Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (30 page)
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Authors: Dorion Sagan
Tags: #Metaphysics
I’VE HAD CAUSE before in this book to mention Niels Bohr’s provocative quip, that the opposite of a trivial truth is wrong, but the opposite of a great truth is also a great truth. Perhaps an answer to the question of the purpose of life is subject to this dual logic. On the one hand, it seems impossible that our existence here doesn’t have some purpose, however obscure. Beneath the veneer of the ordinary could there not
still
lurk something transcendental, metaphysical, sublime, a nacreous lining to the cosmic farce?
Isn’t that the case? Or could this all be—as the out-and-out nihilists suggest—for nothing?
Was the whole idea of finding a purpose to life—other than the cybernetic existential solution, that is, the teleological tautology that life’s purpose is to find its own purpose (featured in that the best-selling DVD
The Secret,
a kind of new age meditation on the power of realistic prayer)—or alternatively, the biological tautology, that life’s purpose is merely to survive, or again, the verbal tautology that the purpose of life is a life of purpose, all just a bunch of BS?
In his unpublished paper, Carranza quotes Bruce Scofield, who continued, after my mother’s death, her signature course, Environmental Evolution. Scofield, author of several hiking guides and an expert in Mayan astronomy who researches the possible scientific bases for some aspects of astrology, has pointed out that in the last 2,500 years of scientific history the current Newtonian–Darwinian mechanical model has been a relative rarity compared with organicist notions.
15
What happens if we take seriously the notion that Earth is alive, or that it is conscious through us, or that the cosmos is?
One thing we can say is that only a universe that is illusorily separated from itself can be aware that it exists.
The perceiver and perceived must be separated for perception to take place. The breaking of the spell of this difference may be the unmediated unspeakable truth at the center of world mysticism, of perennial philosophy. Perception requires separation, spatiotemporality, the illusion of a subject–object difference. I call it “the paradox of aesthetic ontology.”
To see anything we must think we are, in some way, different from what we perceive. We must hallucinate we are a part.
IN
AN APPRENTICESHIP OR THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS,
the brilliant and bizarre, lovely Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector describes her protagonist’s Spinozistic awakening: “Lori had gone from the religion of her childhood to a nonreligion and now on to something less limited. She had reached the point where she believed in a God so vast that He was the Universe with all its galaxies. She had realized this the day before when she walked into the deserted ocean all alone. And because of His impersonal vastness He was not a God to Whom one could call out. What one could do was become part of Him and be great too.”
MANY THANKS
to Tori Alexander, Nora Bateson, Wendell Berry, Dianne Bilyak, Dan Born, Eric Brado, Martin Brasier, Joanna Bybee, Joseph Cami, Carlos de Castro Carranza, Michael J. Chapman, Bruno Clarke, Paul Cobley, Trey Conner, Cristoph Cox, Kathryn Denning, Jacques Derrida, Rich Doyle, Celia Farber, Don Favareau, Stephan Harding, Peter Harries-Jones, John Hartigan, Stefan Helmreich, J. Marvin Herndon, Myra Hird, Bill Huth, J. Richard Kamber, Jean-Marie Kauth, Kermit, Andre Khalil, Eben Kirksey, Kalevi Kull, Frank L. Lambert, Timothy Leary, James Lovelock, James MacAllister, Ximena de la Macorra, Jaymie Matthews, Margaret McFall-Ngai, Josh Mitteldorf, Meghan Murphy, Michelle Murphy, Natasha Myers, Sina Najafi, Boris Petrov, Rick Ryals, Tonio Sagan, Stanley Salthe, Jan Sapp, Eric D. Schneider, Astrid Schraeder, John Scythes, Steve Shavel, Isabelle Stengers, Joy Stocke, F. J. R. “Max” Taylor, Rebecca Todd, Evan Thompson, William Irwin Thompson, Giuseppe Trautteur, Jessica Whiteside, Don Whitfield, Cary Wolfe. To all of these, none of whom did less than offer me a kind word (Wendell Berry), call me one of his heroes (Timothy Leary), or return a letter (Jacques Derrida), I am indebted. Others taught, inspired, shared with, edited, encouraged, supported, and lectured me.
Joy Stocke, Sina Najafi, Victoria N. Alexander, Frank L. Lambert, J. Marvin Herndon, Natasha Myers, and Rich Doyle provided detailed feedback on specific sections. So did Jason Weidemann of the University of Minnesota Press, who provocatively remarked that book writing is a mysterious mix of “crochet and alchemy,” bon mots I heard as “
croquet
and alchemy,” a near homonym but distinct algorithm that I followed for most of the book but whose perhaps wildly different consequences I have not had time to redress. Jason gave me the Apache art critic Paul Chaat Smith’s slim book
Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong
as a model. I loved the line in Smith’s acknowledgments where he agrees to share not just the credit but the blame with some of his friends for any mistakes he may have made. I concur wholeheartedly and extend a similar acknowledgment across the literary nethersphere in appreciation for this plagiarizable observation. Thank you all.
1
. Sam Harris,
Free Will
(New York: Free Press, 2012), 64.
2
. Rick Warren,
The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2002), 20.
3
. Martin Heidegger,
The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy
(London: Continuum, 2002), 5.
4
. Ibid.
5
. Ibid., 205.
6
. P. H. Barrett, “Early Writings of Charles Darwin,” in
Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity; together with Darwin’s Early and Unpublished Notebooks,
edited by H. E. Gruber (London: Wildwood House, 1974).
7
. C. R. Darwin,
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
(London: John Murray, 1859), 482.
8
. Sharon E. Kingsland, “The Beauty of the World: Evelyn Hutchinson’s Vision of Science,” in
The Art of Ecology: Writings of G. Evelyn Hutchinson
, edited by David K. Skelly, David M. Post, and Melinda D. Smith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 4.
9
. Ibid.
1. THE HUMAN IS MORE THAN HUMAN
1
. Richard Feynman,
The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen–Scientist
(New York: Basic Books, 1999), 10.
2
. Karen Barad,
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).
3
. Freeman Dyson,
Origins of Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
4
. Clair Folsome, “Microbes,” in
The Biosphere Catalogue,
edited by Tango P. Snyder (Fort Worth, Tex.: Synergetic, 1985), 51–56.
5
. Steven L. Salzberg, Owen White, Jeremy Peterson, and Jonathan A. Eisen, “Microbial Genes in the Human Genome: Lateral Transfer or Gene Loss?”
Science
292 (2001): 1903–6.
6
. Junjie Qin et al., “A Human Gut Microbial Gene Catalogue Established by Metagenomic Sequencing,”
Nature,
March 4, 2010, 59–65.
7
. Yun Kyung Lee and Sarkis K. Mazmanian, “Has the Microbiota Played a Critical Role in the Evolution of the Adaptive Immune System?”
Science,
December 24, 2010, 1768–73; and see Gérard Eberl, “A New Vision of Immunity: Homeostasis of the Superorganism,”
Mucosal Immunology,
May 5, 2010, 450–60.
8
. In
What Is Sex?
“I” put forward the notion of
hypersex
—the great realm of gene trading not down through the generations but from organism to organism, across types and species, sometimes as we’ve recently seen in the news, as decisions of what to eat, as live food also contains genes. The distributed desire that accompanies organisms commingling, that leads them to eat, meet, engulf, invade, trade genes, acquire genomes, and sometimes permanently merge is bigger than eros; it is more like some primordial cosmic wanderlust. In Myra Hird’s book
The Origins of Sociable Life
I see hypersex refracted back at me, as it were, in fascinating new ways that include not only an evocation of the power of symbiogenesis—the evolution of new species by symbiosis—but in a cross-fertilization of interdisciplinary thought and fields. Imagining that some readers may presume she suffers from microbiology or geosciences envy, Hird, who observed the laboratory of my mother, Lynn Margulis, and whose book I read in preparation for this chapter, admits it but writes: “Might this castigation . . . be a ruse to dismiss further critical reflection? I worry that a sense of smugness pervades the social sciences generally and licenses the false impression that natural scientists are largely ignorant of philosophical and social studies of science (they/scientists are observed; we/social scientists are observers) while we can proceed with social scientific analyses that assume we may gain sufficient understanding of phenomena by studying what we distinguish as social aspects of materiality” (Myra J. Hird,
The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution after Science Studies
[Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009], 181). The very assumption that we can be completely on the outside of what we are observing (which is subtly and ironically reinforced by making this assumption explicit) is a recurrent problem, salient in the study of science, what might be called “the meta-objective aporia”: that because we are looking at people’s frames, their hidden assumptions and sociocultural context, we are not equally mired in our own.
9
. Margaret McFall-Ngai, “Origins of the Immune System,” in
Chimeras and Consciousness: Evolution of the Sensory Self,
edited by Lynn Margulis, Celeste A. Asikainen, and Wolfgang E. Krumbein (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).
10
. Dick Teresi, “Lynn Margulis Says She’s Not Controversial, She’s Right: It’s the Neo-Darwinists, Population Geneticists, AIDS Researchers, and English-Speaking Biologists as a Whole Who Have It All Wrong,”
Discover,
April 2011, 66–71.
11
. Christopher Carter, “The Human Genome Is Composed of Viral DNA: Viral Homologues of the Protein Products Cause Alzheimer’s Disease and Others via Autoimmune Mechanisms,” Nature Precedings, 2010,
http://precedings.nature.com/documents/4765/version/1
.
12
. Carl Zimmer, “Tending the Body’s Microbial Garden,”
New York Times,
June 19, 2012.
13
. Carrie Arnold, “Gut Microbes May Drive Evolution: The Bacteria That Live Quietly in Our Bodies May Have a Hand in Shaping Evolution,”
Scientific American
(2012),
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=backseat-drivers
(published in print as “Backseat Drivers”) (accessed April 29, 2012).
14
. Karen Milius, “Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant,”
Science News
(2011), Wired Science,
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/green-sea-slug/
.
15
. Valerie Brown, “Bacteria ’R’ Us,”
Miller-McCune
(2010),
http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/bacteria-r-us-23628/
.
16
. Jaroslav Flegr, Jirˇí Klose, Martina Novotná, Miroslava Berenreitterová, and Jan Havlícˇek, “Increased Incidence of Traffic Accidents in Toxoplasma-Infected Military Drivers and Protective Effect RhD Molecule Revealed by a Large-Scale Prospective Cohort Study,”
BMC Infectious Diseases
9 (2009): 72.
17
. Kathleen McAuliffe, “How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy,”
Atlantic Magazine,
March 2012,
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is-making-you-crazy/8873/
.
18
. Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis, “Candidiasis and the Origin of Clowns,”
New England Watershed,
October 2005, 16–19. Reprinted in Margulis and Sagan,
Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature
(White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green), 146–52.
19
. This chapter originally was given as an address in 2011 in Montreal to the Society of Cultural Anthropology.
20
. Alfred North Whitehead,
Science and the Modern World
(New York: New American Library, 1962), 10.
21
. Ibid., 15.
22
. Ibid., 17.
23
. These are the rough facts of thermodynamics that I suggest sum to a fourth Copernican deconstruction. (The first is heliocentrism. The second is organicism: we are not made of any rare, special stuff, as the vitalists thought, but from organic compounds, cosmically abundant and found in space. The third is Darwin’s emplacement of us within a temporal continuum, not above but within the animals.) The basic facts of the fourth deconstruction, which shows that the process of life, no less than its material constituents, is common, are these:
1. We live in an energetic cosmos where energy, if not hindered, tends to spread. Though simple, this statement is in fact a modern statement (which applies to open as well as sealed systems) of the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is not mysterious but simply a mathematical abstraction (a ratio) that measures the spread of energy.
2. Although Ludwig Boltzmann initially identified entropy with disorder, the natural tendency for energy to spread is often accomplished by organized, self-like systems. Energy’s spread, or the reduction of gradients, is accomplished more effectively by whirlpools and storms, recursive chemical reactions, and other cyclical processes than by unorganized matter. More entropy is produced, more gradients are reduced, and more energy is dissipated by such natural “self-like” organizations.
3. Thus not only does life not
violate
the second law, but living matter actively accomplishes a basic physical task implicit in the basic structure of matter in disequilibrium, which is inherently teleological, tending toward an end (at least at the local scale) of equilibrium and employing complex systems to accomplish those ends. Metabolizing organisms spread more energy than nonarranged matter, and the spread of growing, reproducing life better accomplishes the second law–described mandate of energy to spread (gradients to be reduced), which is at the core of thermal physics. Einstein identified thermodynamics as, of all the areas of physics, the one least likely to change in the future. In manifesting the second law, life is completely natural. Nonetheless, both scientists and religionists continue to miss this, perhaps because entropy has been conflated with disorder rather than recognized as a measure of energy’s spread. For example, Pope Pius XII invoked the second law as proof of God’s existence, apparently because only he could violate the law of ever-increasing disorder to produce organized life. But the neo-Darwinist philosopher Daniel Dennett exemplarily repeats this mistake when he writes that life forms “are things that defy” and constitute a “systematic reversal” of the second law (
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
[New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995], 69).
4. Despite the tendency for energy to spread manifested by life, this tendency is not
maximized
by life. To maximize your entropy production right now you would have to burst into flames. In fact, measurements show that fast-growing organisms such as juvenile forms and pioneer species in early-stage ecosystems have higher specific entropy production or entropy production per volume than mature forms such as adults or climax-stage ecosystems. The nature of the universe, codified by the second law, tugs organisms to find ways to work together to stably reduce gradients, dissipating the energy that sustains them. As populations must always apportion a fragment of the energy they commandeer toward their own preservation, both the entropy maximization theorists within thermodynamics and the cultural theorists who critique them miss the brute empiricism of sustainability in real ecosystem dynamics.
5. Evolution trends. A universe marked by energy spread is implicitly telic, goal-directed, or end-driven (“preparing the way” for both life and consciousness). Even simple nonequilibrium systems unconsciously calculate ways to reach equilibrium, and complex systems maintain their nonequilibrium as they lay larger energy gradients to waste. The tendency of energy to spread confers a direction upon evolution as a whole. Here evolutionists as distinct politically as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould both err (unintentionally providing fuel for creationists by ignoring clear evidence) when they characterize evolution as intrinsically random. In fact, evolution is accompanied by clear, measurable vectors: Evolution’s main trends include increase in number of individuals, species, and taxa; increase in bacterial and animal respiration efficiency; increase in number of cell types; and long-term increases, despite periodic setbacks from mass extinctions, in global biodiversity, connected sentience, and aggregate information-processing abilities. Evolution, in other words, is a thermodynamic phenomenon. And it is not just theoretical. Using living representatives of animal groups and plotting a curve according to the order in which their groups appeared in the fossil record, the Russian scientist Alexander Zotin quantified a striking trend toward increase in oxygen efficiency over geological time (“Bioenergetic Trends of Evolutionary Progress of Organisms,” in
Thermodynamics and Regulation of Biological Processes,
edited by Alexander I. Lamprecht [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984]).
Another Russian scientist, Vladimir I. Vernadsky (whose work Bataille read in Paris in 1929), pointed out that the number of chemical elements in the Periodic Table that have become incorporated into life at Earth’s surface has increased dramatically over evolutionary time. Later evolved respiring bacteria produce seventeen times more ATP from sugar molecules than fermenting bacteria. Using a gauge he calls “free energy density rate”—consisting of ergs, a measure of work (per second per gram)—the astrophysicist Eric Chaisson scores the human brain higher than any part of a known star. Using a slightly different measure (watts per kilogram), which engineers call “specific power,” we find that the human body, thanks to the energy centers known as mitochondria, is also, adjusted for mass, moving energy through themselves at ten thousand times the rate of the sun. According to this gauge, basically a proxy for energy flow, Chaisson points to increases in complex systems as they evolve from galaxies through stars to biospheres, reptiles, mammals, brains, societies, and computers. Although it is not perfect (it is anomalously high in flames, hummingbirds, and respiring bacteria), Chaisson’s free energy density rate matches our general intuition of complexity and underscores the crucial point that evolving complexity depends on energy flow through systems (
Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature
[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001]). Life would thus seem to be purposive, going somewhere, not “on its own” but along with the universe. The evidence countermands evolutionary prejudices in favor of randomness
and
religious predilections for a humanlike deity: Life is going somewhere, although its telos would seem, on the basis of the evidence, to be operating
through
rather than
to
man. I return to this question in a more vernacular style in the final essay.
24
. Josh Mitteldorf and John Pepper, “Senescence as an Adaptation to Limit the Spread of Disease,”
Journal of Theoretical Biology
260, no. 2 (2009): 186–95.
25
. Robert S. Loomis and David J. Connor,
Crop Ecology: Productivity and Management in Agricultural Systems
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
26
. Stefan Helmreich,
Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 283.
