Silicon Second Nature : Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World [Hardcover]

Stefan Helmreich (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520207998 | ISBN-13: 978-0520207998 | Publication Date: November 16, 1998 | Edition: 1

Silicon Second Nature takes us on an expedition into an extraordinary world where nature is made of bits and bytes and life is born from sequences of zeroes and ones. Artificial Life is the brainchild of scientists who view self-replicating computer programs--such as computer viruses--as new forms of life. Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich's look at the social and simulated worlds of Artificial Life--primarily at the Santa Fe Institute, a well-known center for studies in the sciences of complexity--introduces readers to the people and programs connected with this unusual hybrid of computer science and biology.
When biology becomes an information science, when DNA is downloaded into virtual reality, new ways of imagining "life" become possible. Through detailed dissections of the artifacts of Artifical Life, Helmreich explores how these novel visions of life are recombining with the most traditional tales told by Western culture. Because Artificial Life scientists tend to see themselves as masculine gods of their cyberspace creations, as digital Darwins exploring frontiers filled with primitive creatures, their programs reflect prevalent representations of gender, kinship, and race, and repeat origin stories most familiar from mythical and religious narratives.
But Artificial Life does not, Helmreich says, simply reproduce old stories in new software. Much like contemporary activities of cloning, cryonics, and transgenics, the practice of simulating and synthesizing life in silico challenges and multiplies the very definition of vitality. Are these models, as some would claim, actually another form of the real thing? Silicon Second Nature takes Artifical Life as a symptom and source of our mutating visions of life itself.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Few scientific disciplines are as ripe for ethnographic study as artificial life, known as a-life, a hybrid, high-tech field with practitioners who routinely suggest that the self-replicating computer programs they design not only mimic but actually are living creatures. As Stanford anthropologist Stefan Helmreich convincingly demonstrates, it takes more than just chutzpah to advance such a claim--it takes a powerful belief system. The belief system Helmreich fingers is the complex web of historical, mythical, and religious narratives that form the fabric of modern Western culture.

Of course, a good deal of solid science goes into a-life's elaborate digital simulations of the biological world, and Helmreich takes care not to let his cultural analysis drown that science out. Indeed, his descriptions of the theories and techniques behind some researchers' attempts at concocting artificial life--ranging from simple computer viruses to Tom Ray's globally distributed Tierra system for breeding digital "organisms"--are occasionally more compelling than his own attempts to read disturbing racial and sexual mythologies into those experiments.

Ultimately, though, what fascinates Helmreich about a-life is neither the biology nor the mythology, but the way this unique discipline highlights the intersection of the two. A-life researchers may or may not have created new organisms, but what they have created, Helmreich argues, points the way to a new and more sophisticated understanding of the delicate relationship between science and culture. --Julian Dibbell

From Publishers Weekly

Though it grew out of a dissertation and often reads like one, Stanford anthropologist Helmreich's study is a startling, cutting-edge look at the emerging field of Artificial Life (an offshoot of Artificial Intelligence), many of whose practitioners believe that the self-replicating computer programs they create are not mere representations of life but actual life-forms set loose to mutate, reproduce, compete and behave unpredictably in an alternative cyberspace universe. Helmreich, who interviewed a mix of AL scientistsALos Alamos physicists, ecology-minded biologists, hackers, ex-hippies, roboticists, chemistsAattributes this hubristic conceit to the influence of science fiction, Judeo-Christian creation imagery, the American frontier spirit, New Age mysticism and the pervasiveness of TV in melding artificial worlds with reality. Some AL scientists see themselves as the vanguard force of evolution, on a mission to colonize new realms with their offspring, using programs such as Tierra, which conjures "digital organisms" to mimic biological evolution. Other AL scientists, though atheists, seem to embrace the field as a sort of religion, buttressed by their private, Zen-like experiences. In a scathing pro-feminist critique, Helmreich argues that the AL field, dominated by white males, is permeated with masculine imagery; cyber-organisms and automata are often referred to or portrayed by AL practitioners as "primitive," "childlike," female, dark-skinned or highly competitive. This, charges Helmreich, betrays the discipline's Eurocentric, corporatist, even sexist and racist assumptions. His sophisticated inquiry challenges the underpinningsAphilosophical, scientific, financial, politicalAof the Artificial Life enterprise. 29 b&w illustrations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 330 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (November 16, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520207998
• ISBN-13: 978-0520207998
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,472,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars fascinating and different, January 14, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (SanFransisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Silicon Second Nature : Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (Hardcover)

Far from being a dry scientific text, this book is a probing look into the work and lives of the sometimes bizarre "tribe" of articial life researchers at the Santa Fe Institute. Written by an Anthropologist it gives a relatively objective outsiders view into the heart the emerging science of Artificial Life. The cultural implications of Artificial Life are explored as well as the effects on the culture of the researches on the life they are creating. This outside-in viewpoint really changes the awareness of the reader towards these new creations.

Be careful, this is not a reference manual or a textbook. It is extremely well researched and documented, and surprisingly readable.

The context the science is put into almost makes it read like "Science Fiction" but without the "Fiction".

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful study of ALife social-contextual issues, April 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Silicon Second Nature : Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (Hardcover)

The book is easy-to-read and yet profound. It delineates some of the biases, givens, and constants that may exist and are unperceived. The book also serves as an excellent intro to ALife studies at one of the worlds major thinktanks and research centers.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not All Artificial Life is Fiction, May 25, 2010

By 

Bill Pieper, author of the novel WHAT YOU WIS... (Sacramento, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, Updated With a New Preface (Paperback)

As a novelist, I delight in creating artificial life, primarily the human kind, and the more realistic the better. No wonder, then, that the idea of artificial life interests me in general. Still, my motive to weigh in here comes less from the book itself than from the reviews already posted, since I found little to agree with, whether they offered pans or praise. My own take is that Mr. Helmreich deserves four stars, at least for readers seeking a broad and thought-ful intro-duction to the field of computer-resident artificial life (AL).

One big plus is that he's an anthropologist, not a super-techie like most AL practi-tioners. Hence, no meandering pages of equations or endless tech-speak. Moreover, an anthropo-logical approach allows examination of not only the notable AL experiments and their methodo-logy, but of the field's intellectual roots, its cultural assumptions, and the perso-nal and professio-nal biographies of its prominent figures. In other words, pure fun by my definition.

In the early chapters especially, much is made of how the name AL arose. The emphasis, though, for many practitioners, is on the L, life, with some making extravagant claims that this life is in-distinguishable in "realness" from natural forms that we all acknow-ledge as alive. Sorry, I don't buy it, and Helmreich presents a number of counter arguments. Yet I'm quite wil-ling to settle for the name AL, as long as both words, artificial and life, are accorded equal weight.

It's also troubling to read of experimenters who refer to the entities their byte-models of DNA produce as "people" and to themselves as "gods." Certainly Helmreich could have titled that par-ticular chapter Prometheus Lives. One also wonders if these human gods have program-med their people to worship them. From the attitudes expressed, the impulse is clearly there. Helmreich apparently chose not to ask. Nonetheless, I find the experiments fascinating and think they may ultimately tell us quite a bit about evolutionary processes that we currently don't know and have no other means to find out.

Perhaps the Achilles Heel in all this isn't the fact that, since AL forms have no corporeal exis-tence, they can't independently store energy in case of a power failure, but that the researchers are in such a hurry. What evolution took billions of years to accomplish they want within their life-times--think Nobel Prize--so all manner of shortcuts abound, even including, in some models, a Lamarckian passing along of traits acquired by individuals within a single generation. As per the old saying, you can have fast, cheap and good, pick two. Yet, again, I'm fasci-nated by what might unfold and not all models are polluted by obvious expediency.

The book's major faults represent things I hold the publisher, University of California Press, more accountable for than I do Helmreich. One is that its hardcover pub date remains 1999. A field that is changing--dare I say evolving--at an exploding rate cries out for a new, updated edition, and Helmreich would be a fool to turn down the opportunity, were it offered.

The second fault echoes what some negative reviewers have already said. In commenting on prac-titioners at the Santa Fe Institute, AL's international ground zero, Helmreich points out that they are over-whelmingly well-fed, white, heterosexual males with backgrounds in physics and engineering, and speculates that it colors the attributes they program into their AL worlds. Not hard to grasp and likely true. Where this line of analysis goes wanting is that UC Press allowed him to repeat it boringly and redundantly in nearly every chapter rather than simply mak-ing refer-ence to the potential cultural biases previously noted. Authors tend to get carried away with their own words. I know, I am one, but that's exactly why we need, and put up with, editors.