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.
Think
you're Bright?
Rise and Shine at http://starlarvae.blogspot.com/ |
A mutually beneficial relationship among organisms is called symbiosis. The concept aggravates the difficulty in distinguishing 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 from yet other bodies 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). Whose metabolism is whose?
The ambiguity of species delineations is demonstrated historically by the concept of endosymbiosis. The term refers to a process of independent cells merging to form a new kind of cell. Specifically, the term is used to name the supposed process by which various species of bacteria, or prokaryotes, merged to give birth to the more complex eukaryotes. The cells that make up plant and animal bodies are eukaryotic. The notion that this is how these complex cells arose, through a communal pooling of resources on the part of bacteria, was greeted with scorn when researcher Lynn Margulis originally proposed it. She has enjoyed the last laugh, however. Endosymbiosis is generally accepted today as the most plausible evolutionary path to eukaryotic cells.
"Lichens are also clearly metabolically integrated. The products of photosynthesis flow from bluegreen or green to the translucent partner. What is seldom realized is that in tight associations the metabolites flow in both directions. The animal or fungal partner also releases materials to the photosynthesizer. Symbioses are two-way exchanges. The kindness of strangers, the metabolic flow of gifts, makes them less strange and, ultimately, part of a single, co-dependent biological self."
-- Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan |
Tightly coupled anabolic and catabolic processes create the illusion of bodies as fundamentally discrete organismic 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. The organism, family, society, ecosystem and biome—each can be regarded as a discrete organismic unit.
"Indeed the lower we go in the scale of being, the more necessary is geographical unity for that close interaction of individuals which constitutes society. Societies of the higher animals, of insects, of molecules, all possess geographical unity. A rock is nothing else than a society of molecules, indulging in every species of activity open to molecules. I draw attention to this lowly form of society in order to dispel the notion that social life is a peculiarity of the higher organisms. The contrary is the case. So far as survival value is concerned, a piece of rock, with its past history of some eight hundred millions of years, far outstrips the short span attained by any nation."
-- Alfred North Whitehead |
The borders
of an organism are indistinct because the interactions among organisms,
the material and energy exchanges, ensure a continuously fluid situation,
which in the case of a symbiosis, such as that of bee and plant, makes
for a kind of hyperorganism, which is the unity comprising the participants.
This understanding transcends familiar categorical distinctions, such
as organism and environment, organic and inorganic, natural and synthetic.
Is the coral of the reef distinct from or part of the living organism,
the polyp that excretes the coral? Is it an artifact of the organism or
the true skin of its body? Where does the organism end? Can the reef be
part of the organism and itself not be living? This would suggest 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?
"Hence one must always ask how the partners are integrated, if they are always integrated, and what environmental conditions influence their integration. To substitute these sorts of details of metabolite flow and gene-product transfer between intimate former strangers with neodarwinian terms like 'cooperation','cost',' or 'benefit' is absurd and exemplary of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Such terminology precludes real understanding of the inevitably rich and complex evolutionary past of the symbiotic world that made animals, plants, and their nucleated panetmates."
-- Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan |
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 (ostensibly inorganic) artifacts and their impressions on human nature.
Text Copyright
©2004-2008 Advanced Theological Systems. All Rights Reserved.
