The Metropolis Organism III - growth of Baltimore from 1792 to 1992

Metropolis Organism growth - Las Vegas 1983 to 2007

The Metropolis Organism - film - 1974

The Metropolis Organism, B&W film made in 1974. It looks at earth and cities from the perspective of a distant interstellar scientist. The narrator is a conceptual professor lecturing his class on the discovery of a new organism: The Metropolis Organism.

The Limits of Science

Some people think that science tells them that there is no God. In thinking so, they make a fundamental mistake.

In order to understand what is meant by claiming that a city is an organism, in order to make sense of the conflict between evolution and religion or humanism or whatever, in order to alleviate the anxiety between truths of science and their apparent impingement into humanistic values (if not alleviate it, at least to understand it) one must understand something about the essential nature of science and its relevance to what I will call, for lack of a more defining term, the humanistic.

 

We expect a lot from science and we get a lot from it. However, there is something we expect from science that it cannot give us. Because science is such a powerful diviner of truth we, and I am talking about almost all of us including great scientists, make a fundamental mistake and think that science can make contributions to the humanistic - to philosophy, religion, spirituality - in short to human values.

 

For example, some people think that science tells them that there is no God. In thinking so, they make a fundamental mistake. (I am not making an argument about whether or not there is a God, but whether science has anything to offer in the debate.) The logic is: if science does such a powerful job explaining phenomenon and existence, and if science cannot see God, then God does not exist. The problem with this reasoning is that science by its very nature cannot see God. As I will show later, science, by its very nature, has nothing to say about human values, spirituality, in short, the humanistic. Just as a blind person has nothing to say about the color red and is insensible to its existence, science is insensible to the humanistic.

 

Ernest Nagel, a leading American philosopher of science and University Professor Emeritus at Columbia, wrote that theoretical science, “…requires that inquiry be directed at the relations of dependence between things irrespective of their bearing upon human values.” (The Structure of Science)

 

Peter Medawar, a British physician, Nobel Laureate in medicine and writer in the philosophy of science, eloquently and lucidly demonstrates the limitations of science in his book, “The Limits of Science.” Medawar defines a category of questions. He calls them the ultimate questions, questions about first and last things, questions like how did the world begin? How did we get here? What is the purpose of life? He says that, “The ultimate questions are beyond the explanatory competence of science.” (Medawar, pg. xiii) And then he goes on to show that even though “… there is no limit upon the ability of science to answer the kind of questions that science can answer” … “it is logically outside the competence of science to answer questions to do with first and last things.” (Medawar, pg 86)

 

Karl Popper, one of the most revered philosophers of science, wrote on the same topic. “It is important to realize that science does not make assertions about ultimate questions – about the riddles of existence, or about man’s task in this world. This has often been well understood. But some great scientists, and many lesser ones, have misunderstood the situation.” Karl Popper, Dialectica 32:342

 

So it is pointless to look to science for answers to ultimate questions.  Arguments about ultimate questions that invoke science are misguided. To use science in an argument about God is like using a thermometer to detect sound.

 

It is from the perspective of science that I say a city is an organism. This scientific, objective, deterministic perspective has zero implications about what it is to be human. The humanistic is an entirely different realm.

 

 

 

Chapter I

The Perspective of Science

A city is an organism, a living, breathing biological organism.

This is different than saying that a city is like organism. Great writers like William Cronin in the classic Nature’s Metropolis, and others such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Anne Spirn and Aldo Leopold have put forward the image of a city as an organism. Theirs is an environmental concern. They are saying that like any organism, a city must be taken care of to keep it healthy. Their perspective is in the domain of human control, of human will.

In contrast, there are scientific perspectives outside the domain of human will. For example, the Theory of Evolution is about something that happens to us, something over which we have no control.  It is from this kind of perspective that I am going to look at cities. It is from the perspective of theoretical science. Philosopher of science Ernest Nagle characterizes theoretical science as requiring “… that inquiry be directed at the relations of dependence between things irrespective of their bearing upon human values." pg 10.

We think of the creating and managing of cities as a human enterprise. From the human perspective, that is true. However, from the perspective of science, that is not true. From the perspective of science humans are necessary but unremarkable organelle of what I call the Metropolis Organism.

That these two apparently contradictory perspectives co-exist is not the subject of this book. However, it is clear that they do, and here I will focus exclusively on cities from the perspective of science.

In the next chapter I am going to describe how I came to this perspective. Thereafter I am going to appeal to biological logic to demonstrate the scientific validity of this point of view, as well as roll it in my hand like a cut stone to reveal its facets.