Alas, only in retrospect shall adjusting to these changes seem easy.
Cultural Convergence
From our blinkered perspective, a Biological Century looks like a fundamental shift in world view, with ramifications that will reach into every cultural corner.
Physics proceeds by atomizing nature, and this habit of mind has deeply penetrated realms far from science. Every fiction writer knows that the trick is immersing the reader in a world, a knitted vision. Yet some schools of literary criticism have aped physics, deconstructing literature until it is a swarm of disjoint words, each ambiguous, their author irrelevant. This stress on contradictory or self-contained internal differences in textsjam jar labels or novels alikerather than their link to a culture of meaning, merely leads to literature seen as empty word games.
A biologically sophisticated world view would counter this, looking for how artists and writers manage their integrative effects. Current academe often casts a cold eye on genres, whether the lyric or the epic, the western or the musical, contending that such overt formal differences don't matter much. This may be because genres don't yield to theories of atomized arts, but are best seen as cross-talk, conversations within communities, progressing down through timeevolving. Genres clearly unfold and interact, ragtime to jazz to blues to rock, suggesting biological metaphors.
What would a criticism look like, done in a biological style? Both species and genres have intense interior interactions. Seen in the large, population statistics in literature and life may follow similar laws, though of course occasional individuals can deflect the prevailing tide, in both culture and in survival fitness. Weighing these seemingly contradictory thrusts is the integrative task before us, selectively using conceptual roots from modern biology.
Biologist Richard Dawkins has stressed the role of cultural ideas which propagate themselves, termed "memes," after their analogy to genes. Similar conceptual leaps could dispel the physics-latent mechanical imagery which inhabits much of economics, politics, and the humanities. Marxian ritual invocations of control and commodification, shrouded in a fog of conspiracy, proceed ultimately from misapplied classical mechanics. Self-organization through inherently chaotic interactions, the signature of our economic times, cannot emerge from the linear landscape of deterministic mechanical laws.
Replacing such habits of thought in the minds of managers requires such movements as "bionomics" and, generally, recalling that biology itself is no fixed set of immutable ideas. Evolution itself evolves as an idea, in our time introducing punctuated equilibria, sociobiology, and cladisticsthe method of looking through time for evolutionary relationships among creatures.
All these will have to be tested, and in turn will generate fresh analogies for our views of economics. We shall see economic analogies that use not mere competition/cooperation balances, but complex, nonlinear responses to ever-changing circumstances. Predator/prey evolve into symbiotes; nature need not be red in tooth and claw.
Once our technologies learn the trick of reproduction à la nature, not à la factory, we may see a collision between the classical economy of scarcity and one of bio-plenty. Thinkers like Freeman Dyson have been pointing out that the specters which haunt our presentstrip-mining and burning up our dwindling resourcesmay be as narrow a vision as was Spain's obsession with taking gold out of the New World, while missing tobacco, the potato, "love apples" (tomatoes), and the rest.
Biotech opens the promise that the truly fundamental resources will be sunlight, water, organic chemicals, and landprivileging the tropical South and "green tech." This could neatly turn the tables on the industrial, "gray tech" North which will develop the biotech in the first place. Spain, after all, sent Columbus, but missed the boat conceptually in the following century.
An immense payoff for a small, but self-reproducing investment of "smart" biotech is a daunting possibility. We dropped jackrabbits into Australia before we knew their long-range impact. This point is not lost on the Luddites of our time, the Jeremy Rifkin crowd that fears any biotech product, and considers animal husbandry as "slavery."
The Wild Blue Maybe
One of the troubles with such apparently open-ended future projections is that we have no firm idea of what the limitations on biotech will be. Chances are, they'll be wilder than we think. The Frenchmen who first rode hot air balloons and gazed up at the lunar crescent surely did not glimpse the centuries-long path that led through the airplane and the rocket to Tranquility Base.
The most complex riddle in biology is our own brains, possessing about a 100,000 times the connections in a state-of-the-art Cray supercomputer. These connections work about a hundred thousand times faster than the comparable computer networks. This yields an organism with about 10 billion times the capabilities of our billion-dollar number crunchers. Consider what could be done by modifying some of the wiring diagram of that brain, or perhaps just some of its inherent chemistry. The potential for vast improvementand vast damageis immense.
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