April 2002  

0.0       Introduction

0.1        In this paper, I outline concepts and connexions between three distinct disciplines of human thought – biology, economics and epistemology (the study of knowledge). They are, however, for purposes of this and two subsequent companion papers, but single cells of three vast ‘knowledge domains’ outlined below.  

0.02      Collectively, these three will serve as a vehicle to explore the meaning and implications of a ‘knowledge-based’ economy (OECD 1996), and more generally, a knowledge-based society.  To provide focus definitions are in order:

a) Biology: specifically, its engineering offshoot - biotechnology;

b) Economics: specifically, seven American Economic Association sub-disciplines:

 B - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology;

 H - Public Economics;

 K - Law and Economics;

 L - Industrial Organization;

 O - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth;

 Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; and,

 Z - Other Special Topics – specifically, Z100 Cultural Economics; and,

c) Epistemology: specifically the study of knowledge as organized, systematized and retrievable information.  This is the etymological meaning of science derived from the Latin scientia from scindere ‘to split’ or ‘to know’ then compounded with the Latin suffix entia forming nouns of quality (a word in turn derived from the Latin for ‘kind’), i.e., to split into types or taxonomies.  Technology, on the other hand (conventionally associated with the application of knowledge for fun, profit or military purpose), derives from the Greek techne for art, and logos for reason, i.e. reasoned art.  Similarly, the intellectual device used to split types is ‘concept’, derived from the Latin meaning to grasp firmly with the hands [of the mind].

Index

1.0              Biology

1.1               Biology is one of the three primary natural sciences including: biology, chemistry and physics.  It shares with its sisters a fundamental reliance on the ‘experimental method’ to generate knowledge, more specifically, to disprove hypotheses about the ‘natural world’.  Unlike its sisters, however, biology concerns ‘living things’, some of whom are human beings.  At this juncture, the experimental method, in recognition of ‘human rights’ and the Hippocratic Oath, fades away as an ethically and legally acceptable methodology.  In addition to such rights, human life also exhibits unique biological characteristics as homo sapiens, i.e., it is conscious of itself and it transfers ‘extrasomatic’ knowledge (Sagan 1977) – words, numbers and pictures - to subsequent generations; and, finally, it is the dominant life form on the planet.

1.2               Living things have been ‘scientifically’ classified, beginning with Carl Linnaeus (1707 -1778), into a complex taxonomy headed, at present, by six (or seven) kingdoms: animal, vegetable, fungi, bacteria, protoctists or protists (slime molds, algae, amoebas, and seaweed), and most recently, archea (archaic anaerobic bacteria-like organism).  Virus’ are not counted ‘living’ things at present.  Reductively, the biological taxonomy runs: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species - individual. 

1.3               Living things display characteristics distinct and different from members of the seventh ‘kingdom of minerals’, the taxonomic title given by biologists to the subject matter of physics and chemistry reflected in a shared ‘Periodic Table of Elements’.  Living things display seven distinctive characteristics:

a) they are organized into cells (without or without nuclei) composed of heterogeneous chemicals separated one from the other and from the ‘environment’ by a semi-permeable osmotic membrane;

b) they are fueled by an internal metabolism involving chemical and energy transformations;

c) they exhibit homeostasis, i.e. they maintain internal conditions separated from an outside environment;

d) they grow purposively converting environmental materials into themselves, reacting to and selecting external stimuli;

f) they reproduce transferring sections of DNA for the organization and metabolism of a new generation; and,

g) they evolve through the changing individual caused by mutation and natural selection in response to a stressful environment.  Unless interrupted by catastrophe, life tends towards ever more complicated structures, i.e., from single cell to cooperative or symbiotic cells to multi-cellular organisms to animals with multiple organs and, ultimately, to a self-conscious organism bent on breaking the Third Law of Thermodynamics: entropy: i.e., all structures breakdown into randomness.

1.4               Biological knowledge when applied in the ‘real world’ becomes technology.  The most dramatic demonstration to date of the ‘reasoned art’ of biotechnology was the so-called Agriculture Revolution of six thousand years ago that provided the human organism with a surplus of food sufficient to lay the foundation of ‘civilization’, i.e. living in cities.  In this sense, biotechnology is as old as history: i.e., plants and animals have been selectively bred and microorganisms used to make, for example, beverages (wine and beer) and foodstuffs such as, cheese and bread throughout history, i.e. the written record of humanity.

1.5               The actual term ‘biotechnology’ was coined in 1919 by an Hungarian engineer, Karl Ereky,  who meant all the lines of work by which products are produced from raw materials with the aid of living organisms, e.g., fermentation processes that produce acetone from starch and paint solvents.  Ereky envisioned a biochemical age similar to the stone and iron ages. (Murphy and Perella, 1993)

1.6               Biotechnology generates benefits through enhanced production and quality of foods, fibers, materials and medicines.  Using the newly acquired tools of molecular biology it can, for example, produce enhanced materials such as spider silk produced by goats (Noble 2002); it offers new possibilities for information processing, e.g., the DNA computer (Reaney 2001).  Contemporary biotech has been erected on a foundation laid down by advances in electronic information processing technology, i.e. based on innovations in sub-atomic physics (transistors) leading to the integrated circuit and hence to the modern computer.

1.7               Modern biotechnology commands seven classes of tools (Biotech Education Program 1994):

(a) Fermentation: using microbes to convert a substance such as starch or sugar into other compounds such as carbon dioxide and ethanol;

(b) Selection and Breeding: manipulating microbes, plants or animals, and choosing desirable individuals or populations as breeding stock for new generations;

(c) Genetic Analysis: studying how traits and genes for traits are passed from generation to generation and how genes and the environment interact to result in specific traits;

(d) Tissue Culture: growing plant or animal tissues or cells in test tubes or other laboratory glassware for propagation, chemical production and/or medical research;  

(e) Genetic Engineering/Recombinant DNA (rDNA): transferring a DNA segment from one organism and inserting it into the DNA of another.  The two may be totally unrelated – spiders and goats; and,

(f) DNA Analysis: including polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to make copies of a DNA segment and RFLP mapping (restriction fragment length polymorphism) to detect patterns in DNA that may indicate the presence of a trait gene.  Both PCR and RFLP analysis are used in "DNA fingerprinting" for genealogical studies and forensics.  ‘Junk genes’, i.e. genes for which no trait can currently be attributed are problematic: how does one test for a trait not expressed and that may never have been expressed, and if expressed may doom an organism?

Index

2.0       Economics

2.1        Economics can be defined as the study of the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy an evolving and expanding spectrum of human wants, needs and desires. Economics began as a ‘moral science’, emerging from medieval or ‘scholastic’, and then ‘humanistic’, philosophy, to become the first of the ‘social sciences’.  As a discipline of thought, economics, conventionally breaks down into micro-economics, i.e. the study of individual economic agents like consumers, firms and markets; and, macro-economics, i.e., the study of the (national) economy as a whole and its aggregate parts such as national income, consumption, investment and government spending as well as international trade. 

2.2        The taxonomical organization of information at the micro-economic level is dominated by other disciplines, e.g. business accounting (a product of the so-called Commercial Revolution of the 15^th and 16^th centuries C.E.) and survey research (the product of the 20^th century) as well as government tax and survey data that stretches back beyond the Doomsday Book of William I (The Conqueror) of England in 1066 C.E.  Economists generally have to re-process the resulting evidence of these disciplines (quantitative and qualitative) to test theoretical models concerning the behaviour of consumers, firms and markets.  Economics has not developed its own data collection system at the micro-level.       

2.3        The taxonomical organization of information at the macro-economic level, however, is dominated by the System of National Accounts (SNA) designed by economists and implemented after the Second World War.  The SNA serves to inform macro-economic policy and decision at the political and economic levels of the Nation-State.  To the degree evidence generated by the SNA is produced by ‘public servants’ its veracity is subject to bias similar to all sources of ‘human intelligence’.

2.4        Between micro- and macro-economics, however, lays an ill-defined taxonomic territory sometimes called meso-economics.  Here may be found most economics specialties distinguished from conventional micro- and macro-economics by the recognized peculiarities of their economic agents and/or of their macro-economic aggregates.

2.5        With respect to the seven economic sub-disciplines to be used in this, and two companion articles, peculiarities, or relevance for this paper, include:

 B - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology: e.g., concerns the changing face of the ‘orthodoxy’ in economics.  Thus once upon a time the dominant school was the Physiocrats who believed the wealth of nations depended on the ‘economic surplus’ of agriculture.  It was replaced by Classical Economics that focused on manufacturing and the division and specialization of labour characteristic of the ‘Industrial Revolution’;

H - Public Economics: concerns government usually operating outside the market system with its monopoly of coercive force.  Agents include voters, politicians and bureaucrats who have motivations and objectives different from market players, e.g. pro- or anti-GM (genetically modified) foodstuffs;

 K - Law and Economics: e.g. concerns laws of Nation-States that define economic ‘property’, how it may and may not be sold (civil and criminal law) subject to the coercive powers of the State.  Laws (and regulations) also serve to establish many transaction costs (costs of doing business) as well as intellectual property rights like patents that serve as the legal foundation for the industrial organization of biotechnology;

 L - Industrial Organization: concerns the use and application of micro- and macro-economic tools and techniques in the study of aggregates called ‘industries’ or ‘sectors’ of the economy including the so-called ‘biotechnology sector’;

 O - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth: concerns growing and developing national, regional and local economies.  A critical factor is technological change.  Technological change is generally recognized as emerging from new knowledge flowing from discovery or invention that leads to innovation and marketing.  Much debate in economics surrounds whether technological change is exogenous or endogenous to the economic system.  Recently, purposively built national innovation systems have arisen in many countries to facilitate the 'innovative process’ (OECD 1997);

 Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics: specifically Agricultural Economics concerns production and consumption processes distinctly different from Neo-Classical diminishing marginal returns and its related ‘industrial’ system; and,

 Z - Other Special Topics – specifically, Z100 Cultural Economics; concerns differing patterns of economic behaviour reflecting differences in culture, e.g. language, religion and law that according to some define the battlefield of the post-Cold War era (Huntington 1993).  The ‘institutionalization’ of knowledge accordingly varies significantly between Nation-States.

2.06            In the last generation there has been a revival of an old school of economic thought (in fact the dominant orthodoxy in American economics until the 1930s) known as the “New Institutionalism”.  As in the ‘old’, an institution is a routinized pattern of human behaviour designed, consciously or unconsciously (cum Hayek 1937), to reduce human decision costs including transaction costs in buy/sell relationships, i.e. the ‘price system’.  The work of J.R. Commons, e.g., The Legal Foundations of Capitalism highlighted the importance of law in defining economic property and markets evolving from such definition (Commons 1924) and in Institutional Economics he established the concept of transactions including enforcement costs (Commons 1934).  R.H. Coase identified transaction costs as critical in determining whether an economic activity is carried on inside, or outside, the firm (Coase 1937; 1998).  A.D. Chandler and D.C. North stressed the impact of institutions on the attainment of economic growth and development (Chandler 1973; Davis and North 1971; North 1991, 1994).  Harvey Liebenstein contributed with his discovery of “X-Efficiency” i.e., consumption in the act of production usually through informal ‘office institutions’, e.g. how many are too many coffee breaks before the bottom line suffers and how many are too few? (Liebenstein 1966, 1978, 1992)  The ‘organic’ relationship between the New Institutionalism and the recently emerged Evolutionary Economics (the Journal of Evolutionary Economics was founded in 1997) will be explored in the third paper in this series: Preferred and Probable Futures.

2.07            With respect to technological change, two antinomies play a critical role in thinking about new knowledge.  These are: exogenous/endogenous; and, embodied/disembodied.  Exogenous technological change arises outside of the economic system, e.g. outside the firm or industry and inside some other institutions like a university or through independent discovery or invention by an individual ‘outside’ the marketplace.  By contrast, endogenous technological change arises inside the economic system, e.g., through corporate R&D efforts.  Embodied technological change refers to specific products or processes that embody new, very specific knowledge, e.g. the transistor in the transistor radio.  Disembodied, on the other hand, refers to technological change that is generic and pervasive in nature, e.g. general improvement or progress in communication, transportation or information processing.   

 Index

3.0       Epistemology

3.01      Traditionally, epistemology has identified three units of knowing: quantity (primary), quality (secondary) and values (tertiary) (Griffen 1991: 4).  Knowledge thus extends above and beyond the foundational ‘quantitative’ results of the experimental, value-free natural & engineering sciences (NES).  Another whole domain of knowledge is inherently ‘value laden’ and generated by the essentially ‘non-experimental methods’ of the humanities & the social sciences (HSS).  Yet another domain embraces the world of ‘appearances’, of qualities: of colour and shade, of form and shape, of taste and touch, of sight and sound - the Arts.  Relationships between knowledge domains is organic and osmotic rather than mechanical (e.g. Fig. 1: Genetic Epistemics).  And, in the ‘humanist’ tradition, ultimately only the individual human being can ‘know’ such things.  Everything else is storage of extrasomatic knowledge, it is not ‘knowing’ and has, without competent human intervention, no meaningfulness other than as an indecipherable artifact.

3.03      Each Nation-State institutionalizes knowledge, e.g. universities, libraries, laboratories, etc., in keeping with its own distinct history and traditions.  In fact, each country ‘institutionally’ structures knowledge using its own distinct “national” epistemology.  There are therefore different and distinct cultural epistemologies reflecting different rankings for given domains, e.g. the Islamic Republic of Iran, as an official theocracy, places religious values ahead of ‘scientific’ ones.   Actual prioritization - "putting your money where your mouth is" - is reflected by the amount of public monies devoted to any given knowledge domain, its disciplines and sub-disciplines and its ‘preferred’ methodologies and techniques.

3.04      For our purpose, the Canadian institutional taxonomy serves as a case in point.  Canada, as a knowledge-based geography, has three mountain peaks:

the natural & engineering sciences (NSE: the Natural & Engineering Research Council of Canada),

the humanities & social sciences (HSS: the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada); and,

the Arts (the Canada Council for the Arts). 

3.05      Two questions, among others, need to be answered concerning the specific Canadian pattern.  First, where is the Medical Research Council of Canada (MRC)?  And, second, why do the humanities come first?  With respect to the MRC, it has, in effect, feet firmly planted in two domains NES & HSS.  This is reflected by the Hypocratic Oath and the limitations on medical experimentation with human beings.  Given ‘art therapies’ plays an increasingly important role in medical intervention, one can argue that the MRC is connected to all three primary knowledge domains.  With respect to the humanities, historically it was from the humanities that the social sciences emerged.  Furthermore, placing the humanities first highlights the inherently ‘value laden’ phenomenology of the HSS knowledge domain.

Index

4.0       Connexions

4.01      Four sets of high-level connexions will be drawn in this introductory article:

·         biology/economics;

·         biology/epistemology;

·         economics/epistemology; and,

·         biology/economics/epistemology.

i)  Biology/Economics

4.03      In the case of biotechnology, especially rDNA techniques, ‘non-conventional’ production processes dominate, at least at present.  Once a line of organisms is established, e.g. goats genetically modified to produce spider silk or human growth hormones, the line becomes self-perpetuating and, by definition, breeds true creating a near endless output for the price of feed grain and/or pasture land.  The factories literally reproduce themselves.  The biotech invention process is currently dominated by university-based scientists and researchers who either create firms in conjunction with their host institutions or leave to ‘start-up’ a biotech firm (Zucker, L.G. et al 1998).  In either case commercial viability depends on recognition and protection of intellectual property rights, especially patents.  The issue of intellectual property rights will be explored in the next paper in this series: Part II – Industrial Organization.

4.04      In many ways, however, invention of a new rDNA ‘factory organism’ is but the first step towards an economically viable product.  The output of such new organisms must be collected, purified and processed then ‘mass produced’.  It is at this stage that more conventional scaleable ‘industrial’ processes as well as financing re-enters the picture.  Nonetheless, the economics of organic production are significantly different from secondary manufacturing industries as well as primary ‘extractive’ industries such as mining, natural gas and oil production.

4.05      Given the range of potential outputs from (e.g. foods, medicines, materials, information processing technologies) as well as the unique production methods of biotechnology, e.g. rDNA, the stage is set for a change in the nature of the economy. In this regard, venture capital serves as a proxy for the emerging importance of biotechnology.  According to the tracking service VentureReporter.net, biotech ranked third among tech sectors - behind software and network infrastructure, and ahead of wireless, optical, broadband and semiconductors - in venture funds raised in the fourth quarter of 2001 during which time biotech start-ups reaped $US 613-million (Reuter, “Biotech reaps VC cash”, January 16, 2002.).  The future of biotechnology and its impact on the economy will be the subject of the third paper in this series: Part III – Preferred and Probable Futures.

ii) Biology/Epistemology

4.06          Science, in its original sense, involves splitting kinds of things into organized taxonomies.  Such taxonomies can be either a ‘hard-and-fast’ type, i.e. either it is A or not A, or they can be relatively ‘soft-and-easy’, e.g., applying the fuzzy logic of yes-no-maybe.  Since the time of Newton and the dominance of physics ‘hard-and-fast’ taxonomies have dominated.  Biology, however, has always tended to a more ‘soft-and-easy’ approach (at least until DNA testing became available).  At one sub-disciplinarian extreme, in complex or depth psychology, the phenomenological need to treat a unique human individual has resulted in a reasoned assessment of appropriate taxonomical methodologies in Egalitarian Topologies versus the Perception of the Unique by James Hillman (Hillman, 1980).  Phenomenologically, biological forms are characterized by: adaptation, change, mutation and evolution; osmotic processes through semi-permeable membranes; and, symbiosis, i.e., the living together in more or less intimate association or close union of two dissimilar organisms.  Assuming the future ascendance of biotechnology, it is likely that the metaphors and ‘tolerances’ of biology will increasingly affect epistemological analysis.

 Index

iii) Economics/Epistemology

4.07            Economics made a choice early in its history to adopt a mechanistic, physics-based model of the economy as a machine.  Differential calculus, the gift of Isaac Newton, to the world of ‘astral mechanics’ or astronomy was picked up by economics as the leitmotiv of economic behaviour, e.g. constrained maximization of consumer utility and firm profit.  It is interesting to note that Newton apparently considered his ‘differential engine of analysis’ to be of secondary importance to his work in alchemy, and that, similarly, Goethe did, in fact, considered his plays and poems of secondary importance to his Theory of Colours, a powerfully reasoned artistic response to Netwon’s physics of colour – the spectrum (Goethe 1810).  Neither knew of the vast horizons, on either side of the visible spectrum, that have become new event horizons for human thought. 

4.08            Through time there have been various attempts at biological modeling economics (Boulding 1953; Eaton 1984; Ghisekin 1978; Ginsberg 1931; Penrose 1952). None, to date, has taken root.  Today, however, the New Institutionalism and Evolutionary Economics are probing the organic tolerance of orthodoxy.  Results will be assessed in the third paper in this series: Part III – Preferred and Probable Futures.

4.09            Finally, for economics epistemology is a tool, an instrument.  It has utilitarian value, e.g., to make a profit (or increase the wealth of nations).  Thus the OECD’s use of terms such as: know-what, know-why, know-who as well as codified vs. tacit, represents forms of ‘instrumental knowledge’ (OECD 1996).  Similarly, national innovation systems are utilitarian institutions not necessarily concerned with ‘higher’ or the ethotic use of knowledge. If knowledge is organized, systematized and retrievable information then understanding is the ability to grasp the meaning and implications of the resulting knowledge.  And then there is wisdom, one flight above, resulting from the sufficient accumulation of philosophic or scientific knowledge to discern inner qualities and relationships, to have insight, and, to exercise good sense and judgement. 

iv) Biology/Economics/Epistemology

4.10      One of the great insights provided by biology is that there is but one biosphere shared by all humanity.  Given that Economics, Ecology and Ekistics share the same Greek root and refer, respectively, to: management of the house; activities taking place in and around the house; and, human settlement, then a reasonable epistemological conclusion would be the emergence of a global- as opposed to a macro-(national)-economics for planetary management; the care and cultivation of its environment and the organically-sound settlement of its limited acreage (as well as reaching out to settlement resources beyond the semi-permeable membrane of Earth’s atmosphere).

4.11      Biotechnology stands on the shoulders of physics-based ‘High Tech’.  It promises new complements to, and substitutes for, High Tech silicon-based ‘dryware’ in the form of carbon-based “wetware”.  The transgenetic recombination of knowledge from high-tech physics and wetware biotech is already taking place.  Its implications for the economy and epistemology will be explored in the third paper in this series: Part III – Preferred and Probable Futures.

 Index

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Index

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