George Church is from the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He makes a couple of very interesting comments that show subtle, but very striking, parallels with The Design Matrix. Let me post a couple of examples :

In terms of past and future, what have we learned from the past, how does that help us design the future, what would we like it to do in the future, how do we know what we should be doing? (emphasis added)

and

I'm a little more interested in the future than the past "” but I don't dismiss it either.

Now, I should also point out that Church is playing a lead role in the development of synthetic life. As such, this is a nice example of a designer who, while engaged in designing life, already has his eye on the future "“ "how does that help us design the future?"

In The Design Matrix I outline the logic of front-loading evolution. I note, "Front-loading, by definition, is about designing the future through the present." I ask, "How does one design future states through the present?" I propose, "We get a better understanding of the past by understanding its future" and "When viewed from this perspective, the purpose of life's design had to do with the future. The design was intended to reach beyond the original life forms." Again, all of these points, and more, are weaved into the first and only systematic case for front-loading evolution.

So how does a designer connect his designs to the future? From the DM:

The self-perpetuation of a design is called replication or reproduction"¦"¦.Reproduction is the means to forward a design into the future.

From the teleological perspective, reproduction is the means by which we can carry design into the future without the need for continual interventions on the part of the designer.

So what is Church currently contemplating?

Both Shannon's theory and chemical entropy would say that's a very complicated thing. But what we mean by a living complexity is more like, you've taken something very rare like that mineral, made almost an exact copy of it, and that's replicated complexity. This very unlikely object isn't really any more unlikely than another rock because they're kind of random "” their compositional nature is known. But if you made an exact copy of that rock, or nearly an exact one, that would be interesting. That would be indicative that there's some sort of living process, some living thing was involved. It could have been some 3-D photocopier, but that 3-D photocopier was probably made by an intelligent being. It could be that the rock had the ability to replicate. (emphasis added)

Ah yes, "replicated complexity." The front-loading designer simply makes the next logical step. Instead of that 3-D photocopier being something apart from the replicated design, it is fused to the core of the designed thing to make replication part of its essence. Life, design, and future "“ all in one package.

Church also adds:

That's what we mean when we're talking about basic life. And that's sort of what we're trying to get at when we're doing synthetic biology; we're trying to increase diversity, increase replicated complexity, and maintain our ability to continue to do that for many many years, and we don't want to endanger that by doing something that's too risky.

Whoa. The design of life comes with the design objectives of increasing diversity and increasing replicated complexity, while maintaining the ability to continue the input from design. What you have here, in embryonic form, is the thinking of a front-loading designer.

To design life is to design evolution. Eventually, the designers will have to confront the following question (again, from the DM):

If a designer is trying to use reproduction to perpetuate a design far into the future, how does one control for all the noise that Darwinian evolution will produce along the way?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 11:45 am and is filed under Front-loading, The Design Matrix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. The trackback link is: http://telicthoughts.com/church-in-the-matrix/trackback/