There’s no dot com seen under the microscope

Originally published 8 November 1999

A small green leaf picked up on the col­lege quad. It attract­ed atten­tion by being small and green in a sea of autum­nal col­ors. I was on my way to the Sci­ence Build­ing, so I stepped into a biol­o­gy lab and slipped the leaf onto the stage of a dis­sect­ing microscope.

Now if I were the super­in­ten­dent of schools in my town, or any town, I would place a few good, col­lege-qual­i­ty dis­sect­ing micro­scopes in every class­room and make do with few­er com­put­ers. Almost every kid these days has access to a com­put­er at home, but few have the chance to use a good micro­scope. A dis­sect­ing micro­scope is best because it requires no par­tic­u­lar skill to use it. What mag­i­cal worlds are opened for view.

In this case, it was a vista of the won­der­ful net­work of plumb­ing and pipes that car­ries water and nutri­ents to every cell of the leaf. Poly­gons, sub-poly­gons, and sub-sub-poly­gons of ever fin­er veins: a frac­tal geom­e­try of dis­tri­b­u­tion that resem­bles noth­ing so much as the road sys­tem of a great sub­ur­ban sprawl.

How much alike, I won­dered, is the net­work of veins in one maple leaf to that in anoth­er? I stepped out­side and picked two sim­i­lar leaves. The basic archi­tec­ture was the same; from the stem at the base of each leaf five main veins radi­at­ed towards the five main lobes of the leaf. The place­ment of the prin­ci­ple off­shoots from these main veins was more or less the same.

But from there on every­thing diverged, until on the small­est scale of dis­tri­b­u­tion the pat­terns of poly­gons seemed essen­tial­ly ran­dom. Under the high­est pow­er of the micro­scope, the two leaves were as dif­fer­ent as two snowflakes.

I was face to face with one of the great mys­ter­ies of nature. The Greeks called it the prob­lem of the One and the Many: How do things stay the same in the midst of essen­tial­ly infi­nite variation?

Nature is a ten­sion between the uni­ver­sal and the par­tic­u­lar, the One and the Many. If it were not for the One, sci­ence would be impos­si­ble. Indeed, there would be no such things as nouns and verbs. We could not say “maple,” or “leaf,” or “net­work,” or “vein.” And if it were not for the Many, that one small green leaf would not have stood out in that sea of col­or, every leaf would be a clone of every oth­er, and there would be no need for adjec­tives or adverbs.

“The ulti­mate All is not one thing, but two,” wrote the nat­u­ral­ist Joseph Wood Krutch, in an essay called The Col­loid and the Crys­tal. In Krutch’s dual­i­ty, the crys­tal rep­re­sents the One, the inan­i­mate per­fec­tion of rep­e­ti­tion, iden­ti­cal atoms in lock­step arrange­ment. The col­loid stands for the Many, the shape­less gob, the ooz­ing slime, the flow­ing essence of life.

Physics is the sci­ence of the One. Every pro­ton or elec­tron is utter­ly iden­ti­cal to every oth­er pro­ton or elec­tron. Every quartz crys­tal vibrates at the same fre­quen­cy. Every comet fol­lows a course that is inex­orably con­strained by a sim­ple grav­i­ta­tion­al law. Some physi­cists are even bold enough to imag­ine that they might dis­cov­er a “the­o­ry of every­thing,” the ulti­mate and final descrip­tion of the One.

Biol­o­gy, on the oth­er hand, is the sci­ence of the Many, or at least as close to the Many as one can get and still do sci­ence. Krutch puts it this way: “The astronomer can tell where the North Star will be ten thou­sand years hence; the botanist can­not tell where the dan­de­lion will bloom tomor­row.” There is some­thing cre­ative and rebel­lious about life; it strains against the bonds of the One, striv­ing to bring forth the par­tic­u­lar. There are no selves in physics; in biol­o­gy, every crea­ture is a self.

That small green leaf picked up in the quad announced its indi­vid­u­al­i­ty by being small and green when every leaf around it was large and scar­let. Some unpre­dictable fluke con­trolled its growth and caused its fall from the tree, the same anar­chi­cal dis­po­si­tion at the core of things that caus­es the tini­est veins of the leaf to grow as vari­ably as fingerprints.

Some sci­en­tists — “reduc­tion­ists” — believe that the Many is an illu­sion, that behind the appar­ent­ly infi­nite vari­ety of nature there are a finite num­ber of fixed laws, the hid­den face of the One. Oth­er sci­en­tists — “wholists” — believe the Many can nev­er be reduced to the One, not even in prin­ci­ple, and that any suc­cess­ful sci­ence of com­plex­i­ty must inevitably con­tain a mea­sure of chaos — not exact­ly nature throw­ing the dice, but unpre­dictable nevertheless.

Like Joseph Wood Krutch, my own incli­na­tion is that there is an irre­ducible ten­sion in nature between the One and the Many — the col­loid and the crys­tal — and that we still have some­thing pro­found to learn about how life and con­scious­ness are allied to the Many.

I can’t prove it, but I believe that the infi­nite­ly vari­able pat­tern of tiny veins with­in the rec­og­niz­able pat­tern of the maple leaf will nev­er be explained by physics. A dif­fer­ent kind of sci­ence will be required, a sci­ence of emer­gent qual­i­ties of com­plex sys­tems. Only when such a sci­ence is in place will we under­stand the cre­ative and tan­gled exu­ber­ance of life.