Evolving Thoughts

A blog post by the incredibly multilingual John Wilkins (who knew he spoke French, Portuguese and Spanish? OK, it's by proxy, but it's nearly as good as actually speaking it) is now available in Spanish. Gee but he looks like he knows whereof he speaks... Thanks to Eduardo Zugasti for the choice and translation.

Second, and more important, is a paper in Nature by Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse. Entitled "Life, Logic and Information" it is yet another claim that information technology is the best way to conceptualise biology, in particular biological systems. I am fully in agreement with Bitesize Bio's comment:

The lac operon, for instance, isn’t really an electronic switch. Skipping over the biochemical interaction coefficients is fatal to one’s understanding if he or she uses the lac operon model to explain gene and protein regulation in the Eukaryotic cell.

Systems biology is all very well, but it seems to me there is a fundamental flaw in treating living systems as logical systems. As Inigo Montoya would have said, "You keep using that logical operator. I do not think it means what you think it means."

There has always been a tendency for scientists and philosophers to appeal to the latest and best technology to explain living things. That is where mechanism came from, via clockwork and pulleys and levers in Descartes, to a "mill" in Leibniz, to explanations of the nervous system as a telegraphic, telephonic and eventually cybernetic machine. And these ideas are nothing more than empty similes, unless they are grounded directly in an understanding of the organisms themselves. For example, "natural selection" is not a simile but a way to express what is going on in evolution (some of the time) in metaphorical language. But "the brain or the cell is a computer" is pure metaphor.

Such claims are also often accompanied with the claim that reductionism is dead or unfruitful in biology. I see no reason to think this is true. But the sort of reductionism I would promote is that which includes the systemic relations between parts (indeed, only the very simplest and braindead reductionism would ignore those relations), so systems thinking is necessary in biology. It would be hard to find anyone who said differently.

So Systems Biology tends to resolve to claims like Nurse's that we need to conceptualise biological systems as abstract information processing systems, and the current "best technologies" are of course cybernetic control systems and computers. But while a very good case can be made for some aspects of biology being like a cybernetic control system (especially homeostatic mechanisms), it seems to me that the computer analogy hides more than it reveals about life. At best, nervous systems are computer-like (although they are much more communication-like I think); the rest of biology - including cell signalling and activation cascades - are really not. And genes, as I have previously argued, are not much at all...