Biology, the Brain, and the Meanings of Life: Philip Ball in Conversation with Iain McGilchrist

hi welcome to this conversation hosted by the margin Review of Books between Philip ball a leading science writer and Ian mcgilchrist a leading scientist of the brain and the mind I'm delighted to host this as part of the meanings of science project at the marginale review of books which is supported by the Templeton Foundation and our mission at the meanings of science project of which Philip ball and Ian are very distinguished members it's great to see you both again last time we saw each other we in Oxford two years ago and I'm excited to bring them together and have this conversation and the meanings of science project is just this it's a way of bringing together the great scientific Minds the scholars the writers the philosophers the practitioners who think deeply not only about scientific technical specializations but about how they're connected to the whole web of other scientific disciplines and the meanings that science has for us as human beings at marginalia we firmly believe knowledge is the path towards progress and that science can best be served by having really deeply intelligent conversations with the best people about the issues that affect us most and we couldn't have two more perfect people to bring into conversation today than Phil ball and Ian mcgilchrist we're gonna Focus today particularly on Phil Ball's new work uh a groundbreaking work in biology called how life works this is the American Edition a users's guide to the new biology published by the University of Chicago press and Ian mcgilchrist as many of you I'm sure know is the author most recently of the two volume extraordinary work of Science and philosophy the matter with things and Phil has been giving a lot of talks and conversations about his book but I wanted to start the conversation Phil by just throwing it to you and asking you about how you see your work this book in your whole scientific Arc and what you think is special about this book and special about what you hope you see to happen in the field of biology are you helping show and catalyze a scientific revolution I know it's a big question but the book is a very large scale book so I'd love to just hear you start by telling us how do you see this book in terms of your work and what you hope it's doing in the world well maybe I should start by talking about what I mean by the new biology and uh some people have asked this already you know what's new about it it's uh isn't it just the same old thing carrying on and it's this is a book that has I guess in some way or another taken me decades to to get to um because for a long time certainly going back to when I was an editor at nature during the 1990s at the science journal Nature I started to get a sense and I was an editor there of physical sciences my training is in physical sciences and so I uh was was really on this very steep learning curve about biology at that stage and it was a fantastic place to be to uh to be in that position because nature was receiving particularly in the Life Sciences was receiving work at the absolute Forefront of the field and my fellow editors who handled those papers were extremely knowledgeable so it was a great place for learning what was going on in biology as the years went by um I started to feel there was something that didn't seem quite right about or there seemed to be a disjunction between the the way the discourse about life about biology happened in the public sphere and the kinds of research that I was seeing coming into nature and getting published and uh these words began as nothing more than than vague misgivings um as time went by they became a bit more than that but it was really only when uh I guess it's five years ago now by me I I was invited to be a a visitor for the summer in 2019 at the uh at Harvard Medical School at the department of systems biology which is a fantastic and very forward thinking very creative uh thinking department and I arrived there full of these kind of vague misgivings about the you know the the narratives that biology was uh was using and it seemed to me that pretty much everyone in the department that I spoke to said well yes and it's worse than that and this is why uh and and I found out that actually things were even more different to certainly the public narratives and I think what when I'm talking about a new biology I'm really trying to get across what has changed in biology over the past really I I'd say two three decades particularly uh and perhaps not coincidentally since the completion of the Human Genome Project which some people might uh might have got the impression that this was going to answer all the questions about biology because after all it was going to as we were told decode the code you know the instruction booklet from which we are made um and of obviously understanding those instructions was going to take some time but this was the the project that was going to to to to allow us to do that it seemed to me actually and it certainly seemed I felt to the people I spoke to at Harvard that it didn't haven't quite worked that way that actually what we have come to understand over the past 20 years or so about the details of how life Works they look incredibly complicated for one thing but the more we understand about them the more it seems that old Narrative of an instruction book that is just read out to build us is no longer the right one it simply doesn't work anymore so the new biology is is about trying to describe and find ways of talking about find narratives really for this new understanding that we have I think I would say it's a more sophisticated view of how it is that life Works how uh life gets put together and I in a way the trajectory of the book goes from the very small up to the to the whole organism and you one could take it Beyond um uh looking at for example you know starting off with genes and looking at proteins and looking at how proteins work together and how cells work and how cells assemble into tissues and it's seems to me that at every one of these stages of if you like the biological hierarchy the story that's being told certainly as that's being told about us as complex organisms is not the one that you'll see in uh certainly in school biology text books which is you know the all the biology a lot of people get it's not the one that has tended to be told uh as a way of EX talking about something like the Human Genome Project and it's not really even the one that is often told in some parts of the specialist scientific literature that actually when we start to to really take on board what the work over the past 20 years or so has done I think we really have to acknowledge that it's time for a new story and this book is not telling that story because I don't know what it is I don't think anyone knows what it is now but it's trying to make a start it's trying to suggest you know the at least what we what what what we could start leaving behind and try to find better narratives that give a more accurate really impression of how it is that I mean as the title says how it is that life works it's extraordinary so there is been a revolution in life but we don't know where it's leading yet but but you're arguing we have to see that actually the the old ways of thinking are completely inadequate Ian I'm curious just if you could I'm curious how Phil's project and what he's doing sounds to are you surprised given your work on the nature of science and um how science has both the powers and biases it has are you surprised by this sort of critique and development of biology or is it a in a way something both novel but something your own worldview and work on the brain would have led you to expect might be coming I very much hoped that it would be coming and there have been signs for some years now not really for a very long time perhaps 10 15 years that things are changing in biology um I'm not at the Forefront of any of it so I I I'm just reporting my understanding but I want to thank Phil for his wonderful book I I I loved it I found it very well written for somebody who doesn't necessarily know all the technical details um and I learned a hell of a lot in the course of it I wonder though if you're under selling Phillip uh the not perhaps the novelty exactly but the import of what it is you say in that book I noticed there were moments if I may say so where you move towards uh saying there's something here that's a real problem for Science and then step back pretty fast saying no I'm very much inside the fold which is which is understandable because actually getting on the wrong side of that fence in science is is um not a picnic and um so but I wondered if you sometimes just held back from saying actually the the import of this you do actually say at the end of the book to unfold what this means for evolutionary biology would be a whole other book in itself and and enormous and I think that's right but it's that speculative Edge because at the moment it h you know speculation has a bad name in science but speculation is actually how science moves on and somebody needs to be speculating in an intelligent way about what is happening here um so you you you unlock all kinds of mysterious mechanisms and which are fabulous to read about but at the end of it I I was left with a number of feelings that cere about where we're going to have to go with this in the future I mean the first is the baroness of the reductive Enterprise and I think you are very clear on that you don't hedge any of your bets about that and the reductionism is simply not going to work I mean at one stage you say uh maybe the only way to truly understand life is with reference to life itself and I remember the words of Sydney Brer a no prizewinning biologist of course you know um who said that the only way to express What's Happening Here is talking about amazingly complex intracellular um uh process is is there's a hardly a shorter way of giving a rule for what goes on than just describing what there is which is in a way the death of the reductionist Enterprise which is to show that it's not just another unique mystery but there is something and of course we will I hope come to what uh in the course of time though probably not during this conversation though I'm open for anything we probably will need to come to some ways of thinking about it but I'm just going to name a few areas in which there problems the first is in a way the Su suig generous nature of Life which I think we I've just talked about another is top- down causation where things seem to be attracted from in front or LED from Beyond towards something which of course is a as you say a very difficult area to talk about because as halane said the whole idea of purpose is a mistress that the scientist can't live without but is unwilling to be seen within public so in other words it's it's something that scientists are always saying has to be there but they find other words for putting it um that's not all that's the problem because top down causation isn't just about purpose and Direction though it probably does involve that necessarily then there's just the whole levels of freedom of interaction and the complexity so in a single C or probably a million maybe maybe more in interactions going on chemical interactions going on and even a very small one is immensely complex in the book I quote some researchers from Brussels Who present what they call a horor graph which is just four stages of five interlocking processes and show that it's almost impossible to um describe this as anything other than a horor graph because the idea that this inevitably seems to result in or almost inevitably results in benign and productive outcome is remarkable and then you've got things like you know the the structure of the the brain as it comes into being in in um in utero in the human brain about a quarter of a million cells generated every minute during nine months of gestation quarter of a million in a minute and they're all necessarily going to be in the long run different and we can work that out saying well as they develop their their their environment they will change in response to that of course but the the sophistication of this dance and the level of technical exactness that has to be produced at the end if you look in detail at the micro structure of the brain is something absolutely extraordinary another thing is where is the missing information where is the pattern that shows what that brain should look like where is the pattern that dictates that a dear's antlers if you cut them off they have a unique pattern inside and you know that it will regrow exactly to that pattern where is it stored when a nematode worm has its head cut off it will regenerate a head but it will regenerate the memories that the old head had where are the memories where are the forms these are all I know very difficult and it's very unfair to Lodge these at you because of course I'm not expecting you suddenly to have an answer but these are the questions that your book threw up in my mind very exciting and I hope we can talk about it a little well in youve I mean you you you've uh spotted my strategy uh because it was a strategic decision absolutely right to come at this and I do want to come at this conservatively actually um partly strategically as you say because otherwise the you you will know very well the uh antipathy that can be aroused when certainly when one starts to talk about these taboo words in biology like purpose and meaning um you know the very very quickly the barriers grow up and so I want to try to introduce that idea as gently as possible but also I it was a Strate well it was also a strategic decision because I want to recognize uh it's kind of I hope it's not false I don't think it is false humility I am no expert in any of the areas that I'm talking about in the book and so I want to absolutely recognize that you know there's always something else in biology there's always some layer that that certainly someone like me is not going to know about he not going to understand so I I want to recognize that um so you know that was the the approach I wanted to take but it was also uh a a strategic decision to be if you like conservative about the way I put things because I felt one of the key things I wanted to do in this book was to try to make sure that what I was saying was going to seem and to be linked to remain linked enough to what the regular molecular biologist actually does dayto day looking at cells or looking at molecules in the laboratory so often I think that books that have tried to talk about to to paint a a bigger picture of what life is how life works very quickly get into abstractions that may well turn out to be the right ones but they are all but useless for the practicing molecular biologist for example or cell biologist because it doesn't relate to what they're doing I really wanted to stay focused on you know sometimes to a degree that I felt a bit uncomfortable about in a book that's aiming at a general audience but to stay focused on the the fine details because it's actually sometimes the fine details of how this molecule does this particular task that that that's where that's where the Insight comes from that suddenly you start to think ah it's working this way way rather than the traditional way for this reason so for example for a long time I was as a someone who early trained as a chemist I was very happy with the the picture that's often told in mcop biology you say that you know the cells are full of you know thousands and thousands maybe millions of different molecules packed into this small space how on Earth do they do they do what they're supposed to do and not interfere with each other all the time and the standard story about that is well they these very particular shapes it's all about molecular recognition they fit together in certain ways proteins have a particular shape that fits with the molecule they're meant to modify and it ignores everything else and so so this is what um what biochemists and and chemists call molecular recognition there's absolutely some of that going on in the cell but what actually shocked me actually to some degree and this is something I really heard about at Harvard was in our cells in the cells of complex organisms like us that's often not the case at all actually the molecular interactions are surprisingly promiscuous that these proteins that we learn about as having these you know beautifully sculpted shapes yes many of them and particularly the ones that are often most Central to what cells are doing are quite floppy they're what biochemists call intrinsically disordered this is something we've started to understand in the past 10 or 20 years again because we have the methods for doing so that actually in the past to understand the structure of proteins we needed them to form crystals and they only do that if they do have well- defined shapes so this this story of intrinsic disorder which is everywhere in our cells at least 50% of our protein are have some degree of disorder and so they have some degree of promiscuity um we just didn't know about so how how does that work this makes it it seems to make it even more messy that you know not only do we have all these ules and they have to build these complex systems but they they don't even choose their partners with the specificity that we thought they did and and it turns out I think that once we start to to look at what is really going on in those interactions is that this is an essential part of how they work this promiscuity this openness if you like to find new partners is a crucial part of how you know how we work not only how we work from dayto day but also it builds into the system a kind of evolvability it provides the possibility on new interactions to form which give rise to new phenotypes which allows evolution of these very complex systems to happen what it also does is to allow for that it gives some slack in the system because it means that it's no longer essential for this molecule to meet this particular molecule at this time and place and if they don't get together everything goes you know goes off the tracks that might be to some extent how it is in bacteria but for us it's no good because most of the time the cells are very messy they're very noisy that sort of mechanism isn't going to work we need something that is much fuzzier much looser than that and we find this you know this is one of the themes that came out from me I mean you mentioned that um you know maybe as Sydney brener said maybe you know you just have to describe what's going on system you can't do any better than that I started this book thinking well maybe that's all I'm going to be able to say but actually as I went deep to it these general principles seemed to emerge and one of them was this fuzziness of the interactions and this combinatorial nature where it's different combinations I talk about Committees of mules getting together having conversations if you like and out of that come the decision that's actually it's you know it's it's no coincidence that that happens much more in us than in simpler organisms like bacteria that is actually an essential part of how an organm an organism like us works so these more general principles started to emerge and that's an example of the kind of story that I think we should now start to be telling about life and you know you've made it very clear in in uh your book and in lots of what You' have said I that this is one of the reasons why we need to get away from this machine met for yes yes well there was in what you said that was I agreed with it all of it um not that that particularly matters but I do um I mean first of all there's no reason to feel at all uncomfortable with the idea that you're not an expert on all these things because such as the level of um specialization now in all the science is that it's very hard for anyone any longer however well trained in science to keep some kind of overview of what's going on and it's that that's desperately needed because we won't find the answer to the questions that we both agree need to be answered by going just into one rabbit hole we'll have to put together information from a whole range of different areas and I agree with you that very often detail is a very good way of clarifying that something actually is working in a different way so the payback of examining the detail may be much larger than that detail gives um out to be at the start then I think the whole business of um the the flexibility that's built into the system and somewhere in the book I sort of say typical left hemisphere calls a maximally flexible protein and intrinsically disordered protein but this idea that as life advances it becomes more flexible and and more um more sarcastic in a way but I mean they're still very clearly the shape so we have to be on the borders all the time life seems to me to want to be on the borders of Chaos and Order it can't sacrifice order to chaos but it can't know get anywhere unless there's an element of of of chaos there don't mind you um we know that simple organisms simple single cell organisms can find an adaptation to a harm that they were not prepared for by Evolution and that they had never experience and they can find it very quickly so it doesn't take a billion years of child and error for the solution to pop up it pops up during the time that's required by the by the cell so there's a lot of very interesting things in that I don't know if you have any Reflections on that but but in any case I think that's absolutely right and I love that but when you when you say about um a sort of committee or a boardroom um the thing about it is that it's the sheer scale of what's going on and you we get the sort of contained and manageable idea of messages being passed across the table between people in a committee but in fact we are dealing with committees that are I mean on the scale that Beggar's belief and it's very hard for the imagination to see how all these complex things can work and not just come up with a random outcome but come up with a desirable outcome but they do and they need to but there's also a subtle point which I think I'm sure you would agree with it but it wasn't expressed exactly in the way you talked about it which is that a lot of this is done on well almost all of it is done on the Fly very little of it is stuff that was previously planned but actually has to be done at the moment things change in response to what's happening around them which is also changing and and I've mentioned I always mentioned this lovely book by Cy Sharma called interdependence it's very short book I don't know if you know it but I in it she makes the point that um organisms in their environment are interdependent but in a rather special sense not in the conventional sense that um an organism has an effect on the environment and then the envir environment has an effect on the organism but that actually they co-create one another at the same time so as the environment is sculpting the organism the organism is actually feeding back and sculpting the environment now there you've only got those two concepts but in biology all over the place we've got masses of these things um going on and I don't want to talk about hemispheres yet but I'm sure we will eventually but it's just worth pointing out that there is a distinct difference between the modus operandi of the left hemisphere and the right which which as I understand it from Computer Sciences means that while left hemisphere procedures are highly computable and that's very obvious in fact I believe that comp AI is really a way of pushing out the left hemisphere's mode of of thinking into the environment but the what the right hemisphere does is strictly non-computable because it's it has no points of certainty in it so a computer needs at least one or two reference points to begin working with but in essence there is nothing but experience either the experience of the if one can talk about this I think one can of the cell or the plant or the root or the whatever it is but but effectively the Single Cell um and so it can't be engineered according to principles and when we look at some of the things you so beautifully described it is I mean it is a wonderful book it's very far from producing The Wonder of what we're contemplating it increases it and I think that is a great Accolade for a science book because the thing that really attracts Us in science is if we've still got a soul at all is The Wonder of it and there's not enough Wonder in this world oh gosh yes well I'm so glad to hear you say that in because that's absolutely what I wanted to to convey that um it seemed to me that in you know sticking to the old narratives of biology the very mechanistic anal you know narratives of this being instruction book and it's read out and so forth but actually one of the things as as well as no longer being an accurate way of talking about how life works it also reduces The Wonder of living things themselves I mean it's you know I found that myself I found that that as I would realize oh this is why this is working this is why this this principle is adopted in a complex creature um it it is it's it's it's wonderful in a way that it it it seems to me simply isn't being conveyed this this uh this complexity and certainly you know the idea of thinking about living organisms as machines I mean what could kill that Wonder more than more than that and I think I mean I've um you know one of the things that uh kind of amused me about um the about the I mean I suppose very often that one hears about a gene centered view of life and you know again I'm going to be I hope conservative about it in saying well of course genes are a central element of life we should never forget that we should never imagine that genes aren't somehow you know a central piece of that narrative what they do and how they do it and what they're for might not be what we've heard but nevertheless of course they're they're Central but if we make it if we make everything about that and certainly if we you know have that Gene Centric view of uh of of evolution then you end up with what Richard Dawkins has called the Paradox of the organism where suddenly it you you know the organism itself the thing that is alive because genes are not the thing that is an agent because genes don't have agency becomes a mystery becomes a paradox becomes you've lost it and you have to try to get it back again and you know there are interesting discussions to be had about um the the tensions that might exist between the way genes are operating and the way an organisms operating so I can understand that discussion but certainly if you've got to the point where suddenly you think my goodness i' suddenly it seems that actual organisms are no longer needed how can we get them back then something has gone astray um and and I think one you so one I mean you you've talked about you know Notions of top down uh causation and you know that's where the organism starts that's that that organism Centric view of the way life Works has to be there as well I you know I think that we have to have we absolutely have to have the reductionism in the sense of burrowing down into you know to the level of understanding a protein structure or understanding what a particular Gene uh in codes in order to understand what is going on but if we lose that topown notion in particular the fact that somehow all of these processes are supporting each other at various hierarchical levels to create this organism you know that's the mystery that's the extraordinary thing and that's where I think um you know I suggest in the book that's where we we might benefit from having some better understanding some better dialogue really about what agency is because it seems to me that there's one thing that distinguishes living matter from non-living matter it is this notion it's agency it's not some checklist of you know it to be alive you have to have metabolism you have to have Daran Evol replication and all the rest of it it is that you have some uh some you have agency so we need to understand what is that what are the attributes that are required of a system for that to come about even saying I mean again you will know this much even saying that much is seen by some biologists as being heretical or they will say well we have no you know we we don't this notion of agency we can kind build it back up from from the bottom um but it seems to me and it seems to others that until we're able to have that discussion about organisms as agents as agents that have purposes that have goals and that are able to operate on themselves and on their environment in order to achieve those goals then we're missing the central aspect of what life is yes I I agree completely and one shouldn't worry too much about those who I think we've got to get Beyond there's something very exciting happening now and it feels to me like physics in about 1910 biology is you know 100 and bit years later catching up um physics was all supposed to have been completed by 1900 nothing more for physicist to do then suddenly the carpet is pulled right out from under their feet and they still don't quite know what it is they're dealing with I think the same thing is happening in biology and it's perfectly understandable that people who have all their lives sought a certain way and their jobs depend on keeping going in that way will want to do so but we needn't worry about them they will die out as Max plank said you know science evolves one funeral at a time or said to have said um so I think that's right but the the the business about um where this stuff is is worth a mention isn't it I mean before um we lose track of it have you any speculations on where it's not in the genes we know that but where is the information in heredity because like you heredity is very clear it just clearly can't work in the way we thought it did or not all the time it may in part work that way but there's got to be something else that's a permitting heredity there there some other agent of continuity between the parent organisms and The Offspring which is not encoded in the gene so where is it where are the patterns that tell an organism that it's missing something in a three-dimensional um schema and know to put it in where is the knowledge that the brain has about its complexity and where things should go where is the memory of like the memory of the neob worm where is it where are all these things I mean I'm I'm not suggesting that there isn't an answer to these questions there must be but they they're very interesting questions and since I've got the privilege of having um somebody like yourself sitting here with me what are your speculations on that I find it and I'm not alone in finding it very hard to think about uh these questions as in informational terms as missing in information um I I can't help wondering I don't have the answer is the short answer but I but I can't help wondering whether going too far down the line of trying to sort of add up where the information is um may not turn out to be the right way of doing it it might turn out to be that you know too much of a computational um metaph that we don't need I mean I think you know it's clear that um there is literally uh as far as we can talk literally about information there is literally information in DNA that is passed on of course that is a you know that is a clear principle of heredity that uh you know and and if um you know we have examples of where for certainly for a bacterium uh it if you remove its genome and put in the Genome of closely related bacterium then you you know it starts to behave in that new way it is it so it's perfectly understandable that people might think oh well then all the information is there you're just rebooting it you know with a new operating system if you like and certainly Foria there's a there's a degree to which that seems to be the case but but what I think what I think we should look for the answer to those questions is with the the the aspect of biology that for a long time was overshadowed um and is now uh resurging and that is development biology um that really interesting to me to look at the history of what happened and this is something that Evelyn Fox K has been very good at at at doing and you know it's pointing out and I mean Ian I've seen you you you point out also elsewhere that it was folks like Conrad wton um JBS howan but particularly wton who always felt that developmental biology or embryology as it was once called had been kind of put aside it was it was the you know the sort of center of biology in the early part of the 20th century and then Along Came genetics Along Came understandably because it seemed and it was really such a rich you know discovery that that was developmental biology was put aside and it was all a question of we no longer have to think about that or we no longer to worry about that because somehow we're going to find it encoded in the genome we now recognize that that you know that isn't where we're going to find answers to the questions of how an organism is put together from its con constituent cells somehow that the cells are and I would put it this way around um that are able to use their genetic resources to develop assembly characteristics that give that have a a pallet of possible outcomes and you know the cells will assemble themselves using that information into these outcomes and use usually in the situation in which you know we arise within the womb usually for humans it will come out looking something like us um you know there are lot of variations in that some of them quite dramatic variations but nevertheless it's it's something like us um but it's quite possible in fact it's probably inevitable that there are other possible outcomes of that assembly process so most of which won't be viable you know most of which Evolution will never have hit upon um but that's not just a that it seems to me that that's a necessary characteristic of organisms like us that again you need that that cells and and and tissues need that versatility that adaptability that ability to innovate um in order to be viable at all and you know you you you've mentioned one of the Mysteries that comes about there is how when something goes Ary during the developmental process how is it that sometimes the cells are able to compensate and find their way back to what if you like the outcome is sort of supposed to be sometimes they can't sometimes they will do something else entirely but very often they can where does you know we're not going to find that information somehow encoded in the genome in any form we can read it's something to do with the self-organizing characteristics of cells themselves that have these assembly properties and I don't I I personally don't know how to think about that in information terms it seems that we need something Dynamic really than that um I agree both that we need something Dynamic and that we need something four-dimensional not um a strip of information as it were um but of course the word information can mean and I tend to think of it as still viable in the sense of what in forms whatever is there so it gives the form to it so it's that kind of stuff that we need to be looking for but yes I I I'm sure that we we we we we mustn't I'm the first person to say you know and I think I did say that although genes are very important there still must be other things it's what we're seeing is an enor L creative process which starts being I mean astonishing the the Genesis of a single cell and the amazing intelligence as James Shapiro says that is in a single cell is extraordinary and I think the word intelligence is right these systems seem intelligent the the single selves in them seem intelligent they can solve problems they can solve problems they weren't set up to solve and that to me seems to me to be one of the definitions of being intelligent so that is that is very interesting but Evol not only does evolution govern or or suggest or produce or call forth changes in organisms but there's if you might put it this way or allow me to put it this way there's an evolution of evolution so Evolution itself seems to be moving to complex more difficult to follow ways of doing its job as organisms become more complex so as you say it's much easier to see what's going on when you manipulate the Genome of a single cell organism or bacterium or something of this kind and this stage everything does look a bit mechanical but as you go further on and outwards it doesn't and and actually it was a point made by um Dyson Freeman Dyson that that that an organism um seems to be more mechanical the smaller you take the units but as you then go smaller and smaller from there becomes less and less mechanical so there's a bow tii shape in which in the middle mechanism seems to be quite good but the rest of it isn't and I I I take the view that mechanism is well that's a philosophical Point really so but anyway I'll say it that um you know the opposite of life is not death death is part of life and life and death go together and it's not a a negation of Life what is a negation of and the complete opposite of Life Is Me mechanistic mechanism or mechanistic and these are the really Ultra Ultra incompatible elements and we are moving I believe into a world where we think more and more in terms of mechanisms it's wonderful that physics has had to give this up and now it looks to me as though biology is having to at least sophisticate it and move on from there are there are mechanisms in a complex system but here uh I mean you've probably seen But if you haven't I do um recommend findings if you can I can send it to you um a wonderful map of what was going on in Afghanistan when the Americans were still there um perhaps you know the one I mean it was presented it was done by a London uh London um management consultancy so to advise the US Army on all the different elements in Afghanistan and how they interacted and it's hilarious because it's massively complicated thing with arrows going all over the place and when it was presented to General mccristal he um dry commented when we have understood that map we will have won the war which you can take it either way you like but the point is that if you look at this map sort of with a magnifying glass you can see little areas where there are simple linear lines if you if you intervene here you actually make a big change and so although the system isn't a mechanism there are things we think of as mechanical interventions I love something you said somewhere in the book um that a lot of these interventions in a genome the tweaks as it were are rather like inserting a comma in a sentence that it's a small intervention that can completely change the meaning of the sentence and I thought that was extraordinarily good way of expressing this that sometimes tiny tweaks and we're quite good at Rec iing where to treat can make a difference but that ability to do that leads us to believe we understand the thing as a whole you know and I don't think we it does yeah no no if you've got something to say I was just going to say I wanted to move on to an even more um U I think central but interesting point which is why have life at all I [Music]

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Id: YGCYDw9-yDQ

Length: 44min 47sec (2687 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2024