Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 1. Metabolic Metaphysics
-
Metabolism
-
Complexity and entropy—anabolism and catabolism—feed each other in circuits collectively called metabolism. Nature's universal metabolism encompasses the organic and the inorganic in a continuum of matter and energy exchanges.
Think
you're Bright?
Rise and Shine at http://starlarvae.blogspot.com/ |
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 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 Kabbalists went so far as to try symbolically to diagram reality or, as it were, the divine psyche itself. They envisioned a sefirotic tree. We today are more comfortable with the double helix of DNA or the unified field theory of modern physics, but they're all fundamentally the same: one awesomely integrated organism." --
Lawrence Kushner |
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
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 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.)
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 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.
"The problem is one of cellular psychology, sociology, or ecology, and then of molecular psychology and ecology. Finally, everything is a matter of individual and social psychology, on we know not how many levels." --
Charles Hartshorne |
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 organisms the
physical 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.
"For the early Greeks quite simply, and with some qualification for all Greeks whatever, nature was a vast living organism, consisting of a material body spread out in space and permeated by movements in time; the whole body was endowed with life, so that all its movements were vital movements; and all these movements were purposive, directed by intellect. This living and thinking body was homogenous throughout in the sense that it was all alive, all endowed with soul and with reason; it was non-homogeneous in the sense that different parts of it were made of different substances each having its own specialized qualitative nature and mode of acting. The problems which so profoundly exercise modern thought, the problem of the relation between dead matter and living matter, and the problem of the relation between matter and mind, did not exist. There was no dead matter, for no difference of principle was recognized between the seasonal rotation of the heavens and the seasonal growth and fall of leaves on a tree, or between the movement of a planet in the sky and the movement of a fish in the water; it was never for a moment suggested that the one could be accounted for by a kind of law which did not even begin to account for the other." --
R. G. Collingwood |
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.
| If you need some medical advice on various aspects of your health you may find some on a health info website that could give you a step in the right direction. For specific help on things like medical symptoms and diagnosing problems with your health, such as your metabolism, a doctor will also help. |
Text Copyright
©2004-2008 Advanced Theological Systems. All Rights Reserved.
