More on Symbiogenesis

This post won't do the extended discussion on symbiogenesis justice, but since I took the Acquiring Genomes back to the library today, it will have to suffice.

I want to draw a connection between Margulis' idea of how biological complexity evolved and how species developed with the human-scale social and cultural world. If we use symbiogenesis as a new--or another--paradigm with which to perceive narratives among our observations, I think it has much value.

First, it seems political and historical phenomena like corporate acquisitions, corporate mergers, or liquidations (even these terms are etymologically evocative of bodies consuming, dividing, replicating, merging) follow similar behavior protocols as Margulis and Sagan suggest organisms do. There is a punctuated equilibrium in the business world--companies in niche proximity may exist for some time doing whatever they are doing, well or poorly, until a moment of contact with a competitor. Then after certain discrete tipping points, they become one--"one" composed of the somewhat digested parts of their "many." For example, the local St. Francis Bank was last year acquired by MidAmerica Bank, which was this year acquired by National City Bank. In just the past few years Ameritech was absorbed into SBC which was absorbed into AT&T. Microsoft wants to take over Yahoo. NewsCorp ate up the Wall Street Journal. Subsidiaries are everywhere, and I do not think we often think about the meta- or macro-organisms comprising the socioeconomic realm. At least not in this way. Corporations--literally bodies composed of parts--are the actors on today's economic world stage. Their semipermeable membranes are to be accessed mainly on electronic scales, information scales, rather than only in the physical world. These flexible body boundaries overlap and subsume invisible but parallel sociopolitical boundaries, the invisible lines of nation-states themselves composed of principalities merging and allying or subjugated. It is a fascinating realm of life composed of the individual and willful activities of organisms of other, inclusive or overlapping scales that comprise the multiple functions of such macroorganisms of state and business and culture. I have by no means adequately demonstrated the extent of the analogy, but I hope the reader will appreciate the direction of the analogy, which may be much more than mere analogy.

It seems to me that symbiogenesis offers a different way of viewing life on all scales. Perhaps a product of its time, but probably independent enough from any time, it emphasizes the relationships among different life forms as the way to understand the meaning and organization and origin of life. I think that lesson exists on the human/cultural scale as well as the microbiological; if we view our human bodies as historical emergent communities instead of chemical-processing machines, perhaps this can help us to better understand sickness and how to approach illness. Perhaps this may help us to better celebrate the wonder of the body--that it exists at all with any kind of integrity. How often do we enjoy each fart, appreciating that it is the healthy byproduct of bacteria coexisting in our gut? How often do we consider the matter/energy transfer that occurs every time we eat anything--that apple, that salami--which truly equates what we "are" with what we "eat"? From a strictly materialistic standpoint, this is almost perfectly true (we are of many things, each with a tangled history--the stars, the soil, the seas, the air). We should be frankly amazed at homeostasis, especially considering it may historically have resulted from the literal communion of different, individual organisms--not only the survival of one species but the integrated survival of many in new forms.

Lastly for this post, I also see the application of symbiogenesis as an idea useful in explaining aspects of the politically active realm. The idea of political movements coalescing membership, aligning individuals toward specific goals has often evoked for me the sense of cellular mission or bacterial directive--I've seen on PBS a scientist at the Princeton Institute for Advance Study demonstrating the chemical communication relays of bacteria. When the bacteria are not under stress, they behave as individuals, just hanging around; when stimulated by a chemical alarm signal, they react in unison, with pathological force and multiplied effect. There remains or exists or has evolved within human individuals and human communities a similar, possibly trans-vestigial, hunger for, susceptibility to, and satisfaction in community networks. When political and sports analysts alike talk of "momentum" they are not reporting any physical phenomenon yet they are reporting empirical evidence--an arena may be riveted on what a charismatic speaker or an exceptional athlete will do next, and there is an energy in communal attention that is describable and somatic, if not actually shared among many bodies. While humans have evolved within clan-based social hierarchies, some 20th and 21st century democratic movements seem to me to suggest an actual harmonious unity among groups with a common cause that are not adequately described in terms of fictive clan structure. Some of us seem to be aligning, or magnetized, or gravitating into semi-cohesive sociopolitical networks whose final identities and functions remain unclear. For punctuated equilibrium seems appropriate in describing the historical phenomena known to have been affected by such masses of humanity: The civil rights movement, while a continuous struggle, achieved discrete victories and suffered discrete defeats. Its bold spokespersons were assassinated. Yet the cultural environment changed as a result of legal and social action. Today the coalitions of politics are many and varied, but the individual agents within various movements each participate in collective actions no individual could obtain without the flexibility and massiveness of the network. This is at once an extremely hopeful and extremely fearful line to tread, in my observation: hopeful, because to participate in democracy in such a way is to truly and actively trust other human beings; fearful, because not only may that trust be unfounded or betrayed, but the collective participation raises the silent question of at what point does the individual subsume into the whole and abdicate his choice? This seems an academic and esoteric question, but consider the pace at which our technology--and our relationship with technology--is accelerating. What is a cell phone but a cellular transmitter and receiver, isolating an individual by consigning him to a cellular role even as it connects that individual via messages to and from other cells, but also from a whole neither seen nor understood? The internet is functionally analogous, especially as it grows more accessible in wi-fi and to phones. Corporations and polities and movements and ideologies are all expanding their networks as new means become available. As they do, and as individuals also increasingly make use of new tools, the question may be less whether we can resist forming a macroorganism but what kind of macroorganism it is going to be.

Transhumanism Already Here?

I am very tired so I won't be able to expound as much or as cogently as I hope myself of the future will, but I just clicked on an online news video about a protein that "blinds" sperm, making them unable to recognize an egg. It is being developed as a male contraceptive.

In weeks past, I've been hearing many ads for a procedure known as essure, which injects little expanding metal springs into a woman's Fallopian tubes to block them and thus resulting in birth control.

While "transhumanism" is still thought of as something beyond what we are right now as a species, it is all too common to consider the many little steps being taken to subtly but fundamentally alter the nature of the human species. Something about the nature of birth control, especially these sophisticated biologically manipulative measures, seems to cut to the core of the kinds of alterations being done more and more routinely to human bodies--of humans who have the economic or cultural means to access them, further segregating them from those who lack those means. While artificial limbs become more and more adept and beneficial for war and dismemberment victims and as MIT professors talk about having sex with robots, one might wonder what happened to the narrative warning bells of the great science fiction writers of the 20th (and even 19th) century. Have we forgotten them or have we not read them? Or, do we feel we are superior to the open-ended moral arguments they posited uniquely and in many ways prophetically? Have we read or forgotten our Frankenstein? Our Brave New World? Or even our Jurassic Park (book, not movie).

I cannot here say that technology is wrong or bad. I don't believe it falls into that category--or can. And I don't believe that moral categories, even when functional, are absolute or discrete. But I do think that when we have commentators smiling and nodding about new birth control technologies, their slick accepting presentation about technological and sexual progress belies a slippery slope of possibility, some of it downright dystopic. As we as a species continue to refine and develop and enterprise new technologies, especially those which modify or augment the functioning of the human mind or body more or less directly, I argue it is important to seek a sounder, more whole understanding of what we are and are not already at present--prior to the choice of whether or not to use uncertain technologies. And I argue this better self-knowledge should inform such choices, which, though wrapped in the sugar-coating of medical discourse authority, are genuinely profound choices about the nature of what is human and what is good. This criticism may place me in the Luddite camp and it may seem ultraconservative. And I hope my fears in this regard are only ever demonstrated as fears of the unknown. But I wonder if we are even thinking in these terms. I wonder what other thresholds we cross silently in the night. I wonder about the future of the species. And I wonder about the presupposed value, which appears to underline research of this nature, of separating sexuality from fertility.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke Dies

Clarke's (1917-2008) Obit

I cannot adequately eulogize the man--the writer, the thinker--at this moment, but Arthur C. Clarke was an exemplary human. He should be remembered. He would probably not wish to be mourned, however.

On Symbiogenesis

I recently finished reading a wholly remarkable book.

It is one of the most fascinating and dangerous books I've ever read, and although there is a lot of time to come in this century, it may prove to be one of the seminal classics defining the 21st century: Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan (Basic Books: 2002).

I've been itching to comment on this book since I started this Web log, but I wanted to finish it first. Every thinking person should read this book.

Why the high praise? Several reasons. Margulis and Sagan, a mother and son scientist team, outline a theory to explain the source of heritable variation and to explain how speciation, the evolution of new species from existing species, occurs.

Students of the liberal arts may at first suspect foul play here—for we been taught that these are no longer valid questions. We have been taught that heritable variation mostly stems from random mutations, with phenotypic utility or not, which accumulate over time in those organisms selected by nature to survive and successfully reproduce. We have been taught that speciation occurs when populations of species, often if isolated geographically or at least reproductively, undergo genetic drift as a result from specific environmental circumstances which result, over time, in segregated populations which can no longer viably reproduce fertile offspring because they are no longer genetically similar enough. (I recall a quiz in a human origins college course in which we were asked to describe how genetic drift as a result of geographic isolation might result in the evolution of two distinct species from one founding population. With deference and respect to Professor Axelrod, who administered the quiz, and with my apologies if I am failing to remember the question correctly, I have to admit there was a tiny little bell in the back of my head that sounded even at the time—while speciation by geographic isolation seemed logical enough (Madagascan lemurs come to mind as stereotypes easily lumped into this category without sufficient follow-up thought as to the actual hows), I wondered then about how many Madagascar-like isolated environments would be required to fill the planet with the biodiversity it has now and has had in the past. I wondered, also, why this was even a question worthy of asking undergraduates because on the one hand it seemed so plain that speciation must occur in such a way (having denounced Lamarck conceptually in high school biology, how else could it?) and on the other, it seemed awfully curious why we didn't have current-day examples of isolated populations resulting in observable speciation over the past 200 years, while biological science in some form has been watching (dog breeds and pea plants being examples of variation within a species rather than development of different species—as popular culture will inform us, a Doberman can still hump a Chihuahua).* It seemed, then, that speciation was a thing of the past, that we couldn't put our finger on recent examples of organisms directly traced to their historical ancestor. It seemed that speciation was observable only across geological timescales, and, as it is impressive and daunting to think across geological timescales, I didn't rigorously question this premise as I now feel empowered to, as I am outside the academic establishment.**

What Margulis and Sagan say is this: "We do not deny the importance of mutations. Rather we insist that random mutation, a small part of the evolutionary saga, has been dogmatically overemphasized. The much larger part of the story of evolutionary innovation, the symbiotic joining of organisms (similar, if we extend the printing analogy, to the fusion of texts in plagiarism or anthologies) from different lineages, has systematically been ignored by self-proclaimed evolutionary biologists."

They link their idea, dubbed symbiogenesis, with the punctuated equilibrium concept popularized by Stephen Jay Gould.***

I want to quote a bit more from them before continuing the discussion as to why I feel their thesis is highly significant not only within biology but also in various wider human spheres of thought and action.

Margulis and Sagan: "No evidence in the vast literature of heredity change shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation."

I haven't searched the literature myself, but I'm accepting their qualification about "unambiguous" evidence and linking their claim to my misgivings about those Madagascan lemurs (and even, as the authors discuss, Darwin's famous Galapagos finches, which are heavily studied today and observed to undergo significant genetic drift within species but have not demonstrated actual speciation despite significant environmental shifts).

One more direct quote from the book to set the stage. This one describes what they advance as the primary mode of speciation, symbiogenesis, which highlights the role of bacteria and other microbes in the totality of the evolutionary narrative of all life.

Margulis and Sagan: "From different vantages this poorly known idea can be gleaned: The agents of evolutionary change tend to be fully alive organisms, microbes, and their ecological relations, not just the random mutations these microbes have inside them. The formation and diversification of any new species is the outward manifestation of the actions of subvisible forms of life: the smallest microbes, bacteria, their larger descendants, the larger microbes, protists, and fungi, along with their intracellular legacies, organelles such as mitochondria and centrioles. Evolution emerges from the fact that these small living organisms and their progeny tend to outgrow their bounds."

They argue the main source of heritable variation for any given organism comes from the genomes of other organisms, which have historically come to be so related to others that a merging occurs. Natural selection determines if such mergers are successful.

The authors are explicit about their disagreement with mainstream evolutionary science. "No visible organism or group of organisms is descended 'from a single common ancestor,'" Margulis and Sagan write. The "common ancestor" concept is no doubt familiar to all who studied any evolutionary science at just about any level. Although "missing link" is usually frowned upon as a term about common ancestors, in effect, that's what common ancestors are viewed as—portions of the evolutionary tree whose identities are not yet fully understood and from which various extant species can trace their lineage. Margulis and Sagan replace the idea of an evolutionary tree that only branches outward with one that not only branches but also fuses as evolution occurs. If they are more correct than not, and they provide much evidence to support their theory, theirs is an exciting idea.

There's much more I want to discuss on this topic, but the discussion will have to continue in part II because this post has been sitting around for over a week and now I just want to get it up here.

*It should be noted that man's domestication of the wolf is pretty darn fascinating.

**As an aside, I think the inability of mainstream evolutionary scientists to point to current-day examples of speciation may be one reason that creationists, and their intelligent design brethren, remain able to sway converts despite the religiosity of their appeals. In the current educational paradigm, it's still too easy to view evolution as something that happened in the past, but which is too hard to observe today. Because science at its best is empirical, this was a public relations weakness for proponents of evolution by natural selection in general. As a member of the media, I can also appreciate the need for a contextual appositive—(i.e. "…speciation, for example as we see from organism X evolving from organism Y, is based on empirical evidence…).

***As another aside, punctuated equilibrium was very much taught in my classrooms, usually as opposed to gradualism. Why this concept never came to be linked in my mind to greater curiosity about the nature of speciation is somewhat curious, but probably attributable to the need to digest various textbooks in short order and to the lack of competing voices that complicate the discussion like those of Margulis and Sagan.

Timmtrek 2008 Photos

http://picasaweb.google.com/tonyart/Hunt

Thanks to my friend Tony, who uploaded photos from my camera and his to the above link. This year's scavenger hunt went well.
Thanks to all who participated.

Who first fried cheese? and other questions

Who first fried cheese? Who began domesticating the wolf? Who figured out how to make cheese—or let cheese be made? Who was the first man to shave? Who figured out potatoes?

The hungry. The brilliant. The bold.

Other questions

How do electromagnetic waves propagate without a medium? How did our ancestors make it across the Atlantic without puking their guts out? Do animals make choices?

Old ponderings

I wrote the following years ago but think the questioning is worth posting now, despite the shortcomings in the argumentation.

Dendritic patterns, trees branching, rivers gathering, brain cells organizing, they're all going toward or away some prime mover. In the case of trees, they branch toward the sun. Rivers branch together as a function of gravity. These fractals are "naturally" occurring, but consider the analogous structure their form might have to variables outside the context of their form itself. Observe a river branching from infinitely many water sources toward one ocean, observe intently and track every tributary and measure the weatherability of the soil, and you will never come up with a theory of gravity. You will come up with a theory of downstream and that all water flows downstream. You will not intuit the force of gravitation. Similarly, observe a tree branching out in fractal flow. Observe intently and track every leaf and branch. You will never come up with a sense of the star that is Earth's sun. You will not intuit the presence of a single star radiating light onto the daylight existence of the tree.

Yet our theories maintain that rivers flow according to the force of gravity and that trees branch in order to maximize their receipt of sunlight.

Can this mean that our appreciation for other fractal patterns is lacking some outside understanding either driving or attracting the pattern constituents to their form? What lies outside our appreciation of chaos theory that might accommodate such a sense of a more whole understanding of how apparently chaotic systems behave? What can answer why they behave so?

That is, to say that there is some greater fractal topography to the universe leaves the question open as to what provides a "prime mover" for such patterns. What essential force is left out? What belies the surface of fractal topography?

What is the sun? What is the Earth's core?

Must this link science and philosophy?

Brett Favre Retires

The day Brett Favre retired is like Sept. 11, 2001 in two respects: It is one of those days when an utterly mundane setting suddenly becomes memorable because it is only in one place and at one time—Where were you when you learned Favre retired?—that one learns news of such cultural magnitude. And, both moments leave in their wake a kind of painful, mournful communal resonance. We feel a common wounding, as though we are all connected through common knowledge of the event—and through our emotional reaction to knowledge that the way forward no longer includes something previously held both sacred and stable.

Whether or not there exists a collective soul, the sadness, the suddenness, and the irrevocableness of moments like these are at once striking and bonding.

A Quick Word on Favre

Humility. Excellence. Perseverance. Teamwork. These attributes ring false like some faded motivational management posters hanging in a sterile office hallway between the water cooler and the fake plants. Yet these words are actual and potent when referenced with the human named Brett Favre, because for Favre, they were absolutely true. Through the medium of the television, the feats of his play were shared with a massive fictive family who believed in his ability, his drive, his resilience, his spirit. And we were repaid for that belief with both touchdowns and interceptions, but also those moments of pure magic.

On this day when Favre retires, it is as though an old friend has died. What he means and meant to us will pass from the present tense—the seemingly always mythic—into the pages of memory and legend. An era has ended.

The memory of Favre will now define the shape of some things to come for the Packer nation and beyond. We are no longer tethered to his glorious past nor to his seemingly perpetual youth. We are cut free, free to grow old and become our own heroes. Free to remember him and those memories associated with his greatness, placing those memories into a different category than we might have yesterday. For the world is new. As it is every moment of every day, but which moments and days like this one clarify. Let us take the moment to celebrate the memory of Favre and how he brought so many people together.

What an athlete. What a culture hero. What a human being.