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

Symbiosis

Organisms become harder to delineate when they extend their metabolisms through, and become dependent on, one another.

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. Symbiotic organisms function simultaneously as extensions of one another's metabolisms and as components of their environments.

A lichen appears to be a single type of organism, but the lichens are actually integrated symbiotic communities of bacteria and fungi.

An enzyme produced by a micro-organism that lives in the gut of the termite enables the insect to digest cellulose (wood fiber). According to a 2/25/2008 Boston Globe article, Of Microbes and Men, the human body, by mass, consists mostly of symbiotic bacteria--about 90 percent of the cells. Researcher Anna Skalka, Director Emeritus, Institute for Cancer Research, Fox Chase Cancer Center, and colleagues estimate that at least 8 percent of the human genome is of viral origin. She is interviewed about the work on National Public Radio HERE. Whose metabolism is whose?

The ambiguities encountered when trying to delineate biological "units" is a problem for evolution generally, because evolution theory needs to define something discrete for nature to "select", from among her integrated metabolic processes. Which is a discrete unit of evolutionary selection, a gene, a trait, an individual organism, a species? This "granularity problem" plagues the Darwinian model.

Endosymbiosis

The ambiguities take a dramatic turn in the more complicated mechanism of endosymbiosis. This process occurs 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 proposed the idea in the 1960s. She since has enjoyed the last laugh, however. Endosymbiosis generally is accepted today by evolutionary theorists as the most plausible evolutionary path to eukaryotic cells.

Tightly coupled anabolic and catabolic subprocesses create the illusion that bodies are 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, just another component of the polyp's physical environment, 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 atoms of iron turn out to be essential to the lives of certain organisms, but it seems doubtful that any iron atom feels a distinction between participating in living processes and nonliving ones. During its lifetime an iron atom will make and break bonds with countless other atoms, in hemoglobin molecules and rusty nails. Matter and energy exchanges within nature crisscross back and forth between the organic and the inorganic seamlessly. Nature seems uninterested in maintaining walls of separation between the two domains of the organic and the inorganic. This observation raises questions about the character of manufactured (organic and inorganic) artifacts and the potential range of their impressions on humankind.

NEXT > Technology, or Niche Construction

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