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The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 1. Metabolic Metaphysics

Metabolism and the Complexity-Entropy Circuit

Complexity and entropy—anabolism and catabolism—feed each other through circuits collectively called metabolism. Nature's metabolism encompasses the organic and the inorganic in a continuum of anabolic and catabolic processes.

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, as seen in 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 concept of metabolism typically attaches itself to biology, but it applies more generally to nature's matter and energy exchanges. 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 feed each other. Each leg of the circuit receives as input the output of the other: complexity grows from unorganized raw material, and entropy turns organized complex structures back into unorganized raw material. 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. (In Freudian psychology, a similar dynamic stabilizes mental life. Freud's concept of Eros corresponds to psychic anabolic creativity, and his concept of Thanatos corresponds to psychic catabolic desuetude. The two tendencies interact to produce a [more or less] balanced psychic life.)

The biological organisms that populate the Earth are the complex, self-organizing structures that are easiest for scientists to observe in detail, because their behaviors occur on scales near the human scale. But complexity theory demonstrates that nature manufactures self-organizing systems also on much larger and much smaller scales—spatially and temporally. The scientific understanding of atomic and galactic processes is necessarily less exact than the understanding of biological processes, because biology is so much handier. Scientists can get a solid handle on events that occur on scales from inches to miles and from seconds to decades. Grasping events that occur on scales of angstroms or light years and picoseconds or eons poses a greater challenge. For this reason and given the universality of the principles of complexity theory, science might expect the language of its discourse across disciplines to converge on biological language.

The Earth, 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’s biosphere is a collection of interdependent, interlocking processes of material and energy recycling that cooperate to keep the terrestrial environment fit for life. The processes of entropy—decay, deterioration, breakdown—the processes that liberate materials and the complimentary processes of construction, building up, and organization are equally discernable within the Gaian body. Gaia is not so much a single organism as a single metabolism. The difference is a conceptual one that distinguishes structure from process.

Lovelock defines his insight in a way that relates it to the Second Law. He describes Gaia as being in a state of stable disequilibrium. Gaia operates far from equilibrium, not in a haphazard way with wild fluctuations, but with remarkable stability. For what now has been at least three billion years, the conditions of Earth have remained within the narrow chemical and thermal range that has enabled life to proliferate and evolve to its present state of complexity. Lovelock lists ranges of specific physical conditions within which Gaia must remain to survive as a living entity. A slight decrease in the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere, for example, would suffocate all but the most anaerobic forms of life. A slight increase, and the planet’s surface would incinerate. Similarly with other gases in the atmosphere and with the chemical composition of the oceans. Earth's chemistry is finely tuned to keep life alive. Lovelock suggests that biology maintains the Earth’s stable disequilibrium within the narrow bio-friendly range of physical conditions through the use of feedback controls. Tendencies toward imbalance in the proportions of gasses in the atmosphere, for example, are met with changes in the planetary metabolism—increases or decreases in oceanic algae production, for example—that adjust the imbalance.

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 planetary metabolism. Similarly, galaxies seem to 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.)

Similar dynamics might apply to the universe as a whole. The pattern so far at least has been one of increasing formal complexity arising in nature as time passes, from the near homogeneity of the first seconds that followed the Big Bang to the countless arrangements of matter that constitute the mature galaxies, solar systems, the terrestrial biosphere, and the cities and ecosystems that ornament the Earth's surface and potentially those of other planets. The implication is that the universe is still in an active growing phase, part of a life cycle that began with a bang and might end with a whimper, but sustained during its lifetime by bogglingly complex and interdependent metabolic processes of self-organizing complexity.

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 idea that nature at its fundaments is nonliving, and that life is just 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 has helped alienate the modern mind from nature. The alienation gained steam steadily since the Enlightenment, but now it might be waning as ecological issues force themselves on the consciousness of the industrialized world.

The ancient conception (of nature as a whole and in all of its parts constituting living processes) was revived in modern times by a small number of philosophers, including 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/becoming.

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,

"My point is that a further stage of provisional realism is required in which the scientific scheme is recast, and founded upon the ultimate concept of organism. [. . . . ] The concept of the order of nature is bound up with the concept of nature as the locus of organisms in the process of development."

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 organismic structures and processes the universe might contain.

What, for example, has the study of stars revealed? That stars are born, that they progress through distinct developmental stages, and that finally they die. And that this life cycle is powered by a nuclear metabolism (building up [fusion] processes and tearing down [fission] processes feeding each other raw material). Even given the difficulty of studying galaxies, the latest theories propose that the many forms of galaxies represent particular stages of a generalized galactic life cycle and that the internal processes of galaxies, such as star formation, are controlled by feedback cycles. Astrophysicist Lee Smolin has proposed that parent universes beget baby universes and that universes evolve by natural selection. As much as scientific fundamentalists might resist applying the language of livingness to anything outside of biology, dismissing such applications as metaphorical, the shoe nonetheless seems to fit no matter where scientists look.

And this deep ordering principle—the general applicability of biological functions—expresses itself also through the 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 all other organisms.

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