Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe’s Flash—the results of proprietary development? Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth? An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn’t been so good at creating notable originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force.
Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed software-development shop on Earth?
There were plenty of calls at Sci Foo for developing synthetic biology along open-source lines. Under such a scheme, DNA sequences might float around from garage experimenter to garage experimenter via the Internet, following the trajectories of pirated music downloads and being recombined in endless ways.
A quintessential example of the open ideal showed up in Freeman Dyson’s otherwise wonderful piece about the future of synthetic biology in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books. MIT bioengineer Drew Endy, one of the enfants terribles of synthetic biology, opened his spectacular talk at Sci Foo with a slide of Freeman’s article. I can’t express the degree to which I admire Freeman. Among other things, he was the one who turned me on to an amazing 11-sided geometric figure (see Jaron’s World, April 2007). In this case, though, we see things differently.
Freeman equates the beginnings of life on Earth with the Eden of Linux. Back when life first took hold, genes flowed around freely; genetic sequences skipped around from organism to organism in much the way they may soon on the Internet. In his article, Freeman derides the first organism that hoarded its genes as “evil,” like the nemesis of the open-software movement, Bill Gates. Once organisms became encapsulated, they isolated themselves into distinct species, trading genes only with others of their kind. Freeman suggests that the coming era of synthetic biology will be a return to Eden. Species boundaries will be defunct, and genes will fly about, resulting in an orgy of creativity.
But the alternative to open development is not necessarily evil. My guess is that a poorly encapsulated, communal gloop of organisms lost out to closely guarded species for the same reason that the Linux community didn’t come up with the iPhone: Encapsulation serves a purpose.
Let’s say you have something complicated like a biological cell, or even something much less complicated, like a computer design or a scientific model. You put it through tests, and the results of the tests influence how the design will be changed. That can happen either in natural evolution or in a lab.
The universe won’t last long enough to test every possible combination of elements in a complicated construction like a cell. Therefore, the only option is to tie down as much as possible from test to test and proceed incrementally. After a series of encapsulated tests, it might seem as though a result appears magically, as if it couldn’t have been approached incrementally.
Fortunately, encapsulation in human affairs doesn’t need lawyers or a tyrant; it can be achieved within a wide variety of political structures. Academic efforts are usually well encapsulated, for instance. Scientists don’t publish until they are ready, but publish they must. So science as it is already practiced is open, but in a punctuated way, not a continuous way. The interval of nonopenness—the time before publication—functions like the walls of a cell. It allows a complicated stream of elements to be defined well enough to be explored, tested, and then improved.
The open-source software community is simply too turbulent to focus its tests and maintain its criteria over an extended duration, and that is a prerequisite to evolving highly original things. There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases. A closed-software team is a human construction that can tie down enough variables so that software becomes just a little more like a hardware chip—and note that chips, the most encapsulated objects made by humans, get better and better following an exponential pattern of improvement known as Moore’s law.
The politically incorrect critique of Freeman’s point of view is that the restrictions created by species boundaries have similarly made billions of years of natural biology more like hardware than like software. To put it another way: There won’t be an orgy of creativity in an overly open version of synthetic biology because there have to be species for sex to make sense.
I seem to hold a minority opinion. I’ve taken a lot of heat for it! I can’t hire Martha Stewart as a life coach, so the one thing I hope synthetic biology won’t import from the open-software world is the cultlike mania that seems to grip so many open-source enthusiasts.
