![]() Nature’s Plan for Humankind Part 1. Metabolic Metaphysics Symbiosis
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.
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.
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.
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.
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