Nobuaki Kono: The Match-and-Pump Romanticism of Biology

"The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse" — this is one of Aesop's fables translated by Yukichi Fukuzawa in the Junior Book of Ethics with Many Tales from Western Lands. The glamorous world and the simple world are always adjacent to different truths.

The glamorous progress of artificial intelligence continues to easily overtake our imagination. From the creation of text and video to acting as a sounding board for research, processes that were once personal and human activities are easily being replaced by generative AI. Even videos pass the Turing test as long as they lack a watermark.

And now, the targets of generative AI are not limited to "natural language" but are stepping into the "genome," the blueprint of life. Evo, which can process significantly more tokens than ChatGPT, can write a genome as if writing a book. About 20 years after the Human Genome Project, where the whole world desperately challenged itself to read it, AI has stood alongside "evolution," which was once the sole genome author.

For us biologists, it is only when we can one day create life that we will feel we truly understand it. Such a desire existed. Life has existed naturally since prehistoric times, and we believed that its design principles lay within evolution, the creator. However, now the blueprint of life is also being written from semiconductors. Eventually, we may face the strange "match-and-pump" situation of unraveling the mysteries of both the artificial life we create and the unknown entities produced by AI.

On the other hand, simple nature offers surprises at a completely different tempo. An observation report quietly shook the world, revealing that a structure in a certain insect believed to be an auditory organ was actually a home for useful fungi and a defensive symbiotic organ to protect eggs. In an era where AI designs life, researchers holding magnifying glasses in the field draw out truths from the side of nature. In this disparity, I see the biology of the Romantic era that was born in opposition to mechanical philosophy.

And I recall the fable once again. The rational inference shown by AI and the simple discoveries that can only be noticed in nature. The act of continuing to go back and forth while repeating induction and deduction itself feels somewhat like a match-and-pump, and I feel a sense of "biology-ness" here. Neither mechanical philosophy leaning on efficiency nor Romanticism surrendered to sentimentality can reach it. We are lucky to be living in an era where we can truly feel the dawn of a new biology for the future.