The Languages of Nature - When Nature Writes to Itself

By Cédric Gaucherel

This book is a personal mixture of well-established results and speculative intuitions on Life. The reader should not be afraid by it and try to gain a bird’s-eye view of the coherence of the whole. The reader will often be asked to accept in an unconventional situation, adopting a linguistic and computing science point of view, rather than a more traditional biological and/or mathematical point of view. They should then wonder whether these unusual propositions make sense or not. In case my propositions are unconvincing, the reader may easily return to the usual biological interpretation. If there is a small chance that they prove convincing, then I hope that the reader will join forces with mine to explore the linguistic view of nature. I sincerely hope that they will benefit by reading this book and thus discover a radically new and potentially fruitful understanding of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780244211202

Book preview

The Languages of Nature - When Nature Writes to Itself

The Languages of Nature

(when nature writes to itself)

Cédric Gaucherel

For Sandrine.

Preface

If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. — T. Morrison, 1988.

Everything labors for everything…There are marvelous relations between beings and things... no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellation — V. Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862.

Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species is one of the most impressive science books ever written. It not only puts forward a revolutionary theory, it is also extremely well written and reveals the true depth of the author’s thinking. As a young scientist, I was surprised, on reading the book for the first time, that Darwin described the origin of species as the mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. For me, the mystery of mysteries was that of the origin of life itself! Later in my career, I understood that all scientific subjects are worthy of interest; but that some are perceived as more appealing. In fact, all origin quests are fascinating, including the origin of Earth and the origin of the universe.

Some may wonder why a theoretical ecologist with a physics background should be allowed to explore biology and other topics in which he is no expert. For these readers, I cite the great physicist E. Schrödinger in his preface to What is Life? If we want to expound wide and universal theories, we have no choice but venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them – and at the risk of making fools of ourselves. J. Lovelock also, the scientist who proposed the Gaia hypothesis to which I will return, expressed similar sentiments, which I will also share with my readers.

This book, written in 2014, concerns the study of life in all its forms and adopts a deliberately multidisciplinary approach. I intend to focus on life’s specificities and to propose new explanations for most of them. It does not set out to propose a comprehensive theory of life. Rather, it plans to present a succession of hypotheses, embedded in a coherent and parsimonious framework. Because any understanding of life also involves the study of non-living objects, this book provides an in-depth analysis of phenomena that are described as almost alive, such as ecosystems. I will explain why I think that ecosystems, my dominant field of expertise, provide a kind of missing link between live and inert forms. Obviously, the next step is to test these hypotheses – a process that some colleagues and I already started some time ago.

However, this book focuses heavily on ecology and environmental sciences, as these are the fields whence my ideas first emerged. This work is also my attempt to reveal the deep unity behind the apparently diverse themes of my research. Colleagues have often questioned me on this point and this book is my attempt at an answer. Sometimes chronologically, sometimes thematically, I will reveal here the gradual understanding that came to me, from pattern to process, from purely spatial to non-spatial processes, from applied to theoretical studies, and from (astro-)physical to (eco-)biological processes. The pieces of the puzzle progressively come together.

Some scientists have formulated similar hypotheses to mine, and I will cite their pioneering work wherever possible. Yet, to my knowledge, none has proposed the framework that I will begin to outline here: I am proposing a linguistic view of life (new and/or significant concepts will be written in italics throughout this book). I have listed here the preliminary results in an attempt to base this linguistic framework on more robust and rigorous ground, as well as their justifications. I will systematically mention those hypotheses for which we still have no clue and are awaiting a clear demonstration. In a sense, this book has an objective comparable to that of N. Chomsky’s Minimalist Program: it suggests a program (in the sense of I. Lakatos), a research direction, associated with a conceptual and mathematical frameworks to guide the development of further understanding, rather than offering a stable theory and reliable predictions. This program is so vast that I will later refer to it as a maximalist program.

Nevertheless, the reader should be aware that some of the hypotheses proposed here might appear radical and divergent from the life sciences mainstream. I am not taking a huge risk: they are, after all, mere hypotheses. For example, we will explore the probable incompatibility between the linguistic view of life and the classical view of dynamical systems inspired by physics in understanding biological systems. The last chapter will explain in detail why a reinterpretation of living systems based on (formal) languages appears necessary to me. This too is a hypothesis and to demonstrate this necessity will possibly require a great deal of effort. Many of the propositions made here will therefore require an open mind and a certain indulgence from the reader.

The central hypothesis of this book could be described as follows: Drawing on natural (human) languages, we could benefit, in terms of understanding and possibly management, by searching for languages everywhere in the life sciences, and I suggest that these languages are interlinked in time by specific mechanisms. To explore this hypothesis, the book structure is based on five chapters: 1. The evolution of writing systems; 2. The information concept in life sciences; 3. The ubiquity of grammar and language; 4. The chronology of languages and origins of life; 5. Philosophical justifications. The details of each chapter are as follows:

Similar to Darwin in his seminal book, I will begin by outlining those concepts that are easiest for us to grasp, progressing toward less and less intuitive concepts. For this reason, we will first study human writing systems and their possible evolution in depth, before looking for comparable writing systems in life sciences. A first link to the information concept and its articulation with the language concept will be outlined here.

After this context, I will then review the use and misuse of the information concept in life sciences, with a particular focus on biology and ecology. We will explore its useful properties and the drawbacks that led it to be banished of life sciences. For example, following on from our previous book with colleagues (Information – the hidden side of life), this chapter discusses the immateriality of information and other surprising related ideas. This chapter ends with a clear and testable definition of what, from my point of view, information really is.

We now have good reasons to believe that information is not appropriate to study life. I will therefore elaborate in this chapter on the need to handle languages. Languages have the huge advantage of providing a grammar, which has been defined, formalized and used in various sciences. I will thus show the ubiquity of the language concept in life sciences and insist on its formalizations, often leading to a deep control on our understanding of living systems. In-depth study of language properties enables their differences to be highlighted.

Once accepted, this ubiquity of language is quite surprising. I will propose some hypotheses for this observation; in particular, that languages together exhibit a chronology with varying properties in time over the long term. Here again, ecosystemic languages, rigorously formalized in the previous chapter, will serve as key examples of almost-alive systems. Differences with living system languages will be illustrated too.

At this stage, it seems to me essential to justify the linguistic framework proposed in this book. Why do languages perform so well in the life science systems tested? Why are they suited to this understanding role? It took me some time to understand that the role of time and of historicity of each living system plays a crucial role in this quest. I will therefore posit that languages are the appropriate (mathematical) tool for living systems because they develop and evolve in time!

Finally, this book is a personal mixture of well-established results and speculative intuitions. The reader should not be afraid by it and try to gain a bird’s-eye view of the coherence of the whole. The reader will often be asked to accept in an unconventional situation, adopting a linguistic and computing science point of view, rather than a more traditional biological and/or mathematical point of view. They should then wonder whether these unusual propositions make sense or not. In case my propositions are unconvincing, the reader may easily return to the usual biological interpretation. If there is a small chance that they prove convincing, then I hope that the reader will join forces with mine to explore the linguistic view of nature. I sincerely hope that they will benefit by reading this book and thus discover a radically new and potentially fruitful understanding of life.

1.  The evolution of writing systems

What we call numbers and letters: both are the eyes of mankind

— Thiruvalluvar, ca. 310 BCE.

The resulting replacement of the phase space by a ‘noncommutative space’ [in quantum mechanics] … is one of the most important conceptual steps, on which it is important to dwell.

— A. Connes, 1994. Noncommutative Geometry

In this first chapter, I will first highlight the deep need for humans to describe and represent our complex world in simpler ways. Numbers and letters are, almost certainly, the main concepts used for this purpose, and it is instructive to study why. In particular, I will emphasize the role played by space in any symbolic definition, and the importance of shape, order and position of symbols in more elaborate languages. In order subsequently to compare human languages to non-human languages, I then propose to study the early writing systems including cuneiform and Elamite, and to attempt to identify their dominant properties. Can we detect any evolution (inheritance) over the long term between successive writing systems? If not, we need to explore even longer timescales, such as hand-axe knapping (i.e., toolmaking from stones) in prehistoric times. Indeed, with the help of formalization I will show that knapping hides another surprising language, which also carries its own evolution.

The use of numbers and letters to model our world

To confront and to make sense of the world, humans needed to represent it from an early stage in their evolution. They noticed that most things in their surroundings were repeated, and that stars, stones or trees could be gathered into sets because they appeared similar. Making use of abstract reasoning, our ancestors conceived of numbers allowing them to represent the three shells they held in their hand, the three knots on this rope, the three marks made on this stick and possibly the three fingers on their right hand. This is known as figurative numeration, and is associated with the cardinal of the number three, i.e., the value of this specific number (Ifrah 1994).

Figurative numeration was in all probability rapidly followed by a spoken numeration – i.e., a word that enabled the concerned number to be expressed without showing or drawing it. This word was certainly highly dependent on the ancestor’s language, of which we have all too few clues. Furthermore, to talk about three things is useful and rapid, but to write the number three has the additional advantage of durability in time. Writing the number on a stone or a clay tablet meant it could last longer in a given place, to help someone to remember this information later, or to communicate it to someone else, in another place (Nissen et al. 1993, Glassner 2000). This is known as written numeration, and it was also highly dependent on the writing system used. We do not intend here to mention the fascinating studies made on number apparition in human societies and the way they were possibly used (Ifrah 1994). We will merely evoke certain properties of this concept.

If I take another shell in my hand, my mind switches to another number, that is, the following digit. Indeed, to add a fourth finger in my hand or a knot on my rope systematically takes the concept in question to another level, and always to the same one: that of four. This is the ordinal property of numbers, which allows them to always be consistently listed in the same order, and thus to count sets (Ifrah 1994). This operation appears possible only if the entities gathered within a given set are considered similar. Another example that probably appeared quite early was the need to count successive days and years, for which a numbering system was required (Glassner 2000). How to proceed when the days started to be numerous, too numerous to be named by a number? Our ancestors invented various ways to combine (either cardinal or ordinal) numbers into larger numbers to compress the counting information. Eventually, they designed numeral systems which adopted many different forms.

Numeral systems appeared very useful to represent, and therefore handle, the groups of entities populating the world. But how to proceed when things are no longer considered similar? They can hardly be grouped into sets and it becomes impossible to adopt a quantitative view of the world (Pesic 2002). We all are human individuals; yet I notice easily that my sister and my mother are not similar to me. These women are qualitatively different than me and, sometimes, I need to differentiate them from me, for example, to talk about them to someone else. This case occurs with great frequency: humans need to describe each particular entity they deal with by some specific words. With the help of the language, words enable representation of the world as well as communication with others. This communicative function is probably as old as words themselves (Glassner 2000).

For the same reason as for numbers, it is sometimes useful to write words instead of saying them: the information they carry lasts longer – a kind of information that offsets the limited memory of humans. How does one proceed to write a word? We need a symbol that corresponds to it, and you need to systematically associate this symbol to its meaning. We will further come back to this meaning concept. We need only recall here that a symbol has a double nature (Akmajian et al. 2010): it is a symbol, and it carries a meaning, something other than itself. The simplest symbols one may create are single and isolated forms, such as letters, which have taken a wide range of shapes in the history of humanity. Letters thus provide another and complementary representation of the world than numbers.

Whether with numbers or with letters, defining and then using such objects not only helped represent the world, it also helped organize it. The above-mentioned representation, counting, and communication properties inherent to numbers and letters have been (and still are being) deeply analyzed by specialists and are outside the scope of this introduction (Nissen et al. 1993, Glassner 2000, Akmajian et al. 2010). Our focus here is merely on the organizational properties to which they refer. The first cuneiform tablets already listed objects, persons and valuables. Speaking and writing were thus powerful ways to organize the environment, to classify (any-)thing(s) into categories, to archive and memorize them into stable places. This was a way to momentarily freeze the past, and to make it available for the future (or for elsewhere). Ultimately, writing, more than speech, helps to define the world of today and delineate the world of tomorrow.

Beyond similarities between numbers and letters, one important difference for the following propositions must be noted and further developed. Numbers tend to remove the computations needed to reach them; numbers forget the history leading to their values. When I state 3x4 = 12, in order to reach the total of 12, the final number itself soon erases the operation involved in computing it (I could equally have computed 6x2). Letters and words, by their qualitative descriptions, on the other hand, still retain the path leading to their totality, because they do not separate from the rest of the speech. When I say – and especially write