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Linking gene expression to artistic movements, Enrico Coen’s Cells to Civilizations argues that these processes follow a common set of rules

ORGANISMS grow, populations evolve, individuals learn and societies change: four levels of biological transformations, each following its own distinctive mechanisms. In Cells to Civilizations, Enrico Coen puts forward the thesis that these disparate processes follow a common set of rules.

Coen, a plant molecular geneticist, helped discover the genes that direct the shape of a flower. He sifted through thousands of snapdragon plants to find transposons – short DNA sequences that can splice copies of themselves elsewhere in the genome and can cause gene expression to go awry. In Cells to Civilizations, he couples his knowledge of genetics with metaphor and art, likening the unfurling of mutant snapdragon flowers to an artist’s brushstrokes on an expanding canvas. He also used this approach in his 1999 book The Art of Genes. Now he extends it across a broader swathe of biology.

He uses George Stubbs’s 1763 portrait of a zebra to illustrate a discussion about how embryonic timing governs stripe sizes, and shows that a similar pattern-making process is important in the presence of zebra-style bands in the primate visual cortex.

The book is packed with fascinating facts. Gradients of gene expression can resolve into sharp physical differences, just as action potentials – the signals by which neurons communicate – can give rise to all-or-nothing impulses. The helmets of medieval knights form an evolutionary tree almost as detailed as that of any family of mammals.

Coen’s thesis isn’t new. He illustrates many commonalities between cultural evolution and biological evolution, between somatic development and learning. Each involves feedbacks from the environment, maintenance of homeostasis, and the transfer and storage of information. But he omits the long history of information theory and cybernetics in biology, which was introduced shortly after French physiologist Jacques Monod began to uncover the basis of gene regulation. Information transfer, environmental feedbacks and homeostasis, illustrated in different levels of biological systems, are now taught in secondary schools.

That said, human cultures and minds are among the most complex information systems in nature, and Coen does a good job of reminding us of their roots in evolution. Linking masterpieces to genetic mutations may not be intuitive, but the history of art has built on feedbacks and context just the same.