# Progressive Summary Explicates a processual view of biology, in which processes are more fundamental than things. Brings the Copernican revolution to biology, and dethrones human civilisation, and puts bacterial civilisation in its place. One might say this is how the right brain hemisphere might see the world. # Structured Notes ## Definitions Bacteriosphere - the cloud of microbes enveloping the Earth; the ancient living planet, precursor to Gaia; the basis of the biosphere. Homeorhesis - coined by a British geneticist Conrad Hall Waddington around 1950; it means steady flow, and is the scientific view of the Heraclitean river of life; contrasted with homeostasis, which means steady state; it says that a system always returns to its developmental trajectory. Retrodiction - making predictions about the past based on natural laws Homoplasy - convergent evolution; or what the author prefers to call "biological periodicity" ## Chapter Notes ### Chapter 7 - Scientists ## Timeline 450 million years BCE - forests appear in the Devonian period ## Ideas ### Arguments against anthropocentrism Anthropocentrism is exclusivist. This means that its logic depends on taking an unrepresentative sample size and generalising it to the rest of the phenomena. To see how a non-exclusivist logic would work, if you had two samples, one of which contains DNA and proteins (sample 1) and another contains calcium salts (sample 2), it's obvious that sample 1 is more likely to be organic, because over 90% of organic matter contains DNA and proteins, whereas calcium is found only in the bones of some animals and shells of foraminifera. Anthropocentrism uses a form of logic that would pick sample 2 as more likely to be composed of organic matter. > The exclusivist argument rests on an exceedingly low probability – an outlier elbows its way into the centre. > Biocivilisation is an argument against this human exclusivism. There is not a single species in the history of life on Earth that has not possessed the communication skills necessary for language. Likewise, there is not a single species without collective memory or the practice of natural learning, which leads to the development of technologies. Insects developed their technologies, such as agriculture, millions of years before us, and the bacterial biotechnology known as photosynthesis has fuelled life on Earth for the last three billion years. > > The exclusivist argument makes us blind to the biocivilisations built by bacteria, protists, insects, plants and other species over the course of the evolutionary timeline that preceded humanity (99.99% of it). Some achievements of bacteria will forever remain beyond human technological capabilities. Mathematical solutions that honeybees achieved millions of years ago – the honeybee algorithm – are now used to solve problems of human internet traffic (see Chapter 9). Many species rely on aesthetics for procreation – a possibility that turns the evolutionary principle of the survival of the fittest favoured by modern synthesis on its head. Plants have their own culture that becomes apparent in the complex ecologies of mature forests. There is nothing in the repertoire of human civilisation that is biologically or culturally unique. Every single feature of civilisation that we think of as invented by Homo Sapiens existed, in one form or another, millions or billions of years before us. Gaian democracy is the democracy of biocivilisations. > To mitigate the human exclusivism in the term ‘civilisation’, I have added to it the prefix ‘bio’. The result is a new term, ‘bio civilisations’, that describes the orderliness running through the river of life and all its constituents, from microbes to human beings. In my interpretation, life is a civilising force. Biocivilisations of bacteria or ants are not inferior to various forms of human biocivilisations. If we accept the new interpre tation, the problem of human exclusivism disappears. Order liness is a biological universal. There is no reason to single out the orderliness associated with human civilisation and give it a God-like status at the expense of the rest of the living world. By insisting on human exclusivism, we risk ending up a one-species autocracy that will violently collapse as Gaia shakes us off to preserve the autopoietic balance of the bio sphere. In the river of life, all species are equal. The orderliness that runs through it is a form of biological democracy. > The intelligence of biocivilisations is judged by Gaia, not by us. Cows, lilies or amoebas may look stupid to us when we apply our own standards, but these become irrelevant when the Gaian river selects life forms suitable for long-term inclusion in its flow. Likewise, the persistence of non-living, gradient-reduing systems, such as the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, may be a sign of intelligence that goes be yond human understanding. # Rough Notes Describes a model of biocivilisation that has three elements: - langauge - mind - memory 4 principles of non-mechanistic biology: **Universal flux** - what Heraclitus called Panta Rhei (everything flows); process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead **Agency** (purpose and desire) **Symbiosis** (living together) **Mind** (hyperthought) These 4 principles – everything flows, agency, symbiosis and mind – describe Gaia and the way she creates order through biocvilisations. Orderliness is the result of planetary-scale thermodynamic processes. The amount of energy transferred to the Earth from the sun is estimated to be about 128,000 terawatts daily, of which 90 terawatts (0.07%) is captured by life processes. > Whenever there is energy, that energy will carry out work. The work performed by useful energy results in changes to a system that look like orderly changes. Typical examples of orderliness on the planetary scale are weather patterns that we see not only here on Earth, but also on Mars, Venus and Jupiter. This comment makes me think of Thermodynamics of Emotion, and Bejan's Constructual Law. > The similarity in the forms of orderliness generated by living (brain) and non-living (web of galaxies) processes leads us to the central scientific point behind biocivilisations. One fragment of the planetary-scale orderliness is life. The second law of thermodynamics describes the natural function of energy spread using the concept of entropy. In the process of energy spreading, work occurs that facilitates planetary weather patterns and autopoiesis, but the cumulative effect is more energy spreading. Thus, ‘the inherently telic tendency of energy to spread informs life, whose living systems measurably produce more entropy, that is, reduce more gradients and delocalize more concentrated sources of energy than would be the case without them’. This means that Gaia emerged from the orderliness of the Earth’s thermodynamic system, then rode on that orderliness and amplified it by producing the finest forms of orderliness in the history of the cosmos: life in the form of biocivilisations. > > Translated into the language of science, life is a process that goes beyond physics. Life processes channel energy into their organisation (where channelling equals thermodynamic work or constraining energy into a few degrees of freedom) and by doing so produce autopoietic units or holons (cells to Gaia) that perpetuate themselves as long as the energy is available, and in the process create (1) entropy that leads to thermodynamic equilibrium slower than would occur without them and (2) unpredictable patterns that go beyond the mechanics of classical physics. In the 19th century, many scientists were tempted to associate the inherent unpredictability of life with a mysterious force called elan vital. However, the life force as we understand it today is non-mysterious. ## Universal flux > Life is the flow of matter through processes, governed by constraints. It resembles the flow of water through the Heraclitean river. Water, the material or substance, is less important than its flow. Once the flow of matter through the process is stabilised, it will persist, as long as it has some thing to facilitate the persistence. For example, the energy of the Sun has facilitated the persistence of universal flux since the dawn of life. > Biology is naturally inclined towards the process ontology. For example, all organisms must take in matter to maintain themselves. This is called metabolic turnover – organisms are open systems that constantly exchange matter, energy and information with their surroundings. The only species that have persisted since the dawn of time are bacteria and archaea. Most recent estimate is that the total number of species on Earth is from 1 to 6 billion. This amounts to 550 gigatons of carbon. ## Agency Kant thought of organisms as natural agents. He said that living creatures were self-organising entitiies, which means that the parts act in unison to produce the whole, and the whole exists for the sake of the parts. An organism is the cause and effect of itself. Causal chain remains within organisms. Scientists call this organisational closure. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela use the term autopoiesis ('auto' means self, and 'poiesis' means production or creation). Robert Rosen invented the mathematics of organisational closure. He wrote a book called Anticipatory Systems (his term for living organisms) in 1985. French physiologist Claude Bernard (who developed the ideas behind homeostasis) said, "The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life." Organisms strive to maintain their own bodies while interacting with the world. They produce mental models of themselves and their environment, and regulate their own organisation through the exchange of matter, energy and information. JBS Haldane described teleology as biology's mistress, whom he can't live without but was ashamed to show in public. ## Simbiosis Living things merge and generate a unified flow. The basic and indivisable units of agency are the simplest prokaryotic cells, bactera and archaea. They merge to form all other life forms protists, fungi, plants and animals. Lynn Margulis called animals "coevolved microbial communities". The sequence of mergers produces hierarchy bacteria and archaea merge to produce protists, protists merge to produce plants and animals, these merge to produce ecological collectives, human culture emerges from ecologoical collectives, and all of it is underpinned by a cloud of microbes surrounding the Earth the bacteriosphere. Lovelock used the name Gaia to refer to the biosphere, and was ridiculed by the scientific community. Lynn Margulis then showed that the biosphere was preceded by the bacteriosphere. Originally, Lovelock and Margulis used the concepts of homeostasis and feedback loops to describe Gaia's self-regulation. But Margulis later realised that Gaia is not a static system, but a metaphoric river that constantly strives forward through homeorhesis. Stuart Kauffman believes that the next state of Gaia is unpredictable. The way she functions is more like an artist. Whereas organisms cannot recycle their own waste, Gaia is the exception. ## Mind Bateson "Mind is the essence of being alive." Structure of galaxies is similar to that of neurons in the brain: Vazza, F., and A. Feletti. “The Quantitative Comparison Between the Neuronal Network and the Cosmic Web.” _Frontiers in Physics_ 8 (November 16, 2020): 525731. [https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2020.525731](https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2020.525731). Concept of homeorhesis reminds me of the notion of strange attractors in physics. A dynamic system has a trajectory. Heidegger said "physis is poiesis", suggesting that nature is more like an artist. Gregory Bateson said that the unit of survival is not the gene, but the unit of mind. The unit of mind is the cognitive relationship between the organism and its environment. Cognition is therefore a biological universal. Bacteria account for 70 gigatons of carbon, and plants 450. Together they comprise 520 gigatons of carbon. Since the total Gaian biomass is 550 gigatons, plants and bacteria account for 95% of the Gaian body, and its units of mind. Aristotle contributed to the Great Chain of Being (*Scala Naturae*) idea that humans are superior to everything else. He said that plants were inferior beings. Descartes reinforced this notion by saying that animals were just machines. Carl Linnaeus dod not challenge this. His motto was *Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit* (God created, Linnaeus classified). Recent scientists who have challenged this notion are Lynn Margulis, Gregory Bateson, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and Robert Rosen. --- The interaction of organisms with their environment produces the following features of biocivilisations: - art - aesthetics of doing - engineering - technology - science - problem-solving - communication - semiosphere - medicine - self-preservation - agriculture - population feeding # Quotes > In a 1917 satirical short story, ‘A Report to an Academy’, Franz Kafka imagined a world in which an ape called Red Peter adopted human behaviour in order to escape from the zoo.⁸ Red Peter was so successful at assimilating with human civilisation that he was invited to ad dress the esteemed members of a scientific academy. Our task is to do, in all seriousness, what Red Peter did, but inversely. In the world of biocivilisations, humanity must seek to understand and adopt the best practices of other biocivilisations to the depth and degree that we can convincingly address the academy of life and its principal authority: Gaia. > the human body is as much an organism (a corporate conglomerate of cells) as it is an environment (a plat form for 37 trillion eukaryotic cells and 400 trillion microbes) > The Gaian mind, I will argue in the book, becomes apparent when we discover how individual biocivilisations that are ‘wired’ together, also ‘fire’ together. This enables Gaia, the planetary ecosystem, to regulate itself and survive the challenges brought about by periodic evolutionary catastrophes. Gaia is a fast-thinking and intelligent system, a phoenix that rises from its own ashes. In this system, biocivilisations come and go, but there is one constant. Bacteria have been around since the out set of life on Earth. Lynn Margulis argued that bacteria are the basic unit of Gaia.¹⁵ Indeed, this basic unit may prove indestructible. > ‘The philosophies that have been inspired by the scientific technique are power philosophies, and tend to regard everything non-human as mere raw material. Ends are no longer considered; only the skilfulness of the process is valued. This also is a form of mad ness. It is, in our day, the most dangerous form, and the one against which a sane philosophy should provide an antidote’ > – Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy > But building a biocivilisation with a human model offers only a limited glimpse into the complexity of the Gaian mind. Nevertheless, this is perhaps what true humanism represents. This is the humanism that makes life worth living – by catching glimpses of the Gaian mind, we integrate into it. We become part of the huge river that started flowing four billion years ago. > In the beautiful economy of the Gaian mind, viruses and bacteria are here to help us, not to kill us. The microbial biocivilisation is the mother of all biocivilisations. Lynn Margulis put this biological truth beautifully: ‘We can no more be cured of our viruses than we can be relieved of our brains’ frontal lobes: we are our viruses.’ > At the micro level, mathematical finality and precision are replaced by a cloud of statistical fuzziness. There seems to be more to the qualitative than reductionist science can account for. Robert Rosen expressed this view in a provocative manner, one that still upsets many mechanistic scientists: ‘Why could it not be that the “universals” of physics are only so on a small and special (if inordinately prominent) class of material systems, a class to which organisms are too general to belong? What if physics is the particular, and biology the general, instead of the other way around? If this is so, then nothing in contemporary science will remain the same.’ > We humans are a fleeting thought in the great natural mind of Gaia. > In the mind-like search for the next sec tion of the flow, all components of Gaia work together. This working together is a creative process. It results in the emergence of new organisms and their environments. The emergence of biological novelty is innovation in the artistic sense – even the Gaian system itself cannot predict its next state. > My vision of life differs from that depicted by mainstream, gene-centric biology. In the narrative of mainstream biology, new species (biological novelty) arise from the process of natural selection. Organisms have the capacity to produce more progeny than can survive. Thus, natural selection is the filter that allows only a fraction of progeny to enter the biological world. Mainstream biology gives unprecedented power to the filter; a fraction of this fraction of progeny will contain novel genetic mutations, making it sufficiently genetically different from the rest of the progeny (new species) and better suited to new environmental niches (adaptation). Thus, evolution, ac cording to mainstream biology, is almost a mechanical process. Organisms evolve to fit already existing environments.  > > In my interpretation, natural selection is only an editor, but cannot be, under any circumstances, the creator. Natural selection is a kind of a biological administrator that keeps record of which fraction of progeny, out of the maximum possible, survives. The administrator also takes account of which genes – both type and number – are propagated in the surviving fraction of the progeny. But there is no way that an act of biological administration can have creative powers. > > Rather, the creation of biological novelty is a process far beyond the mechanics of gene-centrism. For example, in the greatest discontinuity in the history of life – the emergence of eukaryotes through the merger of bacteria and archaea – genes did not play a central role. The driver of evolution was the process of symbiosis, in which evolutionary novelty was the result of bacterial–archaeal combinatorics that extended beyond individual features of these organisms. The innovation was a kind of phase transition in which the new phase of the system was qualitatively different from the previous one. The same can be said about the next big evolutionary transition: the emergence of multicellular organisms. This was another symbiosis driven process. And underpinning all evolutionary transitions are the creative and mind-like powers of the totality of the Gaian system. Gaia has existed, in less complex forms, ever since microbes turned the dead planet into a living one three billion years ago. > Homo sapiens is a young and evolutionarily inexperienced species. All other species we know of are our older evolutionary relatives. Insects, plants and amoebas are evolutionary long-distance runners that have been around for hundreds of millions of years, not to mention bacteria and archaea, the true evolutionary marathon runners, masters of Earth for four billion years. In sharp contrast to all of them, humans have been around for a minuscule amount of evolutionary time: a few hundred thousand years.² This makes us short-distance runners with an uncertain future. The faster we sprint, the closer we get to an evolutionary exit. > However, the gentle wind of nature is deceptive. It happens only when the river Gaia enters wide and slow passages that allow all members of biocivilisations to enjoy a temporary tranquillity and thrive within it. But if we go upstream along Gaia’s flow – in science this is known as predicting the past, or retrodiction – we can discover that Gaia was extremely wild in theevolutionary past; for example, the Oxygen Catastrophe, caused by cyanobacteria producing oxygen approximately two billion years ago, killed many anaerobic bacteria. The reality is that the enormous force behind the river of life makes all members of biocivilisations temporary ‘riders on the storm’, as in the memorable song by Jim Morrison and The Doors. We ride on the powerful stream of the cosmic solar energy tamed for us by the Gaian system.