Vol. 2, Number 1	Spring 1999 issue

 

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An experience of oneness with the computer, a oneness achieved when they had an immersed yet detached engagement with a simulation"-no, it's not Deepak Chopra online; it's the virtual nirvana of a community of Artificial Life researchers at the Santa Fe Institute. Artificial Life (also known as ALife, or simply AL) is a new interdisciplinary field, incorporating evolutionary biology, physics, and computer science. In Santa Fe, the primary method of inquiry is computer simulation of evolution, which entails releasing self-replicating programs into a "primordial soup" of computer memory, and then exposing them to mutation and artificial natural selection. It sounds like standard scientific advancement, but there's a twist: researchers have begun claiming that the programs in their computers are no longer merely models of life but instantiations of it in their own right. These scientists envision themselves as a sort of chosen people-chosen by evolution to help it continue its work by transfusing life from carbon and water into silicon and electricity.

Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, by Stanford anthropologist Stefan Helmreich, is not a popular science account, but rather an ethnography, exploring how AL is both influencing and influenced by larger issues and forces in Western, Euro-American civilization. Helmreich is nothing if not thorough, and he invigorates his discussion with everything from Platonism to queer theory.

The book starts off like most ethnographies, with a discussion of the setting of the research. Helmreich introduces us to the local history and reveals, à la Sherlock Holmes, the prejudices and presumptions betrayed by such seemingly neutral decorations as Navajo rugs and quartz crystals. In his discussion of the researchers' personal backgrounds, though, Helmreich manages to work around the obligatory staid scientific language and show the essential humor of his subjects. He points out that most AL scientists have backgrounds as either hackers or hippies, and quotes one observer as describing an Artificial Life conference as "a science fiction convention, a rock concert, and a scientific conference all swaddled together." One memorable presentation on robotics even "included a discussion of the 'disadvantages of biology,' among them the 'emotion thing.'"

Although AL purports to transform the way we think about life, Helmreich demonstrates that many times, it actually reproduces traditional, culturally particular ideas. Drawing on feminist theory, he shows that the beginnings of most models rely on a masculine monogenesis, in which the computer programmer is explicitly referred to as a god who is omniscient and omnipotent with respect to the model-directly paralleling the Judeo-Christian origin story with which the researchers grew up. The manual for one model even titled its start-up instructions "Spreading Your Seed." With typical intellectual opportunism, Helmreich seizes upon this little anecdote to produce an endnote that is simultaneously amusing and disturbing: a quotation of a fifteenth century alchemical recipe for procreation through the incubation of a mixture of putrefying semen and horse dung. While it effectively supplements his argument, it is hard not to suspect that this was not added simply for humor.

In the final section of the book, Helmreich moves from theory to meta-theory, explicating the postmodernism of Artificial Life. In a turn that seems almost whimsical, the "tension" between AL's modernity and postmodernity leads Helmreich to suggest that AL is not so much postmodern as metamodern, hypermodern, or even simply amodern.

This may sound like gratuitous ivory tower recursion, but, occasional academic jargon notwithstanding, one of the most striking aspects of this book is its relevance to such a vast array of contemporary topics and issues that some of them pertain to most, if not all Americans: queer theory, feminism, eco-feminism, the New Age movement, alchemy, the Gaia Hypothesis, abortion, sociobiology, postmodernism, sociology, rhetoric, anthropology, the distinction between the natural and the artificial, the history of New Mexico, and the status of Native Americans. Helmreich continually brings in these issues and others to enrich his discussion and demolish the myth that science is acultural. His arguments are sound, but sometimes it appears that he is simply flipping through his academic rolodex and calling on every theory he can find to analyze AL, rather than concentrating on those that capture the essential nature of his data. The result is a book that reads suspiciously like a dissertation.

Nevertheless, the analyses never fail to be stimulating. Helmreich's concern to relate the ethnography of part of our society to the whole causes us to see ourselves reflected (and occasionally distorted) throughout Silicon Second Nature. As we learn about these scientists, we learn about ourselves; that is the real value of Helmreich's work.