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

Organism and Environment

Some cross sections of nature’s metabolism act like discrete unities. These organisms elude easy delineation, however, because their metabolisms diffuse into their environments.

The interlocking of natural systems in a hierarchy of ascending scale is a common model of nature's organization. The model typically starts with subatomic particles, then climbs to the level of atoms and molecules, then on to cells and organisms, ecosystems and biospheres and from there to the levels of the cosmic beyond—with as many intermediate steps as necessary for the occasion. The problem with this model is that the levels are defined by convention; they are not naturally discrete. Any given level in the hierarchy is an environment for lower levels, and it exchanges matter and/or energy with them. And any given level acts as an organism or population of organisms for higher-levels, which serve as environments for the lower levels. Because an organism exchanges matter and energy with its environment, the precise definition, or delineation, of the organism is problematic. This situation is familiar enough in the case of the many biological cycles that run through an ecosystem, all of which ultimately depend on electromagnetic radiation from an extraterrestrial source—the sun.

But even when events occur below the biological scale, as when atoms bond to form molecules, the identity of each participant becomes fuzzy. A molecule is an environment in which the atoms' electrons are shared or exchanged, and the relationship that results is the chemical bond that keeps the atoms in place. Serving as an environment, the molecule reconstitutes the components that make up the atoms. To which atom do the shared electrons belong?

To illustrate the applicability of this principle at the other end of the hierarchy, on a scale larger than the biological, consider the Earth. Taken as a unity, or single organism, the Earth was dubbed Gaia by scientist James Lovelock. Gaia was an ancient Earth goddess, and Lovelock adopted the name to convey the unity of life on Earth as constituting a single self-regulating entity, with life itself actively maintaining the terrestrial environment in a condition that supports 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. Here's a sampling,

• Not only is Earth the right distance from a star of the right size to make bio-friendly conditions possible, but its conspicuously 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 neighborhood. 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 their data in secular terms. But others interpret the same data 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 supernatural 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 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 level in nature's hierarchy 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.

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