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

Symbiosis

Defining an organism becomes more complicated when the organism extends its metabolism through, and becomes dependent on, other organisms.

A mutually beneficial relationship among organisms is called symbiosis. This concept can make it hard to distinguish between organisms and their environments. For example, if a plant requires the participation of an organism of a different type, a bee, say, to reproduce, then the bee is a part of the plant’s reproductive process. And if the bee requires the pollen from the plant to feed its larvae, then the plant participates in the bee’s reproductive cycle. The organism is the beeplant. To where the bee flies, the plant might expand its range. To where the plant’s seeds light, perhaps due to the intervention of a bird, a new beehive might be established. The bird further complicates the boundaries of the organisms. And all the while the cells that constitute the bodies of the plant, bee, and bird are turning over, with new generations arising from old, continuously remaking the plant, bee, and bird bodies at the microscopic level.

Pheromones and molecules of food and air participate in the endless cycling of matter and energy through the Gaian body. Certain cyanobacteria and fungi have become so integrated that it's common to think of the joint venture as a single organism. These are the lichens. An enzyme produced by a micro-organism that lives in the gut of the termite enables the insect to digest cellulose (wood fibers). By mass, the human body consists mostly of symbiotic bacteria. Whose metabolism is whose?

The ambiguities encountered when trying to delineate biological "units" is a problem for evolution theory, because the theory needs to define something discrete for nature to "select", from among her interwoven and interdependent organic processes. Which is a discrete unit of evolutionary selection, a microscopic "gene" or a macroscopic "species"?

The ambiguities take a dramatic turn in the proposed mechanism of endosymbiosis. This process is thought to occur when different types of unicellular organisms merge to form a new kind of cell, which, being a conglomerate of symbionts, has a more complicated structure than its formerly independent constituents. According to normal evolution theory, various species of bacteria, or prokaryotes, merged to create the more complex, eukaryotic, cells that make up the bodies of multicellular plants and animals. The notion that this is how complex cells arose, through a communal pooling of resources on the part of bacteria, was greeted with scorn when researcher Lynn Margulis originally proposed the idea in the 1960s. She since has enjoyed the last laugh, however. Endosymbiosis is generally accepted today as the most plausible evolutionary path to eukaryotic cells.

Tightly coupled anabolic and catabolic processes create the illusion of bodies as fundamentally discrete biological units. But the metabolic process per se is the fundamental structuring pattern. Organism is a conceptual convenience that designates a relatively stable cross-section of overlapping interdependent metabolisms. Organisms make their ways among other organisms, making and breaking bonds of various kinds, forming new organisms in their combinations and recombinations of metabolic overlappings. Gene, organism, and species each can be regarded as a discrete biological unit, subject to evolutionary selection.

Technology: Humankind's Extended Symbiont

Is the coral of the reef distinct from, or part of, the living organism, the polyp, that excretes the coral? Is the coral an artifact of polyp technology or the true skin of its body? Can the reef's coral be part of the organism and itself not be living? If so, it suggests that an organism can have two parts, one possessed of livingness and one not, the two interwoven in the body of the thing. But are the molecules themselves possessed of livingness? Are the iron atoms that ride along in the hemoglobin molecule that keeps animals alive, alive?

Something as intuitively nonliving as iron is essential for the physical functioning of complex animals, but one has to doubt that any iron atom knows any distinction between participating in living and nonliving processes. During its lifetime an iron atom will make and break bonds with countless other atoms. Nature's matter and energy exchanges among physical forms and processes crisscross back and forth between the organic and the inorganic. This observation raises questions about the character of manufactured (organic and inorganic) artifacts and their impressions on human nature.

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