Category Archives: What is Life?

The Seat of Awareness: On Plants and What We can Learn from Them

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“From the viewpoint of the evolutionary biologist it is reasonable to assume that the sensitive, embodied actions of plants and bacteria are part of the same continuum of perception and action that culminates in our most revered mental attributes. “Mind” may be the result of interacting cells. Mind and body, perceiving and living, are equally self-referring, self-reflexive processes already present in the earliest bacteria.”
—Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, “What is Life?”, 1995

From what do sentience, awareness, consciousness and intelligence come from? Are these capacities a product of an organism’s complexity? At what point does it first appear? is it a property inherent to even the simplest organic chemicals? of peptide chains and amino acids, of atoms themselves?What of the organizing principle that seems to guide embryogenesis, the growth and form of every living individual of every species? Is it in action in the most ‘simple’ interactions between organic chemicals and the energy flowing through them, that favors one form over another and animates those same forms once they meet some critical minimal level of complexity?  Is this evolution towards complexity and ‘awareness’ an inevitability? A product of its component parts and the energies within it? [This is an idea that is separate from the notion of an inevitable ‘progress’ of life, always moving ‘forward’. Progress is a human notion, an assessment and a valuation of the change around us, not a ‘goal’ of natural selection and the animating ‘flux’ of energies within the universe.] Rudimentary awareness must exists at some necessary and basic level in the simplest single celled organisms…even in plants.

I look to that which is shared between all organisms and question the idea of the animal brain, and its neural system, as the basis for these things and its purported absence in plants, fungi, bacteria, viruses and archaea, as lacking in them. The brain itself and associated nervous system is a unique and complex structure present only in ‘higher’ animals. This bias in favor of the brain and neural systems, especially that of the human brain, as the seat of awareness and consciousness, ignores the requirements of any organism. We are biased in our insistence that these capacities must be located in a singular physical organ and no other. A singular occurrence in the universe. A huge conceit on our part, that this capacity exists in us alone, in and organ and tissues we could could physically evaluate, one which we ‘carry’ internally within us as we move freely about. The body, any body, is a vessel which contains life and is shaped by it. Life is both of the body and transcendent, existing beyond it. Life exists within the continuously unfolding moment. Life is not a ‘thing’ so one can hardly expect awareness, consciousness and intelligence to fit neatly into a limited organ, however we define it. The roots of this reach back into the study of evolution, ecology, cell biology, neurobiology, the metabolism and thermodynamics of life and the expanding field of quantum biology.

This latest thought piece has been inspired by three recent books I’ve read, Ed Yong’s, “An Immense World”, Paco Calvo’s, “Planta Sapiens” and Zoe Schlanger’s, “The Light Eaters”. I am not a scientist. I’m a student driven to make sense of this world. The connections and conclusions I make here are mine, although they may be suggested by the writings of others. Continue reading →

Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness and Being, Thoughts on the Book

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[My ‘reviews’ are not strictly book reviews. I’m not trying to distill the author’s ideas down into a simpler ‘bite-sized’ piece or discuss their ‘style’. These are my thoughts after having read these books. My attempts to make sense of them, usually after several rewrites, as I work to fit them into what I already ‘know’, an attempt to make the ideas presented in this book, consistent with those which I’ve read by other authors. They include ideas not covered by this author. Rarely, if ever, can you come to an understanding from a singular perspective. This is a link to an annotated bibliography on my Blog of several of the more significant books which have  influenced me on this topic,]

Complexity theory? Do we need a theory to determine what is complex? No, that’s not what this is about. Theise’s book does not layout a system for determining what should be considered complex/complicated or not. This is a book about systems and structures in nature and how they come about. He discusses how mainstream science has fallen short in explaining this and why, the author believes, without changes in approach, we will continue to fall short. He goes on to present an alternative, or, rather, a ‘sister’ approach which can provide a previously excluded way of ‘knowing’, and in so doing, can account for the ‘gaps’. The problems are not just that this is a difficult concept to understand, but that at the most basic, quantum, level, that at which nothing can be divided smaller, where all things ‘begin’, actions and processes do not follow human logic and contemporary expectation….

I remember reading the book “The Limits to Growth” in the early ’80’s, which introduced me to ‘systems theory’, an approach which required looking at all of the parts and actions within a system, consider their relationships and how they work together, in order to understand its ‘working’. A system could be ‘modeled’, mathematically and the long complex equations run on a computer. There were generally multiple possible models to run. This gave us a degree of ‘predictive’ power, but these would always be approximations, because no model could be perfect and every situation, every starting point, would result in a somewhat different ‘answer’.  I followed this with James Gleick’s book on Chaos Theory and its ‘ability’ to explain certain types of patterns, which appear spontaneously in nature, while introducing me to the idea and maths of ‘fractals’. There were multiple  books on ecology which necessarily take a wholistic approach. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, published their book on Gaia Theory, a product of their collaboration which began in the 1970’s, a theory of the Earth itself functioning as a self-regulating system, as if it were a gigantic, single, organism of which we ourselves are a part. All of these were related, coming out over a short span of years. These were ‘new’ hypotheses and theories, never before seriously considered by science back then, but now being investigated, their validity, and the answers they suggest, impossible to ignore.

Science often advances this way. Seemingly radical ideas, rejected by the majority of the mainstream…until resistance worn down, their validity demonstrated through thoughtfully conducted and reviewed experimentation, the scientific community then coming around to more broadly adopt them and reshape science and our understanding. (Some argue that this ‘process’ requires some number of the old guard to literally die, younger minds being more free to consider the new.)  Margulis and Lovelock’s ideas were just too far out there for most at the time. For many, such thinking then belonged to the realm of metaphysics, or fanciful science fiction, frivolous exercises in thought and belief. Exploring these ideas, testing their validity, only became possible with the computational capacity of ever more powerful computers and an openness to branches of thought once rejected by science. ‘Game Theory’ and cybernetics played a role in all of this as well. Complexity Theory has far more capacity to explain how matter and functional systems emerge, or manifest, than mainstream science could historically. Nature, through the conditions and forces in play at any given moment, ‘drive’ the universe toward order along with the ‘creation’ of complex structures and functions, at the cost of energy spent, ‘held’ in the new structures and dissipated away as lost heat. All of countless processes linked to one another through a myriad of relationships and the feedback loops which comprise them. The universe continues to evolve, and as it does, it continuously spins off everything in it, from sub-atomic particles to human beings over time, a process which it itself is directly influenced by its evolving ‘self’.

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Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, a Review and Look Into its Consistency With the Sciences

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Long ago I took a couple philosophy classes at U of O; one on existentialism, in which we read several novels and discussed their themes; and another, an upper division, class on ethics, because I was curious…I dropped the ethics class after sitting around the table in seminar discussing particular authors’ thoughts, like Kierkegaard and Butler. Majors seemed to take pleasure in making fun of what I got from them in discussions. Hated this. I still have trouble reading philosophy. It seemed like a game to them in which they argued a position to show off their cleverness, their superiority, the ideas themselves of relatively little importance…while hiding their biases. It must have been so self-assuring for them to ‘know’ these author’s precise thoughts and bash those who don’t get it…or saw something different (like the newbie, me). To quote someone isn’t to understand, it is only miming, presumably in hope of getting a reward. I read for understanding. It’s not a competition. So, this book, “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will”, taking a science approach to evaluate a philosophical concept, was difficult to begin. The author, neuro-biologist Robert Sapolsky, argues that those philosophers and theologians who claim that people have free will to do whatever they desire or set their minds to, are wrong. This appealed to me immediately. Continue reading →

Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, A Review

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The cell is the basic, irreducible, unit of life. Whether an organism is animal, plant, fungal or bacterial, the cell is its basic unit. While it can be broken down into its ‘parts’ for examination, none of those parts are capable of independent life, none are able to continue fulfilling their functions on their own. The cell and its ‘community of parts’ operate as a ‘social’ unit, as a whole. Each ‘part’ fulfills one or more roles in the ongoing life of the cell. This book is a review of cell biology, of the development of our, human, understanding of the life of the cell and its centrality to our understandings of what it is be alive, how it has and continues to transform our practice of medicine. The author, Siddhartha Mukherjee, is a doctor and researcher who has spent his professional life studying blood and its cancers, trying to understand and treat disease. Continue reading →

Democracy, Inclusion and Full Citizenship as Biological Imperative: Arundhati Roy and the Politics of the World

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When we open ourselves up to the world, travel to other regions and countries, see and live in different geographies, experience other cultures, climates and biomes, we have the opportunity to be intimate with and understand world’s very different than our own. The world is vast and its peoples and organisms, though astoundingly diverse, are closely related. Even if we could travel ‘everywhere’, having a meaningful experience with all of it is simply not possible. It is dangerously presumptuous to assume that anyone of us might understand all of this. Such travel, should we want to, isn’t possible for the large majority of us, which does not mean that there is therefore no point in traveling to where we can. If our goal is deeper than simply ticking off places and experiences, if we are seeking to understand, to ‘grow’ ourselves, our limited travels can still serve us. For the rest of us it is through reading and the sharing of stories that we can gain such insight, as long as the authors, our guides, are themselves astute observers who are engaged in the places and peoples of which they write. There are many such writers…I can think of none better than Arundhati Roy who writes so beautifully, imaginatively and painfully of her beloved home India. Continue reading →

A Review and thoughts on Peter Hoffmann’s book, “Life’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from  Chaos”, Basic Books, 2012. 

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This is a relatively technical book, one whose title, with its definite mechanistic spin, nearly stopped me from reading it. In this Hoffmann begins with a history of science and how we have looked at life as a remarkable process from the days of Aristotle to today and how that has shaped our inquiry and our capacity to understand it. Is life possible only because of some inexplicable, and yet unknown, ‘vital’ force? Are organisms endowed with this gift of life by a creator? or are there physical laws which shape and determine life? There has been a long ‘battle’ waged between the various ‘vitalists’ and mechanists, the later who once viewed an organism as a special machine, popularly comparable to a watch or clock, animated by a ‘vital’ force, who over time evolved their search into that of more recent times of seemingly fantastical molecular mechanisms, ‘engines’, within an organism which, because of their nano-scale can perform and behave in ways that appear incredible to the layperson. Continue reading →

“The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners and Other Ecological Anachronisms” – A Review and Thoughts on this Life

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“The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners and Other Ecological Anachronisms”, Connie Barlow, Basic Books, 2000.

The titular ghosts here are the long extinct mega-fauna species that once roamed the continents for millions of years shaping the plant species in question here and, in their interactions, shaped the landscapes themselves. Now absent their animal partners, these plants still retain the characteristic structures that evolved in their long dance together, the genetic inertia contained within their DNA. These plants remain today as anachronisms, seemingly misplaced curiosities with no existing, obvious, reason for ever being, mysteries of form and function, that only begin to make sense when we look far enough back.

I only recently came across this book while doing research into my continuing interest and focus on what exactly is ‘life’ and what is it that distinguishes living organisms from other matter. This book is a little outside of this topic, but not by much. Barlow here is concerned with the process of natural selection and how species have come to acquire and retain their physical and functional characteristics, how they’ve retained them long after the shaping forces have disappeared. While there is a somewhat random element in the process of evolution, organic forms follow patterns and particular patterns are ‘selected’ over time through the ‘working’ of shaping forces. Forms are supported or not,  Once acquired they remain disappearing with a particular species when it is no longer supported enough and goes extinct. This ‘opens’ a niche for possible other species to fill.  Each species is time limited. Each is a process or event that continues so long as it is adequately supported.  It in turn fills roles in the lives of other organisms, other species. Natural selection is not some process relegated to the past, but an active, ongoing, one, though we tend to fail to see it around us. We have a tendency to expand the ‘now’ and attribute to it a precedence and persistence that it doesn’t have and so we also fail to see our own role in the continuing ‘work’ of evolution. We all know something of the concept of the ‘survival of the fittest’, a process that suggests that today’s species are the ‘best’ fit given the conditions in the world today.  Barlow, and the scientists who support this idea, argue instead that today’s species are the best fit for the past as a result of thousands, even millions of years of evolution. Today is just a moment in time. Our imagining of it as something broader and more stable is a problem. Continue reading →

On the Chaotic Unreality of the Real and How We Redefine It: Reimagining Reality in a Probable Universe

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Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Grand Odalisque. Ingres was a Neo-Classicist, who attempted to create images that mimicked ‘reality’ even as it distorted it for effect, lengthening her spine and her impossible twist of pelvis. Ingres began painting at the beginning of the 1800’s in a world coming to be dominated by Newton’s mechanical view of the universe. Realism would become a dominant style by the end of Ingres’ career. The solidity of reality. What is, is!

Because the pace of change in our scientific understanding of our world, and the technology which follows it, is increasing at greater rates in recent decades than at any other time in our history, it has become ever so more important that we have at least some basic understanding of that science and technology, that we as a society wield in this world…without this, we are literally blundering in the dark, blindly upsetting systems and cycles, upon which our lives depend, with little understanding of our responsibility for the decline or grasp of our own agency in setting the world back to rights.  The advancement of science is an outgrowth of our curiosity as a society.  It is a look behind the ‘curtain’ that too many of us take for granted.  The technologies that spring from these scientific advances carry with them consequences which amplify our individual impacts while providing us with promised advantages through a marketplace that too often only wants to sell and profit from its latest innovation, with little concern for its overall impacts.  As long as our basic world view, our grasp of science, remains stuck in the past, in the more ‘simple’ classical world of its roots, we are more easily swayed by advertisers and pitchmen who’s business demands that we not look too deeply.  We are not, and can never be, ‘experts’ in every field.  The demands and rigors of scientific advancement have a very high bar, but it is essential, especially in these days, that we understand basic concepts, that we have some grasp of how science has redefined the world making possible those technologies which we either wield clumsily, like a weapon of destruction, or more tactfully and respectfully like a surgeon and healer.  As long as science remains esoteric and remote, ourselves ignorant of its ‘message’ and, by extension, ignorant of our own impact on the world, we place all things at risk. Continue reading →

On Life: An Annotated Reading List of Titles Exploring the Physics, Biology, Evolution, Natural Selection and the Generative Power of Far Out of Equilibrium Dissipative Structures (Organisms)

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Nurse, Paul, “What is Life?: Five Great Ideas in Biology”, WW Norton and Co., 2021. I’m placing this book out of order here, its American edition just released this year and I’ve only just read it, because I concur that this is an excellent introduction to its topic and should be accessible to a broad audience, one without an academic background in biology. It does what Carlo Rovelli’s “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics”, does for its readers, presents in a compact and cogent way the central ideas for understanding the science of life. Nurse, is a Nobel Prize winning geneticist and cell biologist, who has dedicated his research life to the study of the cell and what sets this class of matter apart and unique, looking into its structure, chemistry/metabolism, reproduction, evolution and the relationships and communication which must occur within and between cells. He looks into what genetics is and isn’t capable of, what it seems to control, the genes for 20,000 some different proteins included within our DNA, while leaving open to question the instructions and detailed directions, how the growth and development of an organism is actually determined.

The reader will benefit from having some basic understanding of chemistry to fully grasp what he writes here, but this is an excellent starting point.  At 143 pages this book shouldn’t scare off the reader.  This is a window into life and should peek the readers interest as Nurse reveals what he still finds so fascinating about life and this world.

Al-Khalili, Jim and Johnjoe McFadden, “Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology”, Broadway Books, 2016. In the world of science, quantum biology is a toddler.  Quantum mechanics itself only began a hundred plus years ago and quickly began redefining the way that physicists look at the world.  Today most branches of science are transforming themselves, aligning themselves with this new reality of physics.  This may be impacting none of the sciences more than it is biology and the life sciences.  What was once limited to the quantum world of elementary particles so much smaller than we can see even with technology’s assistance, today we are finding quantum actions behind even the most simple processes up to and including the energy and origins of life.  Mass and energy lie at the heart of everything and life is a very particular case of highly complex ordering of that mass and energy, intricately linked in coherent relationships, borne out of seemingly random, chaotic, actions at a subatomic level.  In these systems/organisms life has evolved effective patterns that ‘feed’ on themselves, self-regulating, self-maintaining, able to reproduce with great ‘fidelity’ to one’s parent organisms, energy dissipating structures, dynamic, balanced between stasis or death and a runaway consumption of one’s self,, a conflagration.  Patterns built on more basic patterns, conformed into very particular resonant structures which are additive and transformative, never perfect, evolving towards greater complexity and capacity, structures that ‘live’ in relationship to one another in a supportive manner, dynamic, time limited and ‘stable’ in a self-reinforcing sense…existing in different states, simultaneously.  Follow Al-Khalili and McFadden down part of a ‘proven’ path. Continue reading →

Physics, Evolution, Natural Selection and the Generative Power of Far Out of Equilibrium Dissipative Structures (Organisms), part 1

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On Darwin and His Theory

Evolution is a word that can divide the world.  Its opponents often claim that all that lives today, in terms of species diversity, did so yesterday…all the way back to the ‘first’ yesterday, which some people claim was precisely 4004 B.C., when ‘God’ created everything essentially in a moment.  Bishop Ussher, of Ireland, published his ‘findings’ in 1650 and his ‘documentation’ is that most frequently referenced by opponents of evolution.  He has it down to the day, Oct. 23 of that year.  This is a problem when a researcher goes in with an ‘answer’ and is only looking for corroborating evidence, evidence which they will eventually find.  Science, through the study of evolution, has developed various specialized technologies and techniques to reach back in time and analyze the evidence at hand.  It has done this building on the work of those studying paleontology, microbiology, geology, chemistry, atmospheric chemistry; palynology, the study of pollen; astronomy and cosmology, quantum physics, stochastic methods developed around the hypothesis of a molecular clock which posits a rate of genetic change; and cladistics which assesses genetic lineages, the relationships between species and larger classification groups…scientists have collectively been dating ‘life’ back over Earth’s 4 billion years.  The creationist argument depends entirely upon belief, denies science and views evidence such as fossils simply as ‘puzzles’ God left to confuse us.…Others accept that lower species may have ‘evolved’, but Man, created in His image, is special, exceptional and exempt, a creation of God, fixed and forever.  Modern science does not give a pass to such claims of specialness seeking instead more direct evidence, making connections, following patterns, doing science….

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