the 1960s, while studying medicine in California. He was diverted from anatomy and pathology by the excitement of looking for order in complexity with the help of a computer. What he discovered was a striking example of how complex systems with enormous numbers of components, thrown together haphazardly without any design or selection, can spontaneously generate dynamic order.

The components Kauffman played with initially were little automata whose behaviour was defined by logical algorithms called Boolean functions. These specify what state (0 or 1) the automaton goes into in response to two input variables (each either 0 or 1). Any number of automata were coupled together to form a network. Boolean functions were assigned to the automata at random, and the connections between the automata were also specified in a random way. There was only one constraint: each automaton received two inputs, though these could come from any other automata, including itself (feedback). The network was then started in some particular state, in which a string of zeros and 1s defined the initial states of the N automata from which it was formed. As units changed their states they affected the units to which they were coupled, so the whole network followed some dynamic pattern of change.

What on earth would motivate anyone to play such a game? The biological stimulus was one of the fundamental breakthroughs of the 1950s: the discovery by François Jacob and Jacques Monod of how gene activity is regulated in cells by simple control signals from other genes and from the environment. Kauffman regarded each of his automata as a gene whose activity was controlled by other genes; the whole network formed a single dynamic system. Its behaviour defined the possible activity patterns of cells, controlled by genes.

Organisms have a lot of genes: from 1000 or more for bacteria to 100 000 in humans. This enormous complexity exists within every cell. Current dogma is that whatever order there is in cells, organisms or ecosystems is the result of natural selection determining what is useful for survival. “I shall argue in this book that this idea is wrong,” says Kauffman. “For, as we shall see, the emerging sciences of complexity begin to suggest that the order is not all accidental, that vast veins of spontaneous order lie at hand. Laws of complexity spontaneously generate much of the order of the natural world. It is only then that natural selection comes into play, further moulding and refining …”.

But what kind of order is this, and how does it arise? A cell with N genes has 2^N states available to it, which for N = 50 000 is 2^{50 000} or 10^{15 000} possible states, a gigantic number which natural selection would not have had time to search for useful states. Kauffman discovered that instead of wandering aimlessly through this vast number of states, the networks rapidly settled into simple cycles in which most genes were at constant values (off or on, 0 or 1) and a few were engaged in a cycle of activity. This is remarkably suggestive of cell behaviour. It turned out that the number of different patterns of activity for nets of different sizes (number of “genes”) matched reasonably well the number of different cell types in organisms with different amounts of DNA.

The order in the model networks arises from the few control signals per gene, again similar to the number in cells. If the number of control signals per gene increases from 2 to 3, 4 or higher, the order disappears and the networks become chaotic, wandering through their immense number of states. Here is a phenomenon that physicists call a phase transition: a sudden change in behaviour from a state such as liquid, to a gas, which has much less order. Kauffman’s genetic networks went from order to chaos as the amount of interaction between genes increased. Since real cells have ordered patterns of activity, the suggestion is that gene interactions have been “tuned” to lie in the ordered regime which is naturally available to them, just on the edge of chaos. Natural selection doesn’t have to design this – order is available for free in complex systems.

Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe is an inventive elaboration of this basic insight. The ideas it draws on were developed with different collaborators and applied to many of the major problems of evolution: the origin of life as a phase transition in catalytic networks; the properties of the model evolutionary worlds called fitness landscapes and how they can change from rugged to smooth; how it is that coevolving species tune their landscapes so that they live on the edge of chaos, where they suffer intermittent extinctions as part of the dynamics of creativity; and how similar ideas can be applied to technological evolution. The models with their diversity of biological, economic and corporate applications arise from a rich network of interactions that Kauffman has with other scientists. The models, conjectures and theories that are spinning off from this Catherine wheel are all flawed and limited in various ways. Kauffman is the first to acknowledge this. Many biologists criticise the sciences of complexity for developing fact-free models that have little relevance to the real world. There is some justification for this view. What this reflects is the gap between experimental and theoretical traditions in biology and the need to close it, as Waddington recognised. Kauffman is pointing to deep generic principles in complex systems that could make biological order intelligible.

There is another sense in which Kauffman is searching for principles in science, and that is in relation to what he calls a sense of the sacred. His perception is that the intrinsic creativity of the natural realm is something to celebrate, to rejoice in, to respect because we ourselves share in it in our deepest natures. The new science invites this kind of sensitive, participative awareness. This is a brave statement to make, undoubtedly the deepest message of the book.