It gives me a great deal of pleasure to introduce our wrap-up speaker today. He is last because his name starts with S, which is the farthest along in the alphabet in this particular group of people. James Shapiro, a professor of microbiology at the University of Chicago, where he has a distinguished career, and a former Marshall Scholar. James.

James Shapiro: Thank you. I actually heard that same story, but the punch line was that God doesn't think he's Professor X.

Anyway, I'd like to switch disciplines now and give you a biological perspective on what I think is the important intellectual and scholarly content of the information revolution. I believe this is a time very much like the Renaissance, when there are deep changes in technology, deep changes in social arrangements, and there are deep changes in our basic assumptions of thinking about nature and our place in it. The Internet serves, in my view, as a powerful conceptual model. It really marks the end of Cartesian domination over our thinking and our intellectual activities.

Connectionist thinking, as we've heard exemplified in a number of ways, is replacing reductionist thinking, and that may actually have contributed to some of the difficulties of the high-energy physics projects. I agree with Michael Gibbons that the focus is increasingly on complex systems and not on the basic building blocks of nature. In biology we see this because we're continually being surprised by repeatedly coming across the same components. Our previous theories had led us to expect that each functional system in biology would be quite different and distinct from every other system. What we're learning, in fact, from molecular biology and molecular genetics is that the parts of many distinct functional systems are actually the same. To be specific, G proteins, protein kinases and other information-processing molecules are common to many cellular systems What distinguishes one system from another is not so much the nature of the parts but how the parts are organized logically into control networks. This is not an absolute statement, but it reflects one of the major trends in contemporary biology, and this trend fits very much with the intellectual change toward connectionism.

The Internet and computer systems can provide valuable examples to us for detailed study. We can learn a great deal about natural systems from paying attention to how they behave. For example, as has been mentioned, one of the major scientific questions today is how do distributed information processing systems work? This has become a key focus in cell biology. John Holland and I organized a workshop last October at the Santa Fe Institute entitled, "Cellular Computation and Decision-Making," looking at cells as computing entities. How computing systems work provides a very fundamental basis for understanding cellular activity.

We also need to look at how computers and networks evolve. What new hypotheses about the evolutionary process, which after all underlies all of biology, can we formulate? In the information world there are survivals and extinctions. We read about these more on the front page and the economics page than on the science page, but these are in fact evolutionary processes occurring in real time We can see in computer systems the appearance and interaction of distinct genera - for example, the PC, the Macintosh, and the Unix machines are distinct genera. And there are even distinct species, so within the PC genus we have IBM and Dell and Compaq and Hewlett-Packard and so forth. On the network, we see viruses appearing, and we also see defensive immune systems evolving to recognize and neutralize or eliminate these viruses. Studying these processes may in fact tell us a lot about how biological systems have evolved. The newest Internet development, of course, is the introduction of autonomous agents, such as applets and cookies. It will be very interesting to see what happens to these as they circulate around. Do they become parasites? Do they become new organisms? Do they create problems or open up opportunities, and do they lead to further diversification?

These are just a few of the questions in biological sciences. The topic that we've chosen for the symposium provides us with some of our basic metaphors for how we understand nature and will influence our basic assumptions about how the universe and life are organized. We are beginning to see that it's as important (and perhaps more important) to understand the logical and informational organization of objects in nature as it is to know their fundamental, irreducible, substantive components. I think that means that we have some pretty exciting times ahead in scholarship, however it may be organized. Thank you.