EARTHDANCE: Living Systems in Evolution Elisabet Sahtouris Copyright © 1999 by Elisabet Sahtouris -------------------------------------- To my planet and its people -------------------------------------- Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space But only the dance lives at once in both space and time In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participant is completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the...cosmos. We begin to realize that our universe is in a sense brought into being by the participation of those involved in it. It is a dance, for participation is its organizing principle. This is the important new concept of quantum mechanics. It takes the place in our understanding of the old notion of observation, of watching without getting involved. Quantum theory says it can't be done. That spectators can sit in their rigid row as long as they like, but there will never be a performance unless at least one of them takes part And conversely, that it needs only one participant, because that one is the essence of all people and the quintessence of the cosmos. -Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things Thank you. Special thanks to Jim Lovelock and Lynn Margulis for the original inspiration to write this book and for their encouragement over the years, also to Teddy Goldsmith for creating the Gaia Seminars in Cornwall. My deep appreciation to Dave Ratcliffe and Rebecca Lord for putting the book on the Web while it was out of print, and to Bruce Bigenho for his tireless efforts with the second edition. My gratitude extends as well to Nancy Larson for the original cover photo and to my son, Philip LaVere, for the cover design. Lastly, but certainly not least, I thank with a smile my sometimes enigmatic but wonderful editor at Praeger, Jeremy Geelan, for his great enthusiasm and effort to get EarthDance out there! Contents FOREWORD BY JAMES E. LOVELOCK A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR 1. A TWICE-TOLD TALE 2. COSMIC BEGINNINGS 3. THE YOUNG EARTH 4. PROBLEMS FOR EARTHLIFE 5. THE DANCE OF LIFE 6. A GREAT LEAP 7. EVIDENCE OF EVOLUTION 8. FROM PROTISTS TO POLYPS 9. FROM POLYPS TO POSSUMS 10. FROM POSSUMS TO PEOPLE 11. THE BIG BRAIN EXPERIMENT 12. WHAT THE PLAY IS ALL ABOUT 13. WORLDVIEWS FROM THE PLEISTOCENE TO PLATO 14. WORLDVIEWS FROM PLATO TO THE PRESENT 15. LESS THAN PERFECT, MORE THAN MACHINE 16. THE BODY OF HUMANITY 17. A MATTER OF MATURATION 18. ECOLOGICAL ETHICS 19. THE INDIGENOUS WAY 20. SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY 21. COSMIC CONTINUATION BIBLIOGRAPHY Foreword --------------- The Gaia hypothesis, now accorded the status of Gaia theory, is maturing with experience and the tests of time, not unlike the humans of this book. It is spurring a great deal of scientific research into the geophysiology of our living planet. It is also spurring philosophic conceptions of what it means to our species to be part of a living planet. Some of these conceptions stay carefully within the accepted limits of science; others have a religious bent. Most, especially environmentalist conceptions, advocate for humanity, being primarily concerned with human survival. A few, taking a clue from my partner Lynn Margulis and myself, advocate for the planet and the much maligned microbes with which the Gaian system originated and which continue to do its basic work. Elisabet Sahtouris' conception integrates scientific Gaian evolution with the human search to connect with our roots, inspiring us to learn from billions of years of Gaian experience in the self-organization of workable living systems. It is well balanced between advocacy for the planet and advocacy for humans, placing the onus on humans to recognize the lack of maturity involved in believing we can manage the planet, and to learn instead to follow its lead in organizing ourselves. Elisabet gives us valuable insights as she draws parallels between the evolution of cells and the evolution of human society, pointing out the contrast between the healthy organization of cells, bodies, and biosystems on the one hand and the unhealthy organization of economics and politics in human society on the other. While she argues that our social evolution is not as much under our control as we like to think, she warns us that our survival depends on our meeting the evolutionary demand to transform competitive exploitation into cooperative synergy. On the whole, her advice makes sense because she herself has taken the trouble to learn directly from nature as well as from the growing store of scientific knowledge about nature. I began the preface to my own book The Ages of Gaia by saying that the place in which it was written was relevant to its understanding. Living and working in the Devonshire countryside, far from universities and large research organizations, makes me an eccentric as a scientist, but, as I said, it is the only way to work on an unconventional topic such as Gaia. When I met Elisabet, having accepted her invitation to trace Gaia's roots in Greece, I recognized her as a kindred spirit. She had abandoned academia for a simple lifestyle in the kind of natural setting that brings one closer to understanding what our planet and our species are all about; she was free to develop her own conception of Gaia through a synthesis of scientific knowledge and personal experience of nature. To my surprise, she expressed some concern, some guilt, at having abandoned her profession of science for a pleasant existence in a forest overlooking the sea, the kind of forest that had been home to her in childhood, where she could work out the meaning of things for herself. As I read her work in progress, I was able to assure her she could never have done anything comparable in a constrained academic setting. In the intervening years, even in the short time since I wrote my own words about Gaia being an unconventional topic, less eccentric scientists than I have declared Gaia more conventional, meaning that Gaia theory is now recognized as a legitimate and fruitful basis for scientific investigation and is thus being brought into the scientific fold. In our first account of Gaia as a system neither Lynn Margulis nor I fully understood what it was we were describing. Our language tended to be anthropomorphic and, especially in my first book, Gaia, poetic. Not surprisingly, some scientists misunderstood our intentions, but over time we developed a clearer version, which became Gaia theory. This theory sees the evolution of the material environment and the evolution of organisms as tightly coupled into a single and indivisible process or domain. Gaia, with its capacity for homeostasis, is an emergent property of this domain. As the title of one article in Science put it, "No Longer Willful, Gaia Becomes Respectable." This means that Gaia scientists are constrained by bureaucratic forces, by the pressures of tenure, and by the tribal divisions and rules of scientific disciplines. That, in turn, means we need some antidote to the inevitable separations and constraints. We need independent synthesizers and visionaries who can make sense of the data produced by the scientific establishment and present it to us in ways that make our living planet real to us within the Gaian context and thus give meaning to our own lives and those of our children and grandchildren. This is what Elisabet Sahtouris' work means to me, for she comfortably integrates the traditionally separated domains of biology, geology, and atmospheric science to show us the evolution of our living planet and our own roots within it. She then inspires us on ethical grounds to learn from this planetary organism of which we are part, showing us how we can mature as a species well integrated into the larger dance of life. Elisabet uses the metaphor of dance effectively for its concepts of improvisation and evolution, the creation of order from chaos, the myriad patterns that can be created from a few basic steps. I am myself an inventor of scientific instruments, and so it is second nature to me to think in terms of mechanical and mathematical models. Cybernetic models have proved especially useful in my work of demonstrating how Gaian homeostasis, such as maintaining the Earth's temperature, might work. Yet I quite agree with Elisabet that any model we make of nature is at heart metaphorical in that it begins with some image or formula familiar to us humans and used to represent the complexities of nature in simple, understandable, and useful ways. No metaphor should be mistaken for reality, and perhaps a variety of metaphors is insurance against the temptation to do so. I am increasingly impressed by scientists and philosophers who find non-mechanical metaphors for natural systems useful in interpreting Gaia theory. Elisabet's analysis of science reflects a trend that may well make science in the near future as unrecognizable as today's science would be to the ancients. She does well to remind us that science is a human activity that evolves, a living system in which conservatism should be balanced by healthy controversy. After all, as she so well describes, all Gaian systems are forever busy working out their cooperation through conflicting interests, their unities through diversity. The optimistic view this book radiates, that despite our errors and immaturities we can still become a healthy species within a healthy planet, is much needed in this age of doomsday predictions. Though time is growing short in our continued destruction of forests, atmospheres, and other critical Gaian systems, nothing would make me happier personally than to see Gaia theory useful in bringing about a better world for Gaia and her people. -James E. Lovelock A Note from the Author ---------------- This book is a work of philosophy in the original sense of a search for wisdom, for practical guidance in human affairs through understanding the natural order of the cosmos to which we belong. It bears little resemblance to what we have come to call philosophy since that effort was separated from natural science and became more an intellectual exercise in understanding than a practical guide for living. To find meaning and guidance in nature, I integrated my personal experience of it with those scientific accounts that seemed to best fit it. From this synthesis, meaning and lessons for humanity emerged freely. I wrote the original version in the peaceful, natural setting of a tiny old village on a small pine-forested Greek island, where I could consider the research and debates of scientists, historians, and philosophers, then test them against the natural world I was trying to understand. Putting into simple words the specialized technical language of scientists and winding my way through labyrinths of philosophic prose, I gradually simplified the story of the origins and nature of our planet within the larger cosmos, and of our human origins, nature, and history within the larger being of this planet. The Gaia hypothesis, now Gaia theory, of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis -- the theory that our planet and its creatures constitute a single self-regulating system that is in fact a great living being -- is the conception of physical reality in which my philosophy is rooted. Quite simply, it makes more sense on all levels -- intuitive, experiential, scientific, philosophical, spiritual and even aesthetic and ethical -- than any other conception I know. And I have come to believe, in the course of this work, that this conception contains profound and pressing implications for all humanity. To ensure that my vision of evolution and history would stay simple and in clear focus, I kept telling its essence and more than a few of its particulars in something of the style of an ancient storyteller during many social evenings among my Greek village friends. I also wrote the story for children before I set about an adult version. To my surprise, these deliberate exercises in simplicity proved more difficult than writing for professional audiences, for in stripping our intellectual language to the essence of what is being said, we must be very sure that essence is really there, really coherent. Science has been a process of differentiating our knowledge into an incredible wealth of precise details, but these details become ever more disconnected from one another and cry out for integration into coherent wholes. I have no doubt I will be accused of oversimplification, and perhaps rightly so, as one pays for scope in lack of detail and precision. Friends and colleagues have asked me now and then why I insist on dealing with all evolution, even all the cosmos, to discuss human matters; why I don't narrow my scope to workable proportions. My answer is that context is what gives meaning, and a serious search of context is an ever-expanding process leading inevitably to the grandest context of all: the whole cosmos. As the nested contexts for the human story -- especially the context of evolution -- became clearer to me, they revealed a simple but elegant biological vision of just why our human condition has become so critical and what we might do to improve it. Other people ask why I'm so eager to save humanity when it is proving such a social and ecological disaster. To this I can only answer that, as far as I can see, every healthy living being or system in nature has evolved survival oriented behavior, and I do not exclude myself from this natural health scheme. Of course my purpose is to show how we are straying from this course, so that we may correct the deviations. I can no more proclaim the worldview arising from my work "reality" than can any particular philosopher working at creating a meaningful worldview in any particular place and time, drawing on the scientific and historical knowledge of that place and time. Philosophy is an intensely personal search that one hopes will have relevance to others, will be validated by their experience, will offer them some insight and guidance, or will at least stimulate them in their disagreement to search further on their own. Yet a work of philosophy also reflects the broader context and search of a culture at a particular stage, and the biological evolutionary viewpoint of this book reflects a broadly emerging pattern of search for our origins and direction in nature -- a reawakening of that search begun by the original pre-Socratic philosophers, indeed that goes further back to the roots of religion -- the search for re-ligio, for "reconnection" with our origins in the nature or cosmos that gave rise to us and within which we continue our co-creation. Paradoxically, our self-imposed separation from nature by way of an `objective' mechanical worldview during the past few millennia has led to the scientific knowledge that makes it possible to understand and reintegrate ourselves into nature's self-organization patterns. It has also brought us to a stage of technology that permits us to share our discoveries and our understanding planet-wide in no time at all, to work together as a body of humanity with hope of transcending our present crisis in a far healthier and happier future for ourselves and all the rest of Earthlife. Although the original version of this book was done in relative isolation and without funding, I am indebted and profoundly grateful to many teachers and friends, from the forest creatures with whom I spent my earliest years to Jim Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who have not only informed and inspired me in this work, but who gave me invaluable encouragement, confidence, and opportunities in seeing the work through. As this edition goes to press, scientists have recognized that we are well into the sixth great extinction of species -- the first caused by a single species, and proceeding more rapidly even than the last one, which eliminated the great dinosaurs sixty million years ago because Earth's climate changed dramatically under the impact of a huge meteor in the Caribbean basin. There is no doubt that we humans continue creating the chaos of ongoing disaster and denial. As I say in Chapter 19, Onondaga Chief Oren Lyons, at the Earth Summit known as Rio '92, reminded us that the passengers of the Titanic refused to believe that marvel of modern technology could go down on its maiden voyage. It did, of course, go down, as its extremely popular and timely Hollywood version reminded us. We may be a true biological marvel as a hi-tech human species, but we have truly gotten ourselves into serious trouble. A healthy world for all cannot easily rise from total destruction; rather it must be formed now, in the midst of the chaos we create. Such a "new world order," I am again and again reminded by the indigenous elders I have listened to intently for their deep understanding of sustainability, must be based on a very old world order -- on the laws of nature as indigenous people understand them, on laws they have been trying to teach us for a very long time: laws of balance, harmony, of giving back in full measure for all you take; laws designed to insure survival at least seven generations into the future. The conclusion reached in this book, that we humans as a species must learn quickly to fit our lifestyles harmoniously into the rest of nature, is what led me to seek out indigenous knowledge between editions. Indigenous peoples never saw themselves as anything but an integral part of nature, and so they tend to know much more about that than do industrial peoples. Once, I listened to Jeannette Armstrong, a wise woman of the Okinakan nation, which still lives traditionally, speaking in detail about her peoples' understanding of nature. It was precisely the understanding I had gained in the course of writing this book far off on a Greek island -- confirmation to me that I had gotten it right, for her people had the credibility of thousands of years of careful and scientific observation. The immense knowledge of nature, the coherent philosophies and the non-technological achievements of indigenous people impressed me deeply. They have observed us far more carefully than we them. Their conscious choice not to develop technological consumer societies gave me a more balanced view of human life and some valuable insights I have shared in several new chapters. One of these insights -- that there can no more be one true science than one true religion -- was difficult to share with fellow scientists of my industrial culture. Almost invariably, they responded, "You mean indigenous knowledge; they don't have science, there is only one science." I have therefore taken some care to show that indigenous people do indeed have science, by our own definitions, as a deep aspect of their cultures (see Chapter 19). The great effort of industrial culture to fragment our world, to separate science, religion, art, economics, politics and other social practices, has long seemed to me very costly in blinding us to their interrelations. Today this is expressed in such problems as the difficulty of integrating the economy with ecology, two words meaning, in their original Greek, the organizational design and the operating principles of a household. Clearly they should never have been separated! How could it have happened? As Janine Benyus pointed out in a speech at a Bioneers conference, we assigned one group of people -- biologists -- to study how other species make a living, and another unrelated group of people -- economists -- to determine how humans make a living. Only now do we see interest in living systems enter the world of business. Indigenous people have also taught me that good science can be done without tearing it out of the seamless and sacred fabric of life. They have always known this is a participatory universe, which Western scientists only now acknowledge. We simply cannot observe it without changing it. Indigenous people understand science and spirituality as aspects of the same reality -- an intelligent, conscious continuum with physical and non-physical aspects. They are aware that all parts and aspects of nature are in constant non-physical communication. In Western science, physicists only now discover the deep connectedness and dialogue of everything through concepts of non-locality and zero-point energy. One crisp cool day in a cornfield on the barren Hopi reservation in Arizona, I watched Martin Gashweseoma -- now almost the only traditional Hopi elder still alive -- kneeling in the dry earth beneath a brilliant blue sky, picking dried ears of blue corn from the stubby plants rustling in a cold late fall wind. Martin continues to live in the sacred way, with only the digging stick given by the Great Spirit, Maasau, along with instructions for living in peace and simplicity. He stood up to greet me and began speaking of the eviction of the faithful Hopi from Old Oraibi in 1906 with only what they could carry, of his uncle Yukiuma who led his people like Gandhi on this exodus, even going to the White House to plead their cause, of the sacred stone tablets his uncle later entrusted to him, of the way they were taken away, of the Day of Purification the white man, Bahanna, is bringing on, with all its suffering as the world becomes desert.... What he said was familiar, as I had been working with the Hopi and other Indians for years by this time, but it took on new significance as it burned into my heart on that crisp, clear fall day, the azure sky blazing behind him as we talked. Three men who had brought me to the field stood behind me and never interrupted; Martin did not take his eyes from mine during our long interchange. It was an experience of total undivided attention I, as a woman, had never experienced from men. The intense energy flowing between Martin and myself created a dense whirlpool tangible even to me, a person normally insensitive to such things. A whirlpool, as I say in this book, is a living entity, and Martin wove such an entity. Anguish flowed through me at his despair. He spoke of his and other elders' failure to reach the White Brother -- our dominant culture -- with the Hopi Prophecy, and of how even the Hopi were abandoning their traditions, their cornfields. The Hopi prophecy, discussed at the beginning of Chapter 19, says the world as we know it will end if the White Brother does not heed the Sacred Way of the Red Brother and share his mission to develop technology in that spirit. His truth -- the need for cooperation between the ways of indigenous and industrial peoples to build a sustainable world -- is vital to our survival. I found this same truth over and over again in many teachings I have gained from indigenous peoples in many places. I explored this truth in many contexts, from presidential commission dialogues on a sustainable human future in Washington D.C. to traditional villages in the Peruvian Andes, where I spent a whole year studying the cosmology and science of ancient Andean cultures, and now in the corporate world of multinationals, the most powerful organizations humanity has yet devised. This corporate world, which, along with science and technology, is often blamed for current crises, is suddenly in crisis itself because of a dramatic new development on the human scene: the Internet. From my perspective as an evolution biologist, this World Wide Web of information exchange is a kind of fractal biology repeat pattern of the first version, built by bacteria billions of years ago, as we see in Chapter 4. And just like its ancient counterpart -- still in existence among bacteria worldwide today -- it is a self-organizing living system. Chapter 20 describes the inherent organizational design and operating principles of this new Web as those of living systems, and that is why it has the power to force corporations with organizational designs and operating principles based on command and control mechanics to change their ways -- to become more like living systems themselves. As corporations, which play such a powerful determining role in our species' behavior as a whole, understand and abide by the sustainable survival principles of living systems, their goals will come into harmony with our personal and community goals. We can then mature like other species from competition to cooperation and build a human society in which the goals of individual and community, of local and global economy, of economy and ecology are met. This will shift us out of crises and into the happier, healthier world of which we all dream. Let it be so! Elisabet Sahtouris, September, 1999 1 A Twice-Told Tale --------------- 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. · · · 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. · · · 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. 2 Cosmic Beginnings --------------- 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! · · · 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. · · · 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. 3 The Young Earth --------------- 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. · · · 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. · · · 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? · · · 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. · · · 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. 4 Problems for Earthlife --------------- 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. · · · 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. · · · 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 tu