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.