Rethinking Life: Beyond the Machine Metaphor
Marginalia Review of Books' Institute for the Meanings of Science Director, Samuel Loncar, hosted a conversation between philosopher, Daniel Nicholson, and Dr. Philip Ball, longtime editor at Nature, author of over 25 books, most recently, How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology (Chicago University Press).
This conversation is the third in a series of interviews for The Meanings of Life Project: The New Biology, led by Institute Director, Samuel Loncar, and Lead Researcher, Philip Ball, and funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation.
The project brings together a working group of leading scientists, scholars, and industry leaders coming together to advance the new scientific vision of life revealed by modern biology, and synthesized in Ball’s book.
The project convenes around this major synthesis, and aims to identify a new narrative for the field through a multi-disciplinary integrative approach that seeks to unite fundamental research at the level of genes, molecules and cells to notions of agency, purpose, and meaning in living entities.
The purpose of the project is to seek ways of understanding and communicating how living organisms function at many different scales, look for the new conceptual and metaphorical frameworks that do justice to the richness of “post-genomic biology,” help to inform medical and health sciences, and reveal the special and wondrous nature of living organisms.
Nicholson specializes in the philosophy of biology, and his scholarly work explains that the machine metaphor in biology is misleading. While the machine view can be useful as a local heuristic, it is not a helpful metaphor for the global picture of life.
The conversation explores the limitations of the mechanistic paradigm in biology, the rise of organicist and vitalist ideas, and the importance of purpose and agency in understanding life. It also reveals insights from the new biology on how new scientific data challenges traditional metaphors and models.
TWCF Grant DIO:
DOI.ORG/10.54224/35403