> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions philosophy - a search for wisdom, for practical guidance in human affairs through understanding the natural order of the cosmos to which we belong Gaia theory - the theory that our planet and its creatures constitute a single self-regulating system that is in fact a great living being anthropomorphism - reading human attributes into nature mechanomorphism - reading mechanical attributes into nature; merely second-hand anthropomosphism, since mechanisms are human products holon - a term coined by Arthur Koestler which refers to anything that is a whole made up of sub-parts, and that is itself part of a larger whole. holarchy - a universe made up of nested holons holonomy - rule by a greater holon, balanced by lesser holon's self-ruling autonomy proteins - amino acids made up of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen atoms autopoeisis - means self-creation or self-production in Greek. Coined by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to refer to the process by which an autopoietic holon produces the very parts of which it is made and keeps them in working order by constant renewal. It works by its own rules and creates a boundary that distinguishes it from its environment and through which it exchanges materials with the environment. ecosystem - systems of related organisms in their habitats moneron - first kingdom of living things; includes archae; single-celled organisms that were the first independent holons within the Earth holon ## Chapter Summaries ### Chapter 1 - A Twice Told Tale Pythagoras, Parmenides and Plato were the founding fathers of our mechanical worldview, and Galileo, Descartes and other Renaissance scientists translated it into the scientific and technological enterprise that has dominated us ever since. Thales, Anaximander and Heraclitus were the organic philosophers who saw all the cosmos as alive. We are one of the few species that are not biologically programmed to know what to do. We are an experiment in free choice. As a result, we have enormous potential, powerful egotism, and tremendous anxiety - a syndrome that is recognisably adolescent. Machines have to say the same in order to work, and will eventually be destroyed by their environment if left alone. Living things have to change constantly in order to stay the same, and they use the environment to their advantage. > 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. > 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. ### Chapter 2 - Cosmic Beginnings The first patterns at the birth of the universe were whirling white spirals called protogalaxies. Somehow, the ancients knew this, because their creation myths contain similar images. The Greeks imagined a goddess whirling out of darkness, wrapped in flowing white veils. Indians thought the universe was born as swirls in a sea of milk. The Greeks thought of *chaos* and *cosmos* as polar opposites. At first *chaos* referred to a great void or nothingness, and later came to mean the absence of pattern. *Cosmos* meant order, form and pattern. Modern physicists now believe that as the hot, chaotic energy of the universe cools, it forms a great dance of spiraling cosmic patterns. This happens because of imbalances between pockets of energy, with lighter and faster pockets creating currents around heavier and slower pockets. > 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. > 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. > 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. Our solar system was born of an older star that became a supernova and exploded about 5 billion years ago. The Earth is still radioactive from this explosion, and its core is kept hot by nuclear reactions. Many atoms all over its surface - in rocks and trees and our own bodies - are still exploding. It is estimated that we have about 3 million potassium atoms exploding in us every minute. We are still made up of stardust along with everything else in this world. ### Chapter 3 - The Young Earth In ancient Greece, a physicist was someone who studied nature - *physis* - all of which was alive. When scientists later divided nature into animate and inanimate matter, the physicists reduced their scope to study only inanimate matter, while biologists took on the role of studying life. Biologists couldn't come up with a definition of life, however, and passed on the job to chemists, who in turn specialized in organic or inorganic chemistry. Chemists have figured out a few things about how inorganic matter becomes organic matter, but they don't know the complete story. When people believed in God, the answer was simple. God created life. But when scientists tried to explain life without bringing God into it, they came up with something called spontaneous generation, for example the idea that earthworms came from garbage. Louis Pasteur showed that earthworms came from eggs. With evolution, we can trace the origins of complex life back to simpler and simpler forms, until we get to microbes. But where do microbes come from? Physicists are beginning to believe that life evolves as an essential process of the cosmos, and that the potential for life exists in every point in spacetime, as a zero-point energy field. Some physicists posit a universal consciousness as the source of all creation. Religion thought that the universe was created by an outside intelligence called God. Science took a big step away from religious explanations and viewed everything through dead mechanics. Now science is shifting to an organic model of nature, which will integrate spirit, energy and matter into a single worldview, superseding previous religious and scientific theories. Even dead planets such as Mars and Venus may play an important role in the life of a solar system. A redwood tree is 99 percent deadwood, yet we don't think of it as dead. Similarly, we may begin to look at stars, solar systems and galaxies as living holons nested within each other. In this worldview, the Earth itself is a living thing. The fields of geology and biology are more intertwined than we think, as the same stardust that formed our rocks also forms living creatures. The Russian scientists V.I. Vernadsky thought of the Earth as rock rearranging itself over billions of years into ever more complicated forms from microbes to men. Dead creatures are recycled back into rocks as fossils. Living creatures also rearrange rocks into habitats. Life is built from sugars, acids and lipids. These organic molecules are formed, not just on earth, but at the core of our galaxy, and perhaps throughout it. It's possible that our planet was an "egg" that was fertilized by meteors. Carbon and carbon compounds (carbon and hydrogen atoms bonded together), when given energy during electrical storms or from energy seeping out from the core of the earth, could bond with oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. These six elements compose all of life. > 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. Less than 5% of DNA is made of genes that code for proteins. The function of the remaining DNA is a mystery. Enzymes are special proteins that speed up the building of other proteins. One definition of life is that it involves enzymes. This is a really good summary of this chapter: > 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. ### Chapter 4 - Problems for Earthlife When the young Earth was starting to come alive with microbes, it was spinning twice as fast as it does now. The Sun's energy was helpful in splitting molecules so that new ones could form, but it could also harm microbes through ultraviolet radiation. > 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. > 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 Early bacteria were spread by wind and water currents generated from the Sun's energy, and formed entire continental shelves long before corals. Bacteria (monera) are the most numerous creatures on Earth. Early monera got their energy by breaking up supply molecules in a process called fermentation. They can be called bubblers because they make bubbles of waste gases. Whenever bubbles appear in mud or stagnant waters, it is a sign of fermenting bacteria at work. The bubblers stored the energy released through fermentation in special molecules called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). These may have been found in their environment, but eventually they learned how to make their own. Every living thing on earth has since used the ATP energy storage system. It is the energy currency of life. The bubblers started running out of building supplies and had to figure out how to unlock the carbon and nitrogen around them. They harnessed solar energy using chemicals such as porphyrins (the substance that makes our blood red) and chlorophyll (which makes grass and leaves green). Then then used this energy to split carbon dioxide, water and rock salts into atoms in a process known as photosynthesis (Greek for "making with light"). This started producing oxygen and nitrogen as waste. At first, the rocks absorbed the oxygen and turned into rust. When they could't absorb anymore, the oxygen began piling up in the atmosphere. > 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. Bacteria protected themselves by: - hiding in mud, or the stomachs of cows (where they help digest hay), or the roots of peas and beans (where they fix nitrogen) - making ultraviolet sunscreens so they could stay in the sun and make food - living together in thick colonies where the top were burned and the dead cells became good filters (stromatolites) Over 2 billion years, the bluegreens multiplied into thousands of different kinds, and then one species discovered respiration, the most efficient way of making ATP. We can call bacteria that used respiration *breathers*. In respiration, the destructive energy of oxygen is used to break up food molecules, freeing up both their parts and their energy for use. This produces carbon dioxide as waste gas, the very gas needed for photosynthesis. > [!The Great Bacterial Age] > The three ways of making ATP that evolved in succession: > - fermentation (bubblers) > - photosynthesis (bluegreens) > - respiration (breathers) Oxygen in the air formed a bubble that protected the earth. Meteorites would burn up when entering the atmosphere. Oxygen would form ozone that blocked ultraviolet light. The oxygen blanket also prevented hydrogen from escaping into space. We are now putting a lot more carbon dioxide into the air and heating up the planet. Gaia will attempt to restore some balance by either entering an ice age, which means humanity will have to retreat and hide, or worse, she will re-set the thermostat at a higher temperature, and wipe out most mammals including humans. > This is what we are learning: to understand that the Gaian life system has evolved in such a way that it takes care of itself as a whole, and that we humans are only one part of it. Gaia goes on living, that is, while her various species come and go. We used to believe that we were put here to do whatever we wanted to with our planet, that we were in charge. Now we see that we are natural creatures which evolved inside a great Earthlife system. Whatever we do that is not good for life, the rest of the system will try to undo or balance in any way it can. That is why we must learn Gaia’s dance and follow its rhythms and harmonies in our own lives. ### Chapter 5 - The Dance of Life James Hutton, the father of geology, called Earth a superorganism in 1785 and said its proper study should be physiology. A century later, Russian scientist Korolenko told his nephew the Earth was a live being. > life is rock rearranging itself -- like music come alive -- packaging itself as cells, speeding its chemical changes with enzymes, turning cosmic radiation into its own forms of energy, transforming itself into ever-evolving creatures and back into rock This is Vernadsky's view that life is a geochemical process of Earth. # Rough Notes # Quotes