Greetings from the Porch,

We made a foray to the eastern part of Pennsylvania this week. One of the highlights for me was visiting the Mercer Museum, which has an extensive collection of pre-industrial tools. As a lover of Moby-Dick, I was particularly interested in their whale boat and collection of whaling implements.

Also, my apologies for the problems with the FPR website last Saturday. I'm told it's on more stable footings now.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about work, allergies, and games.

• Jessica Burke describes the challenges of releasing beloved children to make their way in the world: "We didn’t raise our children to keep them for ourselves. We raised them to go make a home, to share grace and love."

• Campbell Frank Scribner makes the provocative case that AI erodes good pedagogy because students need real teachers to hate: "By heightening emotion, hatred deepens the personhood of both teachers and students."

• Lenny Wells praises his local hardware store: "The hardware store’s customers aren’t just customers. They aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. They are its neighbors."

• Jacob Adkins muses on what he's learned from a widow he's stayed with regularly in recent months: "As I’ve spent much of the last year with her, I have been struck not just by her physical health but by the health of her community—and by how deeply she belongs to this place."

• Aaron Vandiver takes a hard look at the uncomfortable realities Trump reveals about Americans: "Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have told ourselves about who we are."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about telephones--but not cell phones--this week.

I recently finished Philip Ball’s How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. I’m not qualified to assess the merits of all his arguments, but he does a good job of not oversimplifying the complex and mysterious ways that biological life develops. His efforts to articulate the role of agency, meaning, and purpose in a biological context (even if his philosophical account of these remains wobbly) is particularly commendable. I was particularly struck by his warnings that dominant metaphors—life as machine or life as information transmitter—obscure as much as they reveal:

All of these metaphors have their uses, for they were not coined without good reason—and I will sometimes draw on them. But the old saw that the price of metaphor is eternal vigilance is nowhere more apt than in trying to understand life. Metaphors in biology have a dangerous tendency to turn into “explanations,” and schematic representations of experimental findings—how a set of molecules appear to interact, say—may be mistaken even by experts for literal pictures of what happens. One of the fundamental messages of this book is that we cannot properly understand how life works through analogies or metaphorical comparison with any technology that humans have ever invented (so far). Such analogies may provide a foothold for our understanding, but in the end they will fall short, and will constrain and even mislead us if we don’t recognize when to relinquish them. To truly understand, say, how an embryo grows, says developmental biologist Jameie Davies, “we must be prepared to move beyond homely analogies, based on how we build things, and see the embryo in its own terms.” One obvious but very profound distinction of life from machines, for example, is that life must be sustained continuously or not at all: you can’t turn it off and on again.

Comparing life to a machine, a robot, a computer, sells it short. Life is hard to understand precisely because it is like none of these things we have created. And when we forget the limitations of metaphor, our science fails and tis applications flounder. We might seek inappropriate or ineffective medical interventions, for example. The fundamental problem with the machine metaphor of life—which applies equally to the “electronic circuit” metaphor—is that it compels us to consider the parts as things with functions. We take up a particular component and ask: what role is this part playing?

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro