Encounters between Life and Language: Codes, Books, Machines and Cybernetics

Abstract

The histories of genetics and cybernetics overlapped in the mid-twentieth century. Both fields deal with dynamic systems, such as living organisms or machines that move, change and respond to the environment. It might therefore be expected that the metaphors used to research and communicate biological, genetic or genomic phenomena might take inspiration from cybernetics. Molecular biology was indeed inspired by cybernetics, but, surprisingly, the most popular metaphors used for research and communication were rooted in older fields of human endeavour, such as the Morse code, printing and machines. Such metaphors tended to foreground static and product aspects of biological phenomena, rather than dynamic and process ones. This made it difficult to talk widely about complexity, flexibility and dynamics, all aspects of biology (and cybernetics) that were well-known and well-studied. Modern-day biologists have noted this discrepancy between their research and the language used to talk about it, and are now calling for a new language, inspired amongst others by cybernetics, a language that, it is hoped, might capture the dynamic aspects of biology which some of the older metaphors tended to hide. In this article I survey (some of) the history of metaphors from the 1940s to 2019, focusing on the metaphors of the code (and information), the book and the machine. I attempt to show that cybernetics, although influencing the emergence of molecular biology, failed to inspire popular metaphors. Will modern biologists, taking inspiration from cybernetics to create not only a new science but also a new language, be more successful in this enterprise?