Recall N. Arthur Coulter’s Multiple Point of View Rotary: “First, I think of all the examples of when and where the idea is right, then of all the examples of when and where the idea is wrong. Then I look for examples where or when the idea doesn’t seem to apply, and finally I think of examples when the idea seems paradoxical — both right and wrong simultaneously. I have used this tool many times, and I have always understood the idea much better because of it.”

Today, Elisabet Sahtouris helps us see how Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and that includes the NeoDarwinism of Richard Dawkins’ are both right and wrong. We continue with her description of evolution from EarthDance. Thursday, Elisabet described A Great Leap—6. Also see: The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.

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Evidence of Evolution—7

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

Charles Darwin was an English gentleman scientist who lived during most of the nineteenth century and who traveled far and wide to study nature. Seeing the great variety of plants and animals around the world, he was struck by the way each kind seemed uniquely suited to the place in which it lived. He believed, as had a few other scientists, that all these living things must have changed over time to suit their particular environments so well. This was a novel idea at a time when almost everyone believed that the world itself was unchanging and that God had created all species at the same time, just as they are. How could they have changed? Despite Darwin’s careful observations and ideas of likely changes, he had no theory, no way to explain how they could occur.

Nature, he noticed, produced great numbers of seeds and eggs for all kinds of plants and animals, though only few of each kind grew up. Somehow it seemed that only those best suited for survival in their environments — the fittest of each generation — grew up to reproduce offspring like themselves. But how could nature recognize and choose them?

Darwin had seen plant and animal breeders choose the fattest grains or the fastest horses of each generation to be the parents of the next generation. This was possible because, in each species, the young were not all exactly alike, but were as varied as human brothers and sisters. By such selection, generation after generation, the breeders changed the species, producing ever fatter grains or faster horses. This was exactly the kind of thing nature seemed to be doing, but it still puzzled him how nature selected the fittest creatures of each generation.

The theory of evolution finally came to him when he read an article about food shortages and starvation. Could it be that all nature’s young had to compete for food when there wasn’t enough for all? Was this how nature put creatures to the test? If so, then surely the fittest in this competition would pass the test and survive to grow up.

The fittest bears, for instance, would be the ones with heavy coats to keep them warm as they hunted for food in cold places; in warm places bears with lighter coats would more likely survive. Birds with long beaks were the fittest where worms had to be pulled out of holes; birds with short, strong beaks would survive where seeds had to be cracked. The bears or birds born with the fittest coats or beaks would win the struggle for food and grow up to produce babies while others starved or froze or were eaten. Their babies would inherit varying degrees of `fit’ coats or beaks, and again the fittest of all would be selected in competition.

Everything seemed clear now. Large numbers in the face of too little food produced competition, and competition led to natural selection. The selection itself was based on the natural variety of creatures, some of which were fitter than others.

In Darwin’s time, of course, environments — such as deserts or mountaintops or sea bottoms — were seen as places in which living things made their living, not as live parts of a great living planet. Each environment would select for different kinds of fitness in the competition for food, for mates, for the best hiding or nesting places, and so on.

If the wind scattered the seeds of the same plant into different places, a desert would select for young plants that could live on the least water, while a windy mountaintop might select for those with the strongest grip on rocks. Just so, some thick-coated wolves that could do well in cold environments might wander to warmer places and die out while wolves with thinner coats survived.

Offspring of the same original parents might therefore become quite different over many generations as a result of settling in different environments that selected for different body patterns or features. When they became so different that they could no longer mate with each other, they had become different species. Thus Darwin explained the evolution of new species.

In Darwin’s theory, then, unexplained accidents of birth that made creatures fit better into their environment were selected for survival and passed on to future generations. Unlucky accidents that made creatures less fit were rejected by natural selection and died out.

Scientists quickly made Darwinian evolution fit the idea of nature-as-mechanism by regarding creatures more or less as wheels fitting the cogs of other wheels in the great clockwork of nature. Some wheels just happened to be made better than others by lucky mechanical accidents during their replacement, or reproduction. The idea of natural competition leading to the survival of the fittest appealed to men who were obsessed with the new social structure of industrial capitalism.

With the advent of genetics, accidents of birth were discovered to reflect changes in genes. When the structure of DNA and its copy process were understood, these accidents were believed to occur on a random basis — meaning without any pattern — as DNA copied itself or was damaged. Most biologists today still see accidents, now known to occur in DNA, as the only source of natural variation, despite growing evidence that such accidents are detected and repaired very quickly.

Ever since Darwin, our general view of evolution has been of a battle among individual creatures pitted against one another in competition for inadequate food supplies. Only now are we in a position to understand the Earth as a whole — a single geobiological dance woven of many changing dancers in complex patterns of interaction and mutual transformation.

Competition and cooperation can both be seen within and among species as they improvise and evolve, unbalance and rebalance the dance. Consider again the spiraling pattern described as unity-> individuation-> competition-> conflict-> negotiation-> resolution-> cooperation-> new levels of unity, and so on. Note that competition and cooperation are different phases of the cycle. Young species tend to grab territory and resources, maximizing the numbers of their offspring to spread themselves where they can. As species encounter each other, conflict develops in the competition for space and resources. Eventually negotiations leading to cooperation prove useful to the competing species and they reach the higher level of unity, as we saw happening in the transformation of monera into protists.

Evolution is this improvised dance of transformation in which ecological balance is worked out again and again. Remember that living things have to change, even to stay the same. They have to renew themselves and adjust to the changes around them. Rabbits evolve together with their habitats, and we might call that the dance of rhabitats! All creatures evolve in concert or connection with all else evolving around them. New levels reached in the unity spiral through phases of competition and cooperation are examples of what we described as mutual consistency. The internal harmony of our evolved multicelled bodies is a good example, but our global society is not, as it is still struggling to get beyond its competitive phase.

It took a century and more after Darwin’s theory was published for us to understand that environments are not ready-made places that force their inhabitants to adapt to them, but ecosystems created by living things for living things. All the living things belonging to an ecosystem, from tiny bacteria to the largest plants and animals, are constantly at work balancing their lives with one another as they transform and recycle the materials of the Earth’s crust.

Darwin, along with Lamarck, and Wallace, were modern pioneers in showing us that species evolve and attempting explanations of how this could happen. Their theories were a great step forward for science, since religion had put an end to all theorizing about evolution since a few ancient Greek philosophers, such as Anaximander, had thought about it. Anaximander had said that everything forming in nature incurs a debt, which it must repay by dissolving so other things could form — a marvelous description of evolution through recycling in a single sentence!

Now we can see that Darwinism — and its updated version, neo-Darwinism — is a misleading way of seeing nature. The notion of the separateness of each creature, competing with others in its struggle to survive, had well described, and justified, English and American societies’ new forms of competitive and exploitative industrial production in a world of scarcity. But we are now beginning to understand that humans must learn to harmonize our ways with those of the rest of nature instead of exploiting it and one another ruthlessly. The social view of individual people pitted against one another in such struggle makes little more sense as an ideal than the notion that our bodies’ cells are competing with one another to survive in hostile bodies. It is simply no longer useful or productive to see ourselves as forced to compete with one another to survive in a hostile society, surrounded by hostile nature.

The point here is that we do see ourselves in such competition, not because this is inevitable, but because Western science developed in close harmony with social and political traditions that welcomed these ideas. The Darwinian theory of evolution was applied to forming a society, a social system, designed in accord with, and justified by, the Darwinian concept of nature. If we learn to see evolution as a single holarchy of holons working out the mutual consistency of cooperative health and opportunity, we can set up a social system to match that view.

History may someday record the greatest discovery of twentieth-century science not as nuclear power or electronics, but as the recognition that there is no absolute truth to be discovered about the world — that scientific theories can be judged only by their usefulness to science and ultimately to all society. Definitions of usefulness often change over time, and thus scientific `truths’ must necessarily evolve along with human society.

Neo-Darwinism insists that random accident and natural selection are the sole `mechanisms’ of evolution. Yet the self-organized creatures and ecosystems — habitats — such as that which we saw evolving through the genetic information exchange web of bacteria, including their negotiated organization of nucleated cells are not readily explained as simple accumulations of lucky accidents. Nor does natural selection amount to a real theory, since it tells us little more than that some creatures die before they reach the age of reproduction. A modern theory of evolution must concern itself with the way in which natural holons are organized and maintained in holarchies, with descriptions of continual interactions among the levels of DNA, organisms and whole ecosystems. It must also deal with the aesthetics of orchids and butterfly wings and dolphins creating bubble rings and other games for the pure joy of it.

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As pointed out earlier, no place on Earth today, not even the barest-looking mountaintop or the deepest part of the sea, has fewer than a thousand different species from various kingdoms — monera, protists, fungi, plants, and animals. Yet what we humans see as living things are only the largest of the plants and animals — beings the size of bugs and bushes and beluga whales, creatures on our own size scale. The vast majority of Earth creatures, however, continue to be microscopic monera and protists. Think once again of our rocky planet rearranging itself through chemical activity into a rich network of bacteria and environments that are good homes for bacteria. This is what most of the activity of our living planet is still all about.

The age of protists was a long age of creating amazing diversity in the larger single-celled body forms and lifestyles before multi-celled creatures arose. As Gaian evolution continued, ecosystem holarchies went on transforming themselves, as we will see, into ever larger living bodies grown from single cells: worms and insects, fishes and amphibians, funguses, flowers and trees, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Still, the smallest living creatures are even now those that work hardest to create the environments needed to sustain the larger plants and animals. For that matter, larger creatures are really extensions of the microcosm. As eukaryote cells are evolved from prokaryote cooperatives, multi-celled creatures are later cloned upon them, as we will see.

If we think of every ecosystem holon as a kind of body, we can regard each creature as a cell, each species as an organ with a unique function. Their holon evolves its ecological balance as a whole. We really should talk about co-evolution, rather than evolution, to remind ourselves that no species can or does evolve by itself, but that all must cooperate by adapting to, or negotiating with, the others’ steps in the dance of life. Thus they reach mutual consistency with one another and with the rest of their surround. The story of co-evolution is still being put together as we try to understand that creatures are not just passive mechanical cogs in a wheel but active agents in their own evolution, or co-evolutionary process.

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To some extent we can study the co-evolution of species within their present ecosystems and find clues to how they must have co-evolved in the dim past, but we also have many other clues to life’s long-ago patterns. Fossils — the imprints and remains of creatures turned to rock — are very important clues to what early creatures looked like, especially now that we know how to tell their age and have found fossils of even the most ancient bacteria in rocks, such as the stromatolites they built billions of years ago. Fossils alone cannot prove that one species changed into another, but the fossil record clearly shows that larger, more complicated creatures existed only after smaller, simpler ones had paved the way for their existence.

In Darwin’s theory, species change very slowly but steadily as environments select for the tiny accidental changes that make some individuals of each generation slightly fitter than others. Since his time, however, many more fossils have been collected, and we see that most species must have changed in spurts from time to time — far more quickly than such accidents can explain — while others have scarcely changed at all, despite the slow, steady stream of accidents they must have endured.

The known rate of DNA accidents seems to have no relationship to the rate of change in creature patterns. Some bacteria living now are like those that lived billions of years ago. Squid and sharks and ants have stayed much as they were hundreds of millions of years ago, as we see clearly in the fossil record. Yet many of these slow-to-change creatures’ fellow species in co-evolution, such as ourselves, have become very different modern species.

Species whose genetic plans have hardly changed are like bicycles in a world of jet planes — they still work very well as they are, yet they have been steps along the way to bigger, more complicated inventions. They are, in a way, living fossils to compare with creatures that apparently continued to change or evolve. It seems that co-evolution has rhythms like any other dance — some slow, some so fast in comparison that they seem almost to leap from being one kind of creature to being another. We ourselves are a good example of a species that changed very rapidly.

If all living beings were created at once — as creationists still believe — then all modern species should have fossil ancestors quite like themselves. But this turns out to be true of only very few creatures larger than monera. There are estimated to be somewhere between three million and ten million species alive today, yet well over 99 percent of all the species that ever lived are now extinct. It is worth noting here that in the times of most rapid extinction it is estimated that the rate was about one species lost every thousand years, while we humans have probably caused the extinction of a million species in the last quarter of this century alone! Many biologists acknowledge the present as the sixth great extinction, as we pointed out earlier.

Now and then fossils give us wonderful clues to change, such as those showing reptiles evolving into birds. The archaeopteryx — Greek for `ancient-wings’ — was a kind of flying reptile with a horny beak and wings strong enough to propel its big body through the air. Its skeleton looks very much like those of modern birds, and the fossil imprints are so clear we can almost see reptile scales evolving into feathers, front legs into wings, and long snouts into hard beaks. The babies of birds, even today, still hatch from eggs just as their reptile ancestors did.

The fossil and chemical geological records show that dinosaurs and other large creatures of their time died out around sixty million years ago during a period when there were major changes in their environment. Apparently these large creatures could not adjust to big changes in climate caused, it now seems, by the impact of a giant meteor or planetoid. Smaller animals did survive the crisis, but they must have evolved so quickly that none of them left clear fossil records of the gradual changes inferred by Darwinian evolution.

The fossil record alone is simply not adequate to prove modern creatures’ lines of descent. In fact, scientists have not found a single clear and complete fossil line of descent for any modern creature, and this has become a major argument used by the creationists, who don’t believe in evolution. How can we be so sure that modern creatures actually descended from earlier ones that were quite unlike them?

We have, fortunately, other clues to evolution. For one thing, we can actually see evolutionary changes taking place in some living species. In bacteria, protists, fungi, plants, and animals that reproduce quickly and often, we can follow the changes over many generations. With electron microscopes and other modern instruments we can actually track their changing patterns of DNA as well as the more obvious changes in cell or body structure that follow from the microscopic changes.

It was of course a big surprise for biologists to find that creatures can rearrange their own DNA in ways that can hardly be called accidental. In using antibiotic drugs to kill particular kinds of bacteria, as mentioned earlier, we often find that a species we attacked successfully has suddenly changed into a species that cannot be harmed by the drug. We say it has become resistant. But such new resistance implies genetic change — the kind of genetic change we now know all bacteria to be capable of through their WorldWideWeb of DNA recombination — the system that helped them cope billions of years ago with such life-threatening matters as ultraviolet radiation and poisonous oxygen in their environment.

Individuals in bacterial colonies change their DNA rapidly and effectively when the colonies are deprived of their usual foods and forced to live on what they were previously unable to digest, as Ben Jacob has shown. Even more impressive is the fact that larger, more complex creatures also can change their DNA in emergencies. Many insects and plants that we humans consider pests have made themselves resistant to our chemical poisons in just a few generations. Recent work in biology, such as that of Mae-Wan Ho, shows that instructions do not flow only one way from nuclear DNA to bodies, but that bodies can register changes in the environment and in themselves, communicating these changes to their DNA in ways that offspring may inherit.

Many other examples of intelligent and specific genetic change in response to circumstances outside organisms have been shown over the last half century. Just as we are finding that organisms are not separate from their environment, we are also finding that DNA is not separate from its environment within and without its organism. We know now that the DNA recombination capabilities of cells include the ability to reproduce DNA between cell divisions — that genes can be copied and relocated when necessary. And this is only the beginning of our understanding of how organisms change their plans in order to survive in health.

The idea that the environment can trigger inheritable changes in creatures had actually been proposed before Darwin’s opposing idea that environments can only select among changes produced independently of environments. Jean Lamarck, who named the study of living things biology, proposed it as the first modern theory of evolution. Lamarck’s explanation of how living things changed themselves — the classic example being giraffes stretching their necks to reach higher leaves and then passing on long necks to their offspring — was not as convincing to Western scientists as Darwin’s theory of accidental variety and natural selection through competition. Thus Lamarck’s theory was ridiculed while Darwin’s was adopted in the West, though Lamarck continued to be respected in Russia.

Neither Lamarck nor Darwin, of course, knew about DNA or even had a theory of genes, so they could not even guess that bacteria can trade around their genetic material or that larger multicelled creatures can rearrange their genetic material on the basis of experience in their environment. For that matter, many biologists still resist accepting the new evidence consistent with Lamarck’s theory.

There is still a great deal to learn about biological information systems. Earlier we mentioned that the role of most nuclear DNA is still unknown and that it contains many extra copies of some genes. We guessed that the excess may be a hangover from the time when many bacteria contributed to the nuclear DNA. But it may also be, as some biologists believe, that all through evolution species collect and pass on reserve genes which may someday be useful in an emergency. After all, we keep libraries filled with books, the vast majority of which are unused at any given time.

It is certainly obvious by now that DNA can reorganize itself and repair the kind of accidental change that was thought to be the only way to evolution. It is a relief to know we are not just a lot of piled-up accidents and copying mistakes, but beings who have organized and evolved ourselves in harmony with the other living beings that form our environment. It is good to know that life is too intelligent to proceed by accident!

Environments simply are not fixed places that living things must fit into, adapt to, as we had thought, but the busy activity of living things themselves, working out their ways of life together as parts of the live Earth. This co-evolution in ecosystems now seems a matter of creatures changing themselves from the inside, in response to their environment, and also prodding changes in other creatures that are part of their environmental holon. A change in one species will thus be reflected by changes in some others. The Unity cycle reflects these `negotiations’ in which living things evolve themselves and are evolved by one another, together evolving mature balanced ecosystems — such as rainforests — from immature ones with relatively few initially-competitive species. Note that each species is continually incorporating raw materials into its bodies, and being transformed in turn into raw materials for others, as Anaximander observed.

We only began studying ecology a few decades ago, when we recognized things going wrong in our environment because of changes we were making, especially after Rachel Carson called our attention to this enormous problem. We had been creating erosion and deserts by cutting down forests, poisoning land and sea creatures all over the planet with our pesticides and herbicides, polluting and destroying our air, water and soil with various chemicals, creating monocultures and warming the climate unnaturally.

Suddenly we began to study our planet’s ecologically balanced body with attention to ecological `illnesses’ and their possible cures, just as we had begun earlier to study our own bodies with attention to what went wrong with them — to their illnesses. As Lovelock has pointed out, medicine began to make real progress only when we began studying the physiology of our bodies — the way their interwoven systems work under normal, healthful conditions — and so we will make more progress in understanding ecology and evolution as we learn how our planet’s normal physiology works. How are its many kinds of supplies recycled? How do its information systems work to adjust imbalances? How do its countless and varied creatures contribute to its overall health?

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Much groundwork for planetary physiology can be found in the work of Vernadsky, the Russian biologist who described life as a disperse of rock, or rock rearranging itself, as we have been calling the same concept. Vernadsky pointed out that living organisms were originally built of the inorganic minerals of the Earth’s crust and still contain such inorganic minerals, that they transform such inorganic minerals into living matter and living matter back into inorganic minerals. For this reason he saw no separation between biology and geology, but became interested in the constant transformation going on from the one domain to the other.

His concept of all living creatures together as living matter was used to propose that their part of the Earth’s crust is energetic enough to actively transform the more passive parts — what we have called the geological parts — into itself and its products, literally feeding on it. On the surface, this concept of living matter is the same as Lovelock’s concept of biota, as the sum total of living creatures, contrasted with their abiotic, or nonliving environment. But in Vernadsky’s conception the emphasis is on geological continuity — on each part as a transformation of the other — whereas in Lovelock’s conception the emphasis is on their interaction as separate parts of a working system. Oddly, Vernadsky, who apparently did not see the planet alive as a whole, perceived its integrity more fundamentally than Lovelock, who does see it as alive. Vernadsky was interested in the fact that the same atoms over time would alternate as part of animate and inanimate matter.

The processes by which organisms build up and destroy their own bodies — their particular structures built of proteins, water, carbon compounds, and minerals — is called metabolism, from the Greek word for change. Metabolism, which we touched on earlier in discussing the law of entropy, is a process of chemical changes in living matter by which energy is provided for taking in new matter, building and repairing cells, collecting and excreting wastes. Metabolism is divided into two parts: anabolism and catabolism, the buildup and breakdown of body substance, or protoplasm.

Metabolism, then, is the most basic autopoietic activity of all life. It recycles the materials of the Earth’s crust into animate matter and then back into inanimate matter that can be used again to create more living matter. Vernadsky understood metabolism as the activity of all Earth’s living matter taken together, as well as that of any particular organism, since he saw all living matter as a constantly shifting high-energy portion of the Earth’s crust. We earlier observed that virtually all of the Earth’s atmosphere, seas, soil, and rock are made from the products and dead bodies of organisms.

Even the hardest pure-carbon diamonds are pressed coal, which earlier was pressed animal and plant bodies. The sedimentary rock formed by pressure on the ocean floor, as another example, begins as sediment, including vast quantities of algae and animal shells, all passed through the guts of sand and mud-eating worms to further transform them, just as soil is transformed by the related Earth-eating Earthworms of dry land. Life, then, is the most powerful of geological transformers. That the record of Earthlife’s evolution lies everywhere in geology, not only in recognized fossils, is referred to in the title of a book on Vernadsky’s work, called Traces of Bygone Biospheres.

The geological activity of creatures also includes their production of atmospheric gases and their transfer of groundwater back into the atmosphere, a process that is clearly visible in the pumping action of rain forests, the rain then falling to dissolve more earth and rock. On the whole, however, the geological activity of creatures is less the larger they are, most of this work being done by microbes and rock- or mud- or earth-eating worms.

Some microorganisms contain half a million to a million times as much of some mineral, such as iron, manganese, or silver, as their environment does. The concentration of elements is another way in which life alters Earth’s crust. Microorganisms are responsible for concentrating the radioactive materials, such as uranium, that we mine to produce atomic energy — perhaps concentrating it in their habitats to keep themselves warm! Copper and other metals we mine have similar origins. From metal veins to continental shelves and the entire atmosphere, not to mention the composition of seas and soils, we see the staggering work of Earth’s microbes.

It was so clear to Vernadsky that the activity of living matter was metabolic that he proposed we reclassify living organisms on the basis of their metabolism. He argued that our present classification from kingdom to species by way of phylum, class, order, family, and genus had led us to classify as related organisms many that really are not related under natural conditions. A better scheme, he felt, would be to divide kingdoms according to the way in which each of their species metabolizes supplies from its environment. The different ways in which organisms feed themselves had already been named by the German biologist Wilhelm Pfeffer. Vernadsky proposed them as a biological classification scheme.

In this scheme the metabolic process of organisms begins with the category called autotrophs — self-feeding organisms that can build their own giant molecules, such as protein and nucleic acids, from simple molecules and elements such as minerals, water, and carbon dioxide. This category includes the photoautotrophs — self-feeders that use sunlight in metabolizing basic molecules. A second major category of organisms is called heterotrophs — meaning feeding off others, because its members cannot make large molecules from basic ones but must eat other organisms for their ready-made large molecules. A third category is called saprotrophs — meaning to feed on the dead, because its members eat dead bodies and reduce their large molecules back to the basic ones the autotrophs can use. The fourth category is mixotrophs, which can metabolize in more than one way.

Finer distinctions within these categories are made as heterotrophs feed off other heterotrophs, and so on. What is important about this scheme is that organisms are classified not by their structures but by their functions within the whole geobiological life process. It recognizes organisms as self-organizing packets of the Earth’s crust with enough energy to move about the more sluggish matter around them. Vernadsky even suggested that evolution may proceed by the natural selection of organisms which most increase biogenic, life-originated, energy — the energy to move around the atoms and molecules of the Earth’s crust at the highest speed.

The energy of living matter sometimes explodes almost beyond belief. A locust plague of a single day has been estimated to fill six thousand cubic kilometers of space and weigh forty-five million tons! It is the locusts’ heterotrophic metabolism, of course, that makes them a plague as they suddenly convert vast quantities of the autotrophic crops planted by humans into their bodies. Most biogeologic activity goes on less dramatically, though it is impressive enough to consider that a single caterpillar may eat two hundred times its weight each day. All ecological areas have more autotrophs than heterotrophs — it takes more of the former to sustain the latter. Thus, a forest may have 2,000 to 5,000 times as much autotrophic as heterotrophic living matter.

Vernadsky did not consider this classification scheme the only one possible; he recognized that one can learn much by trying other methods. One of his schemes was based on the type and amount of mineral content in organisms. Certainly he was one of the first modern scientists to see the Earth in a truly holistic way and to provide evidence of its evolution through the transformation of rock into living creatures and back into rock.

Many scientists have since built on his work or developed independent studies of the Earth from a holistic perspective, but Vernadsky’s work has been given particular attention here because its fundamental conception of biogeochemical unity is so important and so little known in the West. Our best western scientific progress in understanding Gaian physiology has been through the work Lovelock, Margulis and their co-workers.

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Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

Timothy:

I began reading your material during the evening of April 5. As a matter of serendipity, that was the day that you wrote Understanding Humanity in Universe . I was pleasantly surprised (“astonished” might be a more apt verb) to find that the “worldview” that you articulate in your material parallels what I’ve been doing for awhile. Here’s an analogy: with a line integral, integration gives the same result, regardless of the detailed paths taken between the beginning and end “points.” Likewise, it appears that you and I may have arrived at a similar understanding about things, while the details of our individual paths to understanding probably differ with regard to our experiences and sources of influence.

As an example of what I mean, consider Arthur Young’s ”arc of process“



Although, at first glance, the two diagrams do not appear to correspond, it appears to me that they are attempts to illustrate essentially the same thing (from alternate “perspectives”). By “stretching” and “compressing” the corresponding terms into equivalence categories:

Young	Chaission
Light, particles	Particulate
Atoms	Galactic, stellar, planetary
Molecules, plants, animals	Biochemical
Humans	Cultural, Ethical

the diagrams appear to be alternate expressions of a common underlying viewpoint. Young and Chaisson are (I believe) expressing similar views.

Something else about Young’s diagram (and your explanation) reminded me of another reference. I scanned two figures from Kuntz’s essay “The Metric of the Living Orders” in Integrative Principles of Modern Thought (1972), and included the narative. You should be able to see fairly easily that Kuntz has conceived something resembling Young’s conception of degrees of freedom at levels 5 and 6 of process (1∞ for plants, 2∞ for animals). But Kuntz’s motivating concern is with symmetry breaking in “physical” space.

 

From: “The Metric of the Living Orders” by F. L. Kuntz in Integrative Principles of Modern Thought, Henry Margenau (ed.), 1972

Figure 35 A tree, as well as the forms of other plants, has a stationary habit and tends to a vertical position of the axis of symmetry. That axis is the seat of a characteristic motion of the plant, namely, development and growth. It is here appropriate to drop one of the crystalline space planes, the horizontal. Over that plane there is no symmetry. We may regard the growth axis as the characteristic axis of symmetry in plant space-time.

Figure 36 Most coldblooded animals are self-mobile; thus a new relationship with time (that of the free-living animals) is added to growth. So one more confining plane fades into the background, leaving only the profile plane, which now constitutes the basis of symmetry in animal space-time. With the warmblooded animals, living creatures achieve a new kind of equilibrium, thermal homeostasis. The sensitivity and ingenuity of birds and mammals is also consonantly greater than that of the extant coldbloods, or the extinct dinosaurs. In fact, from crystals through plants, cold- and warmblooded animals, we see stages of psychological resource and diversity. Thermal equilibrium in the warmbloods is a phenomenon of the whole volume of the body. Stability is in the thermal field, and is not represented by a new geometric relation to space.

Despite Young’s and Kuntz’s differing orientations, they appear to have achieved essentially the same insight (1∞ of freedom in plants, 2∞ of freedom in animals).

Here is something else that I think may interest you. In “Understanding Humanity in Universe” you wrote:

Life begins within the molecular stage of process. The primal power of life is memory. Memory is the power on which all other living powers depend.

Several years ago, I noticed a similar observation in Gerald Edelman’s Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind . Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 20 ( “Symmetry and Memory: On the Ultimate Origins of Mind”) of the book (which I believe you may find interesting and useful):
 

Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, pp. 204-207

What may we offer as a new principle underlying the evolutionary development of mind and intentionality in this set of events? I submit that the new principle is one of memory, one that takes many forms but has general characteristics that are found in all Its variations. I am using the word “memory” here in a more inclusive fashion than usual. Memory is a process that emerged only when life and evolution occurred and gave rise to the systems described by the sciences of recognition. As I am using the term memory, it describes aspects of heredity, immune responses, refex leaming, true learning following perceptual categorization, and the various forms of consciousness (figure 20-2). In these instances, structures evolved that permit significant correlations between current ongoing dynamic pattems and those imposed by past patterns. These structures all differ, and memory takes on its properties as a function of the system in which it appears. What all memory systerns have in common is evolution and selection. Memory is an essential property of biologically adaptive systems. This extension of the term may seem hopelessly broad. But let us see what all these phenomena have in common, for it is actually quite specific. What they have in common is relative stability of structure under selective rnapping events. To make myself clear, I shall say something here about structure, stability, and mapping. The physical law concemed with structure and stability is the second law of thermodynamics. This law states that entropy, a measure of the disorder of a system, must spontaneously increase or remain the same but never decrease in a closed system. (By a closed system I mean one in which energy and matter neither enter nor leave.) The most orderly possible system is that of a perfect crystal (one with absolutely identical spacing of its atoms in a symmetrical lattice) at a temperature of absolute zero. Since the earliest evolution of the universe its entropy has been increasing. But in parts of the universe that are open systems (ourselves, for example), entropy can actually decrease locally as a result of the transfer of matter and energy. Various chemical interactions give rise to stable structures, including those of molecules in living forms. The stability of structures and their energetic transactions are govemed by the laws of thermodynamics, including the second law. It is now clear that stable chemical structures can exist in the absence of life or living forms. indeed, even in outer space, evidence has been found of organic molecules that are similar to those in our bodies-molecules formed by the collision of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon, for example. The conditions of their formation and dissolution, of their stability, are determined by energy and entropy. However stable these molecules may be, they lack a hereditary principle. They do not show any ability to replicate themselves-to make molecules that might be called their progeny by using their own structure as a template. I want to be clear about how I am using the word stability in connection with memory. After all, periodic crystals exist in nonliving domains (for example, in rocks) that add atoms to their structures to become larger, following the same rules of symmetry. Such crystals do not replicate ; they grow . What is the difference? In a replicating system, there is an aperiodic structure that undergoes a kind of mapping; think of the sequences of DNA in chapter 6. A chemical reaction faithfully copies the aperiodic structure, resulting in daughter structures. But this fidelity is not absolute; mutant structures arise that are also copied. The result is a variant population. Finally, the stable aperiodic structure maps through additional chemistry to make other kinds of structures that contain it, so that favorable variants have a selective advantage when further copies are made. This abstracted description corresponds to that of a living system: a self-replicating system undergoing natural selection (see chapter 6). The aperiodic structure is DNA or RNA, and the container to which they map is made of various protein products. But notice that the main process, which is lacking in nonliving forms, is the hereditary principle. Notice also that this hereditary principle, which allows an increase in the population of favored variants over time, depends on the stability of chemical bonds. ln the case of DNA, these are the covalent bonds linking different nucleotide bases together to make a genetic code of linked triplet codons, each one corresponding to one of twenty amino acids that make up protein chains. The energy and entropy conditions in the temperature range under which life flourishes assure that a hereditary process takes place. But it is historical selection events that result in the actual sequences found in the population. The appearance of this hereditary process is a new kind of event-a form of memory. Aside from variations introduced into the sequence that have proven favorable, it is the ability to retain much of the order or mapping of the parent aperiodic structure that enables these systems to continue. They have stability of structure under selective mapping events. But notice that this “memory” is not perfect (as it must be, by contrast, in computer messages). Indeed, to some degree, it must contain errors (changes in entropy) or mutants for the system to be a selective one-to be one that is able to respond adaptively to unforeseen environmental events because there is population variance. As these structures evolved and cellular populations formed into animals with many linked cells and with nervous systems, a new kind of memory appeared. This occurred as a result of synaptic changes in the nervous systems of these animals. Because of neuronal group selection, behaviors that proved adaptive were stabilized by selection within a single animal’s lifetime. Memory based on synaptic change is essential for such behaviors. In vertebrates, the requirement that their immune systems make the distinction between self and nonself resulted in the selection of individuals who had a variant of the gene for the neural cell adhesion molecule, N-CAM. By introducing somatic variation into what were to become immunoglobulin (antibody) molecules and by combining that process with the faithful replication of cells selected by foreign molecules, a new recognition system appeared (see figure 8-1). This system had immune memory: The selection of lymphocytes by antigens led to changes that were retained for the entire lifetime of the individual. Yet again, the evolutionary elaboration of sensory receptors and motor sheets in animals with increasingly sophisticated brain maps made memories based on perceptual categorization possible. With the appearance of conceptual capabilities and even more sophisticated mapping, synaptic change in response to novelty occurring within populations of neuronal groups led to additional kinds of memory. Each memory reflects a system property within a somatic selection system. And each property serves a different function based on the evolution of the appropriate neuroanatomical structure. These higher-order systems are selective and are based on the responses to environmental novelty of populations of neuronal groups arranged in maps. They are recognition systems. At some transcendent mornent in evolution, a variant with a reentrant circuit linking value-category memory to classification couples emerged. At that moment, memory became the substrate and servant of consciousness. With the emergence of language in the species Homo sapiens, the iteration of this same principle in specialized linguistic memories made higher-order consciousness possible. And within culture, higher-order consciousness eventually gave rise to a scientific description of nature, one that allows us to study the origins of our own existence in the universe. This description of the development of memory is so different from the previous one describing the development of the cosmos following symmetry principles as to seem incommensurate with it. The biological story is a Iocal saga so far told only on Earth: It is historical, it occurs in a very narrow temperature range, it is extraordinarily complex and specific to particular structures, it takes unexpected and different forms, and it is dizzying to consider in detail. But the saga begins in a world govemed by symmetry. Only with symmetry breaking, only with the formation of chemistry, only with the appearance of large, stable molecules, only with the appearance of irreversible selection events, only with the evolution of means described by the sciences of recognition, could memory lead to the appearance of mind. Symmetry principles govern the possibility that memory can arise, but only after symmetry breaking occurred, leading to chemistry and to living and evolving organisms, could memory develop.

My purpose in providing the preceding comparisons has been to indicate the similarity of insights that we seem to have reached from our independent efforts.

Synergetically,

Don Steehler

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When I was in medical school learning to be a Doctor, I and my fellow students spend hundreds of hours reading, studying, and drilling each other in our efforts to memorize every fact of human anatomy. I always wondered at the paradox that as we struggled to remember every detail, the answers to all our questions lay just out of reach beneath our skins.

One of my readers recently wrote me feeling pretty gloomy. He said he saw little evidence of humanity’s ability to work together, and asked, how could I be optimistic that humanity could become co-Operative?

I answered, Life already knows the answer. Life has already invented synergy and co-Operation. We humans just need to look under the skin.

Today, Elisabet Sahtouris helps us look under the skin with her continuing description of evolution from EarthDance. Yesterday, Elisabet described The Dance of Life—5. Also see: The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.

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A Great Leap—6

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

Little more than one century ago, priests told people that the Earth was a few thousand years old; a few decades ago, scientists believed that life on Earth began only slightly more than half a billion years ago. Now we know that the Earth’s skin was already swarming with fully evolved monera well over three and a half billion years ago. Two billion years, from about 3.7 to 1.7 billion years ago — almost half the Earth’s life — belonged solely to bacteria. This chapter is the story of the dramatic leap into the other four kingdoms of life, a leap that took place about 1.7 billion years ago and which holds important lessons for humanity today.

Before we go into that story, however, let us recall the magnificent work of the bacteria in preparing the way for their own evolution into other forms of life. Let us recall that they invented all life’s ways of making a living and created the conditions for life that we huge latecomers enjoy today. Without the bacteria, the Earth’s atmosphere would be unbreatheable and its crust would have remained a cratered desert of glassy rocks. Without the activity of bacteria, even the oceans, as we saw, would have gassed off our planet.

When we left the story of evolution, the bluegreens were turning solar energy to use in making food, and turning food energy to use in the work of life. Their waste gas, oxygen, together with other waste gases, such as the methane made by the older bubbler bacteria, piled up, creating a new kind of atmosphere. Gaia had solved some big problems and was thriving.

The bluegreens tried out all sorts of new shapes and configurations for their one-celled bodies — tiny balls, big blobs, long strings of individuals joined end to end, and even great sheets of them all stuck together with jellylike stuff and looking like seaweed. Some lived in large colonies, branching out into shapes that plants adopted when they evolved much later. Some even made spores in ways that remind us of plants making seeds. Perhaps the coded plans for such shapes and parts were stored in bacterial DNA and passed on for many millions of years until true plants evolved and found use for them. Other kinds of bacteria lived on their own as threadlike whips, lashing themselves from place to place. This was another early evolved structure that prefigured a way of moving that would evolve later in the dance with flexible backbones and muscles.

Besides trying out new shapes and movements, the monera evolved a division of labor that streamlined individual bacteria by reducing the amount of DNA and equipment each had to carry. Various kinds of monera became specialists at particular jobs, such as respiration, photosynthesis, or fixing nitrogen gas, yet all of them had access to the whole bacterial gene pool because they never lost their ability to trade DNA in their WorldWideWeb when necessary or desirable.

The new, streamlined specialists spread out into new habitats. Some did well in freezing cold waters; others lived in very hot springs. Some blew about in the air they had helped to create, then settled far from where they began. Some even found it possible to live and multiply on land, eating their way into rocks, where they started the processes that would eventually turn them into soil. But the more specialized the monera were, of course, the less independent they were, the more they depended on one another. Oxygen users now needed oxygen makers, food eaters needed food makers, nitrogen builders needed nitrogen fixers, and so on. In specializing, the monera were evolving what we call food chains, or ecological systems, in which each species provided for and took from others.

It seems that nature must always work out a balance between the independence and interdependence of individual creatures — between their autonomy and their holonomy. Specialization — whether in human society, ecosystems, multicelled creatures, or bacterial networks — is a feature of whole systems that makes them more versatile and efficient through the interdependence it creates among parts. Specialization brings variety into the life dance, but increases holonomy at the expense of autonomy, since it increases interdependence. This balancing of autonomy and holonomy is very important to understand if we are to learn to manage our human affairs as well as Gaia has worked out hers.

We saw the bacteria multiplying to ever greater numbers, discovering ever more and different ways of surviving and making their living, adapting themselves to geological changes in their environment as well as to the changes they themselves brought about. Before the ozone layer had gathered, strong ultraviolet light often damaged their DNA, but they invented splicing enzymes to repair the damage, and they learned to share this information, as well as other information stored in DNA plans, with each other. Thus the genetic plans for many variations on their organization were kept available, to be borrowed and copied from one another.

The bacterial population as a whole could therefore respond to emergencies such as chemical changes in the environment by drawing on and quickly spreading the genes that best helped them cope with those emergencies. Nowadays, part of their coping in this manner is their developing resistance to man-made antibiotics, or learning to digest new foods in changing environments. We also observe, in the frequent failure of our genetic engineering, that organisms recognize and remove — edit out — implanted genes.

Huge teams of specialist bacteria were dividing up tasks, recycling Earth’s materials, learning to balance the whole dance of life. But as specialists they also ran into trouble now and then. We can imagine that blue-green food makers needing light, for instance, must have found themselves stuck too long sometimes in dark places, and bubbling or breathing food eaters must have found themselves short of food because there was so much competition for it, so many mouths to feed, so to speak.

Ultraviolet light reaching the Earth had helped produce the sugars and other food molecules on which bubblers and breathers depended. As the ozone layer grew and began to screen out ultraviolet rays, this production was severely limited, increasing the competition for food to the point of crisis. The challenge of worldwide hunger seems to have pushed the monera to rediscover some old steps and patterns in their dance of life and weave them together into a new pattern that produced a very great leap in the dance of evolution.

This leap was accomplished when the ever more specialized bacteria got together within the same walls, where they could use their various ways of making a living cooperatively. In doing so, they evolved a very large and sophisticated new kind of cell — a kind of cell so different from the bacterial moneron that it is more closely related to us than to any of its own ancestors.

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These new cells — on the average a thousand times bigger than bacterial cells — formed a second kingdom of life to join the monera: a kingdom of life we call protista. The name comes from a longer word, protoctists, Greek for first builders. Protists, like monera, are single-celled creatures, though much larger. Later in our story, they will go on to build multicelled creatures, but for now let us look at them as multi-creatured cells.

Although the big new protists, once evolved, were smoothly run cooperative ventures, they did not start out that way. In fact, the new step in evolution almost certainly began quite uncooperatively in the desperate search for food. With the growth of bacterial populations and a developing ozone layer, the time when free food lay or floated all around came to an end. Natural death had not yet been invented to recycle materials, as bacteria do not necessarily or normally die and dissolve into reusable parts. Rather, parent bacteria split themselves to become their own offspring, and ever more offspring made ever greater demands on the food they needed in order to build themselves to full size.

Earth’s crust had come alive by packaging ever more of its atoms and molecules into bacteria, many of which depended on ready-made food supplies that were now limited by the new atmosphere. The planetary process of coming alive was thus in danger of choking itself off by overcrowding and lack of food. It is not impossible that something like this happened to Mars — that Mars once came alive and then died for lack of supplies, or lack of a means to recycle supplies efficiently enough to keep its early creatures healthy.

On Earth, the evolution of giant cell cooperatives probably began when tiny energetic breather bacteria began forcing their way through the walls of larger bubblers to get at their rich molecules — not entirely unlike the way in which we humans invaded each other’s kingdoms and countries to get at supplies and raw materials.

The problem with this approach was — as it still is — that eventually the invaders run out of supplies again, having eaten up their hosts. In the long run, invaders have little more to gain than their victims. But this crisis was a new challenge to life, and life proved as inventive in this situation as it had been in the face of previous problems.

Unable to get rid of, say, the invading breathers multiplying within them, the big bubblers seem to have negotiated an agreement with them that was of benefit to both parties. Perhaps in return for feeding on the bubblers’ molecules, the breathers gave the bubblers some of the ATP energy they could make so much faster. This is not unlike the deals made between countries, when, for example, a rich country offers electrification in return for a Third World country’s food products. As we have learned, it is not easy to make such deals truly beneficial to both sides. Such a bacterial agreement would have helped the big bubblers repair themselves or make extra molecules to feed the breathers in return for supplying them with plenty of energy.

Arrangements of this kind must have been worked out successfully, because the first protist fossils from about a billion and a half years ago show lots of breathers inside single big cells that were apparently healthy. This tells us that the breathers multiplied to large numbers within the host cell without damaging it. When such swelled cells divided, half the breathers went to one side, half to the other. And so the cooperative exchange of food for energy continued in ever more descendant cells.

Later such cells seem to have taken in other partners, such as bluegreen specialists in photosynthesis. The bluegreens were probably eaten by the big hungry bubblers, but they apparently resisted being digested. Eventually another cooperative agreement was reached: the bluegreens would make food molecules, which the bubblers and breathers needed, by photosynthesis. This cooperative arrangement allowed the giant cells to make ATP energy in all three ways within the same cell wall and thus to survive through all kinds of shortages.

As these new partnerships became more complicated, they also grew ever larger and heavier, no doubt finding it difficult to keep from sinking away from light or from moving too slowly to find food. Another cooperative solution — another transformation of imperialism into mutual aid — permitted them to move themselves farther and faster.

Remember that some breathers were shaped like twisting, lashing whips? Others had invented a proton motor. This was a spinning disk in a field of electrical potential, complete with microscopic ball bearings and an attached tail, or flagellum, so the bacterium could propel itself, literally motoring about! In the slime cities mentioned earlier, they can be seen along the canals among skyscrapers.

What might happen if these mobile bacteria stuck themselves onto larger cells in order to suck food from them? The big cells would find themselves moved about by lashing tails and propellers. This is just what seems to have happened. The evolving cooperatives must have found the pushy bacteria worth feeding in return for being driven to where they could find food or light. Eventually, the propellers and flagellae evolved into shorter, stiffer cilia arranged in rows so their rotating movements could be timed like the oars of our ancient ships. Cilia were so successful that almost every plant and animal cell living today has some part or parts that evolved from these ancient rowing hairs.

But before these happy cooperatives had actually evolved, there must have been a phase in which it was not clear whether cooperation would win out over competition, when the evolving protists were like a factory of workers without management, or a world of separate nations trying to take advantage of one another and all trying to give orders at once. After all, each kind of moneron had its own DNA plans, its own welfare requirements.

What was called for was serious organization. And monera, as we have seen, had already evolved a very effective communications system that could make such organization possible — their own WorldWideWeb. They knew how to trade DNA to revise their own plans; they knew how to work from a common gene pool. And apparently they drew on this experience to set up a new kind of local gene pool, or information center.

Instead of collecting one another’s genes inside themselves, they streamlined themselves even further, giving up some of their DNA to a common gene pool of general cell plans, which became the cell nucleus. As time went on, the nucleus became a virtual library of information for producing proteins and, in ways we still understand poorly, probably took on the direction of the whole cell’s affairs. The individual monera of the new cell became less independent but more secure, more inseparable parts of the new wholes.

This pattern of unity-> individuation-> conflict-> resolution-> cooperation-> unity-at-a-new-level-of-organization the ancient bacteria went through was mentioned in Chapter 2, and is a typically repeating cycle in evolution. We humans are engaged in today, as we learn to cooperate at a global level, thereby achieving a new planet-wide unity.

Nuclear DNA, originally donated by many generations of participants in each of the evolving cooperative cells, continues even in modern cells to contain a tremendous amount of duplication. Many theories have been proposed to explain the repetitive nuclear genes, but perhaps there is no more reason for them than there is for all the duplicated documents in our own government offices. In any case, the huge quantity of nuclear DNA could hardly be kept in bacterial style as loose loops floating about in the cell. It would have gotten tangled and broken, messing up plans. Besides, the DNA might well have been destroyed by all the oxygen-making going on in these cells. And so it seems that the DNA was collected from each part of the cell, wrapped tightly in complex close loops around proteins, and stored within a protective nuclear membrane. This nucleus became a kind of central cell office for keeping DNA plans in order, but accessible for use, thus making possible better organization of all the cell’s work.

This nuclear central office and library evolved into a staggeringly complex yet elegant organization we are still working to understand. The DNA in each of our cells, if stretched out, would be about six inches (or 15 centimeters) long, though it is packed into the invisibly small nucleus together with proteins and water. A jet plane, as Jeremy Narby has pointed out, flying one thousand kilometers per hour would have to fly over two full centuries to reach the end of all the DNA contained in a single human body’s several trillion cells strung end to end!

What is even more remarkable is that a single handful of rich, natural soil, a large part of which is masses of bacteria, contains even more DNA than that because of the closer packing of DNA throughout their tiny bodies. That means that our entire planet is coated in DNA — just about the oldest surviving invention of all evolution — the language of life itself. Only now do we recognize DNA as intelligent in its own right, when we see it rearranging itself appropriately within organisms under stress. How foolish, then, are we humans, to kill and sterilize our soils of all life with chemicals, thinking we know better than nature how to engineer and grow our food.

When it was time for the first nucleated cells to divide, each of several very long twisted DNA molecules unfurled itself, then split and replicated itself as it had in bacteria. Theses pairs stayed buttoned together at one point along their length, by a centromere, meaning central place (also called a kinetochore, or moving spot), while each member coiled neatly around itself, that coil coiling into a shorter one, and so on until it formed a compact chromosome thirty thousand times shorter than the DNA molecule was when it started out!

Later we will describe the next steps in cell division. Here we just want to indicate the remarkable feats performed within this nucleus — this DNA-protein information center that evolved as the most important new feature of the giant cell cooperatives. Every living creature of Earth not a bacterium itself evolved from these nucleated cells, meaning that every living being of every kingdom of life beyond monera is made of the same basic kind of nucleated cell. Biologists call this superkingdom of cells, which includes the protist, fungus, plant, and animal kingdoms, eukaryotes (pronounced you-carry-oats, from the Greek meaning `with a karyon, or kernel — the nucleus). To keep things straight, we call bacterial monera prokaryotes (pro-carry-oats, meaning `before a nucleus’).

In evolving these eukaryotic protist cells as bacterial cooperatives, Gaia’s creatures rediscovered some of the independence they had had before they became specialists depending on one another. The giant eukaryotes could now evolve new parts and ways of using them — all sorts of special membrane walls and internal skeletons, gas-bubble vacuoles to control floating and sinking, other structures and chemical systems that helped do new jobs. A means was even found to circulate the jellylike cytoplasm in which all these structures are embedded, providing a transportation system for supplies and wastes.

Eukaryote cells, as we said, are on the average a thousand times bigger than prokaryotes, with a thousand times more DNA. They are in many ways as complex as human cities, or the bacterial colony cities described earlier. Until recently, scientists saw the nucleus as a computer behaving like an authoritarian dictatorship, containing all the information necessary to run the call and sending out `top-down’ command and control orders for what is to be built, produced, carried about, or otherwise done. Now it seems that the governing of cells is more decentralized — that the whole cell governs itself, using the nucleus as an information resource center.

Biology has made more progress in understanding the detailed composition of living things than in understanding their organization as a whole, but this trend is now shifting. In our analogy with cities, some cell parts are structures like roads and buildings; others are chemical messengers, carrying instructions to and from the nucleus; some are production centers like factories; others perform services, taking in and delivering food, collecting waste, making repairs.

With ever more powerful microscopes, moving picture microscopy and animation techniques, we begin to understand how busy and lively, how complicated and amazing, life is inside such cells. But what we see leaves much to be learned about how it is all organized to function so smoothly. Even structurally we are still discovering things of major importance in cells. For example, until very recently we thought cells were bags of jelly-like stuff with the nucleus and organelles suspended within the jelly. Then, to their surprise, microbiologist Don Ingber discovered that cells have an internal architecture not unlike our bone and muscle systems — a tensegrity structure, with tension and compression components giving the cell integrity and the ability to move itself. Until his discovery, scientists had been dissolving this structure with the chemicals they used to prepare cells for study!

A huge new development is the understanding that nuclear DNA is reorganized in response to changes within and beyond the cell, that the entire cell, including its membrane or wall, is a creative autopoietic system.

All the cells of our own bodies (not counting the myriad bacteria living on and within us) are eukaryote cells, but we are just beginning to understand their evolution from ancient bacterial cooperatives. The story of this evolution has been simplified here. In actual fact it is one of the most fascinating and difficult puzzles ever to challenge biologists.

1993 Nobel Prize winning biologists Philip Sharp and Richard Roberts discovered that genes are broken into modules that can be reshuffled by spliceosomes referred to as a cell’s `editors’ because they snip out inappropriate DNA sequences occurring between meaningful `words.’ Some of these modules are apparently shared by different genes, enabling evolution to proceed much faster than it could have if the old models held true. Especially interesting in light of this book’s designation of a nucleus as a central library or information center is the new vocabulary of `editors,’ `words,’ etc. The picture emerging is consistent with the description given here of evolution as an intelligent process, rather than an accidental mechanical process. Sharp, in fact, speaks of a spliceosome as knowing where to cut and where to splice.

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The DNA plans and composition of our own cells are, of course, unique to humans and differ from those of frog and fern cells, bacterial or Bactrian camel cells. When it became possible to analyze DNA in detail, it also became possible to identify a species by its own particular DNA pattern. Many species look very much alike, yet can be distinguished by differences in their DNA patterns.

Among the parts of our cells outside their nuclei are large numbers of tiny things that produce ATP energy currency. These cell parts have long been understood as little mechanisms for burning food molecules with oxygen to produce the cell’s energy. But with rising interest in and understanding of DNA, biologists made a very strange discovery: that these little machines have their own DNA, the coded plans of which are quite different from those of the nuclear DNA.

How could cell parts be of a different species than the creature made of those cells?

Clues soon turned up. However different this DNA is from the nuclear DNA, it was found to be rather like some other DNA that biologists knew about — the DNA of bacteria quite like the breathers that evolved billions of years ago! At the time this was discovered, the story of bacterial cooperation in the evolution of eukaryotes was still unknown. Now that we know it, scientists are finding as many as a thousand different kinds of DNA outside the nucleus of a single cell.

The idea of cell symbiosis — the origin of eukaryotes as prokaryotes living together in cooperatives — had been proposed independently by a German, an American, and a Russian biologist around the turn of the century. All had noticed that the photosynthesizing chloroplasts — meaning `green producers’ — in the cells of plants resembled bluegreen bacteria. The Russian, K. S. Mereschovsky, suggested that other ancient bacteria had evolved into other cell parts. But biologists, who were trained to see living things as put together from mechanical parts, could not see cell parts as creatures in themselves.

Thus the symbiosis theory was ignored until Lynn Margulis an American microbiologist who became James Lovelock’s partner in developing the Gaia hypothesis, revived it and produced a great deal of evidence to support it.

After much work, Margulis and others have shown that these energy-producing cell parts really are descendants of the ancient breather bacteria that came to live inside larger prokaryote cells, cooperating in building the first eukaryote cells. Luckily, teams of biologists working to unravel the ancient mysteries of cell symbiosis have found many clues in the behavior of today’s bacteria. Rather vicious breathers can still be found drilling their way into other bacteria to reproduce there and eat the host bacteria from the inside. In the Tennessee laboratory of Kwang Jeon, protist hosts so invaded learned to tolerate and then to cooperate with their invaders in a mutually dependent relationship that brought about a new kind of creature. Surprisingly, this replay of the ancient evolutionary shift from outright aggression to full cooperation happened in only a few years’ time.

Today, we find the descendants of the ancient breathers living and multiplying in the cells of every kind of protist, fungus, plant, and animal. It’s high time we knew them by name. They are mitochondria — pronounced, mite-o-KON-dree-a — a word that comes from the Greek meaning `thread grains,’ because under a microscope they look like tiny grain hulls packed full of thread.

Using the oxygen we breathe, mitochondria make all the energy our bodies need to keep going and to repair themselves. Without our mitochondria we could not lift a finger. In fact, it is these swarms of ancestral bacteria, working night and day in all our cells, that keep us alive.

Or are we working for them? Lewis Thomas, in another of his perceptive and poetic insights, suggested that if anything in nature is a machine, perhaps it is us — maybe we are giant taxis which mitochondria built to travel around in safely and comfortably. Certainly mitochondria have done very well spreading themselves all over this planet, inside every other living thing, almost since the Earth came alive. There are so many of them swarming in our own cells that it’s hard to guess at their actual numbers, but all together it is estimated they would weigh almost as much as the bodies they live in — that is, mitochondria make up much of our weight, and the weight of elephants and insects, clams and monkeys, toadstools and lizards, fish and worms.

In plants, from seaweed to sunflowers, potatoes, and palm trees, mitochondria live together with their relatives, the chloroplasts, which give plants their green color. You will easily recognize them as descendants of the ancient bluegreens and know that as they make energy from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide, they also make the oxygen their mitochondrian cousins need for making their energy.

Mitochondria and chloroplasts, together with their still free-living monera cousins, the bacteria, are by far Gaia’s most numerous and important creatures, though we are very late in recognizing our complete dependence on them. Quite to the contrary, we discovered bacteria in the context of medicine and treated them only as enemies. They are so hidden and tiny that, for years, we paid no attention to their good works, but we now know that their cooperation is the essence of the entire Gaian life system.

Besides making the vital gases oxygen and carbon dioxide for each other, the chloroplasts and mitochondria of eukaryotes, together with their prokaryote cousins, form other cooperative cycles, for example, the food chains mentioned earlier. While plants make their organic bodies from simple minerals, water, and carbon dioxide, animals can only make their bodies from the ready-made organic molecules of plants and other creatures. It is primarily bacteria that cause the decay of dead plants and animals, reducing them to the simple substances on which new plants can live.

Margulis’ discovery, that eukaryote protists evolved cooperative internal schemes to overcome the problems caused by competition among prokaryote bacteria, was almost as much a shock to the world of science as was the Gaia hypothesis itself. Besides showing that cell `mechanisms’ such as mitochondria are creatures in their own right, she was suggesting that harmonious cooperation played a big role in evolution. This ran counter to the beliefs stemming from Darwin’s work, adopted by scientists in western countries, that evolution was just a survival race driven by competition.

The theory of evolution through competition has played a big role in our world, not only in science but in shaping our whole human outlook and way of life. Only by understanding its origin and its widespread effect on our lives can we understand how to change our view of ourselves and our role within our larger Gaian planet. Let’s look, then, into the way our Darwinian view of evolution came about.

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Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

We continue with excerpts from Elisabet Sartouris’ EarthDance. Yesterday, Elisabet discussed The Problems for Earthlife—4, this followed Sunday’s description of The Young Earth—3, she had earlier told of our Cosmic Beginnings—2, which followed from a Twice Told Tale—1.

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The Dance of Life—5

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

It was in the search for life on other planets that we discovered what a live planet is and that we ourselves are part of the only live planet in our solar system.

The first astronauts to see the whole Earth with their own eyes were astonished by what they saw. Although they couldn’t see any of the living creatures they knew to be on it, the Earth itself looked very much alive — like a beautiful glowing creature pulsing or breathing beneath its swirling, veil-like skin. Their pictures helped us in imagining Earth’s evolution as a film.

Scientists, of course, cannot simply trust the way things look. After all, science was built on the discovery that the Earth is not the unmoving center of the universe, much as it looks to be just that. Nevertheless, it was seeing our planet from afar for the first time, and noting how its appearance differed from other planets, that inspired new ideas and studies of Earth, such as Gaian science.

Long before we saw our planet in this new way, scientists had adopted the view that the Earth with its various environments is a nonliving geological background for life, living creatures having evolved upon it by accident and having adapted to it by natural selection. The Scottish scientist James Hutton, who is remembered as the father of geology, was virtually ignored when, in 1785, he called the Earth a living superorganism and said its proper study should be physiology. A century later the Russian philosopher Y. M. Korolenko told his nephew, Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, that the Earth was a live being, and though it is not clear that Vernadsky believed this himself, his studies of Earth took a very different view of life than did those of other scientists.

Vernadsky called life “a disperse of rock,” because he saw life as a chemical process transforming rock into highly active living matter and back, breaking it up, and moving it about in an endless cyclical process. Vernadsky’s view is presented in this book, as we say life is rock rearranging itself — like music come alive — packaging itself as cells, speeding its chemical changes with enzymes, turning cosmic radiation into its own forms of energy, transforming itself into ever-evolving creatures and back into rock. This view of living matter as continuous with, and as a chemical transformation of, nonliving planetary matter is very different from the view of life developing on the surface of a nonliving planet and adapting to it.

While Vernadsky’s view stimulated much research in the Soviet Union, it never became widely known in the West. The biologist G. E. Hutchinson was one of the very few Western scientists of this century who took an interest in and promoted Vernadsky’s view that life is a geochemical process of the Earth.

Later the independent English scientist James Lovelock, who assisted NASA in its search for life on Mars, shocked the world of science by suggesting that the geological environment is not only the product and remainder of past life but also an active creation of living things. Though he did not know Vernadsky’s work at the time, he said that living organisms continually renew and regulate the chemical balance of air, seas, and soil in ways that ensure their continued existence. He called this idea — that life creates and maintains precise environmental conditions favorable to its existence — the Gaia hypothesis, at the suggestion of his Cornwall neighbor, the novelist William Golding.

The Gaia hypothesis is now recognized as Gaia theory, but it is still controversial among scientists. Lovelock, like his predecessor Hutton, calls Earth-as-Gaia an organism or superorganism and claims its proper study is physiology. Yet he also calls Gaia a self-stabilizing mechanism made of coupled living and nonliving parts — organisms and physical environments — which affect one another in ways that maintain Earth’s relatively constant temperature and chemical balance within limits favorable to life. Lovelock describes this mechanical system as a cybernetic device working by means of feedback among its coupled parts. Thus it maintains Earth’s stable conditions in the manner of a thermostat-controlled heating system that maintains house temperature, or an automatic pilot that keeps an airplane on course. This concept of Gaia as a cybernetic device has been far more acceptable within the mechanical worldview that is still strong among scientists than is the concept of Gaia as a live organism, though this is changing.

For Lovelock, organism and mechanism are equally appropriate concepts, but in fact the two concepts contradict each other logically, and this causes confusion around the whole issue of Gaia theory. The concept of life, by any definition, including the autopoietic definition (of self-producing and self-renewing living systems, as introduced in Chapter 3), is not logically consistent with the concept and reality of mechanism.

For one thing, life cannot be part of a living being; life is the essence or process of the whole living being. If Gaia is the name given to the living Earth, then it would be as meaningless to say that life creates its own environments or conditions on Earth as it would be to say that life creates its own environments or conditions in our bodies. Life is the process of bodies, not one of their parts, and in this book we maintain that the same is true for Gaia-Earth — that life is its process, its metabolic system, its particular kind of working organization, not one of its parts.

We can of course say that organisms within Gaia create their environments and are created by them, in the same sense that we say cells create their own environments and are created by them in our bodies. In other words, there is continual and mutually creative interaction between holons and their surrounding holarchies. But, in this book’s story, we do not divide living bodies or holarchies into life and non-life.

If we accept the autopoietic definition of life, we see another contradiction between Gaia as a living being and Gaia as a mechanical system in which life and non-life are coupled parts. An autopoietic system is self-producing and self-maintaining. It must constantly change or renew itself in order to stay the same. Your body renews most of its cells within each seven years of your life, for instance, and its molecules are turned over far faster. No mechanism can do this, because it does not invent and build itself, it must be invented, built and repaired by external beings. It is not autopoietic, it is allopoietic (not self-produced, but other-produced).

A mechanism cannot, and therefore does not, change itself by its own rules, and that one fact points out the essential difference between living systems and mechanical ones, including even the most sophisticated computers and cybernetic robots. All of them must be programmed by outsiders to do what they do, no matter how intelligent they appear to be. We will say more on this subject later, especially in Chapter 15. For now, let us just note the contradiction that arises if we define Gaia at once as a living organism and as a cybernetic device, because this contradiction is causing confusion about Gaia theory among scientists.

The position of this book, then, is that the Earth meets the biological definition of a living entity as a self-creating autopoietic system, and that only limited aspects of its function — never its essential self-organization — may be usefully modeled by cybernetic systems. For example, we can usefully model aspects of our own physiology (for instance, temperature regulation, or blood pumping) as cybernetic feedback systems, knowing all the while that these systems would not function like machines apart from their embedding holons’ physiology.

Notice that calling the Earth alive, by definition, is more than proposing a new metaphor to replace mechanism. It is also different from proposing a Gaia hypothesis or a Gaia theory. There is nothing to be proven once we decide that Earth fits the autopoietic definition of life, as it simply revises our conceptualization from mechanism to organism. And, as such, it provides fruitful ground for many new hypotheses and theories about how its physiology works. Note, by the way, that autopoiesis as a definition of life does not include growth or reproduction, though these are features of many living entities. One can be alive without reproducing, perhaps an important recognition in an overpopulated world.

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Let us look now at the Earth as the self-creating living planet we are calling Gaia to distinguish it from a nonliving planet with life upon it. We have already seen how magma is constantly transformed into crust, how crust is transformed into microbes and organisms, how these are turned back into crust and magma to complete the ongoing cycle of self-creation.

Lovelock’s first clue to Gaia came to him when he was comparing the atmospheres of different planets. The atmospheres of the other planets in our solar system all make sense chemically as stable mixtures of gases. Only Earth has an atmosphere that is quite impossible by the laws of chemistry. Its gases should have burned each other up long ago.

If they had, Earth would have no living creatures. And of course it does. They make and use almost the entire mixture of gases we call the atmosphere, ever feeding it new supplies as they use it and as it burns itself up chemically. This activity of living things always keeps the atmosphere in just the right balance for the life of Earth to continue. We can compare it to the activity of our cells in producing, using, and renewing the blood, lymph, and intercellular fluids flowing around them.

Living creatures, for example, produce four billion tons of new oxygen every year to make up for use and loss. They also make huge amounts of methane, which regulates the amount of oxygen in the air at any time, and they keep the air well diluted with harmless nitrogen. In fact, the Gaian atmosphere is held at very nearly 21 percent oxygen all the time. A little more and fires would start all over our planet, even in wet grass. A little less and we, along with all other air-breathing creatures, would die.

Every molecule of air you breathe, with the exception of trace amounts of inert gases such as argon and krypton, has actually been recently produced inside the cells of other living creatures! Thus the atmosphere is almost entirely the result of the constant production of gases by organisms. If they stopped making and balancing the gases of our air, the atmosphere would burn itself up rather quickly. And if living things didn’t turn salty nitrates into nitrogen and pump that nitrogen into the air, the seas would become too salty for life to go on in them, and the atmosphere would lose its balance. The right balance of chemicals and acid in the seas and in the soil, and even the balance of temperature all over the Earth — all of the conditions necessary for the life of our planet, that is — are regulated within the planet as they are in our bodies.

Our Sun has been growing larger and hotter ever since the Earth was formed, yet the Earth has kept a rather steady temperature, in much the same way that a warm-blooded animal keeps a steady temperature while things get cooler or hotter around it.

Old attempts to explain how geological mechanisms might regulate the Earth’s temperature are giving way to new explanations of how a live planet does it. Part of the complicated system involves regulating `greenhouse gases,’ such as carbon dioxide and methane, which trap solar heat; another part involves controlling the amount of cloud cover to let in more or less Sunlight. Perhaps the Earth even creates ice ages to cool its fevers.

In our own bodies, there are always things going on to upset the balance of oxygen or salt or acid in our blood and cells. Yet the parts of our living body work together constantly against these upsets of balance. Just so, it seems that the parts of the Earth work together to help it recover from its own imbalances, though as yet we know little about how this is done.

Although we have learned much about the ways in which the complexly coordinated systems of our own bodies function, we can hardly even dream of knowing everything involved in building and running such systems. We seldom reflect on the fact that our bodies work without asking anything of our aware, thinking minds. We need not even know consciously what is going on, much less having to think or plan or do anything about it. And a good thing this is, because we would most certainly mess up our bodies’ wonderful work if we interfered in it in an attempt to control it ourselves. Lewis Thomas, the popular science essayist and physiologist mentioned earlier, has said that for all his physiological knowledge, he would rather be put behind the controls of a jumbo jet than be put in charge of running his liver. Any one of our organs is more complicated by far than the most complicated computer we’ve invented, yet it knows how to run itself, repair itself, and work in harmony with all other organs.

We are just beginning to understand cosmic consciousness and are even farther behind in understanding the nature of consciousness in living cells and bodies that clearly know what is good for them. They know just how they should be balanced as well as how to do the balancing. This still mysterious `body wisdom’ or intelligence seems to exist throughout nature, somehow evolving the kind of consciousness familiar to us as humans. Eastern human cultures have studied non-physical aspects of nature for thousands of years; western science is just beginning to do the same.

The sooner we recognize and respect Gaia as an incredibly complex and demonstrably intelligent self-organizing living being, the sooner we will gain enough humility to stop believing we know how to manage her. If we stay on our present course, clinging to our present belief in our ability to control the Earth while knowing so little about it, our disastrously unintelligent interference in its affairs will not kill the planet, as many people believe, but it may very well kill us as a species, as we are already killing so many others.

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Starting with physicists’ current view of cosmic beginnings, we have seen that the universe has tremendous energy to spend, and that it spends this energy evolving itself into ever more complicated patterns, including those we recognize as alive. We have come to believe that the total useful, or working, energy of the universe — according to the laws of physics, in particular the law of entropy — is gradually running down. Yet living creatures collect, store, and increase working energy wherever they find it, thereby violating this law. To keep the laws of physics consistent, scientists believe that in increasing energy locally living beings must be decreasing the energy of their environment at an even greater rate. Only thus would they satisfy the overall demands of the entropy law, otherwise known as the second law of thermodynamics, the law which says that things are running down as a whole. This implies that living things must use up and thereby degrade their environment, making it ever less useful to other living things.

On our planet this would mean that each form of life gradually uses up or degrades its environmental supplies until it chokes itself off and dies. Indeed it seems that some living creatures sometimes behave in just that way, as did the first bacteria when they used up the ready-made sugars and acids in their environment, and as we humans do when we use up and destroy our natural resources. But when one kind of organism creates such a crisis, the living Gaian system as a whole seems to find a solution.

What about the planet as a living whole? Does it degrade its environment as it organizes its complexity? It is very dependent on solar energy, to be sure, but the Sun does not burn up faster because the Earth uses its energy, and the waste heat given off by the Earth cannot be construed as degrading its cold space environment. Over billions of years — surely a more than adequate test for the law of entropy — our Gaian planet has continued to self-organize in ever greater complexity, recycling its supplies without running down the way mechanical systems do.

We could, of course, think of entropy as the catabolism side of a metabolic cycle: anabolism building things up and catabolism breaking them down. We have already seen several ways in which the Earth’s metabolic cycles work. Physicists are now taking about black/white holes — destroying matter in their black aspect; creating it in their white aspect. Some even believe there may be mini black/white holes at every conceivable point in spacetime, creating and destroying matter simultaneously and continually.

Earth has had occasional big shake-ups of destruction in its evolution — we call them extinctions. In fact, the five major extinctions we can document gave rise to great bursts of new creativity though up to 90 percent or more of its species died out in them. Let us hope the sixth great extinction, which we humans are now causing, according to biologists polled by the American Museum of Natural History, will cause new creativity in ourselves, rather than our own extinction. At present it is proceeding faster even than the extinction 60 million years ago which did in the dinosaurs, through no fault of their own, since that one was caused by a huge meteorite plunging into the Earth and severely altering its climate. In any case, extinctions can hardly be construed as the working of entropy.

Certainly it would seem that the entropy law of thermodynamics, discovered to explain how nonliving `closed’ mechanical systems such as steam engines work, can tell us little about living systems. So, again we run into a contradiction between mechanics and organics. Many non-scientists, many readers of this book, probably find it strange that scientists do try to explain life in mechanical terms, feeling intuitively (and rightly) that there is something wrong with the whole idea. In later chapters we will see how the mechanical worldview of science and society came about and how it is now changing.

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Recent discoveries in physics strongly suggest that the nature of the universe was from the beginning such that it would come alive however and wherever possible. Perhaps planets are to our galaxy something like seeds and eggs are to multicelled Earth creatures, in that far more of them are produced than can actually form new living beings. And perhaps, like the cells in our own bodies, the `cells’ of the universe, in the form of star systems or planets, may be alive for a time and then die. After death, their components may be recycled — in other words, the energy locked up in their atoms and molecules may be used again by some other part coming alive and needing supplies to develop. Those parts of the universe that seem most lifeless to us may be something like its skeleton — providing a framework as does the core of the Earth in supporting its living surface, or the deadwood forming most of a redwood tree under its living surface.

If we agree that nature is not mechanical but organic, why should we not understand the energetic motion of the very first whirling shapes in the early universe as the first stirrings of that self-organizing process leading to living organisms? The spiraling pre-galactic clouds, composed of spiraling atoms, held themselves together, drew in more matter-energy from their surroundings, built it into themselves, and lost energy again to their surroundings. In this process of energy exchange they evolved into new, more complicated forms. By the time we get to galaxies and to fully formed stars within them, the dance toward life has become quite complicated already. We are only beginning to discover how complicated are the structure and process of our own Sun star, and we still have much to learn about the way our own planet rearranges its matter into those lively chemical patterns we all agree to call living organisms.

Earth, it now appears — though we still search — is the only planet or moon in our solar system that had just the right size, density, composition, fluidity of elements, and just the right distancing and balancing of energy with its Sun star and satellite Moon to come alive and stay so. Yet its life is a result of this fortunate confluence of conditions, just as the development of a plant or animal embryo is. Our living Earth is likely no more a freak accident than is the seedling that grows or the frog egg that matures. All are the inevitable result of right compositions and conditions.

Some scientists believe the conditions of Earth were so special that Earth is a rare phenomenon, perhaps the only such planet in the universe. But there is no better reason to believe this than there is to believe that living planets are as common in the universe as are the successful seedlings and hatchlings of Earth. And if this is so, there are billions, maybe trillions, of other live planets in the billions of galaxies, each with their billions of star systems. Surely we are not alone.

To continue looking at Earth as alive, we can note that the only part of the Earth more energetic than living creatures is the lava erupting or oozing through its crust. Yet, most of that energy is quickly lost as heat pouring into the atmosphere, while living things recycle their energy within and among themselves and from one generation to another. The living matter of the Earth contained in all its creatures, according to Vernadsky’s measurements, is up to a thousand times more active, more energetic, than the rocky crust from which they evolved. Hardly an example of the decreasing energy predicted by the entropy law. Where did all this energy come from?

The giant molecules from which the first creatures formed themselves were produced by powerful solar and lightning energy or from Earth’s hot core, and some of that energy got locked up within them. The creatures formed from these molecules released this energy in various ways, often creating new energy in doing so. They also learned to use solar energy directly as we have seen, maintaining themselves and producing an oxygen-rich atmosphere in the process. Oxygen-burning respirers get their energy by consuming fermenters, photosynthesizers and one another. Organisms can thus convert stored energy or direct solar energy into other useful forms of energy — the energy of motion, of heat, of chemical reaction, even of electricity. Meanwhile, the atmosphere they created regulates the kinds and amounts of solar radiation available, keeping it within appropriate bounds. In Lewis Thomas’ words, Earth seems to be a creature “marvelously skilled in handling the Sun.”

Meanwhile, the raw materials of the Earth’s interior spew or well up as new rock to be transformed into living matter, while old living matter, dead and compressed back into sedimentary rock, sinks back into the soft mantle at the edges of tectonic plates. On the Earth’s surface, scientists have a hard time finding any rock that has not been part of living organisms, that was not transformed into living matter before it became rock again. We will see examples of this process later.

Thus the molecules in virtually all of the atmosphere, all of the soils and seas, all of the surface rocks and much of the underlying, recycling magma, have been through at least one phase in which they were within living creatures! It is easier to distinguish between life and death than between the domains of life and non-life we have assigned to biologists and geologists, respectively. In fact, virtually every geological part or feature of Earth we can find is a product of our planet’s life activity. Further, living organisms have invented 99.9 percent of all the kinds of molecules we know, almost all of them back when bacteria were the only creatures around, a few billion years ago.

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What confused us for so long — kept us from seeing that our planet is alive as a whole — is at least in part our own human space (size) and time perspective. We easily see ourselves, and many kinds of plants and animals, as wholes — separate from one another and from their surround. We have had as hard a time recognizing ourselves or them as parts of a single being as we had recognizing that we ourselves are made of separate cells. In one instance we saw the parts more easily than the whole; in the other we saw the whole more easily than the parts.

If we had a magnifying glass powerful enough to let us see everything in the world around us at the level of molecules, we would see life in the energetic molecular dance of chemical reactions and recombinations — the dance that weaves molecules into new patterns, some livelier than others. Instead, our experience comes through eyes that see life as a collection of separate plants and animals. This makes it hard for us to see them as parts of their environment, much less as parts of a whole living planet. Yet when we see the whole Earth from far enough away to show it on a movie screen and speed up its rotations, it does look alive, though we can no longer see its separate plant and animal parts. We have no way of seeing our world of life-within-life at all its size levels at once, but we can use our minds to put information about different levels together and understand its living holarchy of holons.

The smaller living holons or organisms within Gaia grow and reproduce, so we have come to think of growth and reproduction as essential features of living beings. The autopoietic definition of life, remember, does not include them as essential or defining features; rather, they are consequences of the autopoietic life process — something that may or may not happen, as when people do or do not reproduce. Therefore, the argument that the Earth cannot be alive because it does not grow or reproduce does not hold.

Cells, as we saw, are the packages in which living matter contained itself as it individuated. Cells contain and connect autopoietic systems by enclosing them in open boundaries or membranes of their own making that allow materials and energy to be exchanged with the environment, as does the self-produced atmospheric membrane of the Earth. In a sense, the whole Earth is a giant cell within whose boundary membrane other smaller cells evolve, multiply, die, and are recycled in such a way that the whole need not grow. This is a wonderfully efficient way to make living planets possible when they have only occasional meteor or comet impact for material nourishment.

Because our perception has been so focused on separate organisms in their physical or social environments, we tend to see insect animal, and human societies, as well as whole ecosystems, as collections of individuals that have come to live and function together. It is actually more appropriate to see that such collections have always functioned as wholes, never separated into completely individual and independent beings. Some are relatively more or less independent than others, but all their complex forms and ways have evolved within a single system, just as our cells evolved their separate functions within an inseparable whole. Their connections with their species fellows and with their ecosystems are always as holons within holarchies, up to the whole Gaian planet. These interconnections were never broken and cannot be, just as our cells cannot break their connections with their organs or their/our whole bodies.

Some scientists trying to understand Gaia as a collection of separate organisms mechanically coupled to their nonliving environments, get bogged down in arguments. How could organisms — collectively called the biota, or life — actually have joined forces on purpose to control the conditions of their abiotic, or nonliving, environment in their own interests? How could all bacteria — assuming the Gaian mechanism was formed when there were no other creatures — get together, they ask, to work cooperatively and purposively for their own good?

Official science does not recognize purpose as part of nature. It does view nature as mechanical, and mechanisms are, by definition, the purposeful inventions of their inventors. But historically, science threw God-the-inventor-of-nature out, we recall, while retaining the idea of nature as mechanism (more on this in Chapter 15). Scientists thus argue a logical contradiction: that nature is mechanical but has no creator and no purpose. It’s machines are taken to have assembled themselves by accident. If this worldview seems hard to accept, rest assured it is now changing.

When we see living entities as self-ruled autopoietic systems evolving without an external creator God, we see that they simply evolve wherever they are not prevented from so doing, wherever their energetic development is mutually consistent with whatever else is going on around them. This scientific view is perfectly consistent with seeing nature as conscious and intelligent, in fact, suggests that strongly. Alternatively, we can choose to identify all of self-creating nature with the concept of Creator or God, thus ending the split between science and religion.

No one argues about whether or not our bodies regulate our temperature on purpose — we simply accept that they do so because they evolved that way. In the same way, bacteria did not have to assemble for the purpose of controlling their environments. We have seen that all bacteria are living matter transformed from Earth’s rocky crust and packaged in open boundaries that keep them functioning as a single system. They are not separate from one another or from the crust; they are not parts of an assembled mechanism but part of a single Gaian life process we can call geo-biological. Earthlife has evolved to do what it needs to do in order to preserve itself as naturally as we do and with no more or less purpose than we find in our own bodies.

If Gaia is a single live planet, why did its rock rearrange itself into such an astounding variety of individual creatures? Why not just a planet holon, instead of a planetary holarchy of holons?

We might as well ask why the first gas clouds sorted themselves into individual galaxies, and the galaxies into stars and planets and other space bodies. One answer, as we now begin to understand, is that life becomes ever more stable as it becomes more complex. Mechanical systems may be more vulnerable to breakdown as they become more complex, but the opposite seems to be true of living systems.

The Gaian division of function among different species is like the division of labor among the types of cells and organs in our bodies, which function efficiently through their combined work. No place on Earth — from the barest mountaintop to the deepest part of the sea — has fewer than a thousand different life forms, mostly microbial, doing different things to keep it alive and evolving. If a planet does come alive, it would seem that it must come alive everywhere, not just in patches.

Scientists are only now beginning to work out the physiology of our Gaian planet — to understand why the introduction of a single new species into a complex environment can make that environment ill, just as the introduction of a single species of disease microbe into our bodies can make us ill. They are only now coming to understand why the destruction of an environment such as tropical forest can unbalance the whole planet, just as removing an organ from our bodies can unbalance us. Yet we are also discovering that Gaia’s incredible complexity makes her even tougher and more resourceful than we are. We are far more likely to choke our own species off by destroying our environment than we are to kill Gaia. Gaia’s evolving dance of life will continue with or without us.

The word evolution, when used in the field of dance, means the changing patterns of steps, the transformative movements, in any particular dance. A dance thus evolves as its movement patterns, and perhaps its costumes, change into new ones. A good dance has overall harmony, each of its movements contributing to the entire piece. In exactly this sense, the evolution of Gaia’s dance — of Earthlife — is the changing patterns of steps, ever transforming the interwoven self-organization of all creatures and their habitats over time. This is a very different view from that of biological evolution as survival of the fittest.

We see that Gaia’s dance is endlessly innovative. Trying out new step patterns in a dance is called improvising. Improvisational dance is not planned out in advance. Rather the dancers improvise as they go, testing each new step or configuration for its fit with other steps and with the whole dance pattern. Gaia’s dance seems to have evolved by such improvisation, the working out of basic steps used over and over in ever new combinations. Is cosmic consciousness expressing its creativity in all possible ways as it seeks harmonious patterns?

In Gaia’s dance, all creatures, from the first bacteria to trees and ourselves, have built themselves from DNA and protein molecules. The very complex patterns of these giant molecules are almost entirely made of only six kinds of atoms, as we saw: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. And as we also saw, many kinds of atoms other than hydrogen were created all over the universe inside stars. As particles had combined to form atoms, the originally abundant hydrogen atoms had fused into heavier element atoms, and elements had formed themselves into molecules, which formed themselves into creatures.

We saw that there are very few kinds of protein or other molecules on Earth today whose patterns the ancient bacteria had not already invented billions of years ago. Nor have any new basic life processes been developed since bubblers, bluegreens, and breathers invented theirs. In other words, evolution since then has been a matter of rearranging not only the same atoms but also the same molecules and life processes into an endless variety of new creature patterns. This, then, is Gaia’s dance — the endless improvisation and elaboration of the same elegantly simple steps into the ever-changing awesomely beautiful and complex being of which we are the newest feature.

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Reposted from: LifeWeb

We continue with excerpts from Elisabet Sartouris’ EarthDance. Sunday, Elisabet described The Young Earth—3, she had earlier told of our Cosmic Beginnings—2, which followed from a Twice Told Tale—1.

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Problems for Earthlife—4

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

Imagining Gaia as a beautiful goddess dancing gives us a poetic metaphor for nature’s living beauty. But real life is often hard and troublesome, as we know from our own experience. And Earth had big problems right from the time its dance of life began. In more scientific terms, we might say the probability that Gaia — our name for Earthlife as a whole — would continue to evolve was rather low during its early stages, or that a stable autopoietic Gaian system evolved only under considerable threat to its existence.

Even when its crust was already coming alive with microbes the young Earth, whirling more than twice as fast as it does now, still hissed with steam, cracked so that its lava flowed like blood and was endlessly bombarded by meteors belting in through the thin atmosphere, raising dark clouds of dust as they wounded its still tender body. The embryonic Earth’s continuing life was not at all a sure thing; Gaia was not yet a secure, stable being able to maintain itself.

The constant hail of meteors, leaving craters such as we see on the Moon, was a serious threat. Though meteors may have contributed important molecules such as lipids to the formation of microbes, they might also have killed them off again. Every day these space rocks of all sizes came hurling from the sky like bullets. If nothing had happened to protect the Earth from them, it might well have ended up as lifeless and pockmarked as the Moon and our neighboring planets.

There may also have been another problem, though scientists differ on this matter. The Sun’s energy was most helpful in splitting molecules so that new ones could form, but as the first microbes formed and multiplied, the strong Sunlight may have been too much for many of them to stand, putting them in need of protection from the burning part of Sunlight we call ultraviolet radiation. Some ultraviolet is good for living creatures, but too much can burn them, and our young Sun probably produced far more ultraviolet than it does today, when we are concerned about our own threat to the shield of ozone protecting us from it — a shield that did not exist at all around the early Earth, though the smoggy early atmosphere may have offered some protection.

In any case, the first microbes seem to have formed on the seafloor, in seawater or wet mud deep enough to filter out the dangerous rays. There, as we saw in the last chapter, bits of a rich soup of organic molecules and seawater were probably trapped in liposome spheres where the molecules could move about and begin new kinds of chemical cycles. These would have included, had they not already been formed elsewhere, the construction of the giant RNA and DNA molecules that became useful as a storage system for information life needed.

In the self-production and reproduction cycles that gradually evolved, RNA lined up with DNA to copy its information, then lined up with amino acids to produce the proteins coded for, which in turn helped DNA split apart to copy itself, and so on around the loop. But giant RNA and DNA molecules could be broken by ultraviolet light, and so one of life’s earliest inventions, not long after reproduction itself, was the repair of DNA with special enzymes.

Early microbes, were now becoming full-fledged bacteria of the type we call archae, simply meaning ancient. Lipid walls enclosing them permitted the entry of new raw materials and the disposal of wastes. Every living being or system has to cycle and recycle supplies. As Earth’s weather cycles circulate water from sky to ground and sea and back to sky, rock is dissolved in running water and swept to the sea. Atmospheric gases are also cycled and their balance regulated. The planet’s temperature is determined by all these processes, with a strong role played by its variable cloud cover.

Meanwhile, as we will see in more detail later, dissolved rock used up in forming the bodies of sea creatures ends up buried on the sea bottom in sediments pressed back into rock. Later that seafloor rock may end up as dry surface land in new plate upheavals, only to begin the cycle again.

Just so, the liposome microbes formed in the Earth’s crust developed internal cycles for circulating their own supplies and carrying out the business of life. Gradually they replaced their tiny spherical capsules with larger, more flexible cell membranes and evolved into bacteria. They still depended on seawater to float supplies to them, or to float them to supplies, and to float away wastes they could no longer use. By trial and error they learned to use these supplies to grow themselves, to repair themselves when they suffered damage, and to reorganize themselves as needed, keeping records of their new discoveries in their DNA.

Every living creature must get materials and energy from its environment to form itself and to keep itself alive. What is left of these supplies after the useful parts and the energy have been taken from them, along with whatever else was part of the creature but is no longer of use to it, is waste that must be gotten rid of by returning it to the creature’s environment. This is why no living creature can ever be entirely independent — it is always a holon within larger holons, including ecosystems, depending on them for its very life.

As author/scientist/philosopher Arthur Koestler put it, a holon has at once the autonomy — in Greek, self-rule — of a whole in its own right and the dependence of a part embedded within larger holons. Koestler grappled with this concept of dependence along with relative independence, referring to it as an integrative tendency, or even as self-transcendence. Let us call it a holon’s holonomy — the rule of the greater whole or holon that must be balanced with its self-ruling autonomy. Physicist David Bohm used the word holonomy in exactly this sense when describing how the autonomy of every subatomic particle is stabilized and tempered by the rule of all other particles around it — by its holonomy. Recall our earlier discussion of bootstrap theory in physics, which also expressed this concept.

Any holon containing smaller holons, such as an Earth full of bacteria or a body made of cells, tempers the individual autonomy of its components with its own autonomy, which is their holonomy. Any individual human, for example, must transcend simple self-rule and integrate him- or herself with the rules of family and society, while human society must transcend its autonomy and integrate itself with the holonomy imposed by the autonomy of the planet. The balance between any holon’s autonomy and holonomy must be worked out as mutual consistency if the holon is to survive as part of a holarchy, and it cannot survive in any other way if we accept the fundamental notion of mutual consistency as described in Chapter 2 and as illustrated in later chapters.

These concepts of embeddedness or holarchy, and of the autonomy at every level of holarchy always tempered by holonomy are extremely important to understanding how life works. We humans, for example, fight about whether to seek individual interest or community interest, whether to develop locally or globally. This is because we fail to understand life’s fundamentally holarchic nature — always a dialogue among relatively autonomous embedded holons, all of which are critical to the function of the holarchy.

Bacteria are holons within larger holons consisting of their complex communities and even worldwide networks, as well as within their broader ecosystems. While we are talking definitions, let us use the term ecosystem to refer to systems of related organisms in their habitats.

Bacteria are technically called monera — the first kingdom of living things in our present evolutionary classification scheme. Monera include the archae and their later descendents of many types. (Later we will see that bacteria are also called prokaryotes, but let that come in time.) Each moneron is a single cell, and yet it is also a whole organism or creature. The tiny monera that were Earth’s first creatures were thus the first relatively independent holons within the Earth holon — in Lewis Thomas’ view, tiny cells within a huge cell.

Fortunately for these early monera, the sea was full of supply molecules, ranging from small dissolved rock salts to the larger sugar and acid molecules needed to build DNA and protein. So the bacteria could grow and divide and grow again, spreading themselves thickly throughout the seas. As they multiplied, winds and water driven by the Sun’s energy swirled this rich chemical soup about, stirring it into ever greater activity. So prolific were these microbes, that their colonies, including the habitats they assembled, formed entire continental shelves long before corals evolved. Even today, bacteria, or monera, are by far the most numerous creatures of the Earth.

The more bacteria there were to suck up supplies and blow out their wastes, the more the whole chemistry of the Earth changed — sometimes the worse for life, sometimes the better, as we will see.

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Many early monera were getting their energy by breaking up supply molecules in a process we call fermentation. The bacteria we use to make cheese, yogurt, and wine still work the same way today. Yeasts, such as those we use to make bread, do it, too. Fermenting bacteria can be thought of as bubblers, since they make bubbles of waste gases, like the bubbles you see in risen bread and in cheese. Whenever you see bubbles rising in mud or stagnant waters, fermenting bacteria are probably at work.

Breaking up molecules by fermentation or in other ways frees the energy that held them together. The bubblers stored this energy in a special kind of molecule we call adenosine triphosphate ( ATP). At first they may have found ready-made ATP molecules in their surroundings, but eventually they learned how to make them. The bubblers kept the energy-loaded ATP handy until the energy was needed for building, repair, and other work. Every living thing on Earth since then has been using the ATP energy storage system invented by the bubblers, though bacteria later discovered faster, better ways of making ATP than by fermentation. ATP is thus often called the energy currency of life.

In addition to energy, of course, the bubblers needed building supplies, and for a long time, as we said, large sugar and acid molecules were plentiful in the environment, ready to be split up or used as they were. To reproduce, some monera copied their DNA and then split themselves down the middle in the process we call mitosis, building two offspring monera from their own split halves. Others budded off smaller bits of themselves containing copied DNA to start their offspring. When supplies got low here and there, some bacteria learned to pack their DNA and a bit of protein into solid little spores with tough shells. These spores floated about doing nothing at all till they came to places where supplies were plentiful and they could grow into proper monera.

Over time, monera built new kinds of protein and new enzymes and invented new chemical processes and cycles, new parts for themselves, new lifestyles. More than three billion years ago, then, bubbler monera were multiplying and dividing into different strains, forming a thick soup or surface scum, living off ready-made supplies of large sugar and acid molecules. Some strains of bacteria learned to use the acid and alcohol wastes of others, and to set up efficient cycles of using one another’s wastes as supplies. Some learned to make the nitrogen of the atmosphere usable by combining it with other elements. Had they not, life would have died out from nitrogen starvation, as nitrogen is one of the six basic elements needed to build living things.

Still, as competition for large-molecule food supplies increased, a new crisis developed. As if Gaia didn’t have enough problems already, it began to look as though her first tiny creatures might die for lack of supplies.

But they didn’t. Life is far too inventive to give up so easily.

What happened to the monera back then is rather like what is happening to us humans today. We have been making much of the energy we need to live in our human societies from the coal and oil supplies found ready-made in our environment. Now these supplies are running out, and we must find new ways to produce energy. A very important way of doing so involves the use of Sunlight, or solar energy.

This is exactly what some monera began doing as their supplies ran low. Some elements they had to have in order to build their living bodies were all around them, but like the atmospheric nitrogen, they were not in usable form. Others were hard to get at, such as the nitrogen locked into the salty nitrates of the sea or the carbon locked up in the carbon dioxide gas of the atmosphere. There was plenty of carbon and nitrogen all around, but the bubblers had to invent special ways to unlock the carbon and nitrogen and then `fix’ them by turning them into usable bodybuilding molecules.

Perhaps the bubblers’ most important discovery was finding ways to harness solar energy — to trap Sunlight and turn it into ATP energy, which they did by using certain light-sensitive chemicals such as the porphyrins that make our blood red and the chlorophyll that makes grass and leaves green. They could then use this energy to split molecules of carbon dioxide gas, water, and rock salts into atoms, which could be rebuilt into food sugars, DNA parts, and more ATP for the work of growing, repairing, and reproducing. This process is, of course, photosynthesis — in Greek `making with light’ — the use of light in the manufacture of food.

Some of the photosynthesizing monera are called blue-green bacteria because of the color their photosynthesizing chemicals gave them. Let’s call them bluegreens for short. Their new way of life was very successful, so they multiplied quickly. After all, the blue-greens, unlike the bubblers, needed no special supplies. Water full of dissolved rock salts was what they lived in, and the atmosphere was full of light and carbon dioxide.

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There was only one problem: the bluegreens’ wonderful new way of making their own food and energy was also creating pollution.

Both the bubblers and the bluegreens made waste gases as they worked, but light-making food from water and carbon dioxide gas produced a very poisonous waste — so poisonous that it killed living things. This poisonous waste gas was oxygen!

We are used to thinking of oxygen as good and necessary, as a life-giving and life-saving gas that we breathe. But for the first living creatures, it was deadly. It is oxygen that turns metals to rust and makes fires burn. Oxygen destroys the giant molecules of living things, burning them up just as ultraviolet and other kinds of radiation do. In fact, oxygen is more destructive than ultraviolet, for the large molecules needed to build the first living things could never have formed if the atmosphere had been as rich in oxygen then as it is now. So, when the bluegreens began making oxygen, they began making trouble.

Every molecule of carbon dioxide, or CO2, is made of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms — di meaning two. And every molecule of water, H2O, is made of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. It takes six molecules of carbon dioxide and six molecules of water to make one molecule of food sugar. But when the sugar molecule is built from carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms, it only needs twelve oxygen molecules, so six are left over as waste.

This is the oxygen that began polluting the early Earth after photosynthesis began. At first the free oxygen combined harmlessly with dissolved rock minerals such as iron, making them rust, and built itself into rock. When these crustal materials had absorbed all they could, the oxygen began piling up in the atmosphere.

It was as if a giant pump had been turned on. Bacteria were pumping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, using the carbon and pumping some of the pure oxygen back into it. They also pumped nitrogen out of nitrate sea salts, fixed some of it for their use, and pumped useless nitrogen gas into the atmosphere. The living Earth was bringing its own special nitrogen- and oxygen-rich atmosphere into being.

Our nearest planet neighbors, Venus and Mars, have atmospheres made almost entirely of carbon dioxide, just as was Earth’s, very likely, when this great pump got going. But now our atmosphere is almost all nitrogen and oxygen — because life made it so. But how did life survive the poisonous oxygen?

Much of it didn’t survive. Some kinds of bubblers that didn’t need to be near light dug themselves down into mud where the poisonous oxygen could not get at them. Their fermenter descendants still live today by hiding from oxygen in mud or in other safe places such as the stomachs of cows, where they help digest hay, or the bead-like root nodules of peas and beans, where they fix nitrogen to enrich the soil. But many, if not most, kinds of early bacteria must have been killed as the oxygen piled up around them.

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What was Gaia to do? Her dance of life had produced a rich array of living bacteria despite the dangers of meteors and ultraviolet light. Now most of the early kinds were dying just because some had discovered a new and better way to live. It was a lesson Gaia learned more than once, that new experimental forms of life may seriously endanger the whole dance and that other improvisations may be required to rebalance it. Gaia had no human brain to assess her experiment and think up strategies. Nevertheless, our evolving planet developed, as it still does, the kind of `body wisdom’ physiologists attribute to our bodies.

By this body wisdom, living systems operate and maintain themselves, somehow knowing what to do on a momentary and daily basis as well as in most cases when things go wrong. We are used to it in our bodies and we count on it, but to learn that the Earth behaves the same way is still news to many people. Not at all long ago it was scientific heresy to attribute intelligence to nature. Now, as we said, our worldview is evolving rapidly. Many scientists, including Lynn Margulis, the leading researcher on microbial evolution and the author of the greatest change in our `tree of evolution’ since we first devised it, see consciousness and intelligence present in the earliest microbes. If we recall that some physicists now see cosmic consciousness as the source of all matter, then it is not so surprising to find intelligent body wisdom evolving in our Gaian Earth.

Though clever species of bubblers survived by hiding from oxygen, they were no longer the main kind of monera. Bluegreens invented enzymes, which made the oxygen they produced harmless to themselves. Some also learned to make ultraviolet Sunscreens, as we make Sunglasses and chemicals to protect ourselves from Sunburn. These were able to live successfully in stronger Sunlight, where they could make plenty of food.

Others solved the problem of ultraviolet burn by living together in thick colonies. Those on top were burned to death, but the dead cells made good filters, absorbing the burning rays while letting the rest of the light reach those that needed it below. This was another way in which some lives were given for others, and a good reason for bacteria to live as cooperative life teams rather than as independent individuals.

You can see such colonies of bacteria beginning as a greenish brown scum on damp walls or muddy ground. Near the sea, they trap sand and other particles, forming thick muddy masses in shallow waters as live bacteria multiply and keep climbing toward the top. In some places we can still see this mass harden into rocks called stromatolites. In ancient stromatolites, the bacteria that have turned to rock can still be seen and identified.

The number of such rock colonies formed billions of years ago, sometimes extending into entire continental shelves, tells us just how successful the oxygen makers have been. This also shows clearly how rocks that rearranged themselves into living creatures can rearrange themselves back into rock.

For about two billion years — almost half of Earth’s life until now — the bluegreen oxygen makers were her most successful creatures. They multiplied into thousands of different kinds all through her waters and muds, making more and more oxygen in their ever-growing colonies. And then they made yet another dramatic discovery. Some of them learned how to use the waste oxygen they created in making food molecules — they used it to burn those very food molecules for energy.

This process of burning food with oxygen is what we call respiration — the third way of making ATP, after the fermentation of the bubblers and the photosynthesis of the bluegreens. It is the most efficient way of all. In respiration, the destructive energy of oxygen is used to break up food molecules and thereby free both their parts and their energy for use. It is a much more powerful way to do this than fermentation. Soon other kinds of bacteria learned this method of using poisonous oxygen to good advantage. Since we call the intake of oxygen for breaking up or burning food molecules breathing, let’s call the new respiring bacteria breathers.

Like fermentation and photosynthesis, respiration produces waste gas. But this time the waste gas is carbon dioxide — the very gas needed for photosynthesis. What an incredible new opportunity. Respiration completed a cycle by leaving a supply of carbon dioxide with which to start photosynthesis anew.

Looking closely into the green and brown living `scum’ on the tops of stromatolites, or in your kitchen sink, for that matter, with our newest and least intrusive microscopes, we are astounded! For up close, the scum, often containing vast numbers of bubblers, bluegreens and breathers, resolves itself into the most amazing cityscapes populated by all sorts of bacteria doing different tasks cooperatively while living different lifestyles. These cities look like Manhattan’s skyscrapers, as one scientist put it, or like Hollywood sets for cities of the future, with buildings like tall balls on stems or cone-shaped and linked by endless canals, bridges, and other transport systems. Thus our ancient bacterial forbears built infrastructures for their communities much as we do today.

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Let’s look further at how tiny bacteria managed to accomplish so many innovations and lifestyles. Like our own human world, the developing world of bubblers, bluegreens, and breathers in the Great Bacterial Age made its progress through many technological inventions. Simple as bacteria are in comparison with later evolved creatures, they are remarkably ingenious, and we still have a great deal to learn from them. Several of our own greatest recent technological advances, such as the DNA recombination we call genetic engineering, were learned from them. Bacteria discovered this process, actually the secret of their wild success, billions of years ago, while we have just caught on and learned to get them to do it for us in ways that we intend.

Scientific research has shown for over half a century, beginning with Barbara McClintock’s work on corm plants, that DNA reorganizes intelligently in response to specific problems faced by living organisms. It happens in life forms from microbes to very large multicelled creatures. But this evidence had to pile up very convincingly over so much time, because it so flew in the face of the official dogma that it could not be so. Evolution was only supposed to proceed by accident and `selection.’ Scientists firmly believed that changes in the forms of living creatures could happen only as a result of accidental mistakes in copying DNA, or by accidental breakage and recombination of DNA at certain times, such as when it is struck by fast-flying nuclear particles that zoom through the atmosphere and through us without our notice. But now scientists see that many, if not most, DNA changes are anything but accidental.

Modern bacteria have obviously been able to change very quickly in ways that protect them against our lethal antibiotics — in Greek, `against life.’ To do this, they have to make changes in their DNA. Life, it seems, does not just wait around for lucky accidents to solve problems and improve things, but is quite inventive, especially under survival pressure. But just how do bacteria do it?

We can easily see with modern microscopes that bacterial DNA is a very long complex molecule formed into a loose loop inside the tiny creature. We can also see that bacteria come very close to one another and then dissolve parts of their cell walls long enough to create a hole through which they exchange bits of DNA. One or both of them leaves this encounter with a new combination of DNA from the two though no reproduction had taken place.

This information exchange, or communication system, of ancient (and modern) bacteria is at least as remarkable as any of their other inventions and no doubt is what made the rest of their innovations possible. We are just beginning to learn how it works and to recognize it as original sex! — something we thought had been invented much later in evolution.

Sex is by definition the production of creatures by a combination of DNA from more than one individual. Every time bacteria receive bits of DNA called genes from others, they are engaging in sex by making themselves the product of two bacterial sources even though they are not reproducing. This sexual communication system apparently belongs to virtually all bacteria of all strains, so that bacteria can — and do — trade their DNA genes with one another all over the Earth to this day!

. Thus these tiny ancient beings actually created the first WorldWideWeb of information exchange, trading genes as we trade our own messages from computer to computer around the world. We have speeded up their web by carrying them around the world on our ships and airplanes, to make contact in far places they might not have reached by wind and waters so quickly.

All bacteria can be thought of as one great holon with a common pool of DNA genes — a single live network or system covering our entire planet, even extending deep under its polar ice covers and into its below-surface fissures. Throughout this system the bacteria trade and recombine genes according to need and experiment. And their `Internet’ probably includes larger creatures, including ourselves, as we can see bacteria (and viruses, which may be their survival devices) coming into plants and animals to trade bits of DNA. Even before we made this discovery, we knew that no other form of life could survive today without bacteria. Why this is so will become clear as we watch the dance of life develop.

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The young Earth’s bacterial gene pool or web made it possible to spread resistance to oxygen by sharing blueprints for various protective devices, as well as to spread the use of oxygen for breathing, or burning food molecules. Of all Gaia’s creatures, the blue-green breathers that harnessed solar energy were the most independent ever to evolve, and they are still going strong today, billions of years later. They make their own food and burn it, using only the simplest supplies. If they drift away from light, they work in the dark. They fix their own carbon and nitrogen. Living in water, they do not even risk drying up, as do the land plants that evolved long after them to carry on the double lifestyle that the bluegreen breathers invented.

The ancient bubblers, bluegreens, and breathers had invented the only three ways that living beings all over the Earth, even today, make their ATP energy currency, for as we will see, all larger creatures are their descendants. The recycling of carbon dioxide and oxygen that began with them — the simplest and tiniest of Earth’s creatures — was so successful that it has been an essential part of the Gaian life system ever since. In time the two parts of this cycle — photosynthesis and respiration — became ways of life for different kinds of one-celled creatures coming up in our story. Then, much later, plants and animals evolved to cooperate in producing carbon dioxide and oxygen for each other’s use, or in recycling each other’s waste, depending on how you look at it.

Again we are reminded of lessons people are learning today. First the ancient bacteria solved their energy crisis by developing solar technology, then they discovered that recycling supplies is the best way to avoid running out of them.

As the oxygen piled up in and thickened the atmosphere, it not only created new problems requiring new solutions, but was itself a solution to the old problem of ultraviolet burn. Destructive as oxygen was to so many kinds of microscopic monera, it actually helped form a protective blanket of air around the living Earth. Just as in our ancient myth Gaia first formed the seas in her dance of life and then created a protective atmosphere, so it was in reality.

Our atmospheric blanket of air seems very thin to us. We can just barely feel it by waving our arms around in it. But what we feel against our arms would be much harder if our arms were waving much faster. Meteors move so fast that the air is quite solid to them. And rubbing hard against something solid produces heat, as you can easily demonstrate by rubbing your hand hard over a table. Meteors rub up against air so hard that the heat, together with the oxygen, ignites them and burns them up. The more oxygen there was, the more meteors burned up, until so few of them got through the atmosphere that life was much safer on Earth.

Nor were meteors the only outside dangers oxygen protected Gaia against. The oxygen in our air is made of twin oxygen atoms dancing together as free-floating molecules. As ultraviolet rays strike these molecules, they break up the pair, leaving separated twins to join other oxygen pairs as triplet molecules. Such triplet molecules are no longer oxygen gas; they are ozone — O3. And it is very difficult for ultraviolet rays to pass through ozone because it absorbs them. When there was plenty of oxygen, a whole layer of ozone collected in the middle of the atmosphere, shielding the Earth from dangerous amounts of ultraviolet radiation.

Microbe-produced oxygen probably even played a role in preventing the seas from drying up, because atmospheric oxygen can trap evaporating lightweight hydrogen as water, thus preventing it from escaping into space and allowing it instead to fall back into the seas in the form of rain. Methane-producing fermenters may also help hold the oceans onto Earth, as atmospheric methane decomposed by ultraviolet rays creates the tropopause lid, which is another barrier to the escape of hydrogen into space.

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From this early history of the Gaian dance of life we can see that great problems are great challenges, and that living things are very inventive when faced with challenges. Maybe that is one of the most important things we can learn from evolution.

It remains to be seen whether we humans will prove as creative as ancient bacteria in the face of the problems we create. Over billions of years, most of the carbon dioxide was pumped from Earth’s atmosphere by photosynthesis, while nitrogen, oxygen, and rarer gases produced by living creatures replenished it. Over this long time, life worked out exactly the right balance of gases that was best for it. Now we are changing that balance in dangerous ways.

Our use of coal and oil, for example, is creating a very serious double problem. Not only are we using up these important fuel supplies but we are also polluting the atmosphere with too much carbon dioxide in burning them. Coal and oil are made of ancient forests that built much carbon into their plant and animal life. As they were pressed underground over time, the carbon was buried and transformed into natural fuels. That is why we sometimes playfully call oil `dinosaur blood.’ When we dig up these fossil fuels and burn them, the carbon is released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

At the same time, we are also burning today’s growing forests to clear land for our use. This releases even more carbon into the air while killing the very plant life that uses up carbon dioxide to make oxygen, thus preserving the balance.

Billions of years ago oxygen was the great danger. Now the danger is too much carbon dioxide. The result, among other things, is that our planet is heating up, for too much carbon dioxide prevents its normal loss of heat through the atmosphere. When our own bodies heat up in this way, we have a fever. If we don’t solve our energy and production problems very soon in ways that are healthful for life, the Earth will have to solve the problem itself, restoring its balance as best it can. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is rapidly approaching levels it apparently reached previously just before the ice ages. Perhaps Gaia will cool her man-made fever with a new ice age, destroying most of what we have built and forcing us into retreat — like the ancient bubbler bacteria — to safer environments.

Inconvenient as another ice age would be, we at least know humans have survived a number of them by moving to the tropics where new land is exposed as ocean water is removed to form snow and ice. Far worse would be Gaia’s other alternative, which is now looking ever more likely: to reset her thermostat at a higher planetary temperature, thus regaining the Gaian system’s stability as a whole at our expense. Humans, other land animals, trees and other land life, would all succumb to the increased heat and the loss of almost all dry land if polar caps melted and flourishing oceans rose dramatically in a heat age.

This is what we are learning: to understand that the Gaian life system has evolved in such a way that it takes care of itself as a whole, and that we humans are only one part of it. Gaia goes on living, that is, while her various species come and go. We used to believe that we were put here to do whatever we wanted to with our planet, that we were in charge. Now we see that we are natural creatures which evolved inside a great Earthlife system. Whatever we do that is not good for life, the rest of the system will try to undo or balance in any way it can. That is why we must learn Gaia’s dance and follow its rhythms and harmonies in our own lives.

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Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

It was the period of the renaissance when Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15, April 1452. Leonardo was born probably in this farmhouse in Anchiano, which is 3 km away from Vinci. The family of Leonardo lived in this area since the 13th century.

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Happy Leonardo Day

Timothy Wilken, MD

It was three years ago today, that I published the first volume
of UnCommon Sense—We Can All Win! It provided the basic
principles of synergic science as applied to human relationships.

It was published as TrustWare, and offered online without
cost or obligation.

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The Future Will Be Different

It’s early in the 1900′s along the East Coast of America and two young brothers are traveling to their secluded laboratory in an open motor car. They have recently invented a new vehicle of transport. With them is a wealthy railroad man, one of the many potential investors to whom they’ve pitched their invention. The three men talk as they drive along.

Hoping to influence the potential investor, the taller brother predicts the impact of their newly invented vehicle on society, “Our invention, will change the way humans travel in this world. We will go faster, farther, and quicker than ever before. And, people will use our vehicle to go all over the world. Someday, you will travel to London in a just a few hours.”

“Yes,” added the younger brother, “and travel won’t be expensive either. Our invention is highly efficient, with very little mechanical friction compared to all other methods of transport.”

By the time they arrive at the laboratory, the railroad man seems friendly if not a little skeptical of their project. Within a few minutes the vehicle was ready for a demonstration. They seated the railroad man comfortably in the center of the vehicle and took up their operating positions near the front.

Soon the motor was warmed up and running hard. The vehicle vibrated considerably and was also quite noisy. There were two long spinning devices that made it frightfully windy. The potential investor began to wonder to himself. “How could this device be any real improvement over the train or the motorcar?”

Then the vehicle began to slide along the ground on what appeared to the investor to be some type of track. Suddenly, the ride improved, the sound from the track was gone.

“Oh,” thought the railroad man, “this is much nicer than I thought.” Not even his best railcars rode this smoothly. And then ,for the first time, the railroad man realized they were rising into the air. Panic replaced curiosity, and soon his screams drowned out even the sound of the motors. The younger of the inventors, noticing the investor’s distress, signaled his brother to get back on the ground right away. Later, safe on the ground, he asked his brother what had happened. The older brother replied, “I should have told him about leaving the ground.”

“You didn’t tell him the Flyer was an aeroplane?” Asked Orville in disbelief.

Wilbur replied in frustration, “So many of these investors won’t even come to the laboratory if I tell them it’s an aeroplane. So, I told him what it would do, and let him experience the “how” for himself.

* * *

I invented this story about the Wright brothers as an introduction to some recent scientific discoveries and inventions that will allow us to do something that has been thought impossible for all of human history.

Scientific discoveries have the power to turn the world upside down. Prior to the first flight of the Wright’s Aeroplane, when one believed something was impossible it was common to say, “You could no more do that than you could fly.”

We are now 100 years later, and no one would say such a thing today. In those 100 years, humanity has continued to make scientific discoveries and invent evermore powerful tools. Many other things that were once thought impossible have become common place today.

The ability to make scientific discoveries and create inventions is one of the defining characteristics of being human. This ability results from the little known fact that we humans are Time-binders. (1) Time-binders adapt to the stressors in their lives by analyzing and understanding their world. It is this unique awareness of time that grants us humans the ability to analyze and understand our world. By observing change over time, we come to understand process. And this understanding of process is the basis of knowledge. When humans act with knowledge they gain the ability to control. As our knowledge increases, the control we can exert in and on our lives increases as well.

With the growth of the human population and with the ever increasing knowledge, humans now exercise ever increasing control over their lives, and over the lives of others and the environment as well. And, whether for good or for bad humanity now dominates the planet earth.

This unique human power of dominion is made possible by the human ability called time-binding. It is through the binding of time that humans come to find themselves, in turn, bound together. Humans are bound by their mutual beliefs, bound together by their ability to store beliefs and to pass these beliefs onto their children.

Humans are bound together by their common ‘knowing’ in the form of science, art, religion, language, music, history, and myths that are passed from generation to generation. We humans are bound by a powerful inheritance. Our inherited legacy is alive. This legacy is constantly and continually growing; constantly and continually advancing. Every generation of humans refine, improve, and expand the knowing of their fathers and mothers; refine, improve, and expand the knowing of all the other humans who have ever lived.

Time-binders do this by living and thinking; by thinking and deciding. And not only is this legacy of human ‘knowing’ alive and growing, it is growing at an ever increasing rate. The rate of knowledge growth is never greater than it is right now. The scientific discoveries presented in UnCommon Sense are based on the knowledge available now in 1999. Understanding time-binding is the key to understanding ourselves and explaining time-binding will be an important focus of this book. Time-binding is one of a group of discoveries that I will designate as the “synergic sciences”.

The term synergic comes from the root word synergy. The dictionary defines synergy as the working together of two things to produce an effect greater than the sum of their individual effects. A simple example might be two muscles working together or two medications combined to treat a medical illness. R. Buckminster Fuller writing in 1975 explained:

“Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately. Synergy means behavior of integral, aggregate, whole systems unpredicted by behaviors of any of their components or subassemblies of their components taken separately from the whole. Synergy is the only word that means this. The fact that we humans are unfamiliar with the word means that we do not think there are behaviors of “wholes” unpredicted by the behavior of “parts”.

“Synergy can best be illustrated I think, by chrome-nickel-steel – chromium, nickel, and iron. The most important characteristic of strength of a material is its ability to stay in one piece when it is pulled – this is called tensile strength, it is measured as pounds per square inch, PSI. The commercially available strength of iron at the very highest level is approximately sixty thousand PSI; of chromium about seventy thousand PSI; and of nickel about eighty thousand PSI. The weakest of the three is iron.

“We all know the saying, “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link”. Well, experiment on chrome-nickel-steel, pull it apart, and you will find that it is much stronger than its weakest link of sixty thousand PSI. In fact it is much stronger than the eighty thousand PSI of its stronger link. Thus the saying that a chain is as strong as its weakest link doesn’t hold. So, let me say something that really sounds funny: Maybe a chain is as strong as the sum of the strength of all its links. Let’s add up the strengths of the components of chrome-nickel-steel and see. Sixty thousand PSI for iron and seventy thousand PSI for chromium and then and eighty thousand PSI for the nickel, that gives you two hundred and ten thousand PSI. If we add in the minor constituency of carbon and manganese we will add another forty thousand PSI giving us a total of two hundred and fifty thousand PSI. “Now the fact is that under testing, chrome-nickel-steel shows three hundred and fifty thousand PSI–or one hundred thousand PSI more than the combined strength of all the links.

“This is typical of synergy, and it is the synergy of the various metal alloys that have enabled industry to do all kinds of things that man never knew would be able to be done based on the characteristic of the parts.” (2)

The synergic sciences focuses on the whole system to understand the relationships between the parts. These relationships can be positive – synergic, they can be indifferent – neutral, or they can be negative – adversary.

Using the synergic sciences, we humans can restructure our relationships so they are positive. This means that we can be more happy, more effective, and more productive though synergic relationship.

Then we will see, as with the Wright brother’s aeroplane, that the synergic sciences will allow us to accomplish many things never before thought possible.

Like the Wright’s aeroplane, the synergic sciences can solve enormous problems for humankind. And, like the Wright’s aeroplane, the synergic sciences can bring many positive and wonderful changes to our lives, but the “how” will be very different from the way things are done today. The synergic sciences present us with a remarkably new view of humanity and of our human potential. This new view may challenge many of your current beliefs and some of your basic values. But this is good news, because without a major change in beliefs and basic values our human problems are not solvable.

Therefore, as you read, I ask only that you suspend judgement a little while. The synergic sciences are not hard to understand, but like all new knowledge they require some investment of your time. I ask only that you take this opportunity to think carefully and consider fully.

The synergic sciences allow the creation of tools that can turn the world upside down in the most positive of ways. They offer a basis for finally understanding humanity, the human condition, and ourselves. UnCommon Sense brings good news of a better way for humanity – a way in which we can all win. A way that will allow us to create a positive, safe and comfortable future for all of humanity. This is not a partial solution. The synergic sciences can be used to create a safe and positive future for all of us. They will allow us to make a world that works for all humans living today – all six billion of us. And they promise a world that could work for even more of us. If all solutions were synergic solutions, the carrying capacity of planet earth could approach 50 billion humans.

And this is without any need to damage the earth, or degrade our environment. This is the enormous promise of the synergic sciences. UnCommon Sense will explain how this can be accomplished. But to reach that safe and positive future, we will have to change the way in which we relate to each other.

Today most human relationships are either adversary or neutral. Adversary and neutral relationships by their very structure must result in conflict, loss and indifference.

The first discovery I will present is that of the synergic relationship. Synergic relationship enables human individuals to interact with each other in a new way. A way that creates positive alliances marked by strong commitment and trust. The synergic relationship offers us the choice of co-Operation as an alternative to conflict and indifference.

UnCommon Sense will reveal the methods and techniques for creating synergic relationships. Synergic relationship allows you to build strong mutually beneficial alliances with others and to effect corroborative solutions to even the most difficult of problems. This new way of relating can be applied to oneself as an individual, to our spouses–husband or wife, to our children and our extended families, and perhaps more importantly to everyone else – our local and global communities, and finally it can be applied to our relationship with the earth, and eventually even to the universe itself.

However, today we humans are not safe. Today our human world is filled with conflict, loss, and indifference. We have the potential for a positive and safe future, but that potential provides us no guarantees.

Tomorrow may be neither safe, nor positive.

UnCommon Sense points to the opportunity for us to transform ourselves, to change our relationships with each other, to choose synergy, and in so doing transcend our problems.

UnCommon Sense is written as a guide and includes the necessary knowledge and information to safely pass through this stage of human evolution.

Asked of one respected futurist in 1962, “What will the human population be in one hundred years?” He answered, “It will either be very large or it will be zero.” (3)  . . .  In the hope that it will not be zero, let us begin.

Earth, 1999, April 15
Leonardo Day

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1 Alfred Korzybski, The Manhood of Humanity, E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1921

2 R. Buckminster Fuller, SYNERGETICS–Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, Volumes I & II, New York, Macmillan Publishing Co, 1975, 1979

3 Andrew J. Galambos, V50–Introduction to Volitional Science, Free Enterprise Institute, Los Angeles, 1962

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UnCommon Sense—Introduction

UnCommon Sense—We Can All Win !

We continue with excerpts from Elisabet Sartouris’ EarthDance. Yesterday, we were told of our Cosmic Beginnings which followed from a Twice Told Tale.

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The Young Earth

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

Shall we think of the young Earth at this point as a lifeless planet on which life is about to evolve? Most of us have been taught in school that animate matter is one thing — it is alive — and that inanimate matter is quite another, for it is not alive. Are the Earth’s rocky crust and watery seas inanimate, lifeless matter while the plants and animals we know this story is leading up to are made of animate, or living, matter? Just what do we mean by the word life?

It may surprise you to learn that scientists do not agree on what life is. Some change their minds from time to time; others don’t worry about the question “What is life?” believing the answer is known in some other science. In ancient Greece, when philosophers believed that all nature was alive, a physicist was someone who studied nature — physis — and so was concerned with living things. Later, when scientists decided to divide the world into animate and inanimate matter, physicists took on the job of describing how inanimate matter is put together, and biologists, whose name comes from bios — way of life — took on the job of describing living things.

Physicists think biologists know what life is because it is their job to know, but biologists keep changing their definition of life and they pass the question of how to tell life from non-life on to chemists, whose name comes from ancient roots having to do with the transformation of matter from one kind into another. So chemists divide chemistry up, in their turn, into two kinds: organic chemistry, the study of living matter, and inorganic chemistry, the study of nonliving matter. Chemists know something about the transformation of inorganic matter into organic matter, but the question of just when and where life began on our planet still gets tossed back and forth among them, or taken back to ideas from physics.

Some scientists talk about life in terms of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. This contrasts it with the equilibrium dynamics of nonliving things — the physicists’ way of solving the problem they created long ago when they declared that life was separate from non-life. Whether or not physics is the appropriate branch of science to define life, this new view at least talks about life as a process rather than as a kind of matter, and that seems closer to what life is all about.

Before religion and science parted company, the answer to the question of how life began was easy. Scientists themselves believed that God created living things, such as plants and animals and people, putting them into the nonliving world he had created for them. But later, when scientists tried to explain the world without bringing God into the picture, they were stuck with believing that life is a special kind of matter that somehow comes from lifeless matter. One version of this belief was known as spontaneous generation — the belief that worms, for example, sprang from bits of dead garbage or rotting meat.

Louis Pasteur put an end to that, as we are also taught in school. Or did he? His very careful experiments showed that worms come only from eggs, and never directly from garbage. But where did eggs, which are living things, come from? Flies or other insects, also living things. The explanation seemed easy with a theory of evolution: they came from other worms, which had evolved from the smaller, simpler creatures we traced all the way back to microbes — living things so small they can be seen only through microscopes.

But where do microbes come from? That is still difficult to tell, but we assume they come from the simplest molecular systems that could maintain and reproduce themselves. Some biologists believe that life began with small clumps or sacs of organic molecules. The organic molecules themselves are considered nonliving matter that comes alive when they get stuck together in certain ways that permit them to act on each other to form a living system. In other words, scientists still believe that life comes from lifeless matter. In this sense, spontaneous generation was not so much disproved as pushed down to things much smaller than dead meat and worms.

We are still stuck with the question of just what life is. What is it that brings the lifeless molecules in some places, on some planets, to life when they are chained and clumped together in certain ways? Even though we are talking about very tiny things, there is still a big jump from nonliving matter to life.

We have already suggested that it might be better to see life as a process than as a kind of matter. Perhaps it would also help if scientists did not keep looking for the answer only in tinier and tinier parts of nature, believing that in doing so they would see just how things are built from the bottom up.

If we begin, instead, by thinking of wholes, or holons, that form their own parts from the top down, so to speak, everything looks very different. Think, for example, of the huge protogalactic cloud holons we talked about in Chapter 2. If we could watch a movie of the evolution of a protogalaxy sped up so that billions of years happened in a few minutes, what would we see? We would see it whirl and throb, grow and change, its parts dissolving and exploding, more complicated new parts forming in their place and even reproducing themselves as the mature galaxy took on its complicated form. Galaxies themselves split apart and merge with others on collision. And within galaxies — perhaps within all of them — some planets produce what we all agree, here on Earth, to be life.

While astronomers may speak of the lives of stars, they do not seriously count stars or galaxies as living beings. Yet galaxies do some of the things by which we all recognize living beings in our everyday experience of Earth, such as keeping their form through many changes within them, creating and replacing their own parts, sometimes even growing and/or dividing to form offspring galaxies.

The most promising definition of life among biologists, in fact, seems very nearly to fit galaxies, if not stars. This is the definition of life we owe to the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Their concept of life is a process called autopoiesis (pronounced auto-po-EE-sis), which in Greek means self-creation or self-production.

An autopoietic unity, or holon, produces the very parts of which it is made and keeps them in working order by constant renewal. An autopoietic holon works by its own rules and creates a boundary that distinguishes it from its environment and through which it exchanges materials with its environment. We do not see such boundaries around galaxies, yet galaxies are visible as distinct entities that maintain their shape while producing and reproducing their parts. The Earth, as we will see, also produces and renews its parts, including the thick atmospheric boundary through which it exchanges radiation energy with its environment.

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It seems that as we learn more about our universe, we need to change our scope and the questions we ask about life. Until now we have assumed that all the universe is nonliving matter except for some matter on planets such as ours. But why should we divide the universe up in this way? Physicists now tell us, as we will discuss further in the last chapter, that the matter-energy of the earliest universe was already, by its very nature, bound to form living systems. Had things been just the tiniest bit different at the beginning, this would not be so and we could not have evolved. Perhaps, then, life evolves as the essential process of the cosmos as a whole and is not just something happening at a special point we hunt for in vain.

This is, in fact, becoming an increasingly acceptable hypothesis among physicists who have revived the ancient Greek concept of the source potential, or plenum, as a zero-point energy field (ZPF) — the infinite energies existing at every point in spacetime and from which source all matter is created. And even beyond that, ever since quantum theory proved so powerful, some physicists have proposed consciousness — a basic universal consciousness — as the source of all creation.

Historically, we see that science took a big step away from religious explanations of the world, and that it is now taking another big step toward a merger with spiritual explanations. The first step involved a shift from seeing the universe as created by an outside intelligence called God, to seeing it as happening solely through the purposeless mechanics of evolved forces and parts. The second step is a shift from mechanical to organic models of nature, with its organics as self-creation process, not blind mechanics. If science `officially’ acknowledges cosmic consciousness to be the continually self-creative source of the material universe, as many individual scientists now do, this step toward an integrated spirit-energy-matter worldview will be completed, while older worldviews, both religious and scientific will fade into history.

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Galaxies are surely a very significant part of cosmic life processes. It certainly seems that our Earth, born from our galaxy, is alive in its own right.

We do not know whether in our own solar system planets such as Mars and Venus began coming to life and then failed to evolve because they could not keep themselves alive. It is ever clearer that, as with the seeds and eggs of plants and animals, far more planets are produced than actually come to life. Planets must have just the right composition and be in just the right relationship to their star to come as alive as has our Earth. Yet even if only a few planets among many succeed in coming to life, there must be billions of living planets in the universe. And the others — the majority of planets that do not come alive in their own right — may still play a supporting role in the life of their galaxies.

The creatures we are used to thinking of as alive, such as plants and animals, contain much supporting `nonliving’ matter in their woody trunks and shells and bones, their thorns and hooves and nails, their hair and scales. Nonliving planets may also be very much a part of live galaxies, perhaps even playing important structural roles in their dynamics.. What about the Earth itself? Many scientists argue that it cannot be a living being because only its outermost layer — thin as the dewy mist on an apple at dawn — shows signs of life. What, then, we may ask, about a redwood tree, which is ninety-nine percent deadwood with just a thin skin of life on its surface? No one argues that redwoods are not alive.

It is new in modern science to look at the cosmos and the nature of our planet in this way. It is not easy for scientists to jump from seeing the Earth as a nonliving planet that became a home for living creatures, to seeing it as a single living being with its creatures as much a part of it as cells are a part of our bodies. The scientific studies of Earth have been divided, as we said, into studies of living and nonliving matter. Geologists have had the task of explaining how the geological `mechanisms’ of nonliving matter, such as rock, change with time and weathering. Their work was not intended to be mixed up with that of the biologists who study living things, since these living things have been and still are believed by most scientists to arise in ready-made geological environments and either adapt to them or die out.

Now, however, the jobs of geologists and biologists are getting mixed up whether they like it or not, for the same stardust that was transformed into a rocky planet continues to be transformed into living creatures. What we are made of was stardust long ago, transforming itself into rocky Earth crust and, after a long transformative history of evolution, into us.

To make things more complicated, much of the rock that is transformed into live creatures is later transformed back into rock. And so, just as creatures are made of atoms that were once part of rock, almost all rocks on the Earth’s surface are made of atoms that were once part of creatures — creatures that built themselves from the atoms of still earlier rocks.

Think about that. The recycling of stardust gets to be a complicated matter as a planet comes to life. Geologists are now just beginning to believe the Russian scientist V. I. Vernadsky, about whom we will say more later, who understood life on Earth as “a disperse of rock” — rock rearranging itself over billions of years; rearranging itself into ever more complicated forms of life from microbes to men.

That alone is enough to mix up geology and biology, but there is even more to it. Our planet never was a ready-made home, or habitat, in which living creatures developed and to which they adapted themselves. For not only does rock rearrange itself into living creatures and back, but living creatures also rearrange rock into habitats — into places comfortable enough for them to live in and multiply.

But let’s take it one step at a time and look first at life as rock rearranging itself. How can this happen?

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We begin to see that there is more than one way to understand what life is. We just saw it as a mixture of geology and biology. Let’s now try looking at it as a mixture of physics and chemistry.

Remember the forces, such as gravitation, that helped create patterns in the cosmic dance of particles and atoms? One of those forces is the electric force that holds atoms together. This force keeps the outer particle dancers of atoms, their electrons, from flying off into space away from their nucleus of heavier particles. This is not entirely unlike the way gravitation keeps planets from flying off into space away from the Sun, though the orbiting electrons are not hard balls like the ones on the old-fashioned atom models that looked like miniature solar systems.

Powerful electrical, or magnetic, fields were set up by the interaction, through the Earth’s crust, of the Sun’s energy and the molten metal of Earth’s core. We might compare this with a giant battery whose energy can be used to do all sorts of work. At the microcosmic level, the electric force allows electrons to dance in two atoms at once, thus holding the atoms together as a molecule. The more atoms that dance together in this way, the larger the molecules formed.

The strong energy of Sunlight coming to the Earth’s crust through the thin early atmosphere stirred up the molecular electric force within the great electric fields, creating storms above and breaking up molecules in rock dust, mud, and seawater near deep ocean rifts below, re-forming them into new and larger molecules. When molecules break up and recombine in new patterns, we call it a chemical reaction, since chemistry is the study of such transformations in the patterns of molecules. The energy that stirred up the electrical force recombined many molecules of the Earth’s crust.

Such chemical reactions also happen elsewhere in our galaxy. The larger organic molecules such as those of sugars, acids, and lipids (fats) that were formed on the young Earth are also formed in large quantities and great variety somewhere in the center of our galaxy and perhaps all over it. Some of them come to Earth by way of meteors. It is even possible that those planet `eggs’ which come to life may be fertilized by meteors.

Some chemical transformations, as we said, were due to electrical storms created among clouds of cooled steam in the early atmosphere as the Sun’s energy heated Earth’s surface. Besides helping large molecules to form, these storms drove a water recycling system, collapsing clouds into rain, which fell on land and sea, the water rising again by evaporation and collecting back into clouds.

Rainwater ran over the rocks, creating grooves that over the eons formed riverbeds and valleys, carrying ground sand and dust full of rock salts to the seas. Rivers and streams thus formed as the bloodstream of our embryo planet, carrying the supplies needed to develop or evolve its life. For a live planet needs not only a great deal of energy but also flowing matter such as atmospheric gases and water to move things about. As we will see, planetary life is not something that happens here and there on a planet — it happens to the planet as a whole.

The largest new molecules probably formed in shallow waters with the help of Sunlight and lightning storms, or perhaps with the help of the Earth’s internal energy around cracks in the Earth’s crust on the sea floor. Even the Sun’s drying heat at the water’s edge may have played a role in forming large molecules and packaging them.

Large molecules, such as naturally forming sugars and acids, absorbed a lot of electrical energy, which was then useful in speeding up their chemical reactions to form ever larger molecules — giant molecules built from the simpler sugars and acids. Some scientists believe the giant molecules formed as large molecules lined themselves up on molds or templates of clay or other crystal matter that had regular, repeating surface patterns or notches for the molecules to hold on to. Others believe that the production of giant molecules happened only after the earliest molecular life systems were already organized within tiny capsules.

Earthlife may be described as autopoietic-self-creating-holons forming within the great Earth holon. In all its creatures, from its earliest microbes to later organisms, we find carbon, or rather reduced carbon compounds, which are carbon atoms surrounded by hydrogen atoms, playing essential roles. The lively energized carbon of the Earth combined easily with oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus to form all sorts of organic molecules and substances. In fact, you are made of very little other than these six elements in their rich variety of combinations.

Among the giant molecules formed from smaller ones were proteins — long strings of amino acids, which are themselves molecules made of various combinations of a dozen or fewer carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. Other giant molecules, assembling from both acids and sugars, were those we call ribonucleic acid (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). DNA may actually have been a later development of early living systems based on RNA. Whatever the exact sequence, DNA and RNA came to work together with proteins as the copying and building system of life.

DNA molecules are long chains of smaller molecules joined into long, twisted zippers. We have discovered that the teeth of these DNA-molecule zippers act as a four-letter code that can be arranged in endlessly different patterns, just as letters of the alphabet can be written into words and sentences and books. Because of this, a DNA molecule can hold information. After all, information is really anything in formation — anything that is in an ordered pattern rather than in chaos. Some scientists argue that whatever is in formation becomes information only when used by a living system; in this book we define information as anything that is in formation. A book, for example, contains information even if no one reads it, as does a solar system even if no one uses it.

Information, if it can be copied, can be a plan — a plan for a new copy, or a code plan for something else. DNA can copy, or replicate, itself, but not without the help of proteins that can unlock DNA zippers. Once unlocked, the DNA unzips itself into two half-zippers. As these float around in a soup of smaller molecules, the teeth of each half — all letters of the DNA code — attract new partners just like those that were opposite them in the closed zipper, because those are the only ones that fit into place.

Presto! We have two zippers where there was one, and the two are exactly alike if no mistakes have been made. The DNA-protein partnership evolved in such a way that while proteins unlocked DNA zippers, they also got DNA to store plans coded for building more protein as well as more of itself. Thus the DNA-protein partnerships as wholes were capable of reproducing themselves.

This is a bit oversimplified, since viruses, our only examples of RNA or DNA coated by protein alone, have to get inside cells where other things are available in order to reproduce. Nevertheless, protein with DNA or RNA, or both DNA and RNA, formed molecular cooperatives that became the basic reproduction system of carbon-based life. This genetic system — DNA is composed of sequences we call genes (from the same root as genesis) — is usually described as one-way, the DNA code strictly determining the production of proteins, which are the main building materials of living holons within the Earth holarchy. But recent evidence indicates that proteins can in turn affect and change the DNA code. We will get back to this form of cooperation in later chapters.

Less than five percent of DNA is composed of the genes which are blueprints for the specific proteins of which living creatures are composed. The role of the remaining more than ninety-five percent is still largely a mystery. It is as though we know just what kind of bricks or stones, wood, glass, etc. are used in building an elaborate building, but still do not know how to read the architectural blueprint.

At some point early in the Earth’s history there were plenty of the sugar and acid molecules that were needed to build the long chain molecules of RNA, DNA, and protein. And so the formation of these cooperative partnerships very likely became inevitable in the Earth’s warm wet mud and shallow seawater where molecules could move about freely and bump into one another. Possibly there was a long time when these partnerships could hardly have been told apart from the thick soup of building materials around them.

Some scientists, however, argue that such partnerships really could not have gotten under way until the molecules were enclosed in sacs, or membranes, that held them together with other supply molecules and protected them from being dissolved. The most likely candidates for such sacs are called liposomes, literally meaning fat bodies. Liposomes, so tiny they can be seen only with an electron microscope, form as hollow spheres of lipid-fat-molecules, something like microscopic soap bubbles, whenever lipid molecules find themselves in water. This is because the tails of these lipid molecules are hydrophobic, or water avoiding, swinging quickly away from water, protecting one another from it by turning inward so that their heads form a tight sphere around them. Sometimes a double-layered sphere forms with water inside and outside, the double layer having all the lipid molecule heads on both surfaces, with all tails between the two layers of heads. This is the typical formation of simple cell walls and persists even in the most complex cells today.

If a soup containing liposomes and a variety of large molecules is repeatedly dried out and liquefied again, the liposomes break open and flatten out during dry times and re-form their spheres in wet times, sometimes around large molecules — even as large as DNA and protein molecules — that may become trapped inside them while they are broken open. Such conditions must often have occurred at the edges of early seas. The liposomes themselves then function as a skin, or membrane, which serves the molecules inside it both as a protection from, and as a connection to, the outside world. The membrane permits selective chemical crossings, allowing some kinds of atoms or molecules to come in and other kinds to pass outward through them. This soon makes the inside environment chemically different from that outside. Such an arrangement fosters the development of chemical cycles that are basic to living cells.

However the first cells formed, protein became the main material of which living creatures built themselves, while RNA and DNA stored the plans and made it possible for living things to multiply. Some protein molecules came to play a particularly important role by speeding up what other molecules did — say, by speeding up the chemical reactions that build new protein or copy DNA. We call these special proteins enzymes, and their wonderful talent for speeding up the chemical dance is very important to our planet’s life. In fact, the presence of enzymes has been suggested as one way of defining the presence of life, and the first enzymes likely occurred as a widespread chemical Earth event, perhaps both outside and inside early cells.

While details are still missing, this is essentially how the solid and molten crust of the Earth began to rearrange itself into living creatures. Some of its material gassed off into atmosphere, part reformed into seas, some broke up and was washed into the seas. With the help of great amounts of energy, larger molecules formed and joined into partnerships, set up chemical cycles in early liposomes, speeded up their own reactions with enzyme activity, reproduced themselves, and through all this established themselves as living, or autopoietic, holons — the earliest creatures in their own right. These creatures dwelt within the larger living holon that had given them life and to which they gave a new kind of life in turn. Thus on the one hand we can say that tiny separate living holons evolved all over the Earth, but on the other hand we can say that the Earth holon was coming ever more alive as it evolved its own autopoiesis through a new kind of self-packaging chemical activity.

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From our old point of view we could see the beginnings of life only as a collection of microbes descending from some primeval cell that formed accidentally somewhere on Earth, giving rise to offspring that were forced to adjust or adapt their way of life to it by natural selection, which we will discuss in Chapter 7. This was a logical way to see things when we formed our concept of life from our study of individual creatures small enough for us to see as wholes. In our new way of seeing life as autopoietic systems that may be as large as the Earth or even larger, we can think of Earthlife as a planetary process — as the chemical reactions of the planet’s crust speeding up, transforming the crustal matter into a blanket of masses of microbes, which in turn transform more of the crust into their livable home, as we will see in the next chapter. And while all this happens at the microcosmic level, the macrocosmic events of the largely molten, still radioactive planet keep its crust heaving, cracking, and sliding, pushing up mountains, buckling in valleys, changing the shapes and positions of continents amid its deepening seas. All together, this is the self-creating dance of a living planet driven by its Sun and by its own energy.

One way of looking at all this is to see the Earth as having come alive through all sorts of `border activity.’ The crust that stirred to life was the boundary enclosing the Earth and at the same time connecting it to outside energy from the Sun and to new materials coming in as meteors. Then, the first cells seem to have formed specifically at the boundaries separating and connecting the land and the sea, or separating and connecting the inner magma with the crustal surface at volcanic sea floor vents. These cells’ own boundaries made their individual lives possible by separating them from and connecting them to their environment. At all levels from great to small, this border activity can be seen as highly creative and cooperative — a lesson we humans, with the boundaries we have created among ourselves, might well take to heart.

Let’s stop to imagine that we are watching a fast-running movie of the early Earth as it evolves within the larger being of our Milky Way galaxy. As we approach the Earth, we see it whirling and heaving, its thin crust rising and falling, breaking and slipping, bleeding lava where it tears open and sighing bursts of steam. Meteors and planetoids, which are part of the supernova’s debris, strike and wound the Earth, making great splashes of molten rock and gas. The thin atmosphere is often reddish with smog produced by the reactions of its own gases. Lightning flashes, and seas form during heavy rains until masses of land and sea become distinct, though the seas are brownish beneath the murky atmosphere.

Slowly the crust thickens and cracks into plates that slide slowly over the surface, carrying the land masses into new patterns. Patches of colored microbes appear and grow along the shores; gradually a tougher but clearer atmospheric skin develops, making the seas turn a sparkling blue. Meteor impact is low; turmoil subsides, and much of the land becomes covered in green. Now and then ice moves down over the green before withdrawing again to the poles, raising and lowering the level of the seas, covering and uncovering the land as though the whole planet is breathing in some gargantuan rhythm. Everything is in constant motion as the Earth shimmers and glows in the Sun against the darkness of space, its changing cloud patterns swirling over blue seas and varicolored lands.

These changes actually happened over billions of years, at a rate too slow for us to recognize as very active. Yet a billion years to our planet is less than a decade is to us. When we use our imagination to see these changes within the time span of a short film, the truly amazing thing is that our planet looks very much like a living creature — perhaps the great cell that popular science writer Lewis Thomas saw it as.

Our movie makes the young planet appear to be trying hard to express itself in a new way as its materials churn about, its crust forms and reforms, its seas and clouds pool over the rocky crust. It has enormous energy of its own and receives more energy from the Sun, which sends it light and heat. It might remind you of a chrysalis transforming a caterpillar into a butterfly, or of a chick embryo turning and growing inside its shell.

Already at this early stage the Earth begins to fit the autopoietic definition of life as it is creating its own parts, including the tiny autopoietic microbes which, as we will see in the next chapter, create the thickening atmosphere that becomes a new boundary membrane or skin. In later chapters we shall see more evidence of autopoiesis as new complex holons form within the planet’s holarchy.

Had our movie shown the other planets as well, we would have seen the sharp contrast as they settled into relatively stable patterns, the solid ones dull in color, while Earth’s metabolic activity brought it to life with radiant blue and green colors beneath its swirling breath of white cloud.

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Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

We continue with excerpts from Elisabet Sahtouris’ EarthDance. Yesterday, we began with a Twice Told Tale.

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Cosmic Beginnings

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

The Greek myth of Gaian creation began with an image of the goddess whirling out of darkness, wrapped in flowing white veils. In ancient India the very beginning of the universe, or cosmos, was imagined as swirls in a sea of milk.

We will probably never know how ancient peoples understood that the first forms to create themselves were whirling white spirals. However they knew, we in our own day can actually see just what those first swirling white forms out in space really were. We call them protogalaxies, or first galaxies. And we have learned that whole protogalaxies do dance as whirling white forms in space long before planets evolve within them, and longer before creatures can evolve as parts of planets.

The material universe, as most scientists describe it today, began with a huge explosion of energy they call the Big Bang. Some say this explosion was more like a great wave of energy rising out of an even greater sea of energy; others talk about continuous creation as well as an initial event; some of those tell us matter is continually created from an underlying intelligent source, such as consciousness. Whatever happened to start our universe, our current scientific story is that it began as very hot, explosively fast-moving energy that has been spreading and cooling ever since, creating spacetime as it does so.

The ancient Greek word chaos first denoted nothingness — the great void before there was anything material in the universe. (They also spoke of a fullness of potential named the plenum.) Later, chaos came to mean anything so mixed up or messed up that it has no pattern, no order, no meaning, at least none that we humans can detect. (The word random carries the same meaning of lack of order or pattern.) With chaos theory, we began to see chaos as having hidden pattern — pattern we are unable to detect. All these ways of using the word chaos have been used to describe the beginning of the universe. There was nothingness, as no-thing had been formed, yet the dance of energy that would create order or pattern had begun.

The word cosmos was coined as the opposite of chaos, to mean order as opposed to disorder, form and pattern instead of formlessness and lack of pattern, things instead of no-things, a world instead of no world. The first Greek philosophers understood creation as a process of turning disorderly or non-orderly chaos into an orderly cosmos, and we have no better way of describing it today. For as the chaotic hot energy cooled and spread, it turned itself into a great dance of spiraling cosmic patterns

Our best explanation of how this happened begins with the idea of imbalance, as it also did in many ancient philosophies. In the early chaos, as the explosive energy spread and cooled, there must have been pockets of more or less energy, or, as energy formed itself into particles, pockets of more or fewer particles, or different numbers of different kinds of particles. Any such imbalances would have set up currents of motion among the heavier slower-moving particles in the overall force of out-thrusting universal energy.

Particles, or subatomic particles, are the tiniest whirling packets of pure energy from which all matter — all the stuff of the universe — is made. The whirling energy of particles created a new force, or forces, among particles, so that when early cosmic particles passed close enough to each other to attract each other, some of them held together as simple atoms. We can imagine this as rather like people dancing, attracting each other when close enough to whirl each other about. Other particles were pushed apart, while most particles kept zooming along alone among the first slower atoms of floating gas.

The physical force that still works at the greatest distance among the clumps of matter that formed in our universe is the one we call gravitation; two others — the strong and weak nuclear forces — have their effect inside atoms and stars. The fourth and last to develop was the electrical force, which works to combine atoms into molecules, but that is getting ahead of our story. Some new theories describe gravitation as a basic property of the zero-point energy field, rather than as a force. It is wise to note that our theories are still evolving rapidly and that this story may still change dramatically.

Natural, or physical, influences, then, on great and small levels, pulled and pushed the universe into patterns great and small. As the number of atoms, and the explosive young universe itself, grew larger, imbalances here and there drifted and swirled the atoms into great gas clouds. These clouds formed more swirls within themselves, some of the thickest becoming protogalaxies sparking with light.

Light is made of energy packets we call photons. New photons can be created like tiny sparks when other fast-flying particles bump into one another very hard. Photons make the protogalaxies visible, and it now seems they are created continually everywhere in the universe, even inside us.

If an ancient storyteller could have looked through a modern telescope to see a protogalaxy forming, he might well have said, “Ah, you see, there is the white-veiled Gaia whirling about in her dance.” A modern scientist, on the other hand, sees such protogalaxies as the natural result of imbalances and forces in the great cosmic energy field — a swirling of disorderly or chaotic matter into orderly or cosmic patterns; a sea of energy whose forceful currents form natural whirlpools large and small. This is especially important to recognize: that the largest patterns — the great swirling clouds within which protogalaxies took shape — were forming almost as soon as the tiniest particles and atoms began whirling into being. Our universe, or cosmos, has always been a dance of interactions among the large and small moving patterns, each contributing to the other’s formation. It was not built from the top down or from the bottom up, but evolved as a dance between great and small.

But can we really see protogalaxies forming billions of years ago while looking through telescopes now? Is it possible to look back into time, and so very far back at that?

We can. With modern telescopes we can see back to nearly the beginning of the universe! Magical as it seems, the explanation for this strange power we have is quite simple. Everything we see comes to our eyes as light photons that have bounced off or come out of whatever we are looking at. Light bounces off a cat or a cloud, for instance, and comes out of a candle flame or a star. But what exactly is light?

We’ve already talked about photons as energy particles created when other particles bump into one another. Stars and flames are made of atoms and particles moving so fast that unusual numbers of photons are created in them.

Photons travel through space in waves of different lengths and strengths, some of which we see as different colors and brightnesses when they get to our eyes. Though light is extremely fast by human standards — at 186,000 miles per second — it still takes some time to get from an object that created it, or from one it has bounced off, to our eyes. The time it takes light to travel holds the secret of looking back in time.

It takes about seven minutes for light to get from the Sun to our eyes. Every time we look at the Sun, we are seeing the light pattern that left it seven minutes ago. That means we are seeing the Sun the way it was seven minutes ago and not as it is the moment we are looking at it. The Sun is the star nearest to us. Other stars are so far away that their light takes years to get to our eyes — thousands of years, even millions of years, depending on how far away the star is. The distance of stars, in fact, is measured in light-years — the number of years it takes for their light to reach us.

Whenever you look up at the night sky, even without a telescope, you are looking back into time. You see each star as it was when the light reaching your eyes left it. By looking at many stars, you are looking at many times past. How far past depends, of course, on the distance of each star. The farther away the star is, the longer ago it sent out the information about what it looks like — that is, the light pattern of the star that has finally found your eyes.

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is shaped like a giant swirling pinwheel within an enormous but less visible spherical torus. It takes light a hundred thousand years to cross it. If there are any creatures on another planet — say, three thousand light years from us, in our own galaxy — who are looking at us right now, what do they see? If their telescopes are powerful enough, they may be seeing a storyteller speaking of Gaia’s dance in an ancient Greek village!

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Powerful telescopes can pick up light that is too weak from its long travels for our eyes alone to see — even light from stars and galaxies so old that they were among the first stars and galaxies, or protogalaxies, in the universe, so old they are just beginning cosmic creation. Let’s watch one of them in its evolving dance.

Inside the spiraling veils of hydrogen gas, which is made of the first and simplest atoms in the universe, smaller rolling waves create a ring of denser atoms, of more intense energy, at the center. Around it, great loose balls of gas form, something like the way dust balls form under a bed. In the center of such balls, the lively atoms and particles are pulled ever closer together by physical forces until it gets very hot from all the crowding. As these gas balls get hotter and heavier, they become stars.

Wherever we look back into ancient skies, we see galaxies taking shape and growing through different stages. Inside the first generation of stars the incredible heat and pressure begins causing what we now know as nuclear reactions — the transformation of one kind of atom into another. The first such reaction squeezes hydrogen atoms together to form helium atoms, which is what our Sun is doing all the time. This process creates heat and light, some of which escapes from the stars in spreading waves of photons. The burning gases on the outside of stars pull away in waves, like the skin a snake sheds, because of the gravitational pull of matter, such as other stars, around them. Stars must constantly keep their balance between tremendous forces pulling them apart and other forces squeezing them together.

Eventually, the first-generation stars collapse from growing so heavy they can no longer keep their balance between the internal and external pulling. Their atoms mass ever more tightly together. Eventually the star implodes and then explodes, scattering stardust like seeds back into the galactic gas cloud. The mother cloud becomes ever thicker with the gas and dust of such explosions and gives birth to a new generation of stars as the old ones die.

The next generation of stars forges its atoms into yet bigger and heavier kinds until all the different kinds of atoms — all the different elements of the universe — have been formed from the original hydrogen atoms. Meanwhile, the central ring of gas clouds in a galaxy grows larger and more complicated, becoming a kind of skeleton that holds the galaxy together. At last many of the atoms from exploding stars are too heavy to form new stars and begin to form themselves into planets circling around stars that are made of the lightest elements. This is why our Sun, although it is not a first-generation star, is made like one. The heavier elements of its parent star are in its planets.

So protogalaxies evolve into galaxies — whirling, weaving, squeezing, exploding, pulsing their insides into ever richer patterns and parts. Molecules formed of groups of atoms, even the kinds of molecules from which the familiar living systems of the Earth formed themselves, are created in complex galactic processes, as we shall see later. For now, let us remember that the stars we see in our night skies are only a few of those in our own galaxy, and, as we see them with our eyes, they don’t begin to hint of our galaxy’s complex patterns and processes. Far beyond those stars lie billions of other galaxies, each made of billions of stars and planets wheeling in their clouds of gas and dust, creating who knows how much life.

Astronomers, whose name comes from the Greek word for star, astron, now know the different shapes of individual galaxies and can see them clustered into larger patterns. There are even clusters of clusters, called superclusters, even some greater pattern that extends all through the universe, parts of it appearing in the images we have been able to make of them, like huge curved strings and the holes in Swiss cheese. These still crude images, we may hope, will one day resolve themselves into an understanding of the greatest patterns of all.

Though we don’t know what these patterns are as yet, it appears increasingly obvious that they form a cosmic unity of process and pattern rather than a chaotic spray of unrelated parts. A single notion that would account for such pattern is the concept of mutual consistency, which is at the heart of `bootstrap philosophy,’ a mathematical physics conception popularized by Fritjof Capra. This is the concept that the universe is a dynamic web of events in which no part or event is fundamental to the others since each follows from all the others, the relations among them determining the entire cosmic pattern or web of events. In this conception, all possible patterns of cosmic matter-energy will form, but only those working out their consistency with surrounding patterns will last.

Mutual means shared; consistency means agreement or harmony. Thus we can sense mutual consistency as the shared harmony worked out among cosmic patterns. The notion can be made more familiar by considering the shared social harmony worked out by groups of people when each individual adjusts his or her behavior to that of the others in a harmonious way. Anyone who cannot do this will tend to be excluded from the group, unless the deviant can force the others to make their behavior consistent with his or hers, in which case a new (if tenuous) mutual consistency would have been worked out. At present our species is not behaving in a way that is mutually consistent with the other species and features of our planet, and the consequences may preclude our survival.

Increasingly, then, we are discovering with modern instruments and measurements what ancient peoples told in myth — that all of the universe is one great pattern, a single dance evolving into ever richer complexity over billions of years.

Until recently, scientists had a rather different idea of how nature forms itself — a mechanical idea of wholes built from parts as machinery is built, though coming together automatically without any designer or builder. We shall learn more of this way of looking at things later, when we look at human history. For now what matters is to understand this new way of seeing that all evolution — of the great cosmos and of our own planet within it — is an endless dance of wholes that separate themselves into parts and parts that join into mutually consistent new wholes. We can see it as a repeating, sequentially spiraling pattern: unity -> individuation -> competition -> conflict -> negotiation -> resolution -> cooperation -> new levels of unity, and so on.

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We have already seen how the swirling gas clouds that evolved into galactic clusters began forming as soon as particles joined together to form the first simple hydrogen atoms. The early universe thus evolved by forming more and more parts within itself, many of them becoming new wholes in their own right if they proved consistent with other wholes surrounding them. As stars form within a protogalaxy, it becomes a galaxy — a great star system that in turn forms within itself relatively independent single or double star systems, some with planets such as our solar system. Later we will see how a planet’s crust can form the packets of life we call microbes, or bacteria, and how these in turn can join together in building larger living cells, which in their turn evolve into larger creatures.

The universe of all these parts within parts, or wholes within wholes, reminds us of nesting boxes or of the Chinese or Russian dolls of various sizes that fit inside one another. The philosopher scientist Arthur Koestler suggested we call each whole thing within nature a holon — a whole made of its own parts, yet itself part of a larger whole. A universe of such holons within holons is, then a holarchy — in Greek, a source of wholes — one original whole that formed ever more complicated smaller wholes within itself, some becoming holarchies themselves. We will use this image and the terms holon and holarchy throughout this book to show the embeddedness of natural entities.

Our own solar system, with its Sun-star nucleus surrounded by planets, Moons, asteroids, comets, and space dust, is a holon within the larger holon of our galaxy. It was born of the scattered gases and stardust of an older star that became a supernova exploding about five billion years ago, maybe even more than one of them. The Earth is still so radioactive from this explosion that its core is kept hot by continuing nuclear reactions, and many atoms all over its surface — in rocks and trees and even in our own bodies — are still exploding.

In our bodies it has been estimated that three million potassium atoms explode every minute. These explosions are much too tiny for us to see, feel, or perceive in any other way. They are not arranged to blow up neighboring atoms as well as themselves, as in our powerful man-made nuclear chain reactions. Still, they are evidence that stardust is not just fairy-tale magic; it is what we are really made of — we and everything else that is part of our world.

Between five and four and a half billion years ago, some of the gas and dust from that great star explosion gathered into an Earth-ball made of twelve different kinds of atoms, or twelve elements. As it condensed, it grew heavier and spun around faster. The heat of pressure and nuclear reactions inside it melted the packed matter into a fiercely burning liquid. But the outside of this fiery ball, touching cold space, cooled off as a thin crusty skin, a bit the way homemade pudding forms a skin as it cools, or the way fat hardens on top of cooling gravy. The Earth’s skin was made of rock — a crust of rock around a hot, molten mantle of magma, with its heaviest elements at its solidifying core.

While it was still very thin, this crust melted again and again, each time letting the heaviest metal elements sink back towards the core while lighter elements formed a foam of rock around those fiery insides. Today’s Earth has a thicker crust, broken up into great tectonic plates that ride on the denser mantle surrounding the solid core. We can still see the hot liquefied elements of the mantle pouring out through volcanoes puncturing the crust. And in Earthquakes we can feel the motion of the great tectonic plates as they slide about creating new geological formations.

In the myth of Gaia’s dance, as her body forms mountains and valleys, the seas are formed from her warm moisture. Just so, it seems, the seas eventually pooled on the young Earth.

At first, when the Earth’s crust cracked here and there, the liquid magma insides oozed out as lava. Lava, as the pressure that keeps it together is released, separates into heavy atoms that cool into more crusty rock, into water that hisses up as steam, and into other atoms light enough to float over or off the surface of the planet as gases. We now believe the water steaming off the hot crust stayed high above an early atmosphere of poisonous (from our point of view) gases for what may have been a long time, but eventually formed clouds that condensed into rain. The rain poured down so hard and for so long that the seas began pooling on top of the heavier rock. As more and more lava oozed through cracks in the Earth’s crust, the crust itself grew thicker and lumpier; as new clouds gathered and fell in cycles, the seas grew ever bigger and deeper.

As the Earth’s crust grew thicker, new streams of lava broke through it with greater force. Spitting volcanoes shot their fiery insides high into the air, forming mountains as the lava cooled and hot ashes settled down. More mountains were formed when Earthquakes cracked the crust and slid parts of it over one another, and when the crust heaved and bulged without breaking. Rocks sliding over one another were ground into sand and dust.

Huge dust clouds were created when meteors of all sizes — some of them as large as small planets — struck the Earth, smashing into the crust, pitting it, breaking it up, mixing it with the space rocks themselves.

The gases floating around the planet, those just heavy enough to be held by its gravity, were nothing like the air we breathe now. There was no oxygen, but only a mixture of gases which, had the Earth not come alive, would have eventually settled into something like the atmosphere on Venus and Mars today — an atmosphere without oxygen around a lifeless planet.

What, then, did the Earth have that Venus and Mars did not? James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis called one of its special features the `Goldilocks effect:’ Venus was too hot, Mars was too cold, but the Earth was just the right temperature for life. Another was its water, enough of it in liquid form, in this just-right temperature, to carry supplies from place to place as blood is carried through a body. The constant transport of supplies must be possible for life to evolve.

Everything of Earth’s surface — oceans and rivers, mountains and fertile fields, forests and flowers, creatures that float or fly or crawl or climb, everything, including ourselves, is actually made from the same original but recycled supplies, except for the small input of meteors. Our world has created itself as new arrangements of the same atoms that started out inside a star, then formed the molten metal, crusty rock, and gases of a newborn planet — a planet that covered itself in seas as we have seen and is now ready to go on with its dance of life. Let’s follow this great Gaian recycling system to see just how stardust continues to transform itself into a living planet — into all the amazing complexity of our beautiful world.

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Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

If we examine the list of Nobel laureates for female names, we will find only a few. Some have wondered, “Where are the female geniuses?”

One of the interesting phenomena of our time is the current emergence of powerful women thinkers. One example of this new breed is Elisabet Sahtouris. The following is excerpted from her book EarthDance.

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A Twice Told Tale

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

Everyone knows that humanity is in crisis, politically, economically, spiritually, ecologically, any way you look at it. Many see humanity as close to suicide by way of our own technology; many others see humans as deserving God’s or nature’s wrath in retribution for our sins. However we see it, we are deeply afraid that we may not survive much longer. Yet our urge to survival is the strongest urge we have, and we do not cease our search for solutions in the midst of crisis.

The proposal made in this book is that we see ourselves in the context of our planet’s biological evolution, as a still new, experimental species with developmental stages that parallel the stages of our individual development. From this perspective, humanity is now in adolescent crisis and, just because of that, stands on the brink of maturity in a position to achieve true humanity in the full meaning of that word. Like an adolescent in trouble, we have tended to let our focus on the crisis itself or on our frantic search for particular political, economic, scientific, or spiritual solutions depress us and blind us to the larger picture, to avenues of real assistance. If we humbly seek help instead from the nature that spawned us, we will find biological clues to solving all our biggest problems at once. We will see how to make the healthy transition into maturity.

Some of these biological clues are with us daily, all our lives, in our own bodies; others can be found in various ages and stages of the larger living entity of which we are part — our planet Earth. Once we see these clues, we will wonder how we could have failed to find them for so long.

The reason we have missed them is that we have not understood ourselves as living beings within a larger being, in the same sense that our cells are part of each of us.

Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred years of science, has been to see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature, to convince ourselves we see it objectively — at a distance from ourselves — and to perceive, or at least model it, as a vast mechanism.

This objective mechanical worldview was founded in ancient Greece when philosophers divided into two schools of thought about the world. One school held that all nature, including humans, was alive and self-creative, ever making order from disorder. The other held that the `real’ world could be known only through pure reason, not through direct experience, and was God’s geometric creation, permanently mechanical and perfect behind our illusion of its disorder.

This mechanical/religious worldview superseded the older one of living nature to become the foundation of the whole Western worldview up to the present.

Philosophers such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato were thus the founding fathers of our mechanical worldview, though Galileo, Descartes, and other men of the Renaissance translated it into the scientific and technological enterprise that has dominated human experience ever since.

What if things had gone the other way? What if Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, the organic philosophers who saw all the cosmos as alive, had won the day back in that ancient Greek debate?

What if Galileo, as he experimented with both telescope and microscope, had used the latter to seek evidence for Anaximander’s theory of biological evolution here on Earth, rather than looking to the skies for confirmation of Aristarchus’s celestial mechanics? In other words, what if modern science and our view of human society had evolved from organic biology rather than from mechanical physics?

We will never know how the course of human events would have differed had they taken this path, had physics developed in the shadow of biology rather than the other way around.

Yet it seems we were destined to find the biological path eventually, as the mechanical worldview we have lived with so long is now giving way to an organic view — in all fairness, an organic view made possible by the very technology born of our mechanical view.

The same technology that permits us to reach out into space has permitted us to begin seeing the real nature of our own planet to discover that it is alive and that it is the only live planet circling our Sun.

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The implications of this discovery are enormous, and we have hardly even begun to pursue them. We were awed by astronauts’ reports that the Earth looked from space like a living being, and were ourselves struck by its apparently live beauty when the visual images were before our eyes. But it has taken time to accumulate scientific evidence that the Earth is a live planet rather than a planet with life upon it, and many scientists continue to resist the new conception because of its profound implications for change in all branches of science, not to mention all society.

The difference between a planet with life on it and a living planet is hard at first to understand. Take for example the word, the concept, the practice of ecology, which has become familiar to us all within just the few short decades that we have been aware of our pollution and destruction of the environment on which our own lives depend.

Our ecological understanding and practice has been a big, important step in understanding our relationship to our environment and to other species. Yet, even in our serious environmental concern, we still fall short of recognizing ourselves as part of a much larger living entity. It is one thing to be careful with our environment so it will last and remain benign; it is quite another to know deeply that our environment, like ourselves, is part of a living planet.

The earliest microbes into which the materials of the Earth’s crust transformed themselves created their own environments, and these environments in turn shaped the fate of later species, much as cells create their surround and are created by it in our own embryological development.

As for physiology, we already know that the Earth regulates its temperature as well as any of its warm-blooded creatures, such that it stays within bounds that are healthy for life despite the Sun’s steadily increasing heat. And just as our bodies continually renew and adjust the balance of chemicals in our skin and blood, our bones and other tissues, so does the Earth continually renew and adjust the balance of chemicals in its atmosphere, seas, and soils. How these physiological systems work is now partly known, partly still to be discovered, as is also still the case with our bodies’ physiological systems.

Certainly it is ever more obvious that we are not studying the mechanical nature of Spaceship Earth but the self-creative, self-maintaining physiology of a live planet.

Many still take the live Earth concept, named Gaia after the Earth goddess of early Greek myth, more as a poetic or spiritual metaphor than as a scientific reality. However, the name Gaia was never intended to suggest that the Earth is a female being, the reincarnation of the Great Goddess or Mother Nature herself, nor to start a new religion (though it would hardly hurt us to worship our planet as the greater Being whose existence we have intuited from time immemorial). It was intended simply to designate the concept of a live Earth, in contrast to an Earth with life upon it.

Actually, Gaia, or the Roman form, Gea, was an earlier name for our planet than Earth. It was lost in the wandering of words from ancient Greek through other languages to English. In Greek, our planet has always been called Gaia in its alternate spelling Ge, which we see in English words taken directly from Greek, such as geology, the formation of the Earth; geometry, the measurement of the Earth; and geography, the mapping of the Earth. In accord with our own practice of calling planets by the names of Greek deities in their Roman versions, we really should call the Earth Gea. Greek, like English, has always used the same word for Earth-as-world and Earth-as-ground — the ancient Ge that became the modern Gi, pronounced Yee. The English word Earth came from an ancient Greek root meaning working the ground, or earth-ergaze — which evolved into the name of the Nordic Earth goddess, Erda and then into the German Erde and the English Earth. Thus even the word Earth implies a female deity.

With that digression intended to make the name Gaia more acceptable to those who still consider the name and image somehow inappropriate for a scientific concept, let us look also at the myth itself — the creation myth of Gaia’s dance.

The story of Gaia’s dance begins with an image of swirling mist in the black nothingness called Chaos by the ancient Greeks — an image reminding us of modern photos of galaxies swirling in space. In the myth it is the dancing goddess Gaia, swathed in white veils as she whirls through the darkness. As she becomes visible and her dance grows ever more lively, her body forms itself into mountains and valleys; then sweat pours from her to pool into seas, and finally her flying arms stir up a windy sky she calls Ouranos — still the Greek word for sky — which she wraps around herself as protector and mate.

Though she later banishes Ouranos — Uranus, in Latin — to her depths for claiming credit for creation, their fertile union as Earth and Heaven brings forth forests and creatures including the giant Titans in human form, who in turn give rise to the gods and goddesses and finally to mortal humans.

From the start, says the myth — true to human psychology — people were curious to know how all this had happened and what the future would bring. To satisfy their curiosity, Gaia let her knowledge and wisdom leak from cracks in the Earth at places such as Delphi where her priestesses interpreted it for people.

Our curiosity is still with us thousands of years after this myth served as explanation of the world’s creation. And in a sense, Gaia’s knowledge and wisdom are still leaking from her body — not just at Delphi, but everywhere we care to look in a scientific study of our living planet.

The new scientific story of Gaian creation has other parallels to the ancient myth. We now recognize the Earth as a single self-creating being that came alive in its whirling dance through space, its crust transforming itself into mountains and valleys, the hot moisture pouring from its body to form seas. As its crust became ever more lively with bacteria, it created its own atmosphere, and the advent of sexual partnership finally did produce the larger life forms — the trees and animals and people.

The tale of Gaia’s dance is thus being retold as we piece together the scientific details of our planet’s dance of life. And in its context, the evolution of our own species takes on new meaning in relation to the whole. Once we truly grasp the scientific reality of our living planet and its physiology, our entire worldview and practice are bound to change profoundly, revealing the way to solving what now appear to be our greatest and most insoluble problems.

From a Gaian point of view, we humans are an experiment — a young trial species still at odds with ourselves and other species, still not having learned to balance our own dance within that of our whole planet. Unlike most other species, we are not biologically programmed to know what to do; rather, we are an experiment in free choice.

This leaves us with enormous potential, powerful egotism, and tremendous anxiety — a syndrome that is recognizably adolescent.

Human history may seem very long to us as we study all that has happened in it, but we know only a few thousand years of it and have existed as humans for only a few million years, while Earth has been self-creating and evolving for billions of years. We have scarcely had time to come out of species childhood, yet our social evolution has changed us so fast that we have leaped into our adolescence.

Humans are not the first creatures to make problems for themselves and for the whole Gaian system, as we will see. We are, however — unless whales and dolphins beat us to it in past ages — the first Gaian creatures who can understand such problems, think about them, and solve them by free choice. In fact, the argument of this book is that our maturity as a species depends on our accepting the responsibility for our natural heritage of behavioral freedom by working consciously and cooperatively toward our own health along with that of our planet.

Our ability to be objective, to see ourselves as the I or eye of our cosmos, as beings independent of nature, has inflated our egos — ego being the Greek word for I. We came to separate the I from the it and to believe that `it’ — the world apart from us, out there — was ours to do with as we pleased. We told ourselves we were either God’s favored children or the smartest and most powerful naturally-evolved creatures on Earth. This egotistic attitude has been very much a factor in bringing us to adolescent crisis.

And so an attitude of greater humility and willingness to accept some guidance from our parent planet will be an important factor in reaching our species maturity.

The tremendous problems confronting us now — the inequality of hunger on one side and overconsumption on the other, the possibly irreversible damage to the natural world we depend on, just as our cells depend on the wholeness of our bodies for their life — are all of our own making. These problems have become so enormous that many of us believe we will not be able to solve them in time. Yet just at this time in our troubled world we stand on the brink of maturity, in a position to recognize that we are neither perfect nor omnipotent, but that we can learn a great deal from a parent planet that is also not perfect or omnipotent but has the experience of billions of years of overcoming an endless array of difficulties, small and great.

When we look anew at evolution, we see not only that other species have been as troublesome as ours, but that many a fiercely competitive situation resolved itself in a cooperative scheme. The kind of cells our bodies are made of, for example, began with the same kind of exploitation among bacteria that characterizes our historic human imperialism, as we will see.

In fact, those ancient bacteria invented technologies of energy production, transportation and communications, including a WorldWideWeb still in existence today, during their competitive phase and then used those very technologies to bind themselves into the cooperative ventures that made our own existence possible. In the same way, we are now using essentially the same technologies, in our own invented versions, to unite ourselves into a single body of humanity that may make yet another new step in Earth’s evolution possible. If we look to the lessons of evolution, we will gain hope that the newly forming worldwide body of humanity may also learn to adopt cooperation in favor of competition. The necessary systems have already been invented and developed; we lack only the understanding, motive, and will to use them consciously in achieving a cooperative species maturity.

It may come as a surprise that nature has something to teach us about cooperative economics and politics. Sociobiologists, who have told us much in recent decades about humanity’s animal heritage, have tended to paint us a bleak picture. Calling on our evolutionary heritage as evidence that we will never cure ourselves of territorial lust and aggression toward one another, they continue to predict there will be no end to economic greed and political warfare. But it is the aim of this book to show that these sociobiologists have presented a misleading picture — as misleading as earlier scientists’ one-sided view of all natural evolution as “red in tooth and claw,” the hard and competitive struggle among individuals on which we have modeled our modern societies.

The new view of our Gaian Earth in evolution shows, on the contrary, an intricate web of cooperative mutual dependency, the evolution of one scheme after another that harmonizes conflicting interests.

The patterns of evolution show us the creative maintenance of life in all its complexity. Indeed nature is more suggestive of a mother juggling resources to ensure each family member’s welfare as she works out differences of interest to make the whole family a cooperative venture, than of a rational engineer designing perfect machinery that obeys unchangeable laws.

For scientists who shudder at such anthropomorphism — defined as reading human attributes into nature — let us not forget that mechanomorphism — reading mechanical attributes into nature — is really no better than second-hand anthropomorphism, since mechanisms are human products. Is it not more likely that nature in essence resembles one of its own creatures than that it resembles in essence the nonliving product of one of its creatures?

The leading philosophers of our day recognize that the very foundations of our knowledge are quaking — that our understanding of nature as machinery can no longer be upheld. But those who cling to the old understanding seriously fear that all human life will break down without a firm foundation for our knowledge of nature in mathematical reference points and laws of physics. They fail to see what every child can see — that hummingbirds and flowers work, that nature does very well in ignorance of human conceptions of how it must work.

Machinery is in fact the very antithesis of life. One must always hope a machine, between its times of use, will not change, for only if it does not change will it continue to be of use. Left to its own devices, so to speak, it will eventually be destroyed by its environment. Living organisms, on the other hand, cannot stay the same without changing constantly, and they use their environment to their advantage. To be sure, our machinery is getting better and better at imitating life; if this were not so, a mechanical science could not have advanced in understanding. But mechanical models of life continue to miss its essential self-creativity. Fortunately, our survival struggle is leading to intuitive grasps of nature’s principles that are shifting our technologies into serving cooperative life purposes, especially clearly in the phenomenon of the global Internet.

Σ    Σ    Σ

We are learning that there is more than one way to organize functional systems, to produce order and balance; that the imperfect and flexible principles of nature lead to greater stability and resilience in natural systems than we have produced in ours — both technological and social — by following the mechanical laws we assumed were natural.

We designed our societies as though they were machinery; we made a Cold War on one another over who had the perfect social design. Our greatest recent conflict was over whether individuals should sacrifice their individual interest to the welfare of the whole or whether individual interest should reign supreme in the hope that the interests of the whole would thus take care of themselves

No being in nature, outside our own species, is ever confronted with such a choice, and if we consult nature, the reason is obvious. The choice makes no sense, for neither alternative can work. No being in nature can ever be completely independent, although independence calls to every living being, whether it is a cell, a creature, a society, a species, or a whole ecosystem.

Every being is part of some larger being, and as such its self-interest must be tempered by the interests of the larger being to which it belongs. Thus mutual consistency works itself out everywhere in nature, as we will see again and again in this book.

For clues on organizing a workable economics and politics, we need not even look beyond our own bodies, with their cooperative diversity of cells and organs as a splendid example to us in working out our social future.

Diversity is crucial to nature, yet we humans seem desperately eager to eliminate it, in nature and in one another. This is one of the greatest mistakes we are making. We reduce complex ecosystems to one-crop monocultures, and we do everything in our power to persuade or force others to adopt our languages, our customs, our social structures, instead of respecting their diversity and recognizing its validity. Both practices impoverish and weaken us within the Gaian system.

We are right to worry about our survival, for we foolishly jeopardize it.

We are wrong to devote our attention to saving or managing nature. Gaia will save herself with or without us and hardly needs advice or help in managing her affairs. To look out for ourselves, we would be wise to interfere as little as possible in her ways, and to learn as much as possible of them.

Our technology has ravaged nature and continues to do so, but the ravages of technology are rooted in our youthful species’ greed, our single bottom-line quest for profits motive. There is no intrinsic reason that we humans cannot develop a benign technology once we agree that our desire to maximize profits is completely at odds with nature’s dynamic balance — that greed prevents health and welfare for all. As Janine Benyus has pointed out, we assigned one group of people called biologists to study how other species make their living, and a completely separate group of people called economists to determine how our species makes its living.

No other creatures take more than they need, and this must be our first lesson. Our second lesson is to learn and emulate nature’s fine-tuned recycling economics, largely powered by free solar energy. This does not mean going back to log cabins or tipis, but to eliminate waste and junk as we creatively develop diverse human lifestyles of elegant and sustainable simplicity.

The purpose of this book is to help pave the way to a happier and healthier future through an understanding of our relationship to the Gaian Earth system that spawned us and of which we are part — a great being that, however it may annoy us, is not ours to dominate and control. We can damage it, but we cannot run it; we had better try to find out what it is all about and what we are doing, and may do, to survive happily within it.

The aggressive and destructive motives of domination, conquest, control, and profit have been presented to us as unchangeable human nature by historians as well as by sociologists. But mounting evidence from archaeology strongly suggests that human societies were, for the greater part of civilized history, based more on cooperation and reverence for life and nature than on competition and obsession with death and technology. It seems our human childhood, which lasted far longer than has our recent adolescence, was guided by religious images of a near and nurturing Mother Goddess before a cruel and distant Father God replaced her in influence. As we come out of adolescence we often recognize the value of what we were taught in childhood, and this new historical view of ourselves supports the general thesis of this book.

Like Gaian creation itself, human understanding or knowledge ever evolves.

Parts of the story you are about to read will already have changed by the time you read it. Others will change in the years to come as new things about Earth-Gaia and about human history are discovered. Any of us is free to help find new pieces of the story, bring those we know up to date, and then reinterpret the evidence as a whole, for in the last analysis, every interpretation has its personal color and flavor.

The next chapter is concerned with cosmic beginnings as a living context for our living planet; succeeding chapters, up to half of this book, tell of Gaian evolution over billions of years before we humans become part of it. Those interested in the story of human society may be tempted to skip this part of the story, but the scientific account of evolution in this book is not separable from our human social history. The details of our biological heritage from ancient bacteria on are given because therein lie the clues to a better human future. It is only within this context that we can appreciate our newness and our differences from the rest of nature, to see at the same time how we can benefit from its vast experience to fit ourselves in more harmoniously.

It is on this that everything now depends; species suicide is our only alternative, and there is really no reason to make a dramatic adolescent exit instead of growing up, taking on adult responsibility, and reaping the pleasures of productive maturity. Let us then follow the evolution of Gaian creation and of our own history as social and technological creatures within this great dance of life. Let’s see what meaning and guidance all this may give in our present crisis, to speed us on our way into full maturity, to a happier future in which we promote our own health and that of our planet within the greater cosmic dance.

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Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Excerpted from EarthDance and reposted from: LifeWeb

How Evolution Works

Elisabet Sartouris, Ph.D.

Our present scientific understanding of Earth’s evolution is far from complete and may be subject to change in even its essential fundamentals, as I will propose after reviewing our present “state of the art,” if I may use that phrase for our current scientific understanding. Thus, it is not to be taken as dogma. Like the planet itself, our understanding of its evolution will continue to evolve. It is virtually impossible to know just how we will understand evolution in another century, let alone another millenium.

Our actual observations of material reality will probably hold up, but they will certainly be augmented in quantity, accuracy and precision. Year by year, we extend our vision with ever more powerful telescopes and microscopes, scanners, counters and dating techniques, explorations of rainforest canopies, ocean depths, deserts and deep polar ice. We continue to count more species at the same time that we see farther into the vast reaches of outer space macrocosms and deeper into the inner reaches of quantum and molecular microcosms. The more we see, the more the way in which we interpret what we see changes accordingly. In short, our current evolution story is itself evolving with breathtaking speed, and will surely continue evolving for a long time to come.

It is from the leading edge trends in evolutionary science that we can make our best predictions of how this story will evolve. Four such trends are evident at present:: 1) a systems or ecological perspective, 2) the DNA revolution, 3) the new emphasis on our microbial ancestry and 4) the new understanding of life’s creativity in response to crisis.

I will discuss each of these in as much detail as this short time permits, and then turn briefly to new developments in physics and astronomy, because these sciences provide the larger contextual framework for biology. As the data and theories of physics and astronomy change, we biologists are required to revise and adjust our understanding of the biological world in order to keep our overall scientific worldview internally consistent.

The systems view

Ecological or systems thinking involves a shift away from tracing the evolution of individual species’ lineages against environmental ‘backdrops.’ Increasingly, we see evolution systemically and ecologically — as the simultaneous and intertwined co-evolution of all Earth species at once. This way of seeing evolution brings it into new focus, resolving environments into ecosystems — complex webs of co-evolving, interdependent species, each of which helps shape every other, and is shaped by the others. As figure and ground merge, the old view of, for example, rabbits in habitats becomes a view of ‘rhabitats.’

Even our most basic distinctions between geology and biology — the designated domains of non-life and life, inanimate and animate — are blurring into geobiology or biogeology. We see how Earth’s changes over time determine and are determined by its ‘biomass’ of creature life. We amass evidence that the Earth’s rocky crust (the lithosphere), soils, waters (the hydrosphere) and atmosphere are permeated, altered, produced and even chemically regulated by living creatures (the biosphere), especially microbes. It become apparent that even Earth’s temperature is held constant by its life forms despite the ever-increasing heat of its Sun star.

For half of Earth’s life — its first few billion years — bacteria pioneered all later lifestyles of larger creatures as they created a wholly new kind of atmosphere and rearranged the planet’s crust, building continental shelves and sorting its thoroughly blended substances into the pure veins of copper, silver and other metals we humans mine today.

Most scientists today recognize that Earth’s lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere are dynamically interdependent systems — self-organizing and inseparably interconnected. Some scientists now follow British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock’s concept of the Earth as a living planet^1,2 — a concept of nature that was informally common to most of Earth’s human cultures. The concept of a live Earth still remains controversial, and how this controversy is resolved will depend largely on how scientists agree to define life — a matter itself still unresolved. Should the definition of life as autopoiesis — literally, self creation — become the dominant definition, it is not difficult to show, as this author has done elsewhere, that Earth fits that definition.^3,4

The Russian geologist Vladimir Vernadsky viewed life as “a disperse of rock.” Vernadsky saw life as a geochemical process that transforms rock into highly active living matter.^5,6 In this view life is thus a kind of planetary metabolic activity, `packaging’ crustal components into cells, speeding up its chemical changes with enzymes, turning cosmic radiation into bioenergy. Life is literally rock rearranging itself with the help of energy from the core of the planet, solar energy and the energy of weather, such as the lightning produced by air and water cycles.

As rock, solid or eroded into sand and dust, transforms metabolically into ever-evolving creatures, they in turn break up more crust, consuming and moving its components around. Eventually living cells are produced and later they, and the multicelled creatures into which they evolve, are reduced back into soil and sediments, finally completing the geobiological cycle as they return to rock.

To illustrate this process with an explosively visible example, Vernadsky pointed out that a locust plague of a single day has been estimated to fill six thousand cubic kilometers of space and weigh forty-five million tons! This can be seen as forty-five million tons of soil converted

into the same amount of plant matter and then suddenly into the same amount of animal (insect) matter, which is shortly afterwards converted back into soil. Most biogeological activity goes on less dramatically, but it is interesting to consider that the same molecules and atoms may be found over time in rock, soil, plant, animal, microbe, etc.

Certainly Vernadsky’s crustal metabolism view of life fits well with the great planetary cycles we have described and helps us take a more non-linear and holistic view of evolution.

G. E. Hutchinson at Yale University promoted Vernadsky’s view that life is a geochemical process of the Earth, and in 1937 — ten years after the publication of Vernadsky’s book The Biosphere — British geochemist V. M. Goldschmidt wrote about the influence of the biosphere on geology. As Canadian environmental chemist William Fyfe pointed out in 1994, the scale of this influence is only now being appreciated.⁷

Fyfe tells us, as did Vernadsky and Lovelock, that many ore deposits clearly show the important role of microorganisms. Many veins of ores exist because microorganisms coaxed minerals out of water. They also ingested minerals and left them behind as they died in huge numbers within colonies. Thus living beings rearrange and concentrate minerals over geologic time, as mentioned earlier. In Fyfe’s words, “For many elements… there is a good chance that they have spent part of their lifetime on the planet inside a living cell.”

Colonies of microbes are found down to a depth of 4.2 kilometers inside the Earth’s crust. “As deep scientific drilling is developed, a host of observations show the products from the deep biosphere. Indeed, if there is a cavity of appropriate size with sufficient water life will be present… We must understand the deep biosphere if we are to correctly describe the carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur dynamics of Earth.”⁸

In seeing the billions of years of Earth’s evolution as a single process we begin to comprehend its larger patterns, such as that of interwoven species co-evolving with each other, demonstrating a pattern of maturation from young acquisitive and competitive species that multiply as rapidly as possible and take over all the resources and territory they can to mature cooperative species sharing resources and contributing to each others’ livelihoods in more stable ecosystems such as rainforests or prairies.

Seeing living systems as embedded within each other, as by Arthur Koestler’s model of holons (individual living entities) within holarchies (nested and non-hierarchical embeddedness)⁶, reveals other patterns, especially patterns of embedded cooperation such as bacterial colonies living within larger organisms, which in turn may dwell in even larger organisms, while those dwell within complex ecosystems.

Perhaps the most striking case of embeddedness is our own nucleated cells, which — like those of all other creatures larger than bacteria, from protists and polyps to pine trees and panthers — house the modern descendants of those ancient bacteria which

came together to form the first nucleated cells, or eukaryotes, or protists, as cooperative ventures. One might say that in forming these first protists, our remote bacterial ancestors formed the first multi-creatured cells, which later went on to form multi-celled creatures. Popular science essayist and former head of Yale Medical School, Lewis Thomas, has even suggested that bacteria may thus have invented us as big taxis to get around in safely.⁹

The DNA revolution

The discovery of DNA structure in the 1950s has since engendered vast amounts of information about its role in individuals and in evolution, as well as the whole field of genetic engineering. Most notably, our view of DNA as a fixed ‘blueprint’ in each creature, altered only by accidents in the course of evolution, is changing dramatically. We are still in early stages of an exciting new view of DNA: as a complex self-organizing system in communication with other such systems, notably the cell membrane, such that DNA responds with apparent intelligence to information about events outside its cell and even outside the multicelled organism in which it resides.

Let us recall that Einstein’s worldview was shaken when quantum physicists suggested that electrons intentionally leap orbits.¹⁰ Microbiologists are similarly shaken when they see apparently intentional activity in molecular DNA. Discoveries of genomic changes in response to an organism’s environment are changing our story of how evolution proceeds in very significant ways. What is coming to light is that life forms, beginning with the archeobacteria from which all other organisms evolved, are capable of self-improvement through environmental challenge.

Genomic changes in response to an organism’s environment have actually been known since the 1950s, but they challenged the accepted theories of the time, so it has taken half a century to amass sufficient data to warrant changing our scientific picture of evolution accordingly.

Barbara McClintock, who did much of her work on corn plants, pioneered the research showing that DNA sequences move about to new locations and that this genetic activity increases when the plants are stressed. She also found closed-loop molecular bits of self-reproducing DNA called plasmids moving about among the normal DNA and exchanged from cell to cell.^11,12 Plasmids were invented by ancient bacteria and persist in multicelled creatures. They are used a great deal in genetic engineering as they can be inserted into new genomes.

McClintock’s work on transposable genetic elements was verified and elaborated by many researchers until it became clear that DNA reorganizes itself and trades genes with other cells, even with other creatures.¹³ The trading process sometimes involves viruslike elements known as transposons. Some are retrotransposons and retroviruses that transcribe their RNA into DNA — opposite to the usual order and not thought possible before their discovery. Some theorists now believe that bacteria may have invented viruses as well as plasmids.

1993 Nobel Laureate biologists Phillip Sharp and Richard Roberts discovered that RNA is arranged in modules that can be reshuffled by `spliceosomes,’ referred to as a cell’s ‘editors.’¹⁴ Other researchers have shown that bacteria naturally retool themselves genetically and can correct defects created by human genetic engineers.¹⁵ (Recall that ancient bacteria had already evolved the ability to repair genes damaged by UV radiation.)

Further research shows that bacteria not only alter genomes very specifically in response to specific environmental pressures, but also transfer the mutations to other bacteria.^16,17 Many of these genetic transfers appear to be evolutionarily related to `free-living’ viruses, according to Temin and Engels in England.¹⁸ Retroviruses are known to infect across species and enter the host’s germline DNA.

We are still in early stages of understanding the extent to which DNA is freely traded in the world of microbes to benefit both individuals and their communities. And we are just beginning to see these processes of genetic alteration at cellular levels as intelligent responses to changing environmental conditions in multicelled creatures. We know viruses and plasmids carry bits of DNA from whales to seagulls, from monkeys to cats, and so on, but it remains to be understood whether all this transfer is random or meaningful.

Most research in this area of gene transfer among species is still confined to microbes in which these matters are easier to study. As yet we know relatively little about the extent to which DNA trading occurs in creatures larger than microbes, or to what extent it facilitates specific responses to environmental conditions. For that matter, we still do not know what the vast proportion of multicellular creature DNA does at all.

Depending on the particular plant or animal species, only 1% to 5% of DNA codes for proteins. Of the remaining 95 to 99%, 20-30% is made of repeating elements called LINEs (long interspersed nuclear elements) and SINEs (short interspersed nuclear elements) which move from one location to another or even trade places neatly, without revealing exactly why they do so.¹⁹ The rest remains utter mystery. Even the much-discussed human genome project is only concerned with mapping the small protein-coding portion of DNA. So our stories are far from complete, but it seems reasonable to hazard the guess that nature would not have evolved an evolutionary strategy as sophisticated as gene trading to facilitate evolution billions of years ago only to abandon it in evolving larger creatures.

British researcher Jeffrey Pollard reports the rapid restructuring of genomes in response to stress in many different species from microbes to plants and animals, with the changes passed on to succeeding generations. This can bring about, as Pollard says, “dramatic alterations of developmental plans independent of natural selection,” which itself may “play a minor role in evolutionary change, perhaps honing up the fit between the organism and its environment.”²⁰

This growing body of evidence suggests that evolution may proceed much faster under stress than was thought possible. It also reveals how the world wide web of DNA information exchange invented by Archean bacteria still functions today, not only among bacteria as always, but also within multicelled creatures and among species. As microbiologist Lynn Margulis puts it: “Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.”^21,22

New emphasis on our microbial ancestry

Margulis has contributed enormously to our evolving story of the microbial world that was Earth for the first three-fourths of its entire evolution up to the present, and to the understanding that multicelled creatures — fungi, plants and animals — have the descendants of ancient bacteria providing the energy in each and every one of their — and our — cells. Despite her comment that life is a single multidimensional being, and not a linear family tree, it is her work that caused a most dramatic change in the way we picture that old ‘tree of evolution’ we all know from our schoolbooks. Suddenly and dramatically, a brand-new version of this familiar picture was launched into the public eye by an early 1998 article in National Geographic magazine.²³ Animals, fungi and plants were no longer the main branches of the tree; rather, all three were relegated to the mere tip of a single branch on a tree composed of a myriad kinds of microbes — creatures too small to see with the naked eye.

Before our new wave of knowledge about our single-celled ancestors — bacteria and protists, or nucleated cells — the bulk of evolution was as murky a prehistory as the three million years of human existence prior to what we call the Stone Age. Now, quite suddenly, we are unveiling a surprisingly cosmopolitan ancient (and modern) microworld. Discovering the urban lifestyles of bacteria with all their technologies — from skyscrapers to compass and electric motor, from solar energy devices to polyester, and even to a world wide web of information exchange — is an amazing journey.

Over the billions of years that the archae — our name for ancient bacteria — were inventing diverse lifestyles such as fermentation, photosynthesis and respiration, they were also rearranging the planet’s crust, creating a new atmosphere and exchanging bits of DNA information among themselves. We can say they were the first to invent a world wide web of information exchange. The importance this astoundingly flexible gene pool cannot be underestimated. It is still as active among bacteria today as in Archean times and accounts, for example, to their rapid resistance to our antibiotics.

Information exchange gives bacteria close relationships that facilitate cooperation in communal living. We have known of their communal lives for some time, but only now are we able to investigate their amazing urban complexes in real detail. Bacteria

discovered the advantages of communal living eons ago and evolved sophisticated urban lives and cityscapes. We can see these huge urban complexes today, though with the naked eye they appear only as slimy films in the kitchen drain, thick muddy microbial mats or giant fossilized communities called stromatolites — rocky domes of layered ancient seashore communities that trapped sand and other particles. Living slime cities persist on their surfaces.^4,21,22

Stromatolites are found in many locations, some pushed under the surface into fossilized banded rock formations, again reminding us of Vernadsky’s definition of life as a transform of rock that goes back again to rock. Other stromatolites are still growing themselves on the surface in shallow waters and on seashores. Other communal life experiments have less rigid forms than stromatolites. Some bacteria create communities that look and sometimes act remarkably like later multicelled plants; others adopt free-swimming lifestyles. One way or another, they all maintain community through their exchanges of resources and information.

Bacteria living on top of microbial mats or stromatolites are burned to death by ultraviolet light, but the dead cells make good filters, absorbing the burning rays while letting the rest of the light reach those that need it below. In other community situations, some individuals commit suicide so that others may live — a process called apoptosis, also found later in evolution as the embryological process of ‘programmed death’ in which certain cells must die for multicelled creatures to ‘sculpt’ their forms.⁴

Bacterial cityscapes exist today wherever they can take hold — in wetlands, in dank closets, in the stomachs of cows, in kitchen drains. Scientists call them biofilms or mucilages, as they look like slimy brown or greenish patches to the unaided human eye. Only now can we discover their inner structure and functions with the newest microscopy techniques that magnify them sufficiently without destroying them (for example, confocal scanning laser microscopy).

Looking closely for the first time at intact bacterial microcities, scientists are amazed to see them packed as tightly as our own urban centers, but with a decidedly futuristic look. Towers of spheres and cone- or mushroom-shaped skyscrapers soar 100 to 200 micrometers upward from a base of dense sticky sugars, other big molecules and water, all collectively produced by the bacterial inhabitants. In these cities, different strains of bacteria with different enzymes help each other exploit food supplies that no one strain can break down alone.

All of them together build the city’s infrastructure. The cities are laced with intricate channels connecting the buildings to circulate water, nutrients, enzymes, oxygen and recyclable wastes. Their diverse inhabitants live in different microneighborhoods and glide, motor or swim along roadways and canals. The more food is available, the denser the populations become. Researcher Bill Keevil in England, making videos of these cityscapes, says of one, “It looks like Manhattan when you fly over it.” ^25,26

Microbiologist Bill Costerton in Montana observes: “All of a sudden, instead of individual organisms, you have communication, cell cooperation, cell specialization, and a basic circulatory system, as in plants or animals….It’s a big intellectual break.”²⁶ Researchers are coming to see colonial bacteria or even all bacteria now as multicelled creatures.²⁷

Most astonishing to investigators, communal bacteria turn on a different set of genes than their genetically identical relatives roaming independently outside of biofilms. This gives the urban dwellers a very different biochemical makeup. A special bacterial chemical, homoserine lactone, signals incoming bacteria to turn into city dwellers. All bacteria constantly discharge low levels of this chemical. Large concentrations of it in urban environments trigger the urbanizing genetic changes, no matter what strain the bacteria are. (Note that bacteria are classified by strains and not by species because speciation is impossible in creatures that constantly exchange and revise their DNA.)

These changes include those that make bacteria most resistant to antibiotics. Costerton estimates that more than 99 percent of all bacteria live in biofilm communities, and finds that such communities, pooling their resources, can be up to 1,500 times more resistant to antibiotics than a single colony.²⁵ Under today’s siege by antibiotics, bacteria respond with ever-new genetic immunity. Our fifth generation of antibiotics failed in 1996.

In Tel-Aviv, Eshel Ben-Jacob also finds bacteria trading genes and discovers complex interactions between individuals and their communities. The genomes of individuals — defined as their full set of structural and regulatory genes — can and do alter their patterns in the interests of the bacterial community as a whole. He observes that bacteria signal each other chemically, calculate their own numbers in relation to food supplies, make decisions on how to behave accordingly to maximize community wellbeing and collectively change their environments to their communal benefit. ^28,29

Bacterial communities thus create complex genetic and behavioral patterns specific to different environmental conditions. The genomes of individual bacteria alter their composition, arrangement and the pattern of which genes are turned on in response to changes in the environment or communal circumstances. This important information is coming from various research laboratories. Both Ben-Jacob and Costerton see individual bacteria gaining the benefits of group living by putting group interests ahead of their own. Ben-Jacob concludes that colonies form a kind of supermind genomic web of intelligent individual genomes. Such webs are capable of creative responses to the environment that bring about “cooperative self-improvement or cooperative evolution.”²⁹

Creativity in crisis

Evolution, in fact, can be seen as a story of crises and solutions, stability out of instability, ever new levels of order emerging from ever new chaos. Tracing its story we encounter fascinating events that can help us understand the crises we face today. We discover that we are not the first global polluters, nor the first species to evolve from competition over resources to cooperative sharing. From the experience of our Earth in evolution we can actually gain hope, courage and even practical solutions.^3,30

Within the great process and pattern of evolution we see the holistic, cooperative, energy efficient, recycling ecosystems that nature has evolved with apparent intelligence, trial and error over billions of years: rain forests, savannas, deserts, river basins, coral reefs. In these living systems we can find inspiration and models for a new kind of human invention: the ecologically sustainable human communities we must develop to survive as a healthy species in this new millennium.

Already in ancient times, food shortages, global atmospheric pollution and destructive ultraviolet radiation were challenges that led to the invention of new DNA genes and new lifestyles. Later evolved animals and plants faced repeated massive extinctions, the survivors of each such crisis retooling, evolving into new forms and functions. It begins to look as though crises afford life unusual evolutionary opportunities to create novel solutions.

These emerging themes — the geobiological systems view, the DNA revolution, our microbial ancestry and the creativity of life in response to crisis — are leading us to a new story of evolution. Darwin will always be credited as the great pioneer of evolution biology, but Lamarck will also be vindicated for his ideas on the reorganization of species through the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The central theme of our changing story is that life is too intelligent to proceed by accident. We can now see clearly that the accidents we thought were the basis for evolution are rather recognized and repaired as they occur, while DNA is altered in intelligent response to the organism’s needs. We see this in the urban complexes of bacteria that simulate later multi-celled creatures, we see it in the multi-creatured cells that we ourselves are made of. It remains to discover far more of how this process works in multi-celled creatures — to build on the half-century of that evidence pioneered by Barbara McClintock.

The larger picture

If biological evolution is revealing itself to our scientific scrutiny as a holistic and intelligent learning process, what of the universe in which it is embedded?

Western science is but a few centuries old — a very new endeavor on the scale of evolution itself, which is counted in billions of years. The concept of biological evolution and the pursuit of its nature came into this science and into the public eye only little more than a single century ago. Yet in that brief moment we came very far: from the first voyages of the Beagle to identify and catalog a handful of our planet’s still countless species in a framework of the first modern theory of their emergence over time to the temporal mapping of an amazing diversity of life, most of it far too small to see with the naked eye, and to the unraveling of the DNA common to them all, the understanding that it is freely traded in a great world wide web, and the capability of shuffling genes among species ourselves, for our own human purposes.

Does this indicate that we now know how evolution works? Consider that it is now less than two years ago that we officially revised the entire tree of evolution, displacing the visible species that had made up the bulk of this tree to the tip of a single branch on a new tree made largely of microbes. Consider that the truly detailed study of these microbes and their worlds has only become technologically possible in the past decade and that our newly observable information about them is dramatically changing our views of how DNA works. And consider that the sciences of astronomy and physics, within whose frameworks biological theories exist, are in complex transitions of their own, in both observation and theory.

Is it possible to know how biological evolution works without knowing how the physical universe in which it is embedded works? If we believe, as the physicists tell us, that everything in the universe is inseparably interconnected at the most fundamental levels of reality, then I think we can agree that there must be a consistency in the realities of our biological and physical worlds.

In fact, our separation of these worlds has been no more than an artificial convenience of western science — a division of disciplines and labor for studying various aspects and levels of our observable universe and planet. Such divisions for the sake of convention should not blind us to the search for consistency throughout the entire system we call our universe.

Unfortunately, there has been a serious disconnect, or lack of communication, between biology and physics, such that mainstream biology still works with rather Newtonian models while physics has gone on through almost a century of relativity theory, quantum theory and explorations of superstrings, multiple dimensions beyond the usual four, zero-point energy, non-locality, consciousness and other adventures in understanding reality.

Micro and macro biologists argue that it is a question of levels — that physics deals with a quantum world the laws and nature of which are unique to its scale, while biology must look to its own unique scale. But when physicists tell us that non-locality, for example, is a basic property of the universe — that we live in a universe that knows itself because every point in it is ever in informational touch with every other, no matter how distant — can biology ignore this? Or must we then assume that every cell in our bodies, for example, is in informational touch with every other — that a change in DNA within one cell is known by all others — not through chemical or electromagnetic information exchange, but by virtue of the basic property of our entire universe? Do we now have a physical basis for the “wisdom of the body” so long ago named by the great physiologist John Cannon? Can we now explain why a human with multiple personality disorder can instantly change their physiologies from diabetic to non-diabetic, allergic to non-allergic in an instant? If an electron can choose to jump orbits, why can’t a cell or an entire organism choose its actions as well?

What we are being forced into is a deep reassessment of the state of our knowledge about universal physical reality, or, more simply, “reality.” Since the advent of quantum theory, some physicists have been exploring the concept that reality is the collapse of wave functions by consciousness; that without conscious observers there is no reality. Does this mean that there can be no universe without humans? — or does it imply that the universe itself is fundamentally conscious — a learning universe that originates in some simple awareness of itself through non-locality and then ever evolves more complex local consciousnesses within itself until it can look clearly at itself from within? This is what some physicists who center the process on ourselves call the anthropic principle.³¹

Western science is committed to the concept of a permanent knowable reality that is understandable through reason, just as western religions believe a similarly knowable reality to be accessible through revelation. Eastern philosophy, which is an integral spiritual science with a far longer history than western science, has seen reality very differently — as rooted in consciousness, illusory, fluctuating or cyclic, at once impermanent and eternal, but still comprehensible, with an internal order.

One of its tenets, as quoted by Swami Muktananda, is that “Universal Consciousness creates this universe in total freedom.”³² Muktananda goes on to say:

Contemporary scientists are becoming aware that the basis of the universe is energy. They are discovering what the ancient sages of India have known for millennia: that it is consciousness which forms the ground, or canvas, on which the material universe is drawn. In fact, the entire world is the play of this energy. Within its own being, by its own free will, it manifests this universe of diversities and becomes all the forms and shapes we see around us. This energy pervades every particle of the universe, from the supreme principle to the tiniest insect, and performs infinite functions. … Just as this energy pervades the universe, it permeates the human body, filling it from head to toe….this conscious energy powers our bodies.³²

The simple fact most basic to all human experience — including that of all scientists for all of our lives — has been swept under the rug by science until now. That fact is that all human experience takes place in our consciousness and in a single eternal present moment. Neither science nor any other human endeavor has ever discovered a way of getting outside this richly patterned moment of consciousness in which we spin out our histories, our cosmic and biological evolution.

Eastern philosophy and the rigorous science of internal exploration through meditation — as arduous a training as any western Ph.D. program — have long explored the consciousness western science is just discovering at the heart of the universe in poking its probes into and through the zero point energy field.

The great human endeavors of East and West have been coming together in understanding during the past half decade. Science and spirituality were separated by historical events into competitive endeavors, just as species are separated into competitive players during their immature phases. But human endeavors can mature like species themselves.

As humanity matures over the next millennium, I believe science will define spirituality from its own perspective while religions incorporate scientific stories of evolution, and that ultimately they will see themselves clearly as aspects of the same whole, the same participatory universe in which all is interconnected. This, in turn, will restore our view of nature as sacred, rather than as the object of our conquest and destruction, and promote our maturation into a cooperative and benign species of beings knowing ourselves as spirit become Earth matter without losing consciousness of our eternal selves. 

 

Visit Elizabet Sahtouris’ Website

See also Timothy Wilken’s Understanding Humanity in Universe, and Synergic Evolution.

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References for Elisabet Sahtouris’ How Evolution Works 

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33. Swami Muktananda. 1980 Meditate, State University of New York Press: Albany, NY

 

How Evolution Works reposted from: LifeWeb