Table Of ContentDEATH OF LIFE
Death of Life
The Legacy of Molecular Biology
Stanley Shostak
© Stanley Shostak 1998
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First published 1998 by
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10987654321
07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98
To Marcia Landy
Viva la vita!
Contents
Tables and Illustrations ix
Preface xi
1 Biology is m 1
Delirium genetica: Symptoms 2
Biology's Future 17
In Other Words: a Philosophical Recapitulation
of Biology's Predicament 24
2 Before the Ball 35
Observation in Biology: the Evidentiary Method 36
Experimentalism in Biology: Indirect Analysis 51
Theory in Biology: Ideas versus Facts 62
3 Biology Goes to the Ball 84
In the Land of Molecules 85
Moving to the Paradigm Palace 105
Looking Back 118
4 Biology's Mid-life Crisis 126
Biology's 'Revolution' 127
The Legacy of Physicists and Chemists 136
How wen does DNA live up to its reputation
as the gene? 150
5 The Road(s) Not Taken: from Lamarck to
Lovelock 162
Lamarck and Lamarckism: Pathos and Bathos 163
vü
viü Contents
A New NeoLamarckism: Searching for
'Hopeful Monsters' 171
6 La Mort de Cendrillon and Her Last Will
and Testament 198
Last Will and Testament 199
Notes 214
Bibliography 242
Index 263
Tables and Illustrations
Line-up for the Cuvier-Geoffroy debates 66
Bovine insulin 90
The double-helix structure 102
Two cross-sections of DNA 103
The Genetic Code for Nuclei 112
The Code for Mitochondria and Chloroplasts 112
Cnidocysts in Cnidaria and Dinoflagellates 180
Indirect and direct development 183
Larvae from two echinoderms and a hemichordate 184
The line-up of biology and the natural sciences
at the end of the nineteenth century 201
ix
Preface
My original objective for this book was to demonstrate the conson
ance of everyday assumptions about life with the assertions I made
about it while teaching biology. Thus I interviewed students and
friends, manY of whom claimed to have some competence in living
and even considered themselves experts on one or another aspect of
life, based on contemplation and success solving life's problems.
My search for consonance quickly revealed that life in my biology
lecture had nothing in common with life outside the classroom, and
biology rarely entered quotidian contemplation ab out life. In con
trast to physics, which explained force, and chemistry, which
explained matter, biology did not explain life and seemed to offer
no practical guide to living. I therefore revised my objective and
wrote this book to figure out why biology failed in its primary
mission of eluddating life and what could be done about it.
The explanation for biology's failure that I have come up with
does not condemn biologists. They only abandoned life after a
tough struggle with it and after overpowering forces were arrayed
against them. Life proved refractory, refusing to yield its secrets to
even the cleverest experiments; scientific theory turned out to be
inadequate, lacking the sophistication necessary to deal with life;
problems of formulating life as a proper subject for sdentific inquiry
were not solved; life appeared to be a metaphysical construction,
structurally defying explanation, etc.
Be that as it may, the death blow to life was delivered by molecu
lar biologists. They took biology down the easy (and profitable)
road of 'ordinary sdence', avoiding 'problem-making' and invest
ing biology's resources in 'problem-solving'.l Life fell by the way
side, but sdence marched on. Physicists and chemists joined the
ranks of biologists, transmuting 'soft' biology into 'hard' biology
(and converting its support from 'hard' to 'soft' money), the envy of
anthropologists, psychologists and sodal sdentists. The gene
became biology's unitary particle, replication its unitary force, and
transcription and translation, its fission and fusion. Taken to its
logical extreme by Jacques Monod,2 DNA became biology's
E=mc2•
xi
xii Preface
Molecular biology 'threw away the baby (the study of life) with
the bath water (biology's unsuccessful efforts to understand life)'.
Dominated by medieal and agricultural colleges and beholden to
government, agribusiness, biotechnology / pharmaceutical indus
tries and the 'nonprofits', molecular research regimented every
aspect of biologieal research. In order to assure their hegemony,
molecular biologists struck biology precisely where it once had
strength, as apopular, accessible science. Physicists- and chernists
turned-biologists subverted democracy in biology and built a
molecular wall around it, an insurmountable barrier to those it
sealed both in and out. Like other walls, this wall too will fall.
Hopefully, this book will remove a few bricks.
Death of Life also points toward prornising alternatives for study
ing life. I am concerned with philosophieal issues, woefully
neglected by molecular biologists, and with bringing biology back
to these issues. It is not a book about what other books are already
about, variations on current biological practices3 and lacks,4
although it is a response to self-interested polernics.5 Death of Life
skirts the pit of '100 great works' of acadernic biology and is not a
'stranger than fiction' tale ready for the Discovery Channel. Auto
biographieal material and published interviews are kept to a min
imum, because scientists are notoriously antihistorical and self
serving reporters of their own work.6 Death of Life is not concerned
with analyzing influences, attributing priority, praising or blaming
individuals ('all honorable men').
The intended audience is everyone who has ever ignored biology
while pondering life, including my friends, undergraduates taking
biology courses, graduate students, philosophers, historians of
science, culture critics, and, of course, mainstream molecular biol
ogists. In an effort to enter a dialogue with this audience, I have
lightened the burden of discursivity and organized Death of Life
around the Cinderella story: biology as the Cinderella science, the
orphan who makes good. I deviate from the usual tale, however, by
announcing at the beginning that Cinderella is siek. The first chap
ter concerns her symptoms, diagnosis and prognosis. Chapter 2
examines how Cinderella abandoned a robust and vital evidentiary
method for studying life in favor of positivism, reductionism and
determinism. Chapter 3 describes the spread of molecular biology,
the entry of chernists and physicists into biology and the expansion
of their brand of reductionism. Chapter 4 finds Cinderella in the
throes of a rnid-life crisis, and Chapter 5 finds her reflecting on 'the
