Retrospective 2024-30

This is a retrospective of week 30, 2024 (2024-07-22–2024-07-28).

This week I’ve started reading How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology by Philip Ball. I have also listened to Philip Ball’s conversation with Iain McGilchrist which focuses on the book.

Philip Ball writes (my emphasis in italics):

Fundamentally, this new view of biology…depends on a kind of trust. …it seems that life…devise and improvise solutions to living…
The new picture dispels the long-standing idea that living systems must be regarded as machines. … In particular, life is not to be equated with that special kind of machine, the computer. …
…to solve difficult challenges, it is sometimes best not to seek a particular, prescriptive answer…, but instead to give people relevant skills and then trust them to find their way to an effective solution… We can now see that by organizing our human systems this way … we are utilizing the wisdom of how life works.
…one of the best ways to characterize living entities is not through any of the features or properties usually considered to define it… Rather, living entities … mine their environment…for things that have meaning for them: moisture, nutrients, warmth. …for we human organisms, another of those meaningful things is love.
One key reason for the failure of the machine analogy is that cells work at the scale of molecules… They are noisy, random, unpredictable… Life thrives on noise and diversity, on chance accidents and fluctuations. It simply couldn’t work otherwise.
—Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

Philip Ball suggests the following themes and principles in his book (again, my emphasis in italics):

Complexity and Redundancy: …there is a fuzziness to the system, so that different combinations of interactions can have the same result, and a particular combination can have different outcomes depending on the context. …
Modularity: Life never has to start from scratch. Evolution works with what is already there, even if this means redirecting it to new ends. …
Robustness: … Life is not invulnerable, but it is extraordinarily good at finding ways through adversity (which the world supplies in dismaying abundance). …
Canalization: … In just a single cell, the number of possible interactions between different molecules is astronomical—and there are around 37 trillion cells in our bodies. Such a system can only hope to be stable if, out of all this complexity, only a limited number of collective ways of being may emerge. …
Multilevel, multidirectional, and hierarchical organization: To understand how life works, there is no single place to look. You will never find all the explanations at (speaking both metaphorically and literally) a single level of magnification. What is more, each level in the hierarchy of life’s organization has its own rules, which are not sensitive to the fine details of those below. They have a kind of autonomy. …
Combinatorial logic: … Molecular signals…are combinatorial, rather than relying on unique molecules to supply different outputs…
Self-organization in dynamic landscapes: Many things are possible in life, but not everything. … Think of it rather like rain falling on a landscape: …the shape of the landscape causes it to gather in some places and to move away from others. ….
Agency and purpose: … Intuitively, we might suspect that what distinguishes living organisms from nonliving matter is this notion of agency: they can manipulate their environments, and themselves, to achieve some goal. This makes agency inextricably linked to ideas about purpose. …
Causal power: One of the biggest obstacles to understanding how life really works has been a failure to get to grips with causation. …
—Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

Some of these themes and principles are still too mechanistic? We label things barely grasped. Interestingly, Robert Rosen said that organisms need maximum entailment. Computability imposes very strong limitations on entailment. What if the landscape is so dynamic, in fact, that physics, and mathematics, and formal logic cannot handle it? Physics can, as an example, deal with planetary movement, but not the intricacies in living cells? What if it is the shape of the landscape that makes the rich entailment required by life possible? It has nothing to do with laws of physics? It’s rather an intrinsic property of the landscape itself (language fails me here)? Gravitation and Bohm’s quantum potential are two very different expressions of this shape? The Earth does what it does in its way around the Sun being itself, not because of any law. Deeply flawed concepts lead us nowhere.

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