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

Organism and Environment

Processes within nature's metabolism can seem to be discrete metabolisms. But these sub-processes, organisms, cannot be delineated distinct from their environments.

Scientists tend to view nature against a hierarchy in which subatomic particles occupy the bottom rung and which ascends then to the level of atoms, then molecules and on to cells and organisms, ecosystems and biospheres, solar systems and galaxies, galactic clusters and superclusters and from there to a cosmic beyond. The hierarchy includes as many intermediate steps as suits the occasion or as many as ingenuity can contrive. The problem with a hierarchical model is that levels are defined by convention; they are not essentially discrete, because nature has no intrinsic joints or seams at which she can be cleaved.

Any defined level provides an environment within which "lower" levels can exchange matter and/or energy. And any defined level acts as an organism or population of organisms that occupies a niche and goes about its metabolic business in a higher-level. Because an organism exchanges matter and energy with its environment, the precise definition, or delineation, of the organism is problematic. Where does the organism end and the environment begin? This quandary is presents itself glaringly in the instance of the many food chains and biological cycles that run through an ecosystem (not to mention the dependence of all on electromagnetic radiation from our star).

But even events occurring below the biological scale, as when atoms bond to form molecules, the identity of each participant relative to the environment becomes fuzzy. A molecule acts as an environment in which atoms share or exchange' electrons, and the relationship that results is the chemical bond that maintains the environment. The environment of the molecule reconstitutes its constituent atoms. Atomic ownership of electrons in a molecule can become indeterminate.

To illustrate the the principle of indeterminate boundaries at the suprabiological end of the hierarchical scale, consider the whole Earth. Researcher James Lovelock assigned the name Gaia to the Earth when considered as a single, unified, self-sustaining entity. Gaia was an ancient Earth goddess, and Lovelock adopted the name to underscore the observation that life itself actively maintains the terrestrial environment, chemically and thermally, so as to sustain life. Lovelock's model of the biosphere actively maintaining itself—the entire organic world acting in concert on its own behalf—is gaining ground as the overarching model of ecological science.

But, as with any organism, the living Earth is not a discrete, self-contained system. It is embedded in an environment. That environment is the solar system, populated by the sun, other planets, moons, asteroids, and clouds of comets. The sun plays an obvious, essential role in keeping the whole show running. But the other bodies of the solar system also seem to be essential for life to evolve. In Rare Earth, Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee catalog many of the cosmic coincidences that make Earth hospitable to the evolution of complex biological life. For example:

• Not only is Earth the right distance from a star of the right size to make bio-friendly conditions possible, but its anomalously large moon is situated precisely so as to stabilize the planet’s season-generating tilt.

• The outer giants, Jupiter and Saturn, act as gravitational vacuum cleaners, protecting the inner planets, including Earth, from excessive bombardment by stray comets and asteroids. Some of these projectiles get through, but Ward and Brownlee calculate that without the gravitational clean-up work performed by Jupiter and Saturn, Gaia long ago would have been pummeled beyond recovery.

• Much of Earth's water supply is likely to have been delivered by comets. It is hardly controversial anymore to suggest that comets probably also delivered a supply of organic materials to the early Earth, in effect kick-starting the genesis of biological life.

This inventory of dependencies suggests that Gaia is a misnomer. The planet Earth is one component of a larger system, which as a whole can be thought of as constituting a discrete organism. But even that organism, our solar system, is able to thrive only because it resides in a hospitable environment. Neither much nearer the center of the Milky Way galaxy nor much nearer the fringes would it find adequately hospitable conditions. The solar system resides in what cosmologists call a galactic habitable zone, a region of space characterized by a sufficient density of the kinds of materials needed so that solar systems can form. (See "Refuges of Life in a Hostile Universe," by Guillermo Gonzalez, Donald Brownlee, and Peter D Ward, Scientific American, October 2001.)

Based on our solar system’s particulars, Ward and Brownlee dismiss the prospect of complex life existing elsewhere in the universe. They argue that the precise arrangement of conditions needed is too unlikely to occur again. But nature’s propensity to self-organize begs the question as to what constitutes an unlikely coincidence and what constitutes a predictable result of nature's self-organizing tendencies.

Ward and Brownlee interpret Earth's seemingly unique status in secular terms. But others interpret the same observations in religious terms. These theorists propose that Earth is a Privileged Planet, one so uniquely hospitable to biological life that it must be an artifact of intelligent design. Now that space probes are revealing planets around other stars—exoplanets—the Rare Earth hypothesis is becoming testable. In 2009 researchers announced that they had detected "rocky" exoplanets and "super" Earths. The catalog of exoplanets has grown to where in January 2012 astronomers from the European Southern Observatory announced that stars without planets appear to be the exception rather than the rule. The scientific and religious communities might not have to wait long to see whether their hypotheses survive telescopic scrutiny. The star larvae hypothesis predicts that Earth is neither rare nor privileged, but that complex life on planets is commonplace. If this prediction is borne out by future research, scientists and theologians will have to scramble to adjust their paradigms. London's Royal Society already is planning for an announcement regarding inhabited exoplanets.

Identifying any cross section of nature's metabolism as discrete is an exercise in imprecision. The individual organism might seem to be an unambiguously delineated unit of nature, but, as the Gaia example, or any study of biological food chains, reveals, the organism exists only in a state of dependence on its environment. Perversely, environments confuse the issue not only because boundaries among nature's levels of scale are ambiguous, but also because environments introduce organisms to one another and foster mutually beneficial, sometimes essential, relationships among them. That result, symbiosis, further challenges facile notions of the discrete organism.

NEXT > Symbiosis

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