Archive for April, 2002

Welcome

Tuesday, April 30th, 2002

A graduate of Harvard Medical School and Professor Emeritus of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Dr. N. Arthur Coulter is a synergic science pioneer. He began searching for a better way for humanity over 50 years ago. The Time-binding Trust is pleased to announce the availability of the new Revised Internet Edition of his classic: Human Synergetics. The following is from a new appendix added to that edition.


Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

- Goethe    


STARMAKER

N. Arthur Coulter, Jr., MD

To prevent nuclear war, it is necessary to abolish war itself.

To abolish war, a synergic cultural evolution is necessary.

The ability to function in the Synergic Mode is a key to such a change.

The purpose of the Synergetics program is to enable as many people as possible to function in the Synergic Mode as much as possible.

The Synergetics Program

To achieve this purpose, a 57 page Appendix called Stabilization Procedure was provided in my book, Synergetics (1976). While this works, it requires a sustained effort and is very time consuming.

Meanwhile, research continued and an alternative to Stabilization Procedure has been developed. Called Starmaker, it is much simpler, faster, and more reliable.

We began with the observation that a new mode of thinking called Tracking sometimes turned on the Synergic Mode. Tracking is defined as as Self-programmed thinking, with an Information Source orientation, for the purpose of producing Synergy and preventing Dysergy.

A large and growing number of different Tracking Sessions have been developed. In a typical session, the Tracker executes the following programs:

A goal is selected by a Consider, Evaluate, Define, Act Sequence (CEDA Sequence).

The Value or Values of achieving the Goal is estimated.

A Program for achieving the Goal is formulated.

The Program is usually incomplete and emerges in the process of executing the Program. This “engages” the mind and heart of the Tracker, and basically distinguishes Tracking from other procedures like executing a computer program.

The Tracking Session continues until the Tracker, by a CEDA, ends the Session. This is followed by a Session Review.

Experience in Tracking soon disclosed that Tracking is much more effective if the Tracker keeps a notebook, called the Tracker’s Log, in which he writes down ideas, describes images and feelings (emotions), and makes notes on other events that occur.

A single Tracking Session, carried out with”loving precision”, is usually very productive. But we soon learned that Tracking is far more effective when a series of Tracking Sessions—once a day or several times a week—are executed.

A long term process, called a macro-process, emerges. The Synergic Mode may turn on, and does so more and more frequently and with greater intensity.

We naturally predicted that if Tracking were done continuously, or almost continuously, the Tracker would, for all practical purposes, stabilize in the Synergic Mode—function in the Synergic Mode most of the time.

But this prediction was not borne out by experience. We observed that it is simply not feasible, in the world today, to Track in most situations we encounter. Talking with friends, performing a simple task, driving in traffic, etc. etc. make demands on our attention, interrupt the Tracking effort and dominate our minds and feelings, etc.

Something more is needed—simple programs which we can execute while carrying out the processes of everyday life.

Tracking on this problem, we observed that situations were sometimes encountered in which other synergetic programs could be used. Such programs produced synergy and prevented dysergy in the particular kind of situation being addressed, with little effort. Three such programs are:

Star Vision — a special way of looking and seeing, when the Tracker is observing a scene.

The Stardrive — multipurposed action in the synergic mode, when the Tracker is doing something, focused on action.

The Dysergy Converters — when dysergy is encountered, one of these converts the dysergy into a synergy producing process.

Let us now examine these special programs in turn.

Star Vision was inspired by lines from a play by George Bernard Shaw:

“You see things as they are, and ask, ‘Why’?

“I see things that never were, and ask ‘Why Not’?”

Seeing things as they are means observing with ruthless selfhonest, no matter how it hurts, overcoming the natural tendency to wishful thinking.

Seeing things as they might be means focussing on the tremendous synergic potential implicit in the scene, which can emerge by creating new and unique things.

Star Vision means doing both at the same time!

This is easier done than said. Everyone has the ability to look self-honestly, and we can do this for awhile. But everyone also has the ability to imagine, to create, and we can do this for awhile. Then, look both ways at once, without saying anything!

Star Vision is appropriate in situations where thinking is not needed, and in which purposive action is pointless. When these conditions are met, Star Vision may produce synergy and prevent dysergy. 

The Stardrive is the action analog of Star Vision. The Tracker heeds a call to action by creating a goal and pursuing it vigorously. This burst of action generates a second goal, and another, and another. Overdrive turns on! This is fun.

But the situation must be ripe for the Stardrive to work well. Marching like robots in close order drill, or listening passively to advertising and propaganda, induces a trance-like state which drags us down and holds us back. Efforts to start the Stardrive only stall the engine. Repeatedly.

These three basic programs—Tracking,Star Vision, and The Stardrive, provide a much greater domain of action. When Tracking is not feasible, The Stardrive may work surprisingly well. When The Stardrive stalls, Star Vision may produce remarkably clear vistas. But if Star Vision isn’t working, a Tracking Session may explain why. with experience, synergy between basic program and the situation tends more and more to emerge.

But even this may not be enough. We need more basic programs, and we find them, already described in my book: the Dysergy Converters.

There are potentially a very large number of these, and every Star may select his/her own set. I’ll consider these five:

Information Source

Mutation Source

Hidden Advantage

Unique Focus

Buckmaster

Information Source means to regard the situation or other focal point as an opportunity to learn something new, to view things in a different light, etc. The world is full of things we do not know, or think we know when actually we do not. Infosource leads us to some of these.

Mutation Source means to learn a new ability, like playing simple tunes on a piano, executing a computer program, or learning the rules of chess. We not only are informed; we change.
Hidden Advantage means that no matter how unpleasant or difficult a situation may appear to be, there may be one or more hidden advantages which are being overlooked.

Unique Focus means searching for what is new and different, or what is original but unrecognized. We frame the events that happen, the better to understand them, without realizing that the frame itself blocks parts of them from view.

Buckmaster means our current effort may be making matters worse, that a different approach might be tried. Butting one’s head repeatedly against a stone wall might be replaced by searching for a way around the wall.

These four basic programs – the Dysergy Converters, Star Vision, The Stardrive, and Tracking – provide us with a relatively comprehensive set of programs which cover a large range of behavior. Any one of these should produce synergy and/or prevent dysergy, when the context is ripe. My hope is that Stars who use them will function in the synergic mode most of the time. But this means trial by others.


Human Synergetics

 

Welcome

Monday, April 29th, 2002

What’s it all about? Alfie was the title of a popular song when I was young.

“What’s it all about?” is a question that modern science has not answered. Science’s reliance on the tool of reductionism has blinded it to the bigger picture.

Reductionism means to reduce the problem being studied down to its component‘parts’. Then by understanding the behavior of the ‘parts’, you can assemble an understanding of the behavior of the ‘whole’. Historically science has divided Natureinto ‘parts’ in order to study natural phenomena. Some of these ‘parts’—light, particles, atoms, molecules, plants, animals, and humans—form the focus for the classical sciences—optics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology.

Synergy is the associated behavior of ‘wholes’, not predicted by examination of the ‘parts’. So as Universe becomes more complex, reductionism fails to be as effective a strategy for understanding.

This morning Elisabet Sahtouris looks past the parts for the pattern of the whole. She begins to explain: What’s it all about.

From EarthDance. Last week, Elisabet Sahtouris explained The Big Brain Experiment—11 . Also see: From Possums to People—10,  From Polyps to Possums—9,  From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.


What the Play Is All About—12

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

Earlier we said that humans are the only species in the play of life that can think about and try to understand what the play is all about. Yet we are just now forming a scientific worldview in which we understand our world holistically — as a whole made of interconnected parts. We are just beginning to understand how we are related to all the other players in our planetary holarchy of holons; to understand that we are new players in Gaian creation — new players with the responsibility of exercising the freedom of choice our big brain gives us in ways that will keep the play going for all of us.

This idea of humans as part of one huge cosmic play, with freedom we must learn to use responsibly, is actually not new, but ancient. The Hindu Vedists and Chinese Taoists understood things this way, as did Homer and the first Greek poet to write plays surviving to the present — Aeschylus, who lived in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. The plays of Aeschylus are all about the role of humans in their social and natural world — all about the human task of making responsible choices within the situations and limits set by the world of human society within the larger natural cosmos.

In fact, this playwright’s layered cosmos can easily be seen as a natural order of holons in a holarchy. Aeschylus understood how each human choice in behavior affects not only the doer but the doer’s family, society, and the larger cosmos beyond humans. He saw that the extent of our free choice within the natural cosmos to which we belong is the most remarkable thing about us, and his plays are about the questions people must weigh in making their choices, the effort to understand the consequences their choices will have at all cosmic levels.

The ability to think about choice — to make images of our relationship to our world and imagine the consequences of the alternative choices we can make at each step through our world — is the biggest role of our unique kind of conscious mind. The ways in which we picture our world and our relationship to it — our stories of how things are — are our worldviews, and these have a great deal to do with the kinds of choices we make in the play of our lives.

To understand what human worldviews are and where they come from, let’s begin by considering how other species view their world. Whether it has eyes or not, every creature has some way of seeing its world — some way of getting information about itself and its surround. Without such information and the ability to act on it, no creature could function in its environment.

We have said that every creature is a holon within the larger holons on which it depends. To live, it must know, in some sense of that word, what supplies to take in from its environment and what to return to its environment. It must do what it can to protect itself from harm and to do whatever else will help it go on living. Even a microbe can tell whether it is in a plentiful environment or not, can tell what is harmful in its environment from what is not, can tell what is useful in its environment from what is not, and so on. Further, it must coordinate all this information to help itself survive. We can call that pattern of information it perceives its worldview — its map of reality.

The point is that some kind of environmental map, or worldview, is as necessary to the survival of any living creature as is its internal knowledge of how to run itself. In fact, as different creatures evolved, different worldviews evolved. The worldview of a microbe is clearly not the same as that of a marsh grass or a mongoose. Every living being has a worldview tailored to its own needs and experience. This is because each creature is a system capable of interacting with its environment through its unique ability to take in information and act on it.

No creature, even with a brain as sophisticated as ours, sees what is really out there in its world. Our eyes do not photograph a world independent of us. There is nothing remotely like a photographic mechanism in our eye-brain system, nor is there a world apart from that which we create moment by moment within our own consciousness.

Stop to consider this deeply for a moment. Have you ever had any experience outside your own consciousness? It simply is not possible — not for anyone, not even for a scientist. Now, have you ever had any direct experience outside of the present moment? You are not alone or strange, for neither has any scientist. This is very profound. All experience of the world is through consciousness in the present moment. Everything else is stories and images created by ourselves — including the image of linear time. Consider that you have a mental story of reading this book over a period of hours or days, but are always, always in the present moment. This is exactly what the Eastern philosophies meant — that the world is illusion. Now science begins telling us the same thing — that we create reality with our brains from moment to moment, as cosmic consciousness, which includes our individual consciousness, creates our brains from moment to moment. It shakes one up to think that deeply, for all humans across apparent linear time and cultures have made up stories of their reality. If there had been a reality really `out there’ apart from our perceptions and stories, you would think cultural `descriptions’ of reality would have been much more uniform. Instead, we find that every culture believes its own story and no one else’s — more on this shortly. It even means that the story of evolution is just that — our story of how things came to be, not some ultimate truth.

Why then are we talking about how evolution happens? Because it is not possible to be human, to exist in our perceived reality, without a coherent story of how things are. When we recognize that the story is all we really have, then we see that it is truly essential. What matters is to create a story that brings us meaning and fulfillment in the world we see as real. The most exciting trend in our world now is that the stories of scientists and philosophers and religious leaders are weaving themselves into one coherent story told from different viewpoints. If scientists understand an intelligent cosmic consciousness as the source of all creation, and creationists call that source God, our stories are not very different.

So, let us continue this story to see if it could bring us meaning, fulfillment and peace in the world we see as real.

Scientists tell us that inside our eyeballs, light does strike our retina in a way that reminds us of a photographic plate or film, and that the light pattern does produce a related pattern of nerve signals that travel to the brain. These nerve signals, however, are soon joined by a far greater number of other signals coming from inside the brain itself, combining the brain’s own information with the incoming information to produce our visual images. Not like a camera at all — rather, what we then see is this complex production of our brains.

The same thing happens when we look at a photograph. The reason the photograph resembles what we saw with our eyes when we took the picture is that our eye-brain system responds in the same way to the scene as it does to the photo that is a mechanical copy of its pattern of light.

Let’s look at how scientists tell us a frog sees its world. A frog lives mainly on insects it catches as they fly or swim or crawl by. Its eyes and brain and body are an automatic system that has evolved to see and catch bugs. Whenever a tiny dark speck moves across the piece of world the frog’s eyes are aimed at, it shoots out its long sticky tongue and pulls in the tiny dark thing. This system works very well in the frog’s natural environment, because tiny dark things moving about that way are almost always insects.

We can fool a frog into trying to eat tiny shadows that we move past it, or into actually eating buckshot pellets that we roll past it. The frog does not learn that the buckshot is inedible, but will keep eating it until he is too heavy to move. Its catch-moving-dark-specks system is built into its brain and cannot be changed by experience. Its worldview is not subject to change in a way that permits the frog to learn which dark specks are edible and which are not.

A human baby also puts all sorts of things into its mouth, but for the baby this is a way of finding out what is edible and what is not, how things taste and feel. Its tongue, eyes, ears, and other sense organs form a system that determines and limits the kinds of information it can receive, but the baby is not programmed to put the information together in very fixed ways. The baby must test its world constantly, learning about it through direct experience of it, as well as through what it is taught and told. So, in time, it builds a worldview. From infancy on, our brain tests each new experience against those we had before in order to keep the worldview we are building consistent.

Let’s look at another example of species differences in world views. Suppose a child is playing with a cat when it sees a bee land on a pretty flower. And suppose that all three — the child, the cat, and the bee — can talk to one another.

“What a pretty pink flower you have chosen,” the child might say to the bee.

“What pretty pink flower?” the bee might well ask. “Can’t you see I have chosen this flower for its deep red stripes? This kind has my favorite pollen.”

“Red stripes?” the child says. “I should think a bee could see better than that! This flower is pink as pink can be.”

“I beg your pardon,” says the bee, “but it is you who do not seem to see very well! Look here, cat, is this flower striped or am I crazy?”

“Both of you are nuts,” says the cat, “making a fuss about a flower. They all look alike to me, and rather dull-looking things they are, sitting about as they do. Now a grasshopper is another matter . . .”

Such an argument might occur because each of these three actually does create a different flower — the child a pink one, while the bee’s perception constructs a red striped one and the cat’s a dull gray flower! Bees see more colors than humans, while cats have scarcely any color in their world. Bees need to know the world of flowers in order to make their living, but flowers do not matter a bit to cats.

Bats can see in the dark by sonar, as do dolphins in murky waters, by bouncing sound waves off objects in their environment. Dolphins and dogs create a good part of their worldviews from sounds we humans cannot perceive; many mammals live in a world made more of smells than of sights. Birds and insects sense the patterns of magnetic fields in the atmosphere.

Each species has its own system of senses that bring patterns of stimulation from the environment to its brain as it explores and does things to its world. These patterns coming in from outside merge with the existing inside patterns to create perceived images. The worldviews our minds are capable of projecting `out there’ fool us into thinking we see things the way they really are.

The interesting thing about considering the projected worldviews of different species is how clear it becomes that none has a truer picture of the world than any other. A worldview made of smell patterns — with all their attached meaning for that species or individual — is no less true than one of light and sound patterns. Each species has evolved a way of constructing its world and then its worldview — a way that best helps it get along in that world. Each uses only part of all the information, or patterns, available to all Earthlife species collectively — the part it most needs to survive in health and do its part in the greater dance of life.

Only we humans know that all these different worldviews exist. We can record and measure light waves beyond those we see, sound waves beyond those we hear, chemical smells beyond those we smell, magnetism we do not feel. We alone can understand that our perception of the world involves only a small part of all the information available and do what we can to expand our range of information. We have figured out how to peek in on the worldviews of other species by using instruments that show the way they perceive or sense in their world. With sonar, we can see as bats and dolphins do; with microscopes we can look in on the world of microbes; and so on.

Surely this, too, makes us a special brain experiment — the only species of players able to understand something of what all the others are doing in the play. We humans have, in fact, a strange ability that no other species has, as far as we know — we are able to make ourselves the audience of the very play in which we are acting.

While there are always communications going on within and between species holons in holarchies, even among the cells of our body holarchies, no other species investigates the others as we do, trying to figure out what they are like and what they are up to. No other creatures think of themselves as observers of the whole world, indeed the whole universe — all the others simply participate in co-creating it. Nor did we ourselves think this way when we first became human. In fact, it is likely that we played human roles in the play of Gaian creation long before we could stand apart from the world in our own minds to see ourselves and others as players. What was it, then, that changed our worldview to the perspective of audience?

Σ    Σ    Σ

In bacteria and protists, there is a pretty direct link between stimulation from the environment and behavior in response to it. Their sensory parts are directly connected to the parts that behave by contracting, rowing away with cilia, or engulfing a food particle. In multicelled organisms, the stimulus may occur many cells away from the moving, behaving parts, so communications systems evolved — chemical and hydraulic systems in protists, funguses, and plants; ever more elaborate nervous systems in animals. But the more complex the nervous system became, the more it developed its own patterns to come between the incoming sensory patterns and the outgoing behavioral patterns. The connections, that is, are no longer direct, and the creatures’ worldviews are determined as much or more by their nervous systems and life histories than by the new patterns actually coming in from outside.

In social species something else comes into play between the senses and behavior — the whole history of interactions among socially related individuals. There is, in a sense, a social brain or mind organized and shaped by social interactions and language over time, incorporated into the brain and behavior of individuals as they learn to live in society.

Language has played an enormously important role in the building of human societies and cultures. The human mind itself is largely a product of our social language community. Language is without doubt at the heart of our humanity. Written language may have been the invention that changed our mental images of ourselves and our world more than any other.

It was very likely writing that changed the way we saw ourselves in relation to the world in which we live — that permitted us to be observers of as well as participants in life’s play. Before the development of writing, only pictures let people think of themselves as separate from their world — as observers, or knowers, of it. Today, we can see the history of the world in a book, or events in another part of the world in a film or video — the latest technologies for keeping records of ourselves and our world apart from direct or directly reported experience of it.

Before writing, language was not a thing in itself. Talking was simply a skill like walking. Nor could people imagine knowledge being passed on through language in any way other than through direct learning from another living person. Neither poetry nor law nor any other body of knowledge could exist without a live human knower of it before words could be carved in rock, inscribed on a clay tablet, or written on papyrus. Writing made us observers of our own play and gave us a way to store information and pass it on unaltered to our own and all future generations.

It’s hard for us to imagine what it must have been like not to have separated ourselves from the world as observers of it, not to think of ourselves as separate from our knowledge, not to think of our languages as languages and our minds as minds, or our world as something to know about in our minds. Yet all of us were like this as small children before we were taught to read and to think about the world. In this sense, human infancy even today repeats something of the infancy of our species.

Before we invented writing, the script of Gaian creation existed only in consciousness and was stored only in geological records, in DNA, in the development of embryos, in nervous systems, to some extent in human minds constructed by language. Through writing we began to separate our knowledge and ideas about the dance from the dance itself — in a sense, to separate the script from its playing out.

But remember that the reality we humans see as ourselves and our relationship to the world around us is our own creation, our own conscious imagery. Our worldviews are rich in the images that language makes possible — an ever increasing wealth of linguistic portrayals of our human interactions with one another and with the rest of nature. These we accumulate in our beloved and useful linear time and over cultures through written records.

Even our pictorial art is influenced by the way the artist’s mind talks about what it sees. Try imagining something without imagining accompanying verbal labels and ideas. The flower we saw earlier through a child’s eyes as quite simply pink and pretty has become, as we say, all things to all people — a tasty morsel for a farmboy to feed his donkey, a symbol of beauty and a token of love to a lover, a source of perfume to a maker of cosmetics, a model of reproduction to a biology teacher, a solar energy plant to a physicist, a warning of fading youth to one who is advancing in age. Any one of us can change these preceptions into other perceptions as often as we like.

The meaning we give things comes from the context in which we see them, and we supply this context not from the sense impressions we receive from our world but from the patterns ever evolving inside our nervous systems — patterns which reveal themselves as that richly complex self-organizing mind which ever composes and recomposes itself through individual and cultural experience.

It is our human heritage to continually work at making conscious, thoughtful sense of all these patterns. We embed all new information into existing brain-mind patterns, put these patterns into categories or contexts of meaning, add to them, change them, rearrange, distort, and enrich them until they make sense to us as part of our overall worldview.

Σ    Σ    Σ

We have wanted and needed to make sense of the world for as long as we have had our human type of consciousness, and we can do this only by using our free minds to create meaningful worldviews. Yet just because our brain-minds are so free, each individual human can see and understand the world as differently as can various other whole species. If all of us saw and understood the world in the same way, without being told anything about it by others, we wouldn’t have to try to make sense of it, or try to teach one another just what kind of sense we think it makes. Everyone would just know how things were and what they meant. We would be like frogs, all of whom see dark specks in just the same way and know just what they mean and what to do about them.

Human worldviews must be created through the personal experience of living in the world. At the same time, all of us must fit our personal experience into a worldview given to us by others. For if our own experience does not fit into the culturally approved way our fellows see the world, we will be thought quite mad. In fact, people with worldviews completely different from ones we call normal are commonly considered insane or profoundly handicapped.

Only by agreeing with one another on what the world is all about — on how to make sense of it — can we have human societies or cultures. Most of our individual worldviews actually come from our culture — from family, friends, schools, books, television, and so on — though all of us add our own special touches through personal experience and ideas. Our creation of worldviews is thus yet another way in which our brains are an experiment in freedom. While most other species have evolved their special way of seeing the world as they have evolved their behavior — building it into their body plans — we humans are free to improvise both our worldviews and our behavior.

When we look at human history to see what a people’s worldview was in a different time and a different place, we see that worldviews have evolved along with the visible aspects of culture, and that there is a very powerful relationship between the worldviews that people hold and the kind of society they construct — an inseparable relationship, that is, between the way people believe their world is and the things they do to one another and that world. In practice, our worldview is our script for the play of life, assigning each of us our role within it.

The most important kinds of worldviews we humans have created are religious and scientific worldviews. In religious worldviews, a goddess or a god — or both or many deities — create(s) the world and then continue(s) to rule or look out for it in some meaningful, purposeful way. In the western scientific worldview up to the present, the world happens accidentally and runs mechanically without purpose. As we have seen, however, this is changing rapidly to bring western and eastern scientific worldviews together in the belief that the world is a self-creative manifestation of an underlying conscious source that may or may not be purposeful.

In both kinds of worldview, the human task is understanding how the world is ordered — by what god-given or natural laws it works, or what else gives it meaningful or at least coherent pattern. The way to this understanding, however, is very different in the two worldviews. In religious worldviews, the order is learned from certain people, such as priestesses or priests to whom it has been revealed, or from sacred writings such people or their followers have recorded. In scientific worldviews, the order or pattern of the world is learned from scientists who look for it in nature, make theories about it, and do experiments to test their theories.

Theories are no more, no less, than well thought out ideas or models of what various aspects of the world seem to be and how they work. Scientific theories, then, are ordered worldviews that can be tested against predictions we make from them, though we must expect them to change as we ourselves change and as we gain new knowledge. Until recently, religions had worldviews that were not to be questioned, but with new historical information some religious worldviews are now changing to come toward harmony with scientific worldviews from their own side.

Religion and science thus give us our cultural worldview — our image of the natural world and our relationship to it. Our worldview also includes our ideas of what our relations to one another are, or should be, so it includes political, ethical, artistic and other cultural images and ideas.

Until the last half century before the new millennium, it did not occur to people that they could have anything to do with creating their worldview. All through history, people thought the way they saw the world was the way the world really was — in other words, they saw their worldview as the true worldview and all others as mistaken and therefore false. Many wars, both hot and cold, were caused by disagreements between people who believed in a particular religious or political worldview and people who didn’t believe in it — who had a different worldview that suggested different kinds of behavior and social structures. For example, the Christian Crusades against Muslims in the Middle Ages, the democratic revolutions against rulers in the past few centuries, and the more recent communist revolutions, were all of that sort.

People are very reluctant to change their worldviews, because their worldviews hold everything together — as we said, they make sense of the world. To change a worldview is to lose that sense, and so worldviews have usually changed only by force — when people with one worldview conquered those with another, as in the ancient conquests of Goddess-worshiping societies by God-worshiping tribes. In some cases, they have changed by persuasion, as when missionaries or scientists persuade people to adopt a new worldview in place of their old one.

Perhaps the most important discovery of modern science is that there can be no single true and complete worldview. Like all species, we have only partial information about the world, and our information changes as our knowledge increases, as our inventions become more sophisticated, and as we and other species actually change our world. We change the world even while we are looking at it, for we are never only observers — we are co-creative players in the play.

Most of what scientists do is try out — test by experiment — different parts of a scientific worldview, to see where it works and where it needs changing. Archaeologists and historians, along with biologists and physicists, conduct scientific searches, seeking experimental ways of testing their theories. It makes good sense to keep improving our worldviews as we gain new knowledge, to be sure they are reliable maps to the future we want.

While there is no scientific test for the truth of a worldview, there is scientific and practical evidence showing how well we get along in the world when we use a particular worldview as a map to guide our experience and behavior. We can test our worldview to see whether it guides us to as healthy an existence for ourselves and the larger life system of which we are part as do the worldviews that are programmed into other species. We will say more on this in later chapters. For now let us note that for the first time in our history, we as individuals are consciously evolving our worldviews by thinking about, questioning, and testing them, rather than just letting the events of history and a few powerful individuals dictate them to us.

Σ    Σ    Σ

Part of our evolving scientific worldview, as we said, is recognizing the validity and importance of other species’ worldviews, expanding our own by incorporating theirs. It is equally important for us to recognize the validity and importance of different human worldviews, expanding our own in so doing. Every human culture that has its own language and customs has ways of seeing the world that are unique, though any human individual can learn any human culture and language. We can thus communicate across languages and share cultural experience in ways that enrich us all.

Today’s dominant scientific worldview evolved in European languages with common roots and close relationships. These languages happen to be structured in a way that forces us, in talking or writing about our world, to think and speak of it in terms of `thing-nouns’ and `action-verbs.’ This language structure — taken for granted in English and other Indo-European languages — gives us a worldview, as soon as we begin speaking as children, in which we actually see the world as made of separate things that stay still (nouns) or move or are moved in relation to one another (verbs). The reasoning, the logic, and the mathematics of scientists are all based on this way of dividing up the world.

It can come as a great surprise to us that all people do not see the world in this way, and that this is related to language structures. Some human languages do not make our kind of distinction between nouns and verbs. Rather, the world is seen through certain languages as a pattern of interwoven processes in time, not as a pattern of separate things in space. Speakers of Hopi or Nootka, for example — both North American indigenous languages — cannot imagine things without their motion, change, aging, or other aspects of coming into and out of being. Instead of saying, for example, “The light shines,” or “The water falls,” they have single-word expressions that do not separate the light from its shining or the water from its falling. In such process languages, people do not think of time as made up of a series of `things’ called seconds, minutes, and hours. They see time as the change in things, which is more the way physicists now understand time.

These are only a very few examples of the way in which a language can determine how we see our world, yet they are enough to make us think about what the scientific worldview might be like if it had been developed in a very different set of languages. Einstein once suggested to Benjamin Lee Whorf, who studied and wrote about these language differences, that it might be easier to describe the discoveries of modern physics in the Hopi language than in English. In Hopi we would not face the contradictions of a world made at once of particle-things and wave-actions, of matter-things and energy-actions, never having separated things from actions in the first place.

Process-language cultures are better suited to organic than mechanical worldviews. Perhaps such cultures did not develop mechanical technologies because machinery is necessarily conceived and built as the interactions of separate and, insofar as possible, unchanging parts. As it happened, science developed most fully in European-language cultures along with machinery, becoming closely associated with machinery, as we will see in greater detail shortly.

Anthropology and linguistics, the sciences of human cultures and languages, are relatively new parts of science as a whole, but they have taught us that human experience is very varied and rich. They have made us realize that the scientific worldview, which was developed mainly in industrializing western countries, is based on and represents only a limited part of human experience. Many scientists, especially physicists and physicians, have begun to use ideas and practices from eastern worldviews to enrich their western science, while western science has become an important part of eastern life, especially in Japan and China.

Unfortunately, just as we dominant humans have worked at killing off other intelligent species, so have our dominant technological cultures worked at eradicating non-technological human cultures. Every culture and language lost seriously diminishes the variety and richness of human experience. This variety and richness is as essential to our cultural health as is genetic variety to the health of any species, and species variety to the health of any natural ecosystem. Our human mania for reducing variety to create monocultures is not expressed only in our agriculture and animal husbandry, but in our own cultures as well — and it is equally destructive in all cases.

Keeping in mind this perspective on our still-evolving scientific and cultural worldview — our continuing effort to understand what the play of life is all about — let’s now look at its historical roots, its evolution within the cultural traditions of our species. Let’s look, in other words, at the scripts people have written for themselves as they played out the historical steps leading us to our present conception of the play.


Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

Welcome

Sunday, April 28th, 2002

After a long delay, I have have finally published Chapter 5 of UnCommon Science. It is available as a separate paper Understanding Order. This paper includes an explanation of the  advanced work of synergic scientist Edward Haskell.


Edward Haskell

Edward Haskell is one of the least known of the synergic scientists whose ideas and works are presented throughout the UnCommon Sense Library. One can find information on the internet and elsewhere on Alfred Korzybski, Buckminster Fuller, Arthur Young and N. Arthur Coulter. But, you will find almost nothing on Edward Haskell. For this reason, I am including some biographical information on Haskell.

Edward Frôhlich Haskell was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria on August 24, 1906 into a large family of well educated Swiss missionaries. During his childhood, the family traveled widely throughout Europe. and Haskell learned to speak six languages.

The family eventually immigrated to the United States. Haskell finished his education here graduating from Oberlin College with an A.B. in 1929. He did postgraduate studies at Columbia University for one year 1929-30, then left school to travel and write a book. While waiting to get his book published, he returned to postgraduate studies at Harvard University 1935-37, University of Chicago 1937-40. His book, Lance – A Novel about Multicultural Men, was finally published in 1941. He became a fellow at University of Chicago from 1940-43, but never completed his thesis and was not awarded a Doctorate degree. He left University to teach, and he instructed in sociology (human, animal, plant) and anthropology, at the University of Denver 1944-45, and Brooklyn College, 1946-47. In 1948, he left teaching to devote himself full-time to private research.

Haskell was instrumental in the formation of the Council for Unified Research and Education (C.U.R. E., Inc.). This was a private non-profit research organization of scientists committed to the unification of science and education. Their goal was the synthesis of all knowledge into a single discipline. Haskell served as the Chairman of C.U.R. E., Inc., from its inception in 1948 until it was disbanded in the mid 1980s.

The groups membership varied over the years, but was made up of many notable scientists and thinkers including Harold Cassidy, PhD, Professor of Chemistry at Yale University; Willard V. Quine, PhD, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University; Arthur Jensen, PhD, Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley; and Jere Clark, PhD, Chairman of the Department of Economics at Southern Connecticut University.

The scientists of C. U. R. E., Inc. believed that the present universities were really multi-versities, with specialists from different fields dividing knowlege into separate preserves with specialized languages and almost no communication between them. They were convinced that this division of knowledge played a large role in the division of the modern world.

Over the years this group created a body of work that became known as The Unified Science. The Unified Science was to be nothing less than the Assembly of the Sciences into a Single Discipline with a common language. While many made contributions, it was Haskell that was the guiding force and author of the majority of seminal concepts.

Haskell presented The Unified Science at seminars and short courses at Columbia University, West Virginia University, Southern Connecticut State College, and Drew University New School for Social Research. The Unified Science reached its peak of influence in 1972, which was marked by the publication of FULL CIRCLE: The Moral Force of Unified Science .

I first learned of Edward Haskell while attending a General Semantics Seminar at North Adams State College in Massachussetts in August of 1981. General Semantics is the term chosen by Alfred Korzybski to represent his Non-Aristotelian System of organizing knowledge. The foundation for General Semantics can be found in Korzybski’s book Science and Sanity.

One of the faculty for the General Semantics seminar was a Dr. Donald Washburn, a professor of English at North Adams State College. On the second day of the seminar, he gave lecture on Haskell’s Periodic Coordinate System.

The General Semantics seminars were very special experiences with students and faculty working very closely together, Dr. Washburn and I struck up a quick friendship and towards the end of the seminar he gave me several books, one of which was Haskell’s Full Circle.

A month after the seminar, I successfully tracked down Haskell who was living in New York City, and we began a letter correspondence. Haskell had became aware of synergy and its importance in the late 1930s, and the concept was incorporated deeply into the Unified Science and the Periodic Coordinate System.

In 1982, I was in New York City to attend an unrelated medical seminar, and took the opportunity to visit Haskell in person. He was 76 years old and living alone in a small “student” apartment on the East River near Columbia University. His tiny apartment was filled from floor to ceiling with books and papers. There was no room to even sit down, let alone accommodate guests. Haskell enjoyed being near the active academic community at Columbia University. He met and communicated with students and faculty in the coffee shops and restaurants that surrounded Columbia. He was close friends with several faculty members at Columbia including the internationally respected Chairman of the Department of Anthropology. While Haskell was never on the faculty at Columbia himself, his faculty friends occasionally arranged for him to present classes and short courses at Columbia on his Unified Science.

I next visited Haskell in the spring of 1984. This time I stayed at the home of his friend, the Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, I am sorry to say I don’t recall his name. Over the next two years, Haskell and I would exchange occasional letters.

In early 1986 at age 79, Haskell suffered a stroke. When he was released from the hospital, he could no longer care for himself and had difficulty speaking. His family quickly decided to put him in a nursing home and throw his life’s work including all his papers and books into the city dump.

As you can imagine, this caused him great emotional stress. He knew I was sensitive to the value of his work and so he begged his brother to call me. Fortunately, I was able to intervene and I did. My wife and I invited Ed to come and live at our home in California. He arrived a month later early in the summer of 1986.

A few weeks later, I received a shipment from his brother of forty boxes containing all the scientific papers and books from his apartment. Haskell lived with us for about three months, he rapidly regained his strength and began recovering his ability to speak. And, though he did made significant improvement, he was a shadow of the former master scientist I had visited in New York two years earlier.

In the fall of 1986, he felt well enough to return to New York to spend some time with his friends and those few family members who cared about him. He asked me to keep his papers and books safe until he could find a place for them. He hoped to find a University library willing to accept custody of them. To a large extent this was wishful thinking for Haskell was not well known, and fewer still valued his work. Haskell celebrated his 80 birthday with friends in New York, and shortly after that suffered yet another stroke and died.

By default, I became the final custodian of all of Haskell’s scientific papers. FULL CIRCLE: The Moral Force of Unified Science has been out of print for many years. I have managed to find a few copies. The greater part of The Unified Science remains unpublished.

I believe Haskell’s work is important to synergic science and to humanity.

The systems hierarchy which he presented in his Unified Science has probably been done better in Arthur Young’s Theory of Process. Much of his work that focused on cybernetics and general systems theory has been done elsewhere equally well or better (Bertalanffy, et. al.). But he still made several unique contributions to human knowing:

1) The discovery of the 9 Co-Actions.

2) The discovery of three classes of relationships. Prior to Haskell, Neutrality simply represented the boundary between Adversity and Synergy. Haskell recognized that the Neutral class of relationships, in and of itself, was of equal importance to both the Adverse class of relationships, and the Synergic class of relationships.

In effect, Haskell discovered Neutrality. If we are to build a synergic future, we will not only have to transcend the Adversary Way, we will also have to transcend Neutrality as well. I think this is one of the major difficulties humans face today in understanding three-fold nature of relationships. Because Neutrality is invisible in our paradigm of human relationships, most individuals assume if they are not Adversaries they must be Synergic. The same old Either/Or scientific mistake.

3) The invention of the Co-Action Compass or PCS. This at first appears abstract and mathematical, but once understood is a powerful reflection in one diagram of all three classes of relationship.

Haskell’s focus was on evaluating adversary, neutral, and synergic relationships between all stages of process. Much of his work was on relationships between particles, atoms, molecules, bacteria, plants, and animals. The PCS allowed him to plot the resultants of all three types of relationship on a single geometric grid.

The shape of the PCS was not invented by Haskell. The shape evolved and took form from the real data that was measured extensionally, and plotted from analyzing numerous relationships between particles, atoms, molecules, bacteria, plants, and animals. The term extensional here is borrowed from Korzybski to mean from the real world.

Haskell did not study or analyze human relationships, but he predicted that the PCS would be useful in anlyzing adversary, neutral, and synergic relationships between humans and groups of humans, and finally.

4) The Moral Law of the Unified Science – Much more important than Haskell’s recognition of the importance of the spiritual truth “As you sow, so shall you reap,” was his restatement of this truth as a scientific law of Nature that applied in all seven stages of process—light, particle, atom, molecule, plant, animal and human.


Understanding Order (in PDF Format)

Online Version of FULL CIRCLE: The Moral Force of the Unified Science

Welcome

Saturday, April 27th, 2002

Understanding Order



Timothy Wilken explains: Everything found in Universe has substance and form. The substance is “matter-energy” and the form is ”order“. Order is the structure, organization and pattern of that “matter-energy”. Order is as fundamental as “space-time and “matter-energy”. In fact, “order” is the third fundamental of Universe.           Read more

Welcome

Friday, April 26th, 2002

More from EarthDance. Wednesday, Elisabet Sahtouris took us from From Possums to People—10. Also see: From Polyps to Possums—9,  From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.


The Big Brain Experiment—11

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

If you could look inside your own head, as we looked in on our developing embryos earlier, you would see yet another kind of evolutionary record. The innermost part of a human brain looks much like a reptile’s brain, and it seems to be this deep core of the brain that sometimes makes us huff and puff and attack others automatically, as though we have disconnected it from the rest of the brain, which might give thought to what we are doing. Wrapped around this core, is a more recently evolved part of the brain, which, together with the core, looks like a more modern mammal brain, such as that of the horse. This mammalian complication of the brain permits those mammalian feelings we call anger and love, sadness and joy. It also appears to make us playful, curious, and eager to learn.

On the surface of the human brain we find the newest complication — the neocortex, or `new bark’ growth, which ripples and folds itself to look like a great elaborate walnut inside its skull shell. Despite some success in mapping it, the brain is not separable into parts such that we can say that this or that feeling or behavior has its locus in a particular place. Yet we know it is the evolution of the neocortex — richly interwoven with the inner brain — that permits the whole brain to demonstrate our special human abilities. We can remember our past in detail, compare it with our present, and, on that basis, make plans for our future. The neocortex is very much involved when we create our ideas of the world, communicate in language, think up our inventions from courts of law to computers, create works of art, research scientific questions, decide what is good and what is bad, learn and think about our relationship to all other creatures of the Earth and even to the whole universe.

There is a great deal that we still don’t understand about brains. We can study their evolution and construction, count their cells, record and measure their patterns of chemical and electrical activity, and yet we do not really know how they do what they do. There is a very good chance that our explanations of them will change dramatically in the future. Just for example, if physicists are right in saying that fundamental reality is not material — that matter arises through a continual transformation of cosmic consciousness — then brains may be material devices permitting consciousness to operate in, or to interface with, the rest of material reality. This view would see brains as biological devices created and operated by consciousness, rather than seeing them as biological devices which give rise to consciousness, as has been supposed — a rather complete turnaround!

It is wise to remember how much our western scientific stories have changed in the past century and to realize that they are likely to change even more in the next. The concept of cosmic consciousness is still new in western science, though earlier eastern sciences saw it as fundamental to the universe and were very interested in distinguishing it from the kind of consciousness we are familiar with from our ordinary waking experience. Cosmic consciousness can only be directly experienced through long training in meditative exercises, and is most usually experienced as a blissful unity. Ordinary waking consciousness, on the other hand, is always present, usually complex, and seems to have evolved through the evolutionary experiences of Earthlife. What we call the subconscious seems to exist somewhere between the two, and reveals itself in the dreams we spoke of earlier.

The philosopher Alan Watts suggested the universe might be a great game of hide and seek played by God, who was everything and so had to play the game alone, hiding in rocks and trees and people, waiting for them to discover who they were. We might also see the universe as a vast learning experience, with ourselves currently at its leading edge, trying to figure out how it all works by looking back on it through our unique kind of consciousness. As we evolve and learn, so do our stories change, whether they are religious, scientific or other.

It is as though cosmic consciousness keeps trying out new possibilities through biological and social evolution. When we compare the brains of many species, we can see quite clearly the parallel evolution of ever more complex brains with ever more complex behaviors. Species consciousness, communication, and freedom of choice in behavior seem to have evolved gradually, becoming most complex in the relatively bigger-brained species. In our own species, and perhaps earlier in cetaceans, there has been an unusual explosion of these talents. Like humans, dolphins seem to have ideas, ethics, complex languages, and personal names. While scientists have not succeeded in finding a language bridge between humans and dolphins, there is an increasingly large literature on telepathic communications between people and cetaceans, including repeatable experiments and evidence of dolphins healing people.

Indigenous people share an understanding of nature as a vast and continuing dialogue among all parts and species of Earth — as one great family — with humans as the youngest member with the most to learn. Many of them consciously participate in this natural dialogue as co-creators (see Chapter 19) but Earth is now dominated by a branch of humanity which chose to cut itself off from this dialogue. Enamored of our big flexible brains, we of western culture have — in our minds, if not in physical reality — disconnected ourselves from the community of life. We study it as though it were separate and work to control it for our own purposes.

No other species has been in a position to do this, for none is so free to choose its behavior and thoughts at every turn. None is so clever in inventing and producing technology, so powerful in its ability to kill or protect other species, to destroy or preserve whole ecosystems worldwide, or to pretend it is separate from the rest. Truly we are a Gaian or universal experiment in freedom, and a risky one at that.

Σ    Σ    Σ

Most animals, as we saw earlier, do most of what they do as innate behaviors — that is, without having to learn by trial and error. There is little you can teach an ant or a lizard, as virtually all the ways such a creature responds to its environment seem to have been built into it by its evolution in community. Their behavior is carried out by their nervous system and the rest of their physiology in response to their changing environments — the things and events they encounter. In the last chapter we saw that the larger, more complex brains of mammals freed them from some of their rigid innate behaviors and let them learn new behaviors through feelings and experience. In mammals, innate behavior is still apparent, but feelings and learning and voice communication add variety and richness to behavior.

There are a few things we humans do automatically, as we say `by instinct,’ such as running from danger or attacking when we feel threatened, seeking mates, feeling love for our babies, and seeking food or a place to lie down when we are hungry or tired. We don’t have to think about such things. But we have no innate programs for painting pictures or digging up fossils or building airplanes or philosophizing or designing hospitals or doing the millions of other things we do.

Our behavior is guided partly by basic needs, a great deal by what our society has taught us, and somewhat by personal choice. What we do by our own choice usually depends on feelings and experience with our past choices, some of which become habit. What we learn from our society depends on how other people’s feelings and experience with past choices have been turned into customs or social habits and rules. It is our society, for instance, that sends us to school and tries to keep us out of trouble with others.

Let’s consider for a moment this matter of staying out of trouble with other members of our species. In most other social species, built-in behavior patterns keep individuals out of serious trouble with others of their kind. Many species of reptiles, birds, fish, and mammals, for example, make their homes in places or territories they have claimed as their own. When other members of their species come into this home space, the resident inhabitants warn them with species-specific dances or songs. Usually the intruders back off and leave. Even if it does come to a fight, the intruders know innately to give up before being seriously hurt or killed. You may have noticed that the loser in a dog or cat fight turns up his or her throat to the winner, a behavior kittens and puppies show even in early play. At this “I give up” signal, the winner’s attack stops as if suddenly switched off.

Animals use ritual dances and fights to win and protect their homes and mates as well as to raise their young in safety, providing they have adequate territory. The rituals work like a system of rules for living together in reasonable peace — rules of behavior drawn up in evolution as much as was the structure of their bodies. These rules help them balance their lives by spreading each species out over an area of land or sea without crowding, so that all have an adequate chance of getting enough food. In this way, what we call innate territoriality and aggression work for the good of the individual as well as for the good of the whole species, with relatively little aggression compared with our human use of it.

Just as animals know innately how to share land without killing one another over it, they know innately when they have enough land and food for their needs. An animal may hoard just enough food to get itself through a hard winter, but no animal except the human one piles up food or takes land beyond its need.

The price of our freedom to decide our own behavior is the loss of such innate rules to limit our own aggression and greed. Like other animals, we have an innate urge to supply ourselves with the necessities of life, to win mates, to make a home for our family, and to protect ourselves and our family against intruders. But, unlike other animals, which know innately just how to act on these urges, we are free to act on them in countless different ways. We must make our own rules for sharing or not sharing the Earth’s resources with one another and with other species. If we share resources fairly by common agreement, there should be no reason to use aggression. Aggression is not something piling up in us that demands an outlet, as some psychologists and sociobiologists have suggested — rather, it is a reserve capacity available in situations of real need. Whether such need arises is almost entirely up to us.

As we big-brained mammals lost the rigidity of innate behavior and gained freedom of choice, we also gained our unique kind of consciousness — our reflective awareness of what we are doing, our memory of what we have done, and our projected mages of what we might do with our awareness of choice. This conscious awareness that we live in a linear past, present, and future, in which there is cause and effect, makes it possible for us to predict on the basis of past experience what the effects of our behavior will be. Even though physicists now tell us — as eastern philosophies did earlier — that cause-and-effect spacetime is an illusion, this kind of perception of our reality serves as our guide to behavioral choice.

Many humans find that with spiritual practices such as meditation and contemplative prayer, they can directly perceive cosmic love and unity through inner senses. This adds a very important extra dimension to their behavioral guidance system, because they perceive all things — including people — as One. The great teachers of our world, such as Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha, gave us ethical systems based on this kind of perception — ethical systems showing such universal interconnectedness that what is done to others is done to yourself. Now western physicists showing us non-timespace and non-locality begin to teach the same thing!

The problem in our dominant human culture is that we are using only a linear perspective to predict only the very short-term consequences of our behavior, while failing to consider the broader and the long-range results. Most of us know by now how some so-called `uncivilized’ native cultures taught their people to think of the consequences of their choices for seven generations ahead, but we have not yet adopted the practice. In other words, we have not yet learned to use our conscious freedom of choice for the good of our whole species over time. Rather, our so-called `civilized’ history — at least the most recent five thousand or so years of it — shows that humans have used opportunity and power again and again to take much more than they need, usually by taking it away from other humans and killing them if they resist.

Western society, priding itself on its enlightenment, has continued this grim record, prompting Gandhi to respond to the question: “What do you think of western civilization?” by saying he thought it would be a good idea! Clearly, we lack the built-in limits of other species and must choose to limit our aggressiveness for the health of our species, if not for our spiritual development.

There is now good evidence that many early agricultural societies were indeed peaceful, sharing land and other resources, not making war on other societies. Eventually they seem to have been taken over by certain unsettled nomadic peoples who had become aggressive, perhaps for lack of adequate resources. Since that time, there have always been some people who have far more than they need and others who have far less. We simply do not share resources as well as most other species do. But, then, we are still very new, and as we will soon see, there are signs that we may be working this problem out.

Our need to live in societies is as much our natures as our territoriality and aggression. But here, too, we are very free to decide just how to act on it — what kinds of societies to create for ourselves. Insects such as bees, ants, and termites evolved highly organized societies, as had earlier bacteria and protists. We do not know whether they evolved as societies, similar to cell colonies, or whether they evolved first as individuals and later assembled into societies. In any case, social insects build whole cities, make farms to raise plants and other insects for food, have queens, soldiers and workers who tell one another what to do by chemical messages, make wars, and capture slaves.

We are astonished to see the social insects doing so many things that seem so human to us. But actually they could hardly be more unlike humans. Social insects have been living these complicated social lives for millions of years in the same old way, for their hard, external skeletons kept their brains very tiny and unable to evolve. The things they do all their lives, generation after generation, are innately determined. A worker ant cannot change its mind and become a soldier; a queen bee cannot change her mind and run things differently.

To compensate for the smallness of their brains, these insects specialized their functions in such a way that the different specialists together form one social body. Social insects need one another and cannot survive as individuals alone. It’s no use trying to keep a single ant as a pet, for it will lose its appetite, get sick, and die. In a way, it is not a whole creature in itself, but an organ in, or a part of, its social body — its anthill society. In a way, an ant is to its society as a mitochondrian is to its cell.

Mammal species, such as our peaceful gorilla cousins, have much less rigid social behaviors than ants, and yet they, too, have innate behavior patterns that preserve the societies they are born into — social structures that have been tested in evolution and have proved healthful for the species. It is interesting to observe that very aggressive species, such as certain baboons of North Africa, have a very rigid social dominance system, while peaceful species, such as the Bonobo chimpanzees, show greater equality and opportunity to change roles.

As we will see later, we humans are free to form and test and change our own social structures, and indeed we have tried many different kinds of societies in the course of our history. Yet, for all our experiments, hardly any humans except a few vanishing indigenous peoples today live in a social structure that is truly healthful for all the people living in it as well as for the other species among and around them. But again, we are still very young, and there is every indication that we could solve this problem by understanding our living planet, our indigenous survivors, and by looking to our remote but peaceful past and truly desiring a peaceful future.

Σ    Σ    Σ

Our big free brains and our clever hands have permitted us to make dramatic and sudden changes in ourselves and in our world during the past few thousand years. While this is merely the blink of an eye on the time scale of Gaian evolution, it is long enough for our chosen ways of life and our inventions to have become at once a threat and a promise to our whole planet. We may now have become as dangerous an experiment in life forms as were the bluegreen bacteria — recall that they learned to make energy from sunlight and eventually covered the world with poisonous oxygen, killing off countless other bacteria. Still, we humans could prove to be as much a step to healthy new Gaian developments as were the breather bacteria that found a way to use the poisonous oxygen in the most efficient energy-making process ever invented — the breathing process that permitted us to evolve.

We are not actors learning our parts in our sleep and playing out our lives unaware. We are awake and free to learn what the play in which we are players is all about, and we are free to change the play by our own choice. We live right now at the most exciting time in our history. It is a time in which we can see ourselves as never before and understand who we are through knowledge of our own history, our evolution, our universe. Perhaps most importantly, we can see what children we still are as a species and what opportunities there are for us to grow up.

If we evolved by refusing to grow up as apes, then sooner or later we will have to grow up as humans. And to grow up as humans we will have to take the responsibility for using our freedom in healthful ways, to help rebalance the great ongoing dance of Gaian creation and to develop harmonious new patterns within it. But to understand just how we might go about this, we need to look at human history not as something separate and different from biological evolution, but as a continuing part of it — as the social evolution of one species within the Gaian life system.

What, then, has been the historical evolution of roving human hunters and settled human planters in the period of known civilization, which now extends back some thirty thousand to forty thousand years?

Some surviving groups of indigenous peoples living their traditional lifestyles demonstrate the kind of ecological harmony we see among other species in mature ecosystems. But, as we said, the rest of us diverged from this path thousands of years ago. People in settled agricultural societies, despite generally favorable climates and ways of providing for themselves, surely faced hardships such as floods and droughts or epidemics of disease. Such challenges made humans ever more inventive in their lifestyles, just as similar challenges had made ancient bacteria inventive in theirs.

People learned to store food against times of need, to make rules for sharing land and working it, to make medicines from plants, to make canals to bring water from rivers to fields, and to build boats to carry things up and down rivers and coasts for trading with other peoples. Archaeologists, in studying early human civilizations, are now finding more and more evidence that early agricultural societies everywhere worshiped a Mother Goddess as the giver of life and regarded men and women as equal partners, though the actual management of these ancient economies may have been, on the whole, the responsibility of women. Such civilizations developed agricultural techniques, other arts, law, and trade over as many as forty thousand years of peaceful evolution — by far the longest part of known human history. We shall return to them in chapters to come.

Four or five thousand years after the last ice age ended and about the same number of years before Christ, the goddess-worshiping cultures, especially in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean, began to be conquered one by one. Armed tribes of unsettled nomads and hunters on horseback came in waves from less plentiful colder or desert climates, searching for a better living. Ruled by men and worshiping Father Gods, these tribes broke into the more peaceful agricultural settlements, conquered them and, in many instances, stayed to form new more complex social orders, which eventually grew into warlike kingdoms or empires. Until recently these kingdoms were considered the cradles of civilization, as we did not know of the earlier peaceful civilizations.

Again we are reminded of the primeval Gaian world, where hungry monera forced their way inside other monera to get at their rich supplies, then stayed and multiplied, eventually shifting from competition to cooperation as they formed the much larger and more complicated protists. Perhaps without the invaders, the settled human cultures would have remained like bacteria cloning themselves — producing the same peaceful offspring cultures over and over. Instead, the conquering tribes came in like the invading monera eons before, taking over their hosts to pursue their competitive interests, staying to build their own empires. If this pattern among humans follows the pattern of the ancient bacteria — and we will see more signs that it does — then we, too, will work out peaceful cooperation to replace our competition with a healthier life for all.

In Gaian evolution the cloning monera took billions of years to change themselves and their environment in ways that permitted the much faster evolution of oxygen-breathing protists and larger sexually-reproducing creatures. In human social evolution the goddess-worshiping cultures took tens of thousands of years to develop agricultural ways of changing their environment to support themselves, while the later god-worshiping cultures have changed themselves and their environments tremendously in only five thousand to six thousand years.

Clearly human social evolution sped up and created more varied and complicated patterns from the time of these invasions. Unfortunately, however, the competitive, exploitative situation that went on inside large bacteria before they became nucleated protists is still going on in the human world. The male-ruled conquering tribes took almost all women’s social power and status from them, declaring them inferior and setting up other inequalities in society. The records of these invasions are the first clear indication of large-scale violence among humans.

After the invaders conquered these very differently organized societies, they imposed their own social structures and customs upon them, though some of the old ways no doubt persisted in the new hybrid cultures. We humans are creatures of strong habit; our cultural rules, beliefs, and rituals are the glue of our societies. Our very ability to function has always been heavily dependent on our social ideas and structures, and we have therefore fought to preserve them.

As the new larger cultures fought wars with one another, the losers were absorbed into the winners’ empires and forced to abide by their customs, though some always persisted and modified the dominant culture. Thus empires grew ever larger. Great empires were formed by Sumerians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Babylonians, Chinese, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans in South America; Kush, Nok, and Axum in Africa.

Within each empire, people were kept organized by rulers who laid down laws and kept guards and armies to enforce order and fight wars. Wars brought captured slaves, or brought whole cultures into the empire, though some cultures were absorbed peacefully. Recall how bacteria and larger creatures ate other bacteria or creatures who became parts of themselves.

Often such rulers maintained their power by claiming to have been chosen by the gods; some even said they were gods themselves. Some were benign, others less so. Most of the ordinary people in these societies were workers who grew crops and husbanded animals, hauled or channeled water, mined metals and precious stones, made pottery, tools, and weapons, built cities with huge, beautifully decorated palaces and temples for their rulers, and otherwise transformed the natural environment to human use.

Empire building by male-ruled class-structured societies became the main process and pattern of human social organization, and in one form or another it has continued right up to our present time. In ancient Greece a brief experiment in limited democracy was made as collective rule by all non-slave male citizens. Truly inclusive democracy — from demos, which means people or community, and kratos, meaning government — is something we are still working to achieve. Later we will look more closely at this experimental male democracy and why it did not last, though it powerfully influenced our whole modern world. For now let us move quickly through history to see its main pattern, to see how we humans used our big brains to continue the task of empire building.

The Roman Empire conquered Greece and later evolved into the Holy Roman Empire, which ruled Europe. The Byzantine, Chinese, and Ottoman empires were formed in the East; each of them falling in its turn, and eventually the human world divided itself into countries, or nations, as we know them today. But very soon the most powerful of these countries began building their own empires by conquering new territories far from home.

Two human inventions — the compass and the printing press — helped to expand empires across oceans all over the planet and to spread the knowledge and culture of empires over almost all of humanity. Soon more machines were invented to make things other than books in large numbers — the age of mechanical industry had begun. The word manufactured, which literally meant made by hand, soon came to mean machine-made.

Σ    Σ    Σ

The making of things by machine transformed the whole human way of life, bringing about a new kind of empire and building a new road to riches. The biggest empires at the beginning of the industrial era belonged to the kings and queens of seafaring European countries such as England, Holland and Spain. With ships and weapons they conquered peoples in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas, carrying off riches and rich natural resources, making the people slaves wherever possible, and taking over their lands as colonies. The Europeans used these riches to develop their new industrial way of life. Native peoples in Europe’s colonies were forced to mine iron, copper, and other metal ores needed by the conquerors to build machines, weapons and transportation systems. They were also forced to give over their agricultural diversity to grow large single species monocultures — food crops, as well as rubber, tobacco, cotton, and wool. These were then exported to Europe, where other poor, landless people worked at the machines that turned the crops and raw materials into products for sale and who mined the coal that fueled the machines.

In time the colonies began fighting for and winning their independence, thus breaking up the empires. The North American colonies were first to win their independence, and they quickly developed their own machine technology and industry to compete with European empires. The success of the United States, after it won its independence, however, was not typical. In most other colonies, the best land and resources had been taken over by European settlers who had gotten rich by shipping raw materials to the mother countries. After independence was won, these countries continued the colonial way of life, exporting raw materials and food crops to industrial countries and importing machine-made products.

Many peoples who had once cared for themselves independently by hunting for or growing everything they needed to live on their own land are worse off in their now independent countries than they were before the colonial empires were formed. While they are regarded as backward by Western standards, they have actually been systematically underdeveloped — prevented from proceeding with their own natural development in order to support already wealthy countries. Even after they win their independence, the people are forced to continue working the land for others, as they did in colonial times, often farming a monoculture crop or mining a single metal ore or fuel for export. They must buy their food, clothes, and housing with what little money they are paid, so they cannot escape poverty and often suffer hunger and illness.

Such peoples have lost not only their land and natural food supplies but their whole way of life as well — their tribal organization, their nature religions, their arts, and often even their languages. Progress, they were told, meant learning the ways of Europeans and Americans. But though they gave up their old cultures to adopt these new ones, progress for them only meant getting poorer in every way while those who owned their land got ever richer. Later, the richer countries, through international organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, lent these struggling countries money for development. Most of this development served the lending countries more than the developing countries themselves, yet it put them ever deeper into debt, creating a huge problem of global inequity we call `haves and have-nots.’ Imagine such a problem among the cells of your body.

Industry changed the way of life in powerful countries as much as in poor ones. The rich were no longer those who owned big portions of undeveloped land, but those who owned machines and bought up land, stripped it, and put it to use in producing raw materials for industry. More and more people were forced to give up subsistence farming and go to work in factories, swelling cities around the factories as the urban way of life became the social standard and the symbol of progress.

Before the Industrial Revolution all humanity lived off agriculture, and few people were rich enough not to have to produce their own food, clothing, and shelter. In today’s world, most of us buy almost everything we consume, which has been made, often far away, by others. Even when products are made in our own country, the raw materials in them very likely came from another. The whole world is now tied together by its economy — a word coming from oikos, meaning household, and nomos, meaning law or management. The human household, once a local family or tribal unit, now encompasses the whole world. A vast web of transportation and communications lines has been spun around our planet to move about raw materials and finished products and people to manage the global household.

In just a few hundred years, then — much less than the blink of an eye by Gaian standards — our brash young human species with its big brain and clever hands razed vast natural ecosystems to transform them into a single economic empire covering the whole planet and ruled by the rich industrial countries. Yet during two World Wars and the long Cold War following them, both the rulers and the ruled of this empire were politically split into blocs of countries with conflicting, competing schemes for managing this worldwide globalizing economy and its people.

Now, all of this is changing dramatically again. The Industrial Era has given way to the Information Age in the evolution of globalization, and its most important invention — the Internet — is forcing us to understand ourselves as a single living system, a body of humanity. We will see this in greater detail in Chapter 16.

Σ    Σ    Σ

Our modern world, with all its successes and problems, seems easier to understand if we look back again and again to the ancient bacterial monera in the process of evolving protists. The exploitation of host bacteria by hungry invading bacteria that needed their resources reminds us of the God cultures invading the Goddess cultures. It also reminds us of our more recent imperialism, in which some countries invaded others and made them colonies. But using up the host, or colony, bacteria’s resources killed the host, and so this process could not meet the long-term interest of the exploiters.

This is the lesson we are learning after thousands of years of exploiting one another in our struggle to become a mature species — thousands of years, which are as nothing for such a big evolutionary change. The healthy cooperative system that began evolving when invading bacteria produced energy for the host in return for raw materials is paralleled today as developed countries help their former colonies develop industrial energy. The problem is that we have not yet worked out fair exchanges. The powerful countries still demand more political and material concessions from the so-called developing nations than they would in a truly cooperative system. But then, the ancient bacteria did not evolve into protists so quickly, either. Only when many bacteria of various kinds had become involved with one another inside the same walls did a cooperative system, including a common nucleus, begin to evolve for the benefit of all.

Human countries have only recently found themselves inseparably linked inside the boundaries of our planet, and we are just beginning to understand what this means. If exploitation and hostile rivalry continue at the expense of cooperation among countries, the new body of humanity may not survive much longer. Evolution takes time, but when a natural system has pushed itself or been pushed to certain limits, it can reorganize itself with incredible speed, as the great extinctions teach us. Humanity has now reached such a critical limit. It has also invented everything it needs in order to accomplish a dramatic reorganization into a healthy cooperative body.

Particularly interesting is the fact that bacteria invented communications systems prior to organizing themselves into nucleated cells, and that nucleated cells invented intercellular communications systems before organizing themselves into multicelled creatures. This is how the Internet will play out its enormous role.

Communications systems, which we humans now have worldwide, are prerequisites to the organization of larger living systems. Transport systems for moving about supplies also play a critical role in the actual organization and function of such larger systems, and here, too, we are well prepared in our transport capability. If the big brain experiment is to be a success — if humanity is to survive as a healthy body, as a holon in the Gaian holarchy — we must use our communications, our information exchange, and our transport as parts of a cooperatively organized body. The sooner we recognize that this is our only viable direction, the sooner we will get on with the task.


Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

Welcome

Thursday, April 25th, 2002

I began studying synergy in 1979. By 1981, I was thinking of myself as a synergic scientist. There are only a handful of synergic scientists, and with the internet, I thought I knew them all. So it was to my surprise and delight when a search for synergism revealed the work of Peter Corning.


Synergy—Another Idea Whose Time Has Come?

Peter A. Corning, Ph.D.

There is a metaphor in Shakespeare’s Hamlet that has been borrowed by many modern authors, perhaps because it seems to capture an eternal truth: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” Thus, in the 1930s the historian Arthur Schlesinger (senior) used Shakespeare’s famous image in a widely-acclaimed article called “The Tides of American Politics” (1939). In the 1960s, the French historian Jacques Pirenne wrote a majesterial volume that was translated and published in English as The Tides of History (1962). Political scientist Karl Deutsch also used it in the title of his classic text on the Tides Among Nations (1979).

More recently, an online search of the internet bookseller “amazon.com” produced a total of 274 current titles that include the word “tides”. There are books on corporate tides, the tides of power, tides of migration, tides of change, the tides of reform, China against the tides, NATO and the tides of discontent, the tides of war, the tides of love, political tides in the Arab world and, of course, many volumes related to ocean tides.

Our everyday lives are also subject to tidal influences, especially in the business world, in the arts and in politics. This year’s fad is often next year’s “remainder” or “close-out” sale item. This year’s titantic blockbuster movie will be available for rental next year for a pittance. And this year’s hot political issue may be ignored by the media next year, even though the underlying problem still exists. President Clinton’s abortive health care proposal of 1993 is a good example.

Although we like to think that science is free from such “extraneous” influences, of course this is not so. Thomas Kuhn, in his celebrated volume on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1972) argued that science is very much influenced by the tidal effects associated with different “paradigms”. Ideas and theories that fit within or support the currently-dominant framework of basic assumptions and theories in a given discipline are more likely to be favorably received. On the other hand, conflicting work, especially if it challenges the dominant paradigm, is often ignored or rejected. Kuhn’s specific scenario for scientific revolutions has been much-debated. Nevertheless, there seems to be widespread agreement that Kuhn’s core idea is valid, even if the dynamics may be somewhat different from his original formulation.

A classic case in point is biologist Barbara McClintock’s work on the so-called “jumping genes” — genetic rearrangements during ontogeny via what are now called “transposons” (or transposable elements) that can produce variations in the phenotype of an organism (such as the different color patterns in maize). This phenomenon, painstakingly documented by McClintock over 20 years, remained in the shadows until late in her life. The reason was that it contradicted the then reigning “central dogma” of molecular biology — namely, that the genome is expressed during ontogenesis in a linear, deterministic fashion (DNA to RNA to proteins). Now, of course, it is recognized that ontogeny is a much more complex process and that a variety of non-linear, feedback-dependent influences may affect the outcome (see Keller 1983).

In a similar fashion, the dominant paradigm in the social sciences for the better part of this century utilized as its ground-zero premise (so to speak) the assumption that human behavior and cultural processes are “determined” by the socio-cultural environment, and that biological influences are largely irrelevant. According to the widely quoted dictum of Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology: “Every time that a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false” (1895/1938, p. 104). Among the many consequences of this dogmatism was the fact that it created a wall of prejudice against any purported “facts” that conflicted with socio-economic and cultural explanations. Accordingly, Edward O. Wilson’s paradigm-shattering textbook, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) — was greeted by many mainstream social scientists with great hostility, which is not surprising; it threatened their core assumptions and challenged the hegemony of their explanatory apparatus. (The term sociobiology was actually coined by the pioneer biopsychologist John Paul Scott, but Wilson made it famous.)

Now it seems that another, somewhat less contentious tide-change is underway, one that is affecting both evolutionary biology and the social sciences. It is a shift that, hopefully, will result in a more balanced, multi-levelled, “interactional” perspective on the evolutionary process generally and the ongoing evolution of the human species in particular. Over much of the past 25 years, evolutionary theory has been dominated by the “selfish gene” (or Neo-Darwinian) paradigm, after biologist Richard Dawkins’s (1976/1989) famous book by that name. The selfish gene metaphor epitomizes a reductionist perspective in which atomistic individual competition is viewed as the predominant, if not exclusive, shaping force in evolution. In this view, cooperative phenomena are not only very limited in scope but are “reducible” to gene self-interest; “higher-level” cooperative relationships are even considered by some theorists to be epiphenomena that are not causally important in their own right.

Given this predisposition among many evolutionary theorists of the 1980s, a new theory about the role of synergy in evolution — about cooperative (interdependent) functional effects of various kinds as a causal “mechanism” in the evolution of complexity — was, in retrospect, launched on a strongly unfavorable tide. The theory was developed in a book-length monograph called The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution (McGraw-Hill 1983), and it was largely ignored or rejected at the time that it was published. Not only did this theory challenge the dominant Neo-Darwinian paradigm, shifting the focus from competition to cooperation (or, better said, competition via cooperation), but it directed our attention away from genes and stressed the functional dynamics of living systems at various levels of organization — that is, the functional effects produced by the “vehicles” (after Dawkins), the “interactors” (after David Hull), or simply the “phenotypes.” As a corollary, this theory also proposed to shift the explanatory focus to the “economics” of adaptation, survival, and reproduction.

Paradoxically, at the time this theory was first proposed, the concept of synergy was already widely used in biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology and related disciplines. (A search of a biological data-base for the year 1988, using the keyword “synerg”, identified 613 references, of which 95% were related to these “hard” sciences.) By contrast, in evolutionary theory and the behavioral sciences the concept of synergy was largely ignored during those years — aside from a few eccentric uses by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, the engineer-inventor Buckminster Fuller and a handful of others.

But now there is every indication that the tide has turned. One early sign was the adoption of the synergy concept by biologist John Maynard Smith (1982, 1983, 1989), who developed a “synergistic selection” model to characterize the interdependent functional effects that may arise from altruistic cooperation. (Maynard Smith later broadened the concept to accord with a strictly functional interpretation, whether altruistic or not.) The work of political scientist Robert Axelrod and biologist William Hamilton (1981; also Axelrod 1984) on the evolution of cooperation, using the game theory methodology pioneered by Maynard Smith, was also important.

Another significant contribution was made by biologist Leo Buss in his 1987 book on the evolution of higher levels of organization, which invoked the concept of synergy, albeit in a narrow sense and without much elaboration. The biologically-oriented psychologist David Smillie (1993) has also utilized the concept of synergy in relation to social interactions in nature. Biologist David Sloan Wilson and various colleagues have also played an important role with their dogged efforts over the past 20 years to put the concept of group selection on a new footing (Wilson 1975, 1980; also Wilson and Sober 1994; Wilson and Dugatkin 1997). Although Wilson’s paradigm remains gene-centered, he stresses the role of what he calls a “shared fate” among individual cooperators, which implies a functional interdependency.

Especially important, however, is the work of biologist Lynn Margulis on the role of “symbiogenesis” in evolution (particularly in relation to the origins of eukaryotic cells). Now recognized as a major theoretical contribution, this concept has focussed our attention on an area in which synergistic functional effects have played a key role (see Margulis 1981,1993; Margulis and Fester 1991; Margulis and Sagan 1995). (Indeed, the relatively new discipline of endocytobiology — inspired in part by Margulis’s work but centered in Europe — is concerned especially with investigating symbiotic and synergistic phenomena of various kinds at the cellular level.)

But perhaps the most significant sign that a favorable tide now exists for the synergy concept is the book co-authored by John Maynard Smith and Eˆrs Szathm·ry on the evolution of complexity, The Major Transitions in Evolution (1995), which features the role of synergy at various levels of biological organization. Maynard Smith now recognizes the “universal” importance of functional synergy (personal communication), as does Ernst Mayr (personal communication). Nowadays, articles about synergy in evolution are also routinely accepted for publication, whereas 15 years ago they were routinely rejected.

Nowadays “complexity” is also recognized to be a distinct “emergent” phenomenon that requires higher-level explanations. In fact, there is a rapidly growing literature in complexity theory — much of it powered by the mathematics of non-linear dynamical systems theory — which is richly synergistic in character; it is primarily concerned with collective properties and collective effects. To be sure, much (but not all) of the work in complexity theory involves a radically different view of the evolutionary process from the functional, selectionist paradigm within which the synergism hypothesis fits. For instance, the biophysicist Stuart Kauffman’s work (e.g., 1993, 1995) is directed toward trying to identify deterministic “laws” of biological order. His metatheoretical premise is that much of the order found in nature is self-organized — “order for free” as he puts it. (Ultimately, I believe that both self-organizing influences and synergistic functional influences will be recognized as important “mechanisms” in the evolution of complex systems.)

Even the concept of “progressive evolution” — lately denigrated as an outmoded idea (see especially Nitecki 1988; Gould 1996) — has been resuscitated, most recently by John Stewart (1997) in the preceding issue of this journal. Stewart proposes that progressive evolution, meaning the trend toward the emergence of “higher” levels of organization, has been catalyzed and sustained by the functional advantages of cooperation and the ability of “managers” to control cheaters and free riders. Stewart boldly projects this process forward with a futuristic vision of government on a “planetary scale.”

So, the question is, will the rising tide lead on to fortune for the concept of synergy? A firm prediction would be risky, of course, but there do seem to be a number of favorable indications. One is that Maynard Smith and Szathm·ry will soon publish a volume that strongly supports the theoretical importance of the synergy concept. Several of this author’s recent publications (see especially Corning 1995, 1996a,b, 1997), as well as some work currently in preparation, are also seeking to advance the synergism hypothesis.

Another positive development is the growing number of field research programs in the behavioral sciences, especially in behavioral ecology, that are explicitly looking for, and finding, synergy. For instance, Gordon (1987) observed “synergistic interactions” among three major activities in colonies of red harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) in response to various perturbations. Santill·n-Doherty and his colleagues (1991), in a study of stump-tailed macaques (Macaca arctoides), found non-linear synergistic effects among three variables — kinships, sex and rank — in shaping the behavioral interactions among the animals in their study population. And Packer and Ruttan (1988) also explicitly recognized the role of synergy in cooperative hunting. They observed that, when individual hunting success is already high, there is little to be gained by cooperating. Cooperation depends upon synergy — an increase in the average individual feeding efficiency through joint efforts. “An increase in hunting success with group size therefore indicates synergism from cooperation, whereas a decrease indicates some form of interference [negative synergy]” (1988:183).

Finally, there is a recognition, only now beginning to emerge, that synergistic functional effects are a fundamental aspect of virtually every scientific discipline. The reason why the universality of this functional principle was not widely appreciated in the past is that synergy has travelled under many different aliases, including emergent effects, cooperativity, symbiosis, a division of labor (or, more precisely, a combination of labor), epistasis, threshold effects, phase transitions, coevolution, heterosis, dynamical attractors, holistic effects, mutualism, complementarity, even interactions and cooperation.

Of course, it is one thing to recognize synergy as a ubiquitous phenomenon. It is another thing to assign to it a major causal/explanatory role in various domains, particularly biological evolution, human evolution and the evolution of complex societies. This is what the “synergism hypothesis” encompasses, and the case for this theory, along with an argument for using synergy as a unifying concept in the sciences, will be presented in a forthcoming issue of this journal.

Copyright © 1998 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL AND EVOLUTIONARY SYSTEMS, 21(1), 1998.


About the Author

Welcome

Wednesday, April 24th, 2002

More from EarthDance. Yesterday, Elisabet Sahtouris took us from From Polyps to Possums—9. Also see: From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.


From Possums to People—10

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

We are still not sure why warm-blooded animals dream during sleep. Sleeping and dreaming are special behaviors that evolved in mammals and were passed on to their descendants, yet no one really knows why. Scientists used to think sleep restored worn bodies, but there is no good evidence for this theory. Some people sleep very little, even never, and have no problems as a result. For most of us, however, sleep is clearly an unavoidable aspect of our physiologies. That makes it highly likely that sleeping and dreaming evolved because somehow they did our ancestors some good.

One guess is that sleeping was a way to keep warm-blooded bodies, which worked just as well by night as by day, quiet and in hiding during the hours when dinosaurs hunted, as mentioned above. Perhaps dream images of dinosaurs kept the mammals just close enough to waking so they could get up and run fast if a dinosaur poked its head into the nest. This theory seems to fit mammals that are active by night. But shrews, small mouse-like mammals, are active day and night, while bats, which are small mouse-like mammals with big wings, sleep almost the whole day and night. Many mammal species, including humans, do their sleeping at night instead of by day.

Another theory says that we are put to sleep by a chemical that daylight builds up in our bodies, making us more and more tired by nightfall. That still does not explain what good sleep and dreaming did us. All we know for sure is that they were among the many new kinds of behavior organized in the larger, more complicated brains of early mammals such as the possums. Perhaps we sleep simply to prolong our lives, for sleep does slow down body activity and thus makes a body last longer. Bats live about five times as long as their super-active shrew cousins with the same body size, though both species have about the same number of heartbeats per lifetime! But long life in individuals does not necessarily mean their species survives longer, as it is clear that bat and shrew species have survived equally well.

Possums, besides being warm-blooded, hunting by night, and sleeping with dreams by day, take care of their young. Caring for babies through an extended nursing period became the basis for more complex social behavior. Bigger brains had room for more complicated ways of seeing, feeling, and doing, of understanding and acting. Among the new ways of seeing and feeling was the ability of parent animals to recognize their babies and feel the need to care for them — to feed them, clean them, protect them, and teach them, as both birds and mammals do.

Again we must note that nature does not keep things in neat human categories, and so we find insects, such as wasps, providing for their young in advance of their hatching by storing food, and frogs that keep live young in their stomachs, regurgitating them now and then to see if they are ready to function on their own. Some species of fish have evolved quite elaborate care of live young by their parents, though they are not warm-blooded. Seahorse daddies keep babies in kangaroo-like pockets, and some daddy cichlid fishes keep hatched babies in their mouths. After they learn to swim on their own, the fathers herd them and let them back into their mouths any time danger threatens.

Still, if you could watch and compare a fish father and a cat mother caring for their young, you would quickly see that the fish has simpler movements and acts more automatically, while the cat often seems to have a choice about what to do next. The tendency toward particular patterns of behavior evolved in animals together with the structure of their bodies. Such innate, or built-in, behaviors — say, nest building or courting rituals — are popularly called `instinctive,’ though most scientists, having dropped the old concept of instincts, call them `species-specific behaviors’ or simply `innate behaviors.’ Whatever we call them, the animal performs them without having learned them in the way we understand learning, and so they appear automatic, performed without choice or flexibility. Sometimes they are therefore called `fixed action patterns.’

As evolution transforms creatures from simple animals to amphibians, to reptiles, and then to mammals, we find nervous systems getting more complex and behavior becoming more flexible. As brains grow larger and more complicated, some of the innate behaviors loosen up, giving the animal more freedom of choice in responding to its environment and to its own inner urges. The brain is increasingly a flexible coordinating system for changing behavior to fit changing circumstances.

As animals gained more freedom in what to do, and how and when to do it, they gained more freedom in acting on feelings as well as information and in learning new behaviors. Mammals clearly began to show what we recognize as feelings, and some of these feelings seem to be the beginning of evident love in animal evolution. Animal mothers apparently felt good staying close to their babies, feeding them on milk from their own bodies, licking them clean, and hiding them from danger. Whenever mothers and babies got separated, both felt distress and cried. They got back together by listening to each other and tracking the cries. That was the beginning of the voice communications we humans have evolved into complex languages that can be used to express extremely complex ideas and information. Birdsong is a more innate pattern of voice communication, though baby birds often have to learn the exact pattern for their species from the adults. Whales and dolphins have reasonably complex languages they teach their young.

One of the most important things mammals learned and taught one another was to play. Play in baby animals seems to be practice for more serious grown-up behavior such as hunting or winning a mate. You can see wide varieties of baby mammal play, from kid goats butting one another to puppies hiding from and pouncing on one another. Mother cats clearly show their kittens how to practice hunting on one another without being too rough, and the kittens come to enjoy the activity. Ever since it evolved, play has been an important part of social life — the life of animals living together, making a living together, communicating, and caring for one another.

Mammals such as cats, dogs, and monkeys have flexible bodies that make it easy for them to care for babies and to tumble about in play. Flexible feet with toes and nails, or claws, can become very useful paws with which an animal can do many things, as we see watching raccoons manipulate food in complex ways. Stiff-legged mammals without flexible toes, such as goats, antelope, and horses, are specialized for climbing and running, but not for tussling or washing their food! Thus they lead simpler lives, grazing rather than hunting other animals, running from their predators, shielding their babies as best they can. While their strong, slender legs and hooves make them surefooted runners, such legs are too specialized for baby care and play, so their young stand and run on their own stiff legs early.

Mammals of all shapes and sizes — some very specialized, some more flexible — branched off from early possum-like ancestors. Each new species created new steps in the Gaian dance of life as it wove itself into a complex environment. While the oceans filled with animals from microbial plankton to sea snails, from fishes to mammalian whales and sea lions, forests grew thick with colorful insects, birds; and furry mammals, plains rang with the clattering of fleet-footed hooves or shook with the heavy tread of pachyderms.

With the dinosaurs gone, mammals were the largest of land animals, just as trees were the largest plants. All through evolution, larger and larger individuals had evolved in both the plant world and the animal world. But there was a size limit beyond which individuals did not work so well. Trees that grew too tall could not stand upright in storms or pump water to their highest leaves. Giant dinosaurs were too large to survive a catastrophe that smaller creatures did survive. Mammals the size of whales and elephants seem to be about as big as the Gaian life system can manage successfully. Larger bodies, among other problems, would have trouble getting enough food and oxygen. An animal ten times as big as another in each direction weighs a thousand times as much and needs a thousand times as much food. The large animals that have evolved are very few in number compared with smaller species, down to the most numerous of all, the endlessly hardworking bacteria.

While some Gaian animals reached size limits, there seemed to be no limits to variety in their body designs and behaviors. They evolved countless wonderful ways of swimming, slithering, crawling, running, climbing, and flying; of hunting, fighting, playing, and learning. They had senses to see, hear, smell, feel, and otherwise perceive their world. They communicated with one another and found endless ways of making homes and feeding themselves, often developing complex social interactions. They developed marvelous furred and feathered body designs, many with striking colors and seductive dances to attract their mates.

Where could Gaian creation go next? What was possible that had not already been developed?

Σ    Σ    Σ

Think about the world as it was with this tremendous variety of monera, protists, funguses, plants, and animals woven into and weaving the patterns of life. Rock had transformed itself into countless creatures, which had created a rich atmosphere, nourishing seas and soils, producing vast sea and land ecosystems for themselves. Every species of Gaian creation had its part in the dance. Their co-evolution contributed enormously to the overall evolution of their entire planet body.

This great Earth being knew itself in the same sense that we have talked about our bodies knowing themselves. It had and still has the body wisdom to take care of itself and to keep on evolving. In particular, it had learned a great deal through so many generations of creatures living out their lives in concert — in cycles of individuation, conflict and negotiations to new cooperative arrangements. All this went on without those creatures thinking about their lives or relationships with one another any more than do our own cells and organs ponder the meaning of their lives.

Like the cells in our own bodies, they played their parts well. Their perceptions and communications were good enough so that even if they suffered from conflicts and had to learn to resolve them through all sorts of trial and error, the one thing they did not suffer was confusion. In a way, they were like actors who played their parts very well even when improvising — actors who said their lines appropriately. But could they have imagined what the whole play was about in the ways we try to figure it out?

This seems to be where the next step in the dance came in — with the evolution of a very complex and flexible big brain, in a flexible body with a variety of sensing devices, dextrous hands including opposing thumbs, and a throat with vocal-chords uniquely suited to speech between lungs and mouth. This would be a brain capable of finding external ways to communicate with other such brains through language far more complex in expression than body gestures, grunts, roars and whistles could achieve. Through the social use of language, the new big-brained creatures were to become more overtly aware of themselves and one another and of the play they were part of — to wonder about it and about their roles within it.

The biggest-brained mammals in the sea were the whales and dolphins. And what successful creatures they were! Their bodies had evolved in perfect harmony with the sea to which they had long ago returned. They could roam the watery three-fourths of Earth’s surface, seeing by sonar when the water was murky and with their eyes when it was clear. They could adjust to the coldest and warmest, the deepest and shallowest waters, and they could devise a language in which to talk and sing to one another from one side of an ocean to the other.

It is quite possible that cetaceans — whales and dolphins — have evolved the ability to think about their world and to share their thoughts with each other. Dolphin language, for example, is very complex and apparently very much faster than ours. We have just begun seriously to study it, and so far we have made little progress in understanding it. We have even less understanding, or even comprehension, of what their telepathic communications may be like. All we do know is that if brain size and anatomical complexity are clues to intelligence, they outstrip us.

Until very recently we humans believed ourselves to be the only intelligent creatures, and we didn’t treat other creatures with much respect. In fact, we have come close to killing off the whales and dolphins just as, earlier in our history, we apparently killed off most species of elephants — the only other land mammals with brains bigger than our own. Homo sapiens may even have killed off other species of early humans while competing with them for food. The last other known human species was Neanderthal, who disappeared from the evolutionary record only about forty thousand years ago. Some scientists think they may have disappeared through interbreeding with our own species; others think we killed them off.

In any case, cetaceans had little to worry about until our own human species evolved brains as big and clever as their own, thirty million or more years after theirs had evolved. Though we humans evolved so much later than cetaceans, by Gaian standards we evolved with incredible speed, our brains blossoming suddenly, expanding in size almost explosively from the much smaller brains of our apelike ancestors.

Stories abound about our human origins, from the better known religious stories to no few scenarios in which we result from interbreeding between extra-terrestrials and apelike Earth creatures, or from the takeover of the apelike creatures’ bodies by more evolved non-physical beings. While we have, at least as yet, no clear confirmation of any such stories, we would do well to recognize that the purely Earth-evolutionary story of human evolution still contains plenty of gaps and mysteries. With those limitations in mind, let us continue the story as scientists have pieced it together.

To become human, those ancestral apes would have to do something similar to what their much more ancient polyp ancestors did. They would have to practice neoteny — that is, they would have to remain childlike by not growing up into mature apes at all!

Piecing our own history together from fossils and other biological evidence, we get a story of human evolution goes something like this: Generation after generation, some baby apes were born prematurely, until at birth the bones on the tops of their heads were still soft and not grown together. This permitted their brains to grow much larger after being born through the limited diameter of their mothers’ pelvic bone door to the world.

In the first year of a human baby’s life its brain grows three times bigger than at birth, quickly passing the size of a grown-up chimpanzee or gorilla brain. But human faces keep a babyish flatness instead of developing grown-up snouts and jaws and bony eye ridges. If you look at chimpanzee families, you will easily see that people, even grown-up people, look much more like baby chimps than like adult chimps.

Scientists have shown that our DNA is 99 percent identical with that of chimpanzees, and have estimated that we branched off from common ancestors only two or three million years ago. Some scientists find it difficult to believe our species can be so different from our large ape relatives with so little difference in genes, but perhaps the major changes in our bodies have been due simply to a few genes that regulate maturation. The potential for greater size and complexity in ape brains may be there, but locked up by the early sealing of their skull bones.

However humans came about, it is clear that genetically we are very closely related to our much more peaceable chimp and gorilla cousins, and this may help us overcome the obsessive idea that we are naturally violent creatures. On the other hand, eager to see our own violence as natural — and at the same time to see ourselves as better than our ancestors — we emphasize the occasional violence we do find among great apes, as well as among pre-modern peoples.

Our obsession with violence is worth a brief digression. We teach history as the history of warfare, naming its great ages after metals from which human males made weapons. We teach history, rather than herstory, though half of humans are female. Schoolchildren, asked to tell what they know about Incas and Aztecs, are far more likely to remember warfare and human sacrifice than their phenomenal agricultural sciences and architecture, their metallic arts and weavings — as if such great economic and artistic cultures could have been built on mayhem and murder. Of course we do not teach children that European culture at the same time was built primarily on the massive human sacrifice of the Inquisition, which was also Europe’s chief export to the Incas and Aztecs, in turn for their gold and silver, which financed Europe’s industrial revolution.

All this to say that questions of violence are truly of huge importance for humanity, but social bias in discussing them clouds the real issues. Violence is not `good if ours and bad if theirs’ — it is a danger to all. The really important issue is that we endanger ourselves as a species by believing we cannot evolve from the violence we do to each other and to other species — the competitive belligerence from which we must evolve to peaceful cooperation as so many other Gaian species have done.

Back to our story, the babyish new apes, without big snouts in the way, could easily see what they were doing with their hands, which had long been good at grabbing and holding on to things. After all, they had been living a life of swinging through trees for millions of years. Now, more and more, perhaps for lack of adequate food, these evolving creatures foraged and made their homes on the ground instead of up in the trees. Their arms and hands, no longer so engaged in swinging, were free to do new things. In time, their opposing thumbs grew increasingly dextrous at holding and making things. Meanwhile, their necks and hipbones, legs and feet, were gradually re-patterned for walking and running upright.

The longer these new upright mammals stayed babyish, the later their teeth came out and the less hair they grew, though they may also have lost hair in evolving a cooling system that let sweat out all over their bodies. This cooling system helped them run for such a long time that the animals they learned to chase for food and clothing tired out before they did.

Young humans needed warmth, protection, and affection. They needed to be taken care of much longer than other young mammals. But their long childhood gave them time to play and be curious and learn new things, and parents had plenty of time to teach their children before they grew up. In fact, it is because we never really grow up the way apes do that we can keep on playing and learning new things all our lives — providing we don’t seal our own brains up with fixed ideas as inflexible as the old innate behavior patterns.

There were endless new challenges for these first humans. Without the warm coats, strong claws, and long teeth that other animals their size had, they had to survive by using their big brains, their clever hands, and their ability to run longer, if not faster, than many other animals. But perhaps this was in their favor, for even today the most creative and successful people are often those who didn’t have everything they wanted early in life and had to work hard to overcome disadvantages.

Early human diets included a wide variety of leaves, roots, seeds, nuts, fruits, eggs, grubs and easily caught small animals, including fish and shellfish. Nets and snares for birds, fish and rodents were probably the primary hunting and gathering tools for a long time. But our ancestors also learned to drive successful predators away from their game catches and acquired a taste for hunting such game themselves. No doubt this made them more inventive. Tools and weapons extended the use of their hands; keeping warm by turning the larger animal skins into warm clothing for themselves was as important as eating their meat.

We can be quite sure that that early humans were both cooperative and scrappy, with emotions from avarice to anger, from lust to laughter, from fun to fear, playing important roles in determining their behavior. Families and groups of families shared caves and other shelters as well as their ways of life, living together where food was plentiful, traveling together when food got scarce. As they became ever more social and communicative, we can imagine them laughing and dancing with joy when life was good, growing frightened and hostile when food was scarce, when dangerous animals prowled near, or when fires were started by lightning near their homes. Yet there is no reason to assume they were any more hostile to one another than chimps or gorillas are. Even if we became a predator species through hunting, it would have been highly unnatural for us, as a mammalian species, to kill our own kind. The question may be, who did we recognize as our own kind?

It’s easy to imagine how exciting it must have been when truly new improvements were invented. Who were the first people to carry burning sticks to their caves, learning to feed flames without letting them spread, learning to cover coals so they could be re-lit the next day or carried to a new home. How proud they must have been to teach such discoveries to their clan or tribe.

Like apes, humans had very flexible, expressive bodies and a natural talent for imitation. Human language probably began with dances and making decorative marks on their ever more naked bodies, to show each other, and later remind each other, of their experiences. Wearing clothing gave opportunity for elaboration into special costumes with headdresses and adornments as they created these rituals. We can imagine them dancing their hunting adventures, copying animals in courtship dances, and so on.

We can also guess that the sounds they made as they danced took on meaning, eventually becoming spoken words that were symbols for actions and things, just as their drawings on rock or on the ground became picture symbols. Once there was spoken language, it must have been much easier for them to learn and teach ever more complicated ways of life to one another.

Quite as the ancient bacteria had gotten together to do different jobs within the same cell walls, and as the cells of protist colonies, or the ants of ant colonies, divided their jobs among themselves, so humans now organized themselves into communities where different people did different jobs. Some hunted or fished; others scraped skins for clothing. Some became specialists in making tools or baskets or clay pots, which were hardened in fires. Some were no doubt better than others at drawing, dancing, or telling stories. And some became leaders — wiser elders, chiefs or medicine people — who organized jobs, drew up rules to live by, and made decisions on what to do when others could not agree.

Human communities, as they got larger and more complex, evolved leadership and governments just as eukaryote cells had evolved nuclei and just as animal bodies had evolved brains. Every holon that grows larger and more complicated must evolve some way of organizing itself to simplify and manage its complexity if it is to survive. When human communities got too large, they split up, or budded off, into new colonies, thus reproducing themselves much as ancient bacteria had.

Σ    Σ    Σ

Among the oldest artifacts of Stone Age societies are motherly female images carved in stone or modeled in clay. Some of the oldest stone-age temples we have found were actually built in the shape of human female bodies, such as those in Malta, or in mounds that symbolized them, with internal womb chambers and birth passages, as in Newgrange, Ireland. So many such images and temples have been found by now, without any male images from the same times, say of hunters or warriors, that it is clear their makers were more interested in the giving of life than in the taking of it.

The giving of life is actually a lifelong business of feeding and otherwise nurturing people. Early humans probably began agriculture simply by leaving pits and seeds along their habitual tracks, as Amazon hunting cultures still do today. This rearranges ecosystems favorably for humans — a kind of intermediate stage between gathering and gardening. Gradually they learned to grow reliable food supplies in their settlements and to keep and breed captive animals. Where climate and soil permitted, they organized themselves into villages with fields. The art of agriculture evolved from simply planting seeds to selecting the best seeds from each harvest for planting and giving as gifts, as well as to preparation of food for storage against times of need. As humans cleared larger and larger stretches of land, they began to seriously alter their environments, eliminating some species to nurture others, changing the genetic identity of plants and animals through their selection.

The agricultural revolution of the Stone Age was no doubt the greatest transition in human history, forging our destiny as a species that would change the face of the whole planet, destroying and rearranging things to our desire. Evidence suggests it all began peacefully and modestly with simple agricultural techniques for growing plant foods and keeping herds of animals for milk and meat and wool. In nurturing one another, people learned to spin yarn and weave cloth, to mold clay into vessels, to make houses of earthen bricks and furniture of wood. They learned to smelt metals from the earth for making images of worship, adornments to wear, and stronger tools, as well as for weapons.

They made musical instruments and danced and sang in worship of deities as well as to celebrate and tell colorful stories about their world and themselves. Some of those stories were reports, others were used as lessons, still more were told just to exaggerate, boast and entertain. We assume it was difficult for early people to explain their world to themselves — that nature was an incomprehensible and unpredictable power to them and death a frightening mystery — but this is not really likely. Today’s surviving indigenous cultures — tribal cultures still living on their ancestral lands — have a much closer relationship with nature than does our technological society. Those that have been able to maintain their ancient ways despite all efforts by conquerors to destroy them, tend to see themselves as active and responsible co-creators of their ecosystems, something our dominant culture needs badly to learn from them. More on this in Chapter 19.

When we continue the story of human social evolution in the Stone Age and after, we will see that sustained violence among humans was quite likely a distortion of our humanity that came fairly late on the scene of human civilization. This should give us hope that our violent phase may be a temporary aberration from which we may recover. But let us first take a look back and reflect on the fact that for the greater part of our existence we were not so different from the rest of the animal world.

Σ    Σ    Σ

Looking at ourselves today, it’s hard to see humans as natural animals. But from Gaia’s perspective that is just what we are — and a very new animal species at that. For most of our history we did little more than mimic adults as children, mate and give birth, shelter and care for our young, gather food, defend ourselves and our homes against other animals, then rest or play with one another before we fell asleep to dream our restless dreams. Compared with the few million years in which human life was not very different from that of other mammals, our civilizations are still a very new development in a still juvenile species.

Imagine squeezing the four and a half billion years of Earth’s existence into just twenty-four hours. While bacteria were born long before dawn and had the world to themselves until midday, humans came on the scene only for the very last minute before midnight! And only in the last second of that minute have we formed settled societies we call civilizations. We really have just begun to become fully human. Consider the experience whales have gained being already in their present form for some thirty millions of years.

Since people evolved — however recently by these timescales — we have survived many ice ages, which were believed until now to have been abnormal times for our planet. Lovelock and others presently working out Gaian physiology suggest that ice ages may be the Gaian norm during phases when continents are separate and spread out. Between these phases the Earth seems to warm up, creating periods between the waves of ice ages that are abnormally warm, like fevers. We now know of seventeen distinct ice age phases, most of which occurred before humans evolved.

Ice ages are only a few degrees of temperature colder on the average than the times between them, though we sensitive creatures consider them great extremes. In any case, during ice ages, great patches of ice move, as we know, from the poles over parts of the Earth that are warm between ice ages. As more ice is produced, the sea level is lowered and more land is exposed near the equator — as much land as there is in the whole continent of Africa. When the ice recedes again, these areas are flooded, but ice-covered areas warm up, melt the ice, and produce rich new forests and grasslands.

Humans were apparently driven ahead of the great sheets of ice when they advanced, and humans later followed in their wake as the ice sheets receded. They wandered to places that were rich in food and water and settled down until, many generations later, a new wave of ice drove them back. By the time the last ice age was over, around ten thousand years ago, people had spread themselves out over much of the Earth’s land, taking with them their early civilizations, their ways of changing the land, their seeds, and their stock. But before we go on with their history, let’s look a bit more closely at the spectacular brains that made all this possible.


Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

Welcome

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2002

Excerpted from EarthDance, Sunday, Elisabet Sahtouris took us from From Protists to Polyps—8. Also see: Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.


From Polyps to Possums—9

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

One of the many remarkable things about life is its memory. The process of life creates and stores information — not just the kind of information needed to reproduce each new body from a single tiny cell, but remembered information about much of its evolution over aeons of time. The way each of us came into being shows us something of the whole dance of evolution since the time of the first protists. Before we are even born — in just a short nine months — we repeat many steps in a billion years or so of our evolution as Earth creatures.

Each of us began as a single cell, much like an ancient protist that began its life by sexual reproduction, as the offspring of two parents. This new-creature cell divided again and again, cloning itself first into two cells, then into four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four cells, and so on until there was a simple ball-like creature very much like a protist colony. This creature in its early stages lived like other protist colonies in a salty sea — a special uterine bag of salty liquid duplicating our real ancestral sea.

Our own embryonic colony of cells soon specialized and turned us into multicelled creatures. If you could watch a movie of your own development — you may have seen films of human embryos developing — you would see the ball-colony change shape as its specialized cells divide again and again. One side of the ball dents in to form a groove where the backbone will grow. A lumpy head appears at one end. Soon it looks like a tiny fish with gill slits; dark eyes bulging in its big pale head, and a tail that starts twitching. A little later it looks so much like the developing embryos of frogs and turtles, then chickens and pigs, that it is hard to say what it is going to become. Even when our arms and legs have budded from our bodies, we still look much like other animal embryos.

Slowly we continue our formation as we roll about comfortably in our warm sea. Our tails shrink to nothing, our brains grow bigger, our arms and legs and faces become human. Finally, after nine months, we leave our maternal sea to begin breathing air.

How fascinating that this memory of the Gaian life dance is relived by each of us, reminding us of just who we are, where we came from, how we are related to all other species and to the whole dance of life — the evolutionary dance we traced at the end of the last chapter to our discontented polyp ancestors. Let’s continue now to see what made them evolve into more complicated animals and how they came to leave their ancestral sea.

Σ    Σ    Σ

Dull as the polyp’s life cycle was at the beginning and end, the middle stages as medusa and planula permitted some adventure, some spreading into new environments. Somewhere along the line, certain young planulae seem to have felt their difference and rebelled against settling down and growing into a dull adult life as polyps. They began growing up straight into medusae, simply skipping the whole attached polyp stage. Others began sexually reproducing themselves as planulae, skipping even the medusa stage and evolving, generation by generation, into various species of wormlike and then fishlike creatures.

The evolution of new species from the baby stage of a parent species is known by evolutionists as neoteny — meaning `stretched youth.’ Neoteny is a kind of evolutionary step backwards in the dance when a species finds itself at some adult dead end or blind alley, when for some reason the body organization of the grown-up stage evolves to limits that get it stuck.

It seems that when a species becomes highly specialized for a particular and successful way of life, it loses variety in its DNA and ends up with a very fixed body structure that can no longer change or evolve. We can see such dead ends in polyps living today, or in sharks, which are still very like their ancient ancestors, having evolved no further. But in some ancient species, as we said, nature took advantage of the fact that baby planulae, which did not yet have the specialized bodies of adults, could still change. We can trace the descent of some free-swimming creatures back to ancestors who were very likely unspecialized planula babies. Later we will see that neoteny produced other interesting new species, including our own!

Among the new parts of the more complex bodies evolving from planula — like ancestors were networks of nerves. These seem to have evolved from in-turned rowing cilia that became tubes for sending messages from cell to cell. Once animals evolved nervous systems they kept improving them and never gave them up, for these communications systems made it possible to organize ever greater numbers of cells within a single creature, just as nuclei had made it possible to organize ever greater numbers of cell parts within a protist.

Organizing now meant actually forming organs — grouping cells into body parts specialized for particular jobs, such as guts for digesting food, hearts and blood vessels for circulating supplies, eye spots for telling light from dark and later making images that helped identify food or predators. Remember that animals were pushed to evolve complex organs because they had to hunt for their food rather than make it themselves. The other side of that coin is evolving ways to avoid being eaten yourself.

An extra tube, stiff but bendable, evolved along the main nerves running from one end of early wormlike animals to the other. This protected the delicate nerves against damage. Later the tube wrapped itself right around them to become a backbone. But long before that happened, the tube was useful in another way. Long cells, good at stretching and shrinking, attached themselves to it, pulling the tube into wavy patterns. That was the beginning of muscles, which gave creatures an important new way of moving themselves — from the inside, rather than by outside rowing hairs or tails.

Clumps of nerves at the head end of creatures evolved into simple brains; the eye spots evolved into true eyes with lenses to focus light and retinas to make images of what went on in the environment. Squid and cuttlefish have bodies that remind us of tube-shaped polyps with tentacles, but they have evolved eyes not unlike our own. Lyall Watson pointed out the biological mystery of why such wonderful eyes evolved in creatures with so little brain to understand what their eyes can see.

The muscles of squid and cuttlefish evolved into another way of travel — by jet! Their tube bodies take in water and the muscles squeeze it out suddenly, shooting the creature along. They, along with their octopus cousins, also evolved a way of hiding even out in the open, by making supplies of black ink to squirt like a cloud into the sea around them. Octopuses also evolved bigger brains, and are smarter than one would guess.

In some species of early animals, mouths gave up tentacles to grow a single big sucker, as in some eels, or to build jaws and then teeth, which became very popular. Different species experimented with inner bones and outer shells to hold their bodies together and protect them.

So, one evolutionary invention led to another, sometimes improving an old pattern a little at a time, other times by actively reorganizing available genes quite quickly to produce a new pattern. Every time a creature’s DNA replicated itself in the process of forming egg or sperm cells, and every time these came together with gametes of the opposite sex, if not at other times as well, genetic information could be shuffled. Other sources of genetic change now seems to be through the activity of DNA itself, in direct response to situations, and through gene-trading bacteria moving in and out of the multicelled creatures’ cells. The big mystery is just how all these processes are coordinated within and among species. Our best hope of solving it may lay in the physics of cosmic consciousness, continual creation and non-locality, as they increasingly understand fundamental levels of non-physical communications.

Looking into the past, using fossils, microscopes and other technologies, shows us that most genes existing now were developed in very ancient times, just as we already saw that bacteria had developed almost all the molecules and proteins that now exist. The new DNA development since early multicelled creatures seems to lie in the regulator genes, which organize simple genes into more complicated genetic patterns. This makes it possible to keep evolving endlessly new patterns out of the same basic genes

Some of the most fascinating of today’s biological puzzles are arising in genetic engineering — a field in which we take advantage of the microbial ability to transfer genes and get them to do it for us, though the results are not as predictable as desired. We implant genes and sometimes the microbes themselves into species we wish to alter — to make them `better’ in texture, flavor, nutrition or to resist herbicides we want to spray on their fields to kill weeds, and so on. For example, microbes emitting particular toxins are implanted into corn seed; when the corn grows up every cell contains these microbes and emits the toxins that kill insects. The puzzles arise when the implanted species remove the genes we implant, or transfer them to weeds, making them equally resistant to our poisons. We would do well to study nature’s practiced ways before we leap into our own attempts to improve on them.

Much about the organization and reorganization of DNA may be better understood when we understand more about the brain. The DNA pool of bacteria, the cellular nucleus, and the brain are all natural systems for receiving, storing, and processing information required by organisms. The efficiency of the Gaian way of life in using the same schemes over and over in ever more complex arrangements suggests that these three systems are likely to have a good deal in common. We have learned that the brain is more coordinator than dictator of the body’s physiology and behavior — a kind of central clearinghouse and resource center for the body as a whole. Perhaps the organized DNA of cell nuclei is similar, not dictating what the cell does, so much as being used as a resource center by the cell as a whole.

Σ    Σ    Σ

A step at a time, over many millions of years — though some steps as we know were faster than others — the seas filled with an incredible variety of living things co-evolving as ecosystems. Or, we might say, from our Gaian viewpoint, the seas with their ever renewed supplies of salts and minerals washed from land rock turned themselves into a living soup of plankton and larger creatures.

Many species continued the `plant way of life,’ though they were not yet true plants, evolving seaweed colonies from simple algae. Some had parts that looked like roots, stems, and leaves, though true roots, stems, and leaves evolved only much later on land. These chloroplast-containing creatures took over bacterial ways of fixing nitrogen, took other building materials from the sea and from the sea bottom, which was rich with decaying bodies, and continued making food using solar energy. Their usable nitrogen and the carbon was taken from carbon dioxide and built into their bodies, then passed on to animals who ate the algae to build their bodies.

Some of the carbon was recycled, but much of it was buried in sea floor sediments of dead protists, algae, and animals. Over billions of years of evolution, this process plus a similar carbon burial on land after plants evolved there used up most of the early atmospheric carbon dioxide. It and other early atmosphere gases were gradually replaced by a balance of mixed gases that were almost entirely the products of living creatures and were just right for their continued survival and evolution — gases constantly burning each other up, constantly being recycled and replenished by living creatures.

Bacteria and protists continued to live among the larger creatures in far vaster numbers, working at the rebuilding and balancing of the atmosphere and the chemistry of the seas, as well as providing the larger creatures with food. Recall that in each ecosystem, the member species co-evolve as they affect each other’s lifestyles and forms. Over time ecosystems mature from a few species that may compete in a juvenile way for food and space to a mature ecosystem in which many species balance their lives cooperatively.

Plants did not become as complex as animals because nothing pushed them — life was too easy. They had no need to go after their food, to see it, to grab it, to digest whole other creatures. Animals, who did have to do these things, tried out many ways of building themselves. Some evolved hard coverings like those of clams, snails, barnacles, spiny starfish, and sea urchins Some, like crabs and lobsters, successfully tried out legs in pairs. Others, like worms, squid, and octopus, stayed soft. Still other free-swimming forms became sharks and the bony ancestors of modern fish. But no matter how different their shapes, they all evolved muscles to move with, blood to circulate supplies, eyes to see with, and nervous systems with brains to coordinate their ever more complicated bodies.

Together, this great variety of living things created different ecosystems for themselves and for one another on the sea’s floor, on its surface, and in the shallows near shore. The first such systems with large creatures appeared so suddenly we refer to them as the Cambrian Explosion. This is what we identify as the start of the Paleozoic Era — meaning `ancient animal period’ — around half a billion years ago. Our best fossil find of this explosion of creativity is the Burgess Shale in western Canada, with a wide variety of creatures from very large soft-bodied quilted creatures to smaller armored creatures such as Opabinia, with a long, flexible but fanged vacuum cleaner hose of a mouth. Some look like moonwalkers or weird lifeforms we imagine on other planets. All together they look completely unlike any ecosystem of today, and indeed they went extinct long ago.

Σ    Σ    Σ

The stardust that formed our rocky Earth had come a long way in rearranging itself. But while countless small bits of the planet’s crust were turning into living creatures, the crust as a whole had broken into pieces that slid about on the softer molten insides, like the armor plates of an armadillo. Ever new eruptions of lava pushed the plates apart by adding cooling rock to their edges, while their opposite sides slid under the edges of other plates to make room.

We introduced them in Chapter 2 as tectonic plates, their name coming from the Greek word for `builder.’ And, indeed they built the shape of the world we know. The thickest parts of tectonic plates are the land masses we call continents that stick up out of the seas. Over the past three billion years these thicker continents have repeatedly moved together and apart, with half their land mass submerged when they are most spread out. During the spread out phases, such as the one we are in now, Gaia’s temperature drops an average of ten degrees centigrade, causing waves of recurring ice ages in cycles of about a hundred thousand years.

At the time the dinosaurs evolved, hundreds of millions of years after the Burgess Shale creatures, all the thick parts had moved together into one huge supercontinent called Pangaea, which means `all Gaia’ — a name chosen well before Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. Ever since then, this land mass has been breaking up to form continents separated by oceans and seas. The Atlantic Ocean is still getting wider year by year as South America and Africa are pushed ever farther apart.

Before they became the Pangaea supercontinent, the continents had been separate, but they had then dominated what we know as the southern half of the Earth. As Pangaea formed and split up again, the continents moved northward and apart from one another. If you could see their movement over billions of years as a film, you would see them riding the slowly swirling soft insides of the Earth.

Σ    Σ    Σ

Let’s go back to pre-Pangaean times now, to the next big step in the evolving dance of life — the great land adventure, when some creatures took to dry land and continued to evolve there.

Of the organisms that were larger than microbes, algae and funguses got to dry land first, paving the way for animals by multiplying into rich food supplies, especially by evolving into plants — just as bacteria had paved the way for plants by breaking up rock and reproducing themselves, thus starting a supply of soil.

Perhaps the migration of creatures onto land began when the algae were left high and dry for hours every day by Moon-pulled tides. To survive, they adjusted their bodies, learning to live both in and out of water. Algae and funguses first appeared on shores, then their spores were blown further inland by wind. Wherever bacteria had made enough soil and there was enough moisture from dew or rain, such spores developed.

Fungi are a whole kingdom in themselves, including molds, yeasts and mushrooms. They dissolve rock for food by excreting acids, and digest organic food before consuming it by excreting enzymes onto it.

The first plants, evolving yet another new kingdom, were mosses growing close to the ground along with cooperating teams of algae and funguses called lichens, which look like very close-cropped plants and come in a variety of colors. It took a long while for plants to develop strong roots and taller, stiffer bodies that could evolve into ferns and trees. The major new structures plants had to develop to support their bodies in air and carry water from roots to all parts were vascular systems — stiff tubes, or veins, running the length of plants. The whole plant kingdom is divided into vascular and non-vascular plants.

Animals followed more slowly onto land. Arthropods, the first to come ashore, are jointed — foot creatures with their hard skeletons outside — from the Greek, arthro meaning `joint’ and `pod’ meaning `foot.’ Arthropods evolved in the sea — the Burgess Shale’s Opabimia was an example — but they also learned to breathe air in coming to live on land, where some of them evolved into lightweight insects, while their relatives in the buoyant sea evolved larger bodies, such as those of crabs and lobsters. Horseshoe crabs, like sharks, are like those bicycles in a jet age — Cambrian creatures still going strong today!

It was just as fungi, plants and insects were getting their real grip on land that the first great extinction occurred — around 440 million years ago — when one of Gaia’s great waves of ice ages formed great land glaciers and chilled the seas. More than half of all her life forms died out — the least affected being the adaptable bacteria and protists — and it took her 25 million years to recover her biodiversity.

After the extinction, a new type of animal emerged from the sea. These animals, like the early shore plants, evolved ways of living part-time in the sea and part-time out of the sea. We call them amphibians — amphi meaning `double’ and bios meaning `way of life’ — creatures who live double lives, on the land and in the sea. While arthropods have their bony skeletons outside their bodies, amphibians were fishlike creatures that crawled on fins and developed lungs to breathe air. Eventually they transformed their fins into short legs, and later we will see that some species evolved into reptiles. Most of the ancient species of amphibians died out as other animals evolved. Among those still living today are frogs and salamanders.

Only a hundred million years after the first mass extinction there was a second, again related to cooling climate change, again doing in half the species of Earth. The third mass extinction happened only 37 million years later, so it took a hundred million years altogether for full recovery. During that recovery plants had their time in the Sun, as we say — great carboniferous forests with giant tree ferns, ginkos and cycads growing up and thriving for 70 millions of years, generation by generation, removing carbon from the atmosphere and burying it with their bodies as they were pressed underground to become coal and oil. It was during this era that Pangaea the supercontinent was assembling herself from older pieces named Laurasia (which would later again break off to form Asia, Europe and North America) and Gondwana (which later broke off to form South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica).

Insects thrived in the great forests; amphibians moved inland, inventing self-contained eggs and splitting into two lineages: the synapsids — meaning `with arch’ (in their bony skulls) — that evolved into large four-footed tetrapods that evolved in turn into mammals and humans, and the second lineage: the reptiles that evolved into turtles, snakes, lizards, and archosauromorphs — meaning `ruling lizard forms.’ (Note: archeo means ancient, archo means ruling.) Guess which became our favorite dinosaurs and pterydactyls.

In that great age when the ruling reptiles stalked the Earth as the largest of its creatures for 160 million years — two to three times as long as mammals have been around, some forty times as long as humans have existed. The fossil record shows many shapes and sizes of reptiles and lets us know what important roles they played in evolution. But a quarter billion years ago, just as the first lizard began gliding through the air near the end of the Paleozoic era and before our favorite huge beasts appeared, 95 percent of all existing species disappeared in the fourth and greatest extinction. About the best thing we can say about it is that its recovery period — the Mezozoic, or `mid-animal-era’ — brought the world an explosion of color in flowers along with triceratops, brontosaurus and early birds.

Flowers, those marvelous sex organs with their wonderful blaze of color, brought a special kind of beauty, but that beauty was practical as well. With flowers, plants achieved their full two-parent sexuality, but with both sexes housed in the same individual. Sitting still in one spot, they needed a way to spread their genes around to other potential mates they could not reach themselves. Flowers gave plants a way of attracting birds and insects to cooperate with them in getting the male pollen of one plant to the eggs of another.

It is interesting to note that 60 percent of all known species are insects, while less than one percent include all birds and mammals! One third of the insect species — one fifth of all species — are beetles. It would be easy to argue that beetles, with their four-winged armored bodies are the most successful of Gaian creatures.

Birds, we can see clearly, descended from the still half-reptile archaeopteryx — `ancient wings’ — and its cousin the pterodactyl — `feather fingers’ (both the words `wing’ and `feather’ come from the Greek root ptery). Their fossils, as we said earlier, show us leg bones evolving into wing bones, jawbones into beaks, scales into feathers. These early birds were far larger than today’s, with wing spans up to twelve meters. People build flying models of them to see how such great beasts could stay in the air.

The great beasts of the Dinosaur Age grew up to twenty-seven meters long and some species towered very tall on their hind legs. Scientists still argue about just what dinosaurs were, and at present it looks as though they were rather odd creatures — neither reptile, nor mammal, nor bird, but with elements of all three. During their reign, the land world buzzed with flying and crawling insects and grew ever greener with plants and their colorful flowers. In the sea world, lovely protists were filling the oceans to recycle minerals, while great marine lizards called mosasaurs and icthyosaurs — `fish lizards’ — swam over bottom-dwelling ammonites and clams and other creatures.

Late in the age of dinosaurs, therapsids were evolving into true mammals with a kind of croco-dog-bear look, just as archaeopteryx and pterodactyl were transforming their lineages into birds. Warm-blooded mammals, who keep their own body temperature constantly warm, as dinosaurs seem to have pioneered, and keep their babies inside their bodies, rather than in eggs, until they are ready to be born, were the last kinds of animals to evolve. Though mammals and birds were until not long ago thought to be the only warm-blooded creatures, we now know that some fish, as well as some dinosaurs, also evolved this feature. Red-blooded tuna, for example, keep much warmer than the surrounding sea, with systems that are extremely efficient in preventing heat loss.

Σ    Σ    Σ

The really big boost to mammalian evolution was given by the same catastrophic event that spelled utter disaster for dinosaurs. About 65 million years, the Mezozoic era ended abruptly as a huge meteor plunged into what we now call the Caribbean, first incinerating life, then freezing it in cold temperatures as a black cloud of debris spread around the Earth, causing the fifth great extinction — the last until we humans initiated the present sixth one!

The great dinosaurs disappear, as do archeopteryx and pterodactyl, from the fossil record after this great catastrophe. The weather, the climate, the whole environment on which they depended was gone and the huge specialized creatures who had ruled Gaia for so long could not change fast enough to survive such sudden change. But just as new types of bacteria took over when many of Gaia’s early bacteria had died of oxygen poisoning, new kinds of animals evolved now from the small ones left after this great extinction. Gaia has shown again and again the ability to recover from disasters, always continuing the dance of life in creative new ways.

So life continued in the new age, the Cenozoic, with particular species of plants and animals evolving particular bodies and ways of life to balance and harmonize with one another as parts of the great Gaian system in which they evolved — a system that went on working as a single being to regulate the Earth’s temperature, chemistry, and weather.

Living things may even help tectonic plates to move by weighing them down as their bodies turn back to rock, or at least by providing chalky layers that help some of the weighted plates slide under the edges of others. Pangaea was breaking up, splitting Africa from South America and separating Greenland out between America and Europe, the Atlantic Ocean flowing between all these pieces. India, at that time, had moved about halfway from Antarctica, where it began, toward Asia, where it was to get stuck in place, pushing up the Himalayas as it crunched into the greater landmass.

Somewhere around 50 million years ago, just before India struck Asia, it pushed the seafloor up, forming a warm shallow sea called Tethys that teemed with plankton life and lured some early wolf-like creatures back to the aquatic life. This is the apparent origin of the sea mammals we call cetaceans, which include whales and dolphins. First the wolf-like creature reverted to a sort of hairy crocodile amphibian stage, then they took seriously to the seas, giving up fur and feet for smooth skins and flippers. Pinnipeds — `fin-feet’ — also became aquatic mammals, such as sea lions and walruses.

The Earth was beginning to look as it does today, though the continents were still closer together than they are now. As land bridges between them disappeared under water, plant and animal species were stranded on separate continents to continue separate paths of evolution. This is why many species alive today, like the kangaroos and koalas of Australia, are found only on a particular continent. Some species of different continents, such as the alligators of North America, the caimans of South America, and the crocodiles of Africa, are still recognizable descendants of the same Pangaean ancestors despite differences due to their later evolution.

Remaining reptiles in the Cenozoic were, as they still are, cold-blooded animals, their body temperature rising and falling with the temperature of their environment. Like the birds descended from them, we saw that reptiles lay eggs. But unlike warm-blooded birds, they rarely take care of their young. Their brains are so simple that most reptiles can’t even recognize their own babies when they hatch. In fact, they have been known to eat their own babies — not because they are vicious or cruel, but because they cannot seem to tell the babies from other edible things. This challenge to reptile babies made them evolve into creatures that run very fast very early. A baby reptile, in fact, is almost as good as a grown-up at doing most everything reptiles do.

Reptile behavior emerges directly from reptile genes, bodies, and physiology, without benefit of very much thought or choice. They do pretty much the same things in the same old ways, not having enough brain to think about or change them. They hunt food, show off to win their mates, huff and puff at strangers who come into their home territory, and fight if the stranger is not frightened away. That’s about all. They don’t even sleep, but just settle down quietly when night cools them off.

Early mammals were quite different, with their lively warm-blooded bodies, the female ones keeping their offspring inside until time for birth and feeding them on mothers’ milk from the mammary organs which gave them their name. Many early mammals were active by night, having evolved a pattern of waiting till dinosaur types went to sleep before going about their business. These included small tree-dwelling primates with stereoscopic depth vision adapted to seeing in the dark and nimble fingers to pluck their food from branches. They carried their young on their backs as they swung nimbly through the trees.

True mammals branched into two types. One branch, the marsupials, which includes kangaroos and opossums, gives birth to very undeveloped babies that stay in pouches on the outside of the mother’s body after they are born, until they are ready to live on their own. The other branch grows its babies to a later stage deep inside the body until they are born.

Some of today’s small mammals show links back to the early mammals that evolved from reptiles. The platypus, for instance, is a strange, furry, warm-blooded aquatic animal that lays eggs and has a duck-like beak and webbed feet, as though it couldn’t decide whether to evolve into a bird or a mammal. A few mammals later devolved their legs back to flippers and fins when they returned to the sea to become seals, sea lions, manatees, whales, and dolphins.

Possums are one of the most primitive, or antique, species of mammal living today. They seem to have changed little since they evolved among the dinosaurs, so they are important in the study of evolution. Among other things, they may have been the first animals to sleep and to dream.


Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

Welcome

Monday, April 22nd, 2002

What is synergy? How common is it? How come we know so little about it? How does it relate to self-organization?


Synergy and Self-Organization in the Evolution of Complex Systems

Peter A. Corning, Ph.D.

It has always seemed to me ironic that we are surrounded and sustained by synergistic phenomena — combined (or “co-operative”) effects that can only be produced by two or more component parts, elements or individuals — yet we do not, most of us, seem to appreciate its importance; we take its routine miracles for granted. Nor do evolutionists, for the most part, seem to recognize the important causal role of synergy in the evolutionary process, despite the fact that we depend upon it in a myriad of ways for our survival and reproductive success, and so do all other living things. Synergy is literally everywhere around us, and within us; it is unavoidable. Here are just a few examples:

* About 2,000 separate enzymes are required to catalyze a metabolic web. But if you were to remove one of the more critical of these enzymes, say the hexokinase that facilitates glycolysis, the process would not go forward.

* Water has a unique set of emergent, combinatorial properties that are radically different from those of its two constituent gases. But if you simply mix the two gases together without a catalyst like platinum, you will not get the synergy.

* Our written language, with well over 300,000 words, is based on various combinations of the same 26 letters. Thus, the letters “o,” “p” and “t” can be used to make “top”, “pot”, “opt” and “p.t.o.” (paid time off). But if you remove the vowel, there will be no “pattern recognition” in the reader’s mind.

* The humble clay brick can be used to make a great variety of useful structures — houses, walls, factories, jails, roads, watchtowers, fortifications, even kilns for making more bricks. Truly a synergistic technology. But without mortar and human effort (and a plan), you will have only a pile of bricks.

* A modern automobile is composed of roughly 15,000 precisely-designed parts, which are derived from some 60 different materials. But if a wheel is removed, this incredible machine will be immobilized.

* The African honey guide is a bird with a peculiar taste for bees’ wax, a substance that is more difficult to digest even than cellulose. Moreover, in order to obtain bees’ wax, the honey guide must first locate a hive then attract the attention of and enlist a co-conspirator, the African badger (ratel)(Mellivora capensis) . The reason is that the ratel has the ability to attack and dismember the hive, after which it will reward itself by eating the honey while leaving the wax. However, this unusual example of co-operative predation between two different species in fact depends upon a third, unobtrusive co-conspirator. It happens that honey guides cannot digest bees’ wax. They are aided by a parasitic gut bacterium which produces an enzyme that can break down wax molecules. So this improbable but synergistic feeding relationship is really triangular. And, needless to say, the system would not work if any of the partners, for whatever reason, withdrew (Bonner, 1988).

* Economist Adam Smith’s classic description in The Wealth of Nations (1776) of an eighteenth century pin factory is often cited as a paradigm example of the “division of labor.” Smith observed that 10 laborers, by dividing up the various tasks associated with making pins, were able collectively to produce about 48,000 pins per day. However, Smith opined that if each laborer were to work alone, doing all of the tasks independently, it was unlikely that on any given day the factory would be able to produce even a single pin per man.

The Ubiquity of Synergy

Synergy is clearly not a peripheral phenomenon associated only with drug interactions or corporate mergers. Though it often travels in disguise, synergy can be found in the subject-matter of most, if not all of the academic disciplines. In physics, it is associated with the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles, as well as with superconductivity, synchronous light emissions (lasers) and such esoteric molecular phenomena as scale effects — the “broken symmetries” highlighted in physicist Perry Anderson’s classic article “More is Different” (1972). Indeed, the periodic table of elements is a monument to the many forms of synergy that are responsible both for the naturally occurring stable elements and for the more unstable or even transitory creations of modern physics; various combinations of atomic building-blocks produce substances with very different “emergent” properties. Even the “chaotic” phenomena which have been the subject of intensive research by physicists and mathematicians in recent years exhibit many forms of synergy.

Biochemistry and molecular biology are also rife with synergy. Living matter (at least in the form we know it) is composed mainly of a few key constituents — carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and energy. In various configurations these constituent parts have produced a wondrous array of emergent products, perhaps 10-20 million different species — nobody really knows. By the same token, as we all know, the DNA that is used to write the genetic code consists of only four nucleotide “letters.” With this modest alphabet, evolution has been able to fashion a human genome with perhaps 100,000 genes. During ontogeny, our genome is able co-operatively to fabricate an incredibly intricate emergent product composed of an estimated 500 trillion cells of about 250 different types.

Many individual organisms, from bacteria to humans, also engage in internal or external symbiosis — synergistic relationships with “dissimilar” organisms — a subject that will be discussed in more detail below. Sociobiologists, likewise, have documented numerous behavioral synergies among members of the same species, from co-operative foraging and hunting activities to co-operative defense, reproduction, environmental conditioning and even thermoregulation. (More also about sociobiology below.)

In the social sciences, synergy can be found in many of the phenomena studied by economists — from market dynamics (demand-supply relationships) to economies of scale, the division of labor and, of course, the influence of technology. Psychologists also deal with synergistic effects, ranging from gestalt phenomena to social facilitation, group “syntality”, mob psychology and cult behavior. And political scientists observe synergistic effects in voting processes, interest group activity, coalition behavior, and a host of organizational phenomena, among other things.

The computer sciences are also grounded in synergy. There is, for example, the microscopic complexity of Intel’s Pentium microprocessor, which embodies the equivalent of 3.1 million transistors in a substrate that is about 2.17 inches square (it varies with the temperature). There is also the current generation of word processing software, which utilizes — synergistically — about two million separate lines of programming code, or instructions. Or consider the multi-leveled synergy that occurs when a computer and its software are combined. We know that the result is synergistic because we also know what happens when the two are not combined, or when the computer and software are incompatible. Similarly, massively parallel computers, which in effect exploit the synergies associated with a division of labor and hierarchical control, offer performance improvements that are many orders of magnitude greater than what can be achieved by conventional sequential processing technology.

The Synergism Hypothesis

What is the principle underlying such mundane forms of magic? It is not magic at all, of course, but a fundamental characteristic of the material world that things in various combinations, sometimes with others of like kind and sometimes with very different kinds of things, are prodigious generators of novelty. And these novel co-operative effects have over the past 3.5 billion years or so produced at every level of life distinct, irreducible “higher levels” of causation and action whose constituent “parts” have been extravagantly favored by natural selection. Furthermore, in many instances these emergent wholes have themselves become parts of yet another new level of combined effects, as synergy begat more synergy.

The formal hypothesis is that synergistic effects of various kinds have been a major source of creativity in evolution (see Corning, 1983); the synergism hypothesis asserts that it was the functional (selective) advantages associated with various forms of synergy that facilitated the evolution of complex, functionally-organized biological and social systems. In other words, underlying each of the many particular steps in the complexification process, a common functional principle has been at work.

The Self-Organization Paradigm

The recently developed theories of self-organization would seem to be orthogonal to this functionalist, selectionist theory. Mathematical modelling work in biophysics, utilizing a new generation of non-linear partial differential equations, has produced a radically different hypothesis about the sources of biological order. As articulated by Stuart Kauffman in an important new synthesis (Kauffman, 1993), much of the order found in nature may be “spontaneous” and autocatalytic — a product of the generic properties of living matter itself. Kauffman envisions a new physics of biology in which the emerging natural laws of organization will be recognized as being responsible both for driving the process and for truncating the role of natural selection. Natural selection in Kauffman’s paradigm is viewed as a supporting actor.

This article will explore the relationship between synergy and self-organization in some detail in the hope of shedding additional light on how complex systems have evolved and how they may be expected to continue doing so over the course of time. The relevance of these two major theoretical paradigms to the process of human evolution will also be briefly discussed.

Read the full discussion


About the Author

Welcome

Sunday, April 21st, 2002

Today, Elisabet Sahtouris helps us see how Evolution works as we continue with another chapter from EarthDance. Yesterday, Elisabet described Evidence of Evolution—7 . Also see: A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.


From Protists to Polyps8

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

If you look at a drop of pond water under a microscope, you will see a great variety of protists living together, creatures you would never have suspected were there, unless you’ve done this before. You may see, for instance, paramecia, tiny slipper-shaped algae rowed along by lineups of waving cilia oars. Then along will come a giant, blobby amoeba, changing shape before your eyes as it pushes out pseudopods, `false feet,’ in its search for food. Perhaps it will get stuck in a tangle of rod-like algae, strings of cells sitting quite still and making energy from light with their green chloroplasts. Other green algae, such as euglena with their long whip-like tails, may also flit by.

If you look instead at a drop of seawater, you may see whirling dinoflagellates that glow in the dark by making their own light or diatoms and radiolaria, looking like beautiful crowns or glass ornaments. There seems to be no end to the fantastic patterns of these tiny single-celled creatures, whether they live alone or stuck together in colonies like the ball-shaped volvox.

The world of single-celled creatures in a drop of water is probably much as it was a billion years ago when there were no larger creatures. Yet these same protists went on to build and evolve all the larger multicelled creatures of Earth

On today’s oceans great blankets of plankton, mostly made of protists, float about ever renewing the atmosphere with nitrogen, oxygen, methane, and other gases they release. Sulfur dioxide produced by plankton actually seeds the water droplets forming clouds. This means that the cloud cover over much of the planet, and thus the planet’s warming and cooling system, is regulated in large measure by these tiny creatures. They also provide food for many heterotrophic species, from the almost microscopic shrimp that swim among them to the largest of whales. The wastes and dead bodies of those that eat plankton sink to the bottom where myriad saprotrophs decay them back into molecules that may come to the surface to nourish new plankton.

Plankton not only serve as part of a food cycle but play most important roles in balancing the chemistry of the atmosphere and the seas, as well as in the geobiology we talked about in the last chapter — the transformation of the Earth’s crust from rock to living matter and back to rock.

Among the creatures forming plankton are thousands of species of diatoms and radiolaria, those particularly beautiful protists whose shells look like fancy glass ornaments when seen through a microscope. In Gaia’s dance there are more diatoms than any other kind of creature except bacteria and they are responsible for transforming a great deal of rock.

Land rock, we know, is dissolved by streams and rivers into salts and minerals, which they carry to the sea. Life in the sea needs these building materials, but like the gases of the air, they must be kept in balance. If too many of them pile up in the sea, living creatures will choke. One such mineral is silicon, in its silica form (silicon dioxide). A huge amount of silica is washed into the seas every year — hundreds of millions of tons of it. But huge numbers of diatoms wait in the sea for these silica supplies, for silica is just what they need to build their sparkling shells. When they die, the diatoms sink to the bottom, leaving their silica shells to settle into rock — three hundred million tons of silica rock every year!

The number of diatoms in the sea naturally adjusts itself to the supply of silica brought by the rivers. There is always just the right number of diatoms to use up the silica dissolved in the sea. This well-balanced system — water dissolving rock, diatoms and other protists making it into lovely silica shells, then being eaten by others or dying so their shells sink down to the sea bottom to become new rock — worked itself out in co-evolution as a kind of transport system within the great Gaian body. The shells of radiolaria are also part of this process. The famous white cliffs of Dover on the English coast are ancient deposits of the microscopic, chalky, snaillike shells of yet another marine protist — foraminifera — which were pushed out of the sea by the endless motions of the Earth’s crust.

Many other geobiology cycles or systems are still to be discovered as we keep working on the puzzles of planet physiology. Unfortunately, our old view of nature made us see ourselves as just one of the many creatures competing for survival on a planet without enough for all to live. But now that we have microscopes, telescopes, spaceships, computers, and other instruments that show us so much more than we could see with our eyes alone, we are in a position to understand the pattern of life within life from the largest to the smallest holons.

We know the mitochondria cooperating in our cells long ago worked out a mutually consistent way of life with other cell parts. We know they and we have a mutually consistent arrangement as we provide their fuel and safety while they make our energy. We can see how all species, including our own, must work out their mutual consistency with one another as co-evolving parts of the great Gaian body.

Σ    Σ    Σ

Of all the cooperative steps in Gaia’s dance, we saw that one of the most important was the invention of sex — the sharing of creature plans by uniting DNA from more than one source to create a new being. Because the exchange of genes among bacteria worldwide was and is so free and continual, biologists had to give up their attempts to classify species of bacteria — recall that species are identified by their DNA. We can only identify strains of them that keep recognizable forms despite the free trade. Remember that this kind of original sex had nothing to do with reproduction, as Margulis pointed out in tracing the origins of sex. It is because of this sexual freedom, this efficient communications system lost forever in later kingdoms of life, that bacteria could remain streamlined creatures with tremendous flexibility, able to trade information worldwide and thus solve almost any emergency situation.

In the kingdom of protists, sex took some strange new twists, very likely quite by accident. These twists eventually linked and limited their sex to reproduction and to two partners within the same species. Thus the boundaries of sexual reproduction became our way of defining species boundaries. The within-species sex of the protist kingdom was passed on to multicelled creatures though sometimes different species co-evolved to help each other in their reproduction, as in the case of flowering plants cross-pollinated by birds, bats, moths, bees, or other insects. But before we get to larger creatures, let’s see just how the kind of sex we know — the production of offspring by the mating of two parents — came about among protists.

A prokaryote without a nucleus, remember, reproduces by splitting or budding after its loose DNA loop unzips and copies itself. Even though this process gets a bit more complicated with the great quantity of DNA packed into a eukaryote’s nucleus, most eukaryotes, including our own body cells, also divide in this way. The process begins with the unzipping and copying of each section of DNA, their neat coiling and recoiling into chromosome pairs buttoned together by centromeres or kinetochores, as we saw in Chapter 6. The nuclear wall dissolves to release them, and the cell constructs a fabric of microtubules on which the pairs of doubled chromosomes line up. These then unbutton themselves by dividing their kinetochores, which then button themselves to the tubes such that the two members of each pair of doubled chromosomes ride smoothly in opposite directions, pulled by the kinetochores to opposite ends of the cell before it divides into two with a full set of chromosomes each.

This usual way for cells to divide is called mitosis — mito, as in mitochondria, meaning thread, such as humans invented for weaving. If you could watch cell mitosis through an electron microscope, the neat formation of microtubules called the mitotic spindle and the shuttling of chromosomes along its threads would indeed look like a weaving process.

Mitosis is a non-sexual, or asexual, way to reproduce. The offspring of mitosis are clones — offspring of a single parent cell usually thought of as being exact copies of that parent. Of course we know that our whole bodies are cloned from the single fertilized egg we began as, and our cells are very varied. The idea that clones are all alike is linked to the idea that sexual reproduction is what brought variety into evolution. But the clones of rare asexually reproducing animal species, such as certain lizards, are quite as varied as the offspring of the more usual sexually reproducing species.

If sexual reproduction did not evolve by natural selection for the advantage of variety, as scientists thought for so long, then why did it evolve?

Again we owe the tracing of a story from the ancient microcosmos to Lynn Margulis and her co-workers, who combined clues from earlier biologists and from their own research. Margulis noted that sexual reproduction has three important aspects: the halving of chromosome numbers within each parent, the doubling of chromosome numbers by bringing two parent cells together, and the alternation between these two stages of halved and doubled numbers generation after generation.

How odd to halve chromosomes continually, only to double them again. Margulis investigated this mystery by looking for cases of halving and doubling chromosomes in the microcosm and for ways in which they might have become linked into a single reproduction system. The story that emerged is, like the evolution of eukaryote cells, one that begins with exploitation and ends in cooperative partnership, and once again starvation is the initial motive.

A desperately hungry protist, even today, may resort to cannibalism, and on occasion may fuse the swallowed victim’s nucleus with its own. All nucleated cells will fuse with one another under the right conditions. Doubled chromosomes may also come about when a protist begins mitotic division and is then unable, for some reason, to finish the process, failing to divide after doubling the number of its chromosomes and fusing them back into a single nucleus. This, too, has been observed.

In either case, the extra chromosomes may work well in times of need but become unwanted extra baggage when things go well. So protists learned long ago-over a billion years ago, which was not so long after they had become protists — to reduce the number of chromosomes again when this was to their advantage. The process of halving a cell’s chromosomes is called meiosis, which means `lessening.’ Some protists seem to have become experts at doubling and halving their chromosomes according to the demand of changing conditions from drought to plenty and back.

The fusion of two sets of chromosomes into a single nucleus — if they are from different protists, even if one protist has eaten the other — is a sexual union. The halving of chromosomes in meiosis, as we just saw, was a solution to the unnecessary and troublesome burden of doubled or tripled chromosomes. What we call the haploid, or `half-set,’ of chromosomes that seeds, pollen grains, eggs, and sperm contain, are half of our normally double, or diploid, number.

The chromosomes of all our body cells are paired, one of each pair from each of our parents. Far back in evolution this doubling must have occurred as described, and stuck as the normal number. When sexual nuclear fusion became linked to the reproductive formation of new generations of individuals, the double number had to be halved before each sexual-fusion and reproduction event to avoid doubling the chromosomes mercilessly in each generation, which would have been literally a dead end. Sperm, pollen, and egg cells are all produced by this meiotic halving process in such a way that the fusion of egg and sperm or egg and pollen results the normal diploid chromosome sets of animals and plants.

Cannibalism, fusing nuclei and then reducing chromosomes again, accidents of timing, and perhaps other events finally worked themselves out into a reliable system of sexual reproduction — not the most elegant system nature ever devised, but one that has obviously worked well enough in the world of creatures less elegant and less sexually free than bacteria.

To carry out the work of a developing embryo, the DNA of haploid chromosomes from two parents must match stretch for stretch, gene for gene. As new species branch away from each others DNA sequences, their offspring may be infertile, as in the case of mules born to horses and donkeys, or tiglons born to lions and tigers. With further separation, mating become unproductive and ceases altogether. Branching species usually branch by occupying different ecological areas and so do not normally find each other to attempt mating, but humans have shown the possibility, though their hybrid offspring are sterile.

The change to the new way of reproducing did not happen all at once. Even today, in fact, some protists, such as paramecia, still reproduce both in the old way of mitotic cloning and in the newer way of sexual reproduction. Paramecia are a good example of nature’s experiments with sex and reproduction, having as many as eight different sexes rather than only two, if we so want to label mating or gender types.

Many protists can reproduce with or without sex, that is, sexually or asexually. Sometimes one way serves their needs better, sometimes the other. Diatoms, for example — those lovely tiny creatures with the fancy silica shells — tend to reproduce just by mitotic splitting. They manage this by making their shells in two pieces that can come apart, one piece slightly larger, fitting neatly over the edge of the other to close it, just like a round pillbox with a lid.

The trouble is that while all the offspring must complete the half-shell box they inherit, diatoms have learned only how to make the smaller bottoms of box shells when given half a shell to start with. That means the split-off diatom that gets the bottom of the box has to use it as a top, making a smaller bottom than its parent diatom had. Over generations, then, lines of offspring inheriting bottom shells get smaller and smaller — only those with direct inheritance of the original top shell maintaining the original size. This problem is eventually solved by sex!

Instead of continuing to split by mitosis, they resort to meiosis, producing little packages of single-set chromosomes called gametes, or sex cells, that have no shells at all and behave the way eggs and sperm do. When two of these gametes get together, it seems they have all the DNA plans for a new diatom, including plans for the top and bottom parts of a normal-size diatom shell. That way even the smallest diatoms can bring themselves, or at least their offspring, back to full size.

Sexually reproducing protists — giants in a world of bacteria — evolved into a new variety of complex patterns tailored to different lifestyles and environments. The co-evolution of monera and protists with these environments led to one improvisation after another, including the protists’ formation of a new kind of cooperative that led to multicelled creatures, and thus to the remaining three kingdoms of life-fungi, plants, and animals — in all their visibly fantastic variety.

Σ    Σ    Σ

We have watched the Earth transform itself from a fiery ball to a crusty planet whose skin came ever more alive as giant molecules and enzymes formed, then packaged themselves as bacteria. We’ve seen living masses of microbes transform themselves as they discovered new lifestyles, rearranging and recycling minerals, creating the atmosphere, and so on. We saw how the monera collected themselves into the much larger protists, inventing nuclei and stumbling on sexual reproduction. Now our story continues with the evolution of ever larger and more complicated creatures.

Some protists began living together in colonies by sticking together after division rather than floating off on their own, though each protist in the colony remained as independent as if it had gone its own way. But just as protists evolved when various monera began working together as cooperatives, protists living together as colonies eventually took the next step of communicating with one another and developing joint plans.

After all, communication had always played a major role in Gaian life, from the bacterial Web to the DNA-RNA-protein communication systems between the nucleus and cytoplasm of eukaryote cells, and the communications systems between cell membranes or walls and the outside world. Now it was time to develop communications among eukaryotes, and one way in which they did it was by sending chemical messages to each other.

This chemical communication made it possible for the individual protist cells to harmonize the things they did — such as beating their cilia oars together in rhythms that moved the whole colony smoothly along in one direction. The ability to communicate soon became useful in many new ways of cooperating, especially in divisions of labor among different cells in protist colonies, thus beginning the evolution of multicelled creatures.

A most peculiar and fascinating in-between step in the evolution of multicelled creatures from single cells is the appearance of slime molds. Scientists have devoted whole careers to studying these strange creatures that seem to be part protist, part fungus, part animal. Slime molds start out as separate amoeba-like creatures, but when their food source runs out, they emit chemical messages that attract them to one another until they gather together into a visible slug-like community. You can see their jellylike mass sometimes on the underside of a rotting log or leaf. Some varieties form a large sheet of jelly.

The slug-like community can actually move itself about like a brainless worm, but eventually it stops and begins sprouting stalks that form fruiting bodies on their tips. These then release spores — tiny dried-up packets of DNA and other cell materials — the way any self-respecting mold would. The spores blow through the air and, after settling in a new moist place, form new amoeba-like creatures to start the cycle all over again.

Slime molds thus are capable of specialization and cooperation under hunger conditions, if not otherwise. Note that we have now found hunger as the prod behind the cooperative evolution of nucleated cells, the invention of cooperative sexual reproduction, and the evolution of multicelled-creature cooperatives — all creative responses very different from the competitive struggle Darwin attributed to food shortages.

In other ancient protist colonies that did not lead the double lives of slime molds, some of the cells became specialists at making food, others at catching it, still others at breaking down and digesting food. In some colonies there were specialized cells to move the whole thing about; others contained specialized cells for sticking it tight onto rocks. The first multicelled creatures were cooperative colonies of protists, just as the first protists had been cooperative teams of monera — multi-creatured cells. Our present human process of globalizing seems to be forming us into a new planet-sized multi-creatured cell, in what we might call a fractal biology of repeating evolutionary patterns. But let us go on with the story of the first multi-celled creatures for now.

In some colonial creatures, certain cells began specializing in the sexual reproduction of the colony as a whole. That meant a few cells could reproduce the whole colony, instead of each cell in the colony reproducing itself. This was a big step in the evolution of colonies into creatures and in the evolution of embryos as a way of starting new generations. For the continued life of the species, all the other cells now depended on the specialized cells that produced gametes — those haploid chromosome packages we saw diatoms making. We call them gametes because they were not yet either the specialized eggs and pollen of plants or the eggs and sperm of animals. Early gametes from different parent looked alike, though they had to pair to make a new being.

The development of multicelled creatures that reduce themselves back to single-celled creatures in each generation to carry out their reproduction, brought inevitable death by aging into Gaia’s dance — a new way to ensure recycling. Bacterial progenitors, remember, do not die except by unfortunate accidents, such as being burned by ultraviolet. These in fact happen often enough to keep bacterial populations within bounds, but they do not die of old age. Instead, they phase out their physical and genetic identities over generations of gene-trading offspring.

Multicelled plants and animals, however, leave their bodies behind as their genes continue on in new generations. DNA is the oldest living survivor in all nature. From a microbial point of view, the large multicelled bodies cloned from eggs and seeds have no further value as new generations emerge, except as excellent sources of food.

The fact that death is necessary for multicelled life to continue virtually without end has been hard for us humans to grasp and accept. If new creatures kept coming to life without others giving up their lives, the supplies in the Earth’s crust would soon be used up and the mass of creatures would all die together of crowding and starvation, as we humans are rapidly learning from our successful efforts to increase food supplies and delay death.

With the death of creatures so that others can recycle the materials of their bodies, life can go on and on. In fact, the way living things die to make way for new life in Gaia’s dance is very much the way things happen in any dance. Every dancer knows that each dancer can only perform one step at a time — that old steps must be abandoned so that the dancer’s body will be free to perform new ones, which may then repeat or change the pattern of old steps.

Gaia, our living Earth, has lived for billions of years and has billions more years of life ahead. Our individual bodies will die and be replaced by others, much as the cells of our own bodies are constantly dying and being replaced by new cells. Every seven years or so we are in fact a wholly new person through such replacement of cells, yet we only see the changes in our bodies as aging, not as endless newness. In the same way, from Gaia’s point of view, there is no death — just endless replacement of old cells in her body with new ones.

Every atom that is now, ever was, or ever will be a part of us will live on somewhere in Gaia’s ever-evolving dance for billions of Earth years yet to come. Even after the Earth dies, those atoms will live on as part of our galactic dance, some perhaps finding their way into new living bodies of new planets.

Σ    Σ    Σ

Animals, as part of our own planet, were a marvelous evolutionary development in the face of yet another problem. Some protists, after running out of food, were unable to make their own food from light because they contained no bluegreen bacteria, or their chloroplast descendants. We are not sure whether our own protist forebears never took in any bluegreens or whether they took some in and later lost them. We do know that plants have always had both chloroplasts and mitochondria, which allow them to make food using sunlight and to burn food using oxygen. Animals, including ourselves, can only burn ready-made food.

This means that plants could — and still do — live their whole lives sitting in one place, making their own food, while animals had to evolve ways of going after their food. Animals, as we will see, evolved all sorts of equipment, from eyes and ears to feet and wings, to heating and cooling systems, to nervous systems with brains for organizing all this complexity, just to help them chase after food — and all because they had no chloroplasts!

Nature is, of course, never quite as orderly as we would have her, so she managed to leave around some puzzles such as the giant green clam, an animal that does have chloroplasts and uses them to make emergency energy from sunlight, though it is clearly an animal in every other way.

Among the earliest multicelled animals to evolve from protist colonies were polyps. Luckily, there are still many living polyp species that match ancient fossils and so give us clues to their early evolution. Actually, polyps look more like plants than the animals they are. Sea anemones, which look like flowers, are polyps; forests of coral are huge polyp colonies.

The polyp animal is shaped like a tube with a flowerlike circle of tentacles at one end around its mouth. The other end of the tube is stuck to a rock or to the body of another polyp in its colony. And there it stays. It is a simple animal with a body organized to catch its prey in its tentacles and stuff the food into its mouth.

Still, many polyps have rather amazingly complicated cells along their tentacles. These cells have a special name; we call them nematocysts — meaning `thread bags’ — because they evolved from ingrown cilia that grew into extremely long, thin, hollow threads and became very specialized in their job. When prey touches one of these surface cells, the long coiled thread shoots out under the pressure of liquid filling it, tangling the victim and paralyzing it with poison barbs. Nematocysts are a wonderful example of the amazing patterns of organization that nature has worked out even within the cells of the smallest and simplest of creatures. Nematocysts are such good self-contained weapons that other creatures, after eating polyps, may not digest the nematocysts but may, instead, keep them for their own use in catching prey.

Polyps reproduce by budding like bacterial forbears. This job is sometimes assigned to certain members of a polyp colony, which are fed by the others so they can concentrate on their important work. In some species the polyp buds grow up stuck to the parent, but in others something much more interesting happens. The newly budded polyp breaks off, flips over so its tentacles hang down, and floats off into the sea. As it grows, it becomes a glassy bell or umbrella with a softly fringed edge of trailing streamers — a jellyfish, as we call it, though it is not a fish at all. Its proper name is medusa — a name taken from the ancient myth of a woman who had snakes on her head instead of hair.

Medusae are a much more adventurous stage of polyp life that learned to reproduce sexually. Some species tried having both sexes in the same individual — as flowers and earthworms have them — while other species began making separate males and females. In any case, all medusae produce female eggs and male sperm, which fuse to make baby medusae. The baby medusa is so different from its parents that it, too, gets its own name. We call it a planula. The planula is a long, flattish blob that rows itself about freely for a while using a fringe of cilia. Then it settles onto a rock and sticks itself tight to grow into a polyp.

The life of a polyp is thus a matter of metamorphosis — changing form from planula to polyp to medusa. Such metamorphosis was later repeated in evolution, in butterflies and moths, for example, like so many other earlier step patterns that are woven again and again into the later dance. Polyps in countless variety still abound in the seas, looking much as did their ancient forebears. Yet sometime, somewhere in the dim past, some of them became discontented with this three-stage metamorphosis, which always came back to a sedentary phase, and went on to invent more adventurous lives.


Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb