Professor Farnsworth’s Explanations in Biology presents biological concepts in the form of Professor Farnsworth’s lecture notes, exploring the boundaries between life and non-life, the identity of humans and machines, and asking the reader to consider how absolute concepts change according to social interests.
Professor Farnsworth’s Explanations in Biology is a biology textbook with a unique structure. Professor Farnsworth is a fictional character created by Hefner, and the book is structured as a collection of his lecture notes. It’s interactive, just like a real lecture transcript, and the illustrations and flowing narrative make the complex biology much less overwhelming for the reader.
However, the most impressive part of the book is Chapter 2, which covers the definition of life. After the introduction to the lecture in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 opens with a man riding a motorcycle into the lecture hall. To everyone’s bewilderment, he explains that he made a bet with his friends that a motorcycle could be considered a living thing, and that he came to the professor for help in case of a counterargument. This sparks a debate between the students and the man about whether motorcycles are living things. The students argue that motorcycles are not living things because they cannot evolve, self-repair, or reproduce, but the man argues that motorcycles can be modified and are self-repairing to a certain extent. The man also argues that mules are living things and cannot reproduce, which confuses the students. The man then nonchalantly removes his disguise and returns as Professor Farnsworth to begin the lecture, asking how the line between life and death can be drawn. After a variety of opinions are offered, including cardiac arrest and brain death, the professor concludes that “life and death are on a continuum, with no clear boundaries,” and concludes Lecture 2 by stating that students should become familiar with these concepts in order to study biology.
The definitions of concepts like animate and inanimate, life and death, while seemingly clear, are actually complex. For example, viruses multiply like living things, but when they are inactive, they are inanimate. The absence of a beating heart does not necessarily mean death, and the advent of artificial hearts and the recently discussed possibility of head transplants raise new questions about life.
A parallel issue to the one discussed in this book is that of cyborgs. It is now commonplace for people who have lost limbs in war or accidents to return to life with robotic prosthetic limbs. However, can a person still be called human if their entire body is replaced by a machine, or if a machine takes over not only their physical body but also their brain functions, as in ‘Ghost in the Shell’? Conversely, if a machine becomes capable of thinking, as in “iRobot” or “2001: A Space Odyssey,” should it be considered inanimate just because it doesn’t have a body made of protein?
Why do we struggle with these boundaries? I think it’s because we’re trying to hold dynamic, continuous concepts within the framework of fixed, discrete words. We, at least I, don’t easily accept concepts with fuzzy boundaries. If there is an A and a B, it is either an A or a B. It is difficult to recognize a state that is both an A and a B. It was the same when I was learning about the development of the atomic model. The idea that if an electron is in the first orbital, it is in the first orbital, rather than being described by a probability of distribution in an unspecified location, like the concept of an orbital, was too vague for me. In real life, we hear the phrase “You’re very kind,” but we never hear “I feel 74% kind.”
So what’s the point of discussing the vagueness of words? Certainly, concepts like animate and inanimate, life and death, and kindness and unkindness have clear extremes. You don’t hear people advocating for respecting the life of an oil field, or digging up graves to see their ancestors again, and you don’t call throwing away a delivery box kindness. But many issues arise in this vague gray area. Real-life issues such as whether an abortion is murder or not, whether a brain-dead patient should be euthanized, and whether a store has grounds for a claim arise from this “gray area.” In the modern world, where codified laws are the foundation of society, it is inevitable to discuss the boundaries of words.
Are these boundaries fixed and immutable? Before Farnsworth concludes his lecture, he asks the students if a circle has a starting point. One student replies that a circle has neither a beginning nor an end, but that we can define it at a certain point for convenience. The professor is pleased with the answer, and tells them that they can set a reference point if they need to, but that it is not absolute and can be moved as needed.
However, this standard is often set according to interests rather than a valid consensus. This is because language does not exist independently of society, and many interests are intertwined. A few decades ago in Korea, the word communist, or even red, frightened many people; rather than being judged by their actions or ideas, people were often labeled communists simply because they opposed government measures. We see similar phenomena today. For example, the word “passion” is no longer used in a positive way. It is sometimes used as a rhetoric to justify exploitation, i.e. “passion” to fulfill my dreams has been transformed into “willingness to work for less than minimum wage to gain work experience”.
In short, many concepts are continuous, while the words that encapsulate them are discontinuous, which creates a blurry line. The boundary, like a thick line, is directly related to various real-life issues, and law enforcement must eventually draw a line somewhere along this fuzzy line. Along the way, the line is constantly shifting as numerous interests collide.
As I mentioned earlier, I think this is the limitation of words. In the process of extracting and abstracting the characteristics of something, a loss of meaning is inevitable. In the process of trying to draw the blurred boundaries in our favor, sometimes unreasonable interpretations arise. However, we don’t want to fall into the pessimism that it’s impossible to get it right. I believe that we can communicate better if we recognize the limitations of words and constantly debate to find stricter boundaries. In particular, we need to reconsider whether certain words are really appropriate. For example, we need to redraw the line as a society when it comes to expressions that package labor exploitation as passion.
In the past, when things were technologically and socially simpler, pushing the boundaries of language wasn’t as important. If you caught an infectious disease, you were dead, and if you were deaf, it didn’t matter if you were considered disabled. But as technology has advanced and society has become more complex, it’s become harder to draw lines and define things clearly. It’s a time-consuming and cumbersome process, but it’s an important and necessary one. Didn’t the development of biology also begin with the discovery of cell boundaries through the microscope?