Frank Heppner’s book Professor Farnsworth’s explanations in biology demystifies complex concepts in biology and explores the ambiguity of the boundaries between life and non-life, life and death. This blog post explains how definitions and boundaries are shaped by interests and emphasizes their importance.
Professor Farnsworth’s explanations in biology is a uniquely structured biology textbook. Professor Farnsworth is a fictional character created by Hefner, and the book is a collection of lecture transcripts of the fictional professor. The book’s interactive format, illustrations, and flowing narrative make the complex biology much less intimidating.
But what really impressed me about this book was Chapter 2, which covers the definition of life. After the introduction to the lecture in Chapter 1, a man suddenly appears in the lecture hall on a motorcycle. To everyone’s bewilderment, the man explains that he made a bet with his friends that he thought a motorcycle could be considered a living thing, and that he came to ask the professor for help in case of a counterargument. A debate ensues between the students and the man about whether motorcycles are living things. The students argue that motorcycles are not living things because they cannot evolve, self-repair, or reproduce, but the man confuses the students by arguing that motorcycles can be modified, that both living things and motorcycles can self-repair to a certain extent, and that mules are both living things and cannot reproduce. The man then casually removes his disguise and returns as Professor Farnsworth and begins his lecture. The professor then asks the students how to define the line between life and death. There are several answers, including cardiac arrest and brain death, but in the end, the professor says, “Life and death are on a continuum, and there is no clear line.” He concludes Lecture 2 by saying that students need to become familiar with these concepts in order to study biology.
While the definitions of words like animate and inanimate, life and death may seem very clear at first glance, they are not. Viruses reproduce and multiply like living things, but when they’re not active, they’re like inanimate crystals. Just because a person’s heart stops beating doesn’t mean they’re dead, and the advent of artificial hearts and the recent possibility of head transplants are also drawing attention.
The problem of cyborgs is similar to the one mentioned in the book. It is no longer uncommon for people who have lost limbs in war or accidents to return to life with robotic prosthetics and artificial limbs. But can we still call a person human if their entire body is replaced by a machine? Or, as in Ghost in the Shell, can we call a person human if a machine takes over the functions of the brain as well as the body? Conversely, if a machine becomes capable of thinking, as in iRobot or 2001: A Space Odyssey, should it be considered inanimate because its body is not a lump of protein?
Why do we run into this problem? I think it’s a problem that arises when we try to enclose a dynamic, continuous concept within the confines of static, discrete words. We, or at least I, don’t easily accept concepts with such fuzzy boundaries. If there are different A’s and B’s, they are either A or B, not both A and B. We don’t recognize the state of being both A and B. When I was learning about the development of the atomic model, the explanation that the first orbital is the first, the second orbital is the second, and that the positions of individual atoms, like orbitals, cannot be specified, but can only represent the probabilities of their distributions, didn’t sit well with me. It seemed too vague to me. In real life, you can say, “You’re very kind,” but you can’t say, “You’re about 74% kind.”
So is there any point in discussing the ambiguity of words? Certainly, concepts like animate and inanimate, life and death, and kindness and unkindness are distinguishable enough at either end. No one is asking you to respect the life of an oil field, or dig up your ancestors’ graves to see them again, and no one is calling it kindness to dump a delivery box. But it’s in this gray, fuzzy area that most issues arise. Real-life issues such as whether an abortion is murder, whether a brain-dead patient should be euthanized, and whether or not a store has grounds for a claim lie in this “gray area.” In a modern society based on codified law, it’s inevitable that we’ll discuss gray areas.
Are these boundaries fixed and immutable? Before Professor Farnsworth concludes his lecture, he asks whether a circle has a beginning, to which a student replies that it has neither a beginning nor an end, but that a point can be fixed for convenience. The professor is very pleased with the answer and says that the criteria can be set if necessary, but it is not absolute and can be moved if necessary.
However, this standard is not determined by consensus, but by interests. Language doesn’t exist independently of society, but rather is intertwined with many interests. A few decades ago, in South Korea, the word communist, or even red, was considered to be a threat. It didn’t matter what kind of behavior or ideas you were based on. For example, if you opposed the government’s measures, you were not serving the national interest, you were cooperating with North Korea (which was not even technically recognized as a country), and therefore you were in favor of their idea, communism, and therefore you were a communist. This phenomenon is not much different today. For example, the word “passion” no longer carries only positive energy. Rather, passion is often used as a rhetoric to justify exploitation: the “passion” to fulfill one’s dreams has slipped over the line to mean “willingness to work for less than minimum wage to gain work experience.
In short, many concepts are continuous, while the words that capture them are discrete, and this creates a blurred line. You can think of them as thick lines. This boundary is an important one, directly related to many real-life issues. And in order to enforce the law, a line must eventually be drawn at some point along this fuzzy line. Along the way, the line shifts as myriad interests collide.
As I mentioned earlier, I think this is the limitation of words. In the process of abstracting and characterizing something, there is bound to be a loss of meaning. And in the process of trying to draw the fuzzy boundaries to one’s advantage, unreasonable interpretations arise. However, we don’t want to fall into the pessimism that it’s impossible to get it right. At the very least, I think we can communicate better if we recognize the limitations of our language and constantly debate where to draw the line. In other words, we need to ask ourselves whether certain words are really appropriate in our linguistic life. For example, we should be able to redraw the line and say that it’s wrong to use slavery as a passion.
In the past, when things were technologically and socially simpler, it wasn’t as important to push the boundaries of words. If you had a contagious disease, you were dead, and if you were deaf, you weren’t considered a person. But as technology has advanced and society has become more complex, it’s become harder to nail things down and define them. It’s time-consuming and troublesome, but it’s also very important and necessary. Didn’t the development of biology also start with the microscope, which discovered the boundaries of cells?
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