A Case for Biology of the Living
This post was originally submitted with responses from two AI models included for comparison. To align with LessWrong guidelines, the AI responses have been removed. Only the prompts have been retained.
People are as wrong about the human body as we are about the blobfish. When we first hauled up this dopey creature from the bottom of the sea, we remarked on how absurdly cartoonish it was with it’s giant nose, beady eyes and flappy frown. Unfortunately, we later discovered that bringing it to the surface decompresses the poor fish, prolapsing all it’s orifices. According to Heisenberg, you can’t know an object’s position and momentum at the same time. This counterproductive uncertainty is threaded throughout existence. In the example of the human body, each one is filled with life when it’s living. But that life itself dies under close examination. We end up with a biology of the dead. Our studies all through academia teach the body in its static form. But it’s the form in which the body is simply an enclosure for a vast marine ecosystem that the experience of the body is much more pertinent.
Indeed, taking this living perspective on biology produces immediate and practical benefits. For example, the ear is not a slab of peculiarly shaped cartilage. It’s a receiver, processor, and transmitter of sound waves. It takes in all of the acoustic vibrations in the surrounding environment and transfers them into the eardrum in the form of a sonic plane. The two dimensional surface accepts directional data and source movement by mapping the vibrational frequencies onto this body part. The signal is then transmitted via nerves to the audio interpreting sections of the brain.
95%+ of all studies of the human body study living bodies. Surgeons cut into living flesh umpteen times a day, and biologists do horrible things do living lab rats in a million different ways. Every study that comes out of today’s universities on behaviour, medicine, optics, or what have you not, is performed on living volunteers.
Many of the most important fields in biology focus on dynamic systems, such as biology, neurology, and yes, anatomy.
I’m not sure what justification there is for saying that biology is to focused on the dead, or static systems.
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Thank you for the clarification. This was my first post, and I’ve revised it accordingly.