The biological metaphor

 

A valuable conceptual break-through, in the understanding of the Internet and the World Wide Web, can come about if, instead of looking at the Internet as a communication media, we looked upon it as an information environment very similar to a biological environment.

This may seem strange, but, the modern trend in molecular biology is to treat biological processes as a form of information processing.

With this new way of looking at biology - where molecules are seen as packets of data , cells seen as miniature computers and DNA considered to be digital storage devices - the abstraction of a biological environment maps across perfectly well to the environment of the Internet.

As we shall see later, there are many remarkable similarities between the information landscape of the Internet and biological environments and when abstractions of different kinds of systems are similar it becomes perfectly valid to use one as a metaphor for the other.

From a biological perspective, the Internet, with its substance consisting of hundreds of thousands of computer, can be viewed as fertile virgin soil: a fresh environment, where organic-like structures are free to form and evolve to create a new kind of eco-system.

This is more than just a novel way to look at the Internet, the implication is that all the vast knowledge and tools developed over this last century for understanding and controlling biological forms and structures can be brought to bear in helping us to understand the exact nature of this phenomenon we call the Internet and the World Wide Web.

In particular, we can call upon the tools and conceptual models developed for understanding and explaining the complex world of evolution. We can call upon the modern developments in molecular biology: where the break-throughs which have come in understanding the processes within the human cell will give us insights into developing and using the Internet. It is strange, but true, that the research now being carried out to help us defeat the aids virus is likely to be of great value in helping us design new product for the Web.

In the world of biological landscapes, the most successful structure to have evolved has been the cell. Enclosed within its confining membrane, the cell contains a vast library of genetic instructions (DNA), together with the machinery (mitochondria, etc.) to interpret and act upon those instructions. In this way, a single cell can multiply and turn its clones into a myriad of different little factories and data processing units whose combined interactions can create complex self replicating life forms; the variety of which defies all imagination.

In "Lingo Sorcery - the magic of lists, objects and intelligent agents", I described how the cell was analogous to a computer system and explained how the book's approach to object oriented programming was taken not from techniques of computer programming, but, from the more advanced programming techniques found in nature (molecular biology).

In this present book, I want to extend that biological theme very much further - way beyond the cell itself - to the phenomena produced by the processing activity of the cells.

In the landscape of natural biology the resultant product of cell processing is a life form. In the landscape of the Internet and the World Wide Web the resultant product will be... an AVATAR.

 

copyright 1997 Peter Small - No part of this document can be used or reproduced in any form without express permission

Details of book, CD-ROM and online continuation - peter@genps.demon.co.uk