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."

Comments

The future

[MyLongNickName]

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.

Re:The future

[Elemenope]

Agreed. 'Proceed with caution' is the best method for approaching technological progress. I must say though that on this one I sympathize much more with the technophobic instinct than usual, as it might not be possible to gauge just how cautious a truly cautious approach would need to be. Ecosystems (and gene sharing within them) are vastly more complicated than we can at present hope to model down to the probable impact of the introduction of a new or altered phenotype. I would say that proper caution would be to wait until computer science has yielded robust enough modeling algorithms and badassed enough machines to run them on to have a better handle upon what exactly we might be monkeying with.

Of course, human curiosity and human greed will outstrip any sense of caution quite quickly if these technologies become as prolific as Dyson predicts.

Dyson's predictions with a grain of salt, please!

[microsoft_hater]

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.

Information Technology

[mcrbids]

At its heart, the science of Information Technology will grow and consume all other industries. Biology is a form of information technology - the information contained in the DNA/RNA and mitochondria define the outcome of the biological organism - they are the software that comprises us.

It's not written in a language easily understood by humanity, but once the concepts of how things really work together are clearly understood, it won't be long before a high-level language can be developed to define the requested behavior and structures can then be "compiled" into an organism.

This is the fusion of biology and information technology commonly called the technology singularity and which, I'm convinced, is happening all around us.

Slow at first, growing towards advancing rapidly. I see it in software, networks, information technology, science, medical technology, and manufacturing. It's amazing, exciting, and thrillingly dangerous all at once. I honestly thing that we'll either pull it off, and move beyond evolution to create an entirely new form of life, or destroy ourselves and regress to bacteria, rodents, insect life.

Either way, we aren't in Kansas, anymore.

Deep deep flaws in the analogy

[G4from128k]

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.

Dyson needs to stick to physics

[quixote9]

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.

Re:Open Source == Gene Hacking

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.