![]() Nature's Plan for Humankind Part 1. Metabolic Metaphysics
The concept of metabolism typically attaches itself to the physiology of organisms, but it can be applied to nature generally. Generalizing the concept highlights the feedback relationships and interdependencies among nature's entropic and anti-entropic processes. The building-up (anabolic/anti-entropic) and tearing down (catabolic/entropic) processes of metabolism depend on each other. Each leg of the metabolic circuit receives as input the output of the other: anabolism feeds on unorganized raw material, and catabolism feeds on organized complex structures. The processes enlist one another to create metabolic circuits, which stabilize the whole of nature and give it an organic, specifically biological, quality. Metabolism in this general sense enables natural forms to persist in states that are far from equilibrium for extended periods. If complexity theory and the Second Law of thermodynamics describe the essential tendencies of nature, from the largest to the smallest physical systems and spanning the organic-inorganic divide, then nature’s essential activity must be metabolic. Her essential, fundamental process is metabolism. Physicists
characterize the universe as running down, heading toward equilibrium,
but that observation accounts only partially for nature’s doings.
It describes only the catabolic leg of nature’s metabolism. The
tendency away from equilibrium, anabolic processes—the subject matter
of complexity theory—is just as apparent. And the linking of the
two tendencies into the higher-order concept of metabolism elevates biology
to an overarching position in the hierarchy of the sciences.
The Earth
considered as a single entity, for example, actively maintains its characteristic
chemical and thermal conditions so as to retain a biosphere that is suitable
for life. In other words, it behaves like an organism. This characterization
of the Earth constitutes the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock. The British
scientist proposes that the Earth is suitable for life because life itself,
through chemical feedback loops that operate across ecosystems, stabilizes
the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans (see Lovelock’s "Gaia:
A New Look at Life on Earth The Earth
and its biosphere constitute a spontaneously self-organizing complex system.
The carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and similar recyclings of materials
that operate globally, taken collectively, constitute a singular planetary
metabolism. Similarly, whole galaxies might regulate their rates of star
formation by means of material feedback loops. Galaxies seem to possess
natural regulatory processes that precisely control the distribution of
matter and energy within them as well as controlling their exchanges of
matter with the intergalactic medium, the space between galaxies. Apparently,
like organisms and planetary biospheres, galaxies persist for long periods
in a state of stable disequilibrium, something that they are able to do
by using means strikingly similar to those used by organisms and other
kinds of self-organizing systems. (For an overview of the metabolism and
ecology of galaxies, see "The Gas Between the Stars," by Ronald
J. Reynolds, Scientific American, January 2002.) This way of looking at nature, putting biological notions in the center of the conceptual map, is atavistic. It recalls ancient, archaic conceptions of nature, in which the cosmos was conceived as being a living environment—as being alive in its motions, ensouled. The most primitive religious conception of nature apparently was one in which every discernable natural process was seen to be alive. To premodern sensibilities an inanimate universe is an unintelligible concept. The concept of nature at its fundaments being nonliving, and life being a local aberration moving in the “wrong” direction (away from entropy), is a very modern conception of nature and of biology’s place in nature, and this concept alienates the intellect from nature. This alienation has proceeded steadily since the Enlightenment. The ancient conception (of nature as a whole and in all of its parts constituting living processes) was revived in modern times by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. He placed the concept of organism at the center of his understanding of nature. For Whitehead, the concept of organism superceded attributes of organic and inorganic and ultimately even the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity. Organism is the fundamental unit of natural organization, in his philosophy, of those things that actually exist. It is the organizational pattern and process of being.
Whitehead
argued that the actual constituents of reality are events, or occurrences,
rather than things. The fundamental units of actuality come into being,
incorporating influences from the past; they take place, then they pass
out of being. They influence their descendents just as they incorporate
influences from the own past. This notion formed the basis of Whitehead's
metaphysics, which he called the philosophy of organism. He summarized
the view in "Science
and the Modern World
A human being is a relatively small organism, with a chemical metabolism. A galaxy is a relatively large organism, with a nuclear-gravitational metabolism. The star larvae hypothesis proposes that the concepts and language of biology apply generally to nature and, if substituted for the concepts and language of complexity theory and thermodynamics, provide a unifying perspective from which to view nature’s operations on any scale. Metabolism,
physiology, anatomy, development, descent, symbiosis, parasitism, mutation,
metamorphosis, ecology, evolution, and other concepts from biology might
better describe, than do concepts from thermodynamics and complexity theory,
what occurs in nature—in and among atoms, molecules, crystals, bacteria,
humans and their societies, ecosystems, planetary biospheres, solar systems,
galaxies, superclusters of galaxies, and whatever other organisms the
physical universe might contain.
And this deep ordering principle—the general applicability of the concepts of biological science—also expresses itself through the novel structures and processes of human industry. The industries of human enterprise, no less than those of bees or beavers, should not be considered an anomalous or undesirable development from the point of view of nature. Life is not a fluke in the physical world, an unlikely localized countertrend to the iron law of entropy, and neither is its industry. Life, as a tendency to metabolize, to interweave catabolism and anabolism to keep structures operating far from equilibrium, drives the forms of the physical world, both the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial, the organic and the inorganic, the "natural" and the "engineered." Growth and decay alike are local phenomena, always occurring within the context of and subordinate to, a superordinate metabolism. Nature in this view is defined as a nested hierarchy of organism-ecologies, in which the discernable units, the stable disequilibria, function simultaneously as organisms that participate in ecologies and as ecologies constituted of subordinate organisms. Every organism then participates in the life of every other organism.
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