In 1944 the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger wrote a short book entitled What Is Life? in which he advanced clear and compelling hypotheses about the molecular structure of genes. This book stimulated biologists to think about genetics in a novel way and in so doing opened a new frontier of science, molecular biology*
During subsequent decades, this new field generated a series of triumphant discoveries, culminating in the unraveling of the genetic code. However, these spectacular advances did not bring biologists any closer to answering the question posed in the title of Schrodinger’s book. Nor were they able to answer the many associated questions that have puzzled scientists and philosophers for hundreds of years: How did complex structures evolve out of a random collection of molecules? What is the relationship between mind and brain? What is consciousness?
Molecular biologists have discovered the fundamental building blocks of life, but this has not helped them to understand the vital integrative actions of living organisms. Twenty-five years ago one of the leading molecular biologists, Sidney Brenner, made the following reflective comments:
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In one way, you could say all the genetic and molecular biological work of the last sixty years could be considered a long interlude. . . . Now that that program has been completed, we have come full circle—back to the problems left behind unsolved. How does a wounded organism regenerate to exactly the same structure it had before? How does the egg form the organism? ... I think in the next twenty-five years we are going to have to teach biologists another language. ... I don’t know what it’s called yet; nobody knows. ... It may be wrong to believe that all the logic is at the molecular level. We may need to get beyond the clock mechanisms. 1
Since the time Brenner made these comments, a new language for understanding the complex, highly integrative systems of life has indeed emerged. Different scientists call it by different names—“dynamical systems theory,” “the theory of complexity,” “nonlinear dynamics,” “network dynamics,” and so on. Chaotic attractors, fractals, dissipative structures, self-organization, and autopoietic networks are some of its key concepts.
This approach to understanding life is pursued by outstanding researchers and their teams around the world—Ilya Prigogine at the University of Brussels, Humberto Maturana at the University of Chile in Santiago, Francisco Varela at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, Lynn Margulis at the University of Massachusetts, Benoit Mandelbrot at Yale University, and Stuart Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute, to name just a few. Several key discoveries of these scientists, published in technical papers and books, have been hailed as revolutionary.
However, to date nobody has proposed an overall synthesis that integrates the new discoveries into a single context and thus allows lay readers to understand them in a coherent way. This is the challenge and the promise of The Web of Life .
The new understanding of life may be seen as the scientific forefront of the change of paradigms from a mechanistic to an ecological worldview, which I discussed in my previous book The Turning Point. The present book, in a sense, is a continuation and
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expansion of the chapter in The Turning Point titled “The Systems View of Life.”
The intellectual tradition of systems thinking, and the models and theories of living systems developed during the early decades of the century, form the conceptual and historical roots of the scientific framework discussed in this book. In fact, the synthesis of current theories and models I propose here may be seen as an outline of an emerging theory of living systems that offers a unified view of mind, matter, and life.
This book is for the general reader. I have kept the language as nontechnical as possible and have defined all technical terms where they first appear. However, the ideas, models, and theories I discuss are complex, and at times I felt the need to go into some technical detail to convey their substance. This applies particularly to some passages in chapters 5 and 6 and to the first part of chapter 9. Readers not interested in the technical details may want merely to browse through those passages and should feel free to skip them altogether without being afraid of losing the main thread of my argument.
The reader will also notice that the text includes not only numerous references to the literature, but also an abundance of cross- references to pages in this book. In my struggle to communicate a complex network of concepts and ideas within the linear constraints of written language, I felt that it would help to interconnect the text by a network of footnotes. My hope is that the reader will find that, like the web of life, the book itself is a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
Berkeley, August 1995
Fritjof Capra
PART ONE
The Cultural Context
