Brian Eno: Before and After Darwin

Filed in archive Society & Ethics on January 14, 2007

Reading the text of a recent talk by Brian Eno called Before and After Darwin, this caught my eye:

In the past, you took things apart and studied them, but an even better way is to make them. When Craig Reynolds studied the flocking of birds in 1986, he decided to simulate flocking. It only took three simple rules (separation, alignment, cohesion) to be perfectly recreated inside a computer. Suddenly, by trying to create lifelike behavior, we understood something about life itself. Looking at generative art this way, it may well be preparing our minds for the possibility to create life itself.

Nanotechnology and biotechnology already offer us the power to create life, depending on your definition of life. So what will making things with nanotechnology and biotechnology teach us about nature? Already we see many developments resulting from biomimicry, the art of imitating natural objects, so we can say that we learn from nature how to make better products. Certainly genetic engineering shows that we think we can design some things better than nature.

What will our benchmarks be as we make more and more things with the tools of nanotechnology and biotechnology? Will we look to nature and compare our products with natural objects? Will we be more defiant than that, looking beyond nature as transhumanism does to propose transnatural standards? The process of evolution Eno addresses in his talk has its own internal "standards" for growth and success. What course will evolution take as we increasingly sidestep its rules in favor of our own rules now that nanotechnology and biotechnology have freed us from its constraints?