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Freeman Dyson On Open Source Biology
kripkenstein sends us an article by Freeman Dyson in the NY Review of Books, in which the eminent physicist and big thinker takes on the possible end to the Darwinian era of speciation that has endured 3 billion years on this planet. He discusses the history and future of biology in terms that many in this community will find familiar: "[We can speculate about] a golden age... when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information... Evolution could be rapid... But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share... [But] now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient... practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when... the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented."
This analogy is flawed. The Open Source community creates code from ideas to create programs and systems. In the Biohacking world, genetic code is copied from one system into another system (with fingers crossed) in the hopes that something good happens. Programmers tend to understand the systems on which their code runs. The biohackers struggle with how their code will impact their systems in terms of "gene expression" and generational interactions.
Sure biohackers are creating new organisms, but it isn't the same as creating it from scratch and understanding both the system and how the system interact with other systems. Maybe I am too critical of the genehackers, but I fear that genehacking without deep understanding is going to end badly.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Ahhhh, I love when these discussions that come up. The "Luddites" come out against this, claiming we are playing god. The "Technophiles" come out and tell us how we must embrace this. Both sides yell so loud that the moderate (and correct) "proceed with caution" crowd gets drowned out.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
He also denies human induced global warming. Great scientists are, of course, always great scientists... But, I think it is time for Freeman to go back to church.
This communal hippy bullshit does not belong on Slashdot.
Actually it does, but perhaps you don't.
Because those of us engaged in genetic programming research find it relevant to stuff that matters to us.
He seems to think that genes exist to serve species.
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This summary would leave any biologist apoplectic for its flaws:
1. Sex IS sharing. It's the ultimate cross-fertilization (literally). Almost all organisms, including humans, openly and enthusiastically share DNA via this mechanism.
2. Horizontal gene flow is terribly terribly limiting in its utility. Once organism becomes more complex, you can't plug-and-play like you can with a bacteria.
3. Horizontal gene flow does not foster rapid evolution in the same way that sex does. Picking up snippets and fragments from another organism is not as powerful as cross-over in sex (which does a far far better job of doing a controlled recombination of complete plans)
3. No organism in the world can resist "sharing its genome." If pirating the DNA of others was really that great an idea, then the human digestive track would contain tools for pulling DNA out of hamburger. It really would not take much cellular machinery to engulf a target cell, deconstruct it, and co-opt its DNA. The fact that horizontal gene transfer doesn't occur outside of simple organism should be an strong evidence of its limitations.
As much as I enjoy Freeman Dyson, he really lost me on this one.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The future of "the technological singularity":
/ 30/1247249
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06
HTH
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That's funny, which is how I assume he meant it. As a serious statement, it would be totally laughable except that a few people who know even less are going to say, "Ooh, Freeman Dyson. Must be good."
Like the commenter above said, biologists are just mixing and matching from organisms and hoping for the best. A simple regulatory cascade involves around sixty (60) proteins, and biologists have only the vaguest ideas about how to manipulate the process. And that's a big step up from even three years ago. Really. They have barely a clue. As a biologist who's taught college for decades, really, it's true.
Life was never "open source" in Dyson's sense. Horizontal gene transfer is always a rare event, even more so in multicellular eukaryotic organisms like, say, vertebrates or trees. Natural selection has always and will always operate because in order to survive, creatures have to be able to produce lots of offspring. However, there's not enough resources for all of them, and the ones less able to use the resources die. This would be true of any life, anywhere. It's not limited to Earth. Kind of like the speed of light is the same everywhere, and gravity operates everywhere.
Sure, people will get better and better at genetic engineering and biotech. And a good thing, too. Paralysis will become a thing of the past, as will blindness and failing organs. That's great. But it's not going to change life itself.
"The biohackers struggle with how their code will impact their systems in terms of "gene expression" and generational interactions. "
Well, nowadays, with huge operating systems like Vista, nobody knows anymore what impact their code will have, from security breaches to DoS to unexplainable bugs. Couple this with bugs in the processors themselves (Intel, anyone?), with constant vendor patches, and you have developers that struggle with how their code will impact their systems in terms of features and interactions.
"Programmers tend to understand the systems on which their code runs."
Those days of happy mathematical proofs on computing systems in paper are gone. Today we have the sad ordeal of testing a system like if it was small modification in a mind-boggling complex beast created randomly. A simple sorting algorithm implementation can fail without any sensible reason, because of an obscure detail of the implementation of your processor or operating system.
>> This analogy is flawed. The Open Source community creates code from ideas to create programs and systems. In the Biohacking world, genetic code is copied from one system into another system
I don't find it flawed at all.
Free and Open Source Software is concerned not with the creation of a bag of abstract ideas, but a bag (or pyramid) of software components of various kinds (libraries, classes, utilities, etc). Those components are copied around from one application to another very freely, and not restricted to just one type of application or system (analoguous to "species"). This is very close indeed to horizontal gene transfer, cutting them out of one sequence and splicing them into another.
The analogy may be little more than a coincidence of course, so one shouldn't read too much into it, but I think that Dyson uses it quite accurately. Moreover, the equivalent to horizontal gene transfer pervades every single one of our fields of technology, so I think it's true to say that speciation is totally dead in all activities of Man, and biotech is just one example.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Funny thing about exponential curves: It always looks like you are always on the 'flat' part when you are looking towards the future. It is only when comparing to the past while ignoring the future that it looks like you are on the steep part, and that is true at any point in time. Unless "progress" ends up being a sigmoid curve, we will always be wondering if the Singularity has happened and if so when was the point it occurred.
The characters in Charles Strauss's novel Accelerando wonder this very thing even after the Earth has been dismantled for computation parts and the character have uploaded their brains into computers capable of simulating an entire human existance in a fraction of a second.