Computer Biology and Goethe’s Conception of the Synthesis of Science and Art



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Computer Biology and Goethe’s Conception of the Synthesis

of Science and Art
Kh.P.Tiras
Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics Russian Academy of Sciences, Pushchino, Moscow Region, 142290
Two hundred years ago J. W. Goethe wrote in his work on plant metamorphoses that the world should be viewed from “the standpoint of a plant”. Despite great respect and esteem the intellectual Europe had for Goethe, the botanists of that time, “narrow” specialists, considered the saying of the great citizen of Weimar rather as a poetic metaphor and pushed it to the background of their routine scientific activity. They had Karl Linney, a great Swede, who brought calm into botany once and for all, by having banned arbitrariness from the scientific presentation of botanical objects. The essence of Linney’s revolution was to leave only those features that can be characterized quantitatively, namely, the number of stamens, pistils, and the size and form of leaves. Among the “rejected” features were color and smell of plants, features that have often been invoked in earlier botanical descriptions. An argument of Linney, which was supported by the entire scientific botanical community, was that these “bad” features could hardly be adequately described by technical means available at that time. However, what seemed absolutely correct at the beginning of the 19th century, is by no means apparent at the beginning of the 21st century.

The computer technology revolution in biology, which was caused by extensive introduction of digital means of image creation and analysis, changed abruptly the biological scenery. As a result, biologists were faced with a new reality. It turned out that the results obtained by several generations of botanists and zoologists and accumulated in abundant and extended zoological museums and herbaria are obviously incomplete. The chief drawback of these collections is that they involve specimens of formerly alive plants and animals, which were fixed and dried in one way or another. It is paradoxical but we know well how the “dead” nature appears and do not know the morphology, that is, the structure of living matter.

The advent of digital cameras and scanners opened the biologists a way to the creation of images of living nature in the form of electronic and virtual collections and museums of living plants and animals.

One of the current projects is the Pushchino virtual biological museum, which is a part of the Pushchino computer cluster. A distinguishing feature of museum is that its collection involves what is called “flat” objects, i. e., those biological objects whose morphology can be represented with the greatest possible completeness as a two-dimensional projection. Among these are plant leaves, wings of butterflies and dragon-flies, flatworms planarians, and some other zoological taxons.

Any user of the Internet can enter the museum server and copy, with the wanted quality, electronic images of plants and animals. The storage of images is accomplished by a three-level system: in the form of “light” and “middle-weight” *jpg-files by direct access at the museum site and in the form of “heavy” *tiff-files, which are available either on compact disks on special request or are transmitted per Internet. Images of plant leaves are created using plotting board scanners at a resolution of 600 dpi, and images of butterflies and planarians, by scanning the color slides at a resolution of 2820 dpi. For permanent storage, the primary information is recorded on tapes. An additional way of storing the information is the storage of original images on slides.

For each group of objects, it is suggested to form a team of experts, which would elaborate internal standards for file creation. After the elaboration of these standards and allocation of the information at the museum site, any user of the Internet can participate in the replenishment of the museum collection by sending his own images on compact disks or per e-mail. Such an organization of the museum makes it possible to radically expand the geography of regions where the primary information is collected and increase the number of persons involved in collecting the materials.

As a result, it becomes possible to pose a limiting (optimal) problem, for example, the storage of very great numbers of images of one and the same species from different regions. Thus, a project is being currently in progress within which a collection of leaves of three tree species (lime-tree, oak, and maple) from the South of the Moscow region is created. Fifty images of leaves from ten trees in different places of the Moscow region have been stored. Never before could the task of such complexity be posed and solved. The collection of lime-tree leaves from four places of the Moscow and Tula regions occupies more than 100 Gb of disk space. Of fundamental importance is that the images can be analyzed using various image analysis systems, and their precise quantitative characteristics can be obtained. Thus, owing to information technologies, botany and zoology change from descriptive to exact sciences and form the main part of the novel science, computer biology. Simultaneously, the color of the object returns to biology: the exact color of the object can be easily recorded by modern scanners. The Linney’s scale of biological values has been replenished by one more informationally important property.

Another distinguishing feature of virtual biological museum is that the creation of images of living objects is a remote process (“watch-no-touch” principle), which is of particular importance in the work with animals: they are neither injuried nor killed. This is a fundamental difference between a virtual exhibit and a real stuffed animal. Interestingly, we involuntarily appear in the channel of the original idea of Goethe since we “merely” look at the object and do not take its life for our egoistic considerations.

Of special note is that we not only comply with the ethic norms of the attitude to the living but we also obtain more qualitative and exact knowledge about the object. Therein lies the paradoxical pragmatism of computer biology: the quest for the highest degree of quality of images leads to a careful treatment of the object. Thus, bioethics goes from the category of desired to the category of necessary disciplines, i. e., becomes a practical, ordinary, and natural affair.

Conceivably, the most intriguing consequence of the development of information technologies in the field of image creation and analysis is the discovery of new ways of studying the nature of human creative activity, on the one hand, and the biological bases of cognitive mechanisms of brain function, on the other.

A modern painter creates images using the same devices a scientist uses in studies of the surrounding natural objects. Today it became possible to determine, for instance, what features of biological objects the human eye distinguishes during their analysis. Natural and artificial images are next to one another in the computer disk space, which creates a radically new medium for these studies.

Here we again find ourselves in the circle of Goethe’s ideas: his principle “from the standpoint of the plant” becomes apparent. The scientific ethics of distant relations approaches the ethics of the artist, who has to “penetrate” into the inner world of his model, the object, to reincarnate sometimes into it, and perceive the world from “its viewpoint”. For Goethe, as an artist and researcher, the reincarnation from one state to another was a quite natural affair.

It is noteworthy that Goethe’s ideas coincide almost textually with the “ethics of sympathy” of the known paleobotanist S. V. Meyen. He wrote that, during discussions, one has to “feel” deeply the logic of the opponent but not to merge entirely with it in order not to loose the ability to analyze and appreciate it. For a scientist it is important to recognize the logic of the intuition of his opponent; an artist makes the same unconsciously but not less effectively. Here we see a moment of synthesis of the “viewpoints” of science and art.

For example, owing to information technologies, it became possible to simulate concrete experimental situations that can help in understanding the human cognitive apparatus. One such approach is a comparative analysis of electronic images of natural objects and the images made immediately by painters. For this purpose it is suggested in the framework of virtual museum to create, along with ordinary scans, electronic images of drawings of leaves being examined.


The study was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project no. 01-07-97059-p2001 “podmoskovie”) and the Federal Purpose-directed Program “Integratsiya” (project no. B0018).
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