Is it best to post to a blog in rough and brainstorm fashion, half-baked ideas, fully formed sets of thoughts or highly polished gems of completed works? Hmmm…
This one is definitely far to the rough side of that spectrum…
Some thoughts inspired by discussions with Judith Rosen and others on the rosen@home discussion list. This is a first cut at trying to integrate five ideas into one. I specifically was hoping to link up the anticipatory systemic property of life to the Gaia hypothesis and my view of Gaia – the biosphere – as a bona fide, valid, evidence-confirmed, essential and irreducible unit of life fully comparable and equal to the cell-organism-individual and community-ecosystem units of life. Takes a few other threads to weave those two threads together…
1. Anticipatory systems – not only is anticipation a key signature and unique quality or capacity of life as clearly defined and elucidated by Robert Rosen, but anticipatory behavior is reported and emphasized among many other workers as well. There is a quote about the “pull of the future” which I need to find again. I think it may be in a quote by John Haught and may also actually be about God as pulling us toward a positive future. As anticipation is often associated with teleology, and then often further found guilty by association to ideas of spirit or elan vital, anticipation can be ostracized by the “hard” scientists as in those who see and use only mechanism and material in their worldview and work. It will be an excellent breakthrough and contribution if and when we can bring more harmony and less conflict around these ideas. Robert Rosen made huge contributions…Bob Ulanowicz has and does too. An emphasis on relations can help – these are special in that they are clearly real and physical, yet they are not at all material. Among other unapologetically spiritual and still scientific workers we find de Chardin and his idea of the omega point. In general I think of anticipation as a complex process of life in which life enables, catalyzes, harnesses, is open to the influence of some kinds of ideals or potentials that exist in the future. These ideals or potentials only “exist” in the future in the sense that they can only be realized in the future (brought into material existence?), yet even from this odd place of “non-existence” they can influence behavior in the present (or life is able to use them for such influence, or etc.).
2. Space – we have been talking about space a lot recently, and much is in the news. Astronomers have been searching for and finding planets far away from Earth that may have the potential for life. To identify such planets – with POTENTIAL for life – they look for ones in the “Goldilocks zone” – not too hot, not too cold, just right. This zone – which involves a kind of balancing act between planetary mass and (most importantly) distance from the central star – is seen as not only the “just right” zone for life, but this zone is also associated with planets that may have moderate temperatures to enable liquid water to exist on the planet. And I think (if I am remembering real info from the web and these searchers as opposed to inserting my own ideas here) they also associate this zone with a set of conditions that could allow an atmosphere to exist. So it is not too close to the star, and not too hot – which would burn off the atmosphere and liquid water – and it is not too far from the star, and too cold – which would perhaps keep all water in frozen, solid, ice form…and…(not sure how this “too cold” region links to atmosphere presence…maybe since some water vapor would be key part to atmosphere?). Anyway…one such planet is orbiting around Gliese 581…
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/gliese_581_feature.html
So this thread is about potential for life as associated with liquid water and a “Goldilocks zone” with planetary and environmental conditions potentially right for life – life as we know it, which is based largely on liquid water. Life as we know it…is the only life we can really know…until we find something else…which we would then know again…
3. Gaia hypothesis – Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis also came from work he was doing to help search for, or design indicators or approaches for how to search for, life on other planets. As I remember the story and history…he was helping do this for Mars. My rough memory is also that he looked at data for the composition of the atmosphere of Mars and compared this to known composition of the atmosphere of Earth (and perhaps other planets as well) and then informed the space folks that he could tell them with confidence that no life existed on Mars. This conclusion involved synthetic understanding and pulling many other threads together about chemistry and physics and realizing that Earth’s atmosphere is a very odd and unexpected composition based on laws of physics and spontaneous reactions, atmospheric chemistry, etc. That is, Earth’s atmosphere – with its abnormally high oxygen concentration – is very far away from thermodynamic equilibrium. Lovelock attributed this special set of conditions on Earth to the action of life and as the results of life processes. And thus by reversing this logic inferred that if planets have no such anomalous atmospheric composition and if the concentrations of gases would be expected and predicted by laws of physics, spontaneous (non-living) chemical reactions and thermodynamic equilibrium alone…then it seems a safe prediction that no life is present.
I have tried to take Gaia to the origin of life…to imagine how life emerged as Baby Gaia. This links to Gliese 581 in that if we imagine that the conditions were right for life to emerge on Earth – Earth was in the Goldilocks zone, had liquid water, had an atmosphere, etc. – then the next questions are what would it take for this potential for life to become real and realized? And what kinds of processes might be involved in the origin of life that make use of these key environmental conditions (liquid water, atmosphere, etc)?
Generalizing a bit more…and trying that hard, hard bridge between non-life and life…it seems to me a paradoxical set of ideas that 1) the potential for life is always there (it is a natural aspect of the universe, very broadly defined so as to include God if or as needed)…yet 2) we do not always have life present, life is not always and everywhere realized (existing in real, physical, matter-energy-relational form,) at least partly since we do not always have the right conditions for life. Odd. It seems we need to bridge the general process by which potential becomes real…need to ask John Kineman…
My story for the origin of life on Earth is one in which biospheric, ecosystemic and organismic forms of life all emerge in concert. The role of the planetary unit is that being in the Goldilocks zone we get a hydrological cycle. This to me is the crucial pre-cursor to life (when working from the physical and environmental pre-life situation). In addition to the “just right” aspect of temperature, I see a need for a balance between solar (or stellar) radiation hitting a planet, and the gravitational power of that planet based on its mass and size. Where these are balanced we can get water to evaporate – but it does not fly off into space…it is pulled back to Earth (or whatever planet) partly by action of gravitation acting to aid precipitation. These two phase changes (evaporation, precipitation) operating in the Goldilocks zone in which radiation and gravitation are nearly equal leads to a water cycle that can run indefinitely. From here…we have the backbone cycle of life. It takes other threads to weave in the ecosystemic and organismic aspects co-bootstrapping at the same time. HT Odum has a scenario in which he says “the ecological system precedes the origin of life” (from his book Environment, Power and Society, 1971).
4. Buddhism – how can we leap to Buddhism? Why is it needed to weave these threads together? The main key aspect is via Joanna Macy and her book on Mutual Causality, Buddhism and General Systems Theory. In this book she wrote that “dependent co-arising” was the central insight of Buddha. I need to review this to get it clear again…but my basic, rough (perhaps incorrect) memory of her section on this links to pairs of opposites well known in Eastern religions and worldviews…classically captured in the Yin Yang symbol and Taoism. My general sense of what Macy says Buddha says is that “things” arise or come into existence in the recurring pattern of dependent co-arising. I vaguely remember that may apply to both “things” in the mind – ideas, thoughts, feelings, fears, etc. – as well as things in reality, things as they come in to real existence, come to life, etc. And of course, these realms are intimately linked and logically related…the realms of mind and “real world”, or internal and external realms for any person.
At the origin of life, at the birth of Baby Gaia, I see this same seemingly generic, fundamental process of the universe active and helpful for explanation. There is the Yin and Yang interplay of opposing forces…namely this is represented or instantiated (the ideal made real in this specific case) by the roles of solar radiation and Earth gravitation both acting in opposite ways to influence water. As these two forces of nature interplay…and in this Goldilocks zone where they are equal and matched in terms of causal influence…we get not only an open-ended water cycle…we also get myriad actions that this cycle can have to also influence other aspects of Earth – the atmosphere, the land, the oceans, everything. All of these can be mixed and brought into contact, reacted and sifted and sorted and mashed and eroded and washed away and deposited and built up and mixed again, endlessly…all of these can interact and inter-influence…and co-evolve…and perhaps via dependent co-arising…two apparently opposite forms may co-bootstrap together to bring life into functional and dynamic and active form at smaller scales than the planet.
I have depicted these original functional forms as the composer and the decomposer. The composer is the pre-cursor to the autotrophic functional form able to string together molecules and store energy in their bonds. And the decomposer is the pre-cursor to the heterotrophic functional form able to “eat” and break apart such molecular strings to release the stored energy made available by the composers. I see these two arising in dependent or interdependent co-existence. And that the two together are far more lifelike and alive than either alone. A good analogy is to word processing – to type words is like the composer function, to erase words or letters is the decomposer function. Put the two together…and voila…something special…the ability to write-edit-communicate much better than with either of these two functions alone. The Escher image Drawing Hands is good too…would be even better if one hand had a pencil with an eraser instead of two pencils…but same basic idea…it takes 2 to tango…two coupled complementary processes.
5. Increasing order – hands getting tired…have to stop…one more…
To link to anticipation and to life, I think it important to note how over time life increases in order and complexity. The other key issue here is that not only does life increase its own order and complexity…it even increases the order and complexity of the non-living environment in which it lives, operates and has influence. This links back to how Lovelock could get to Gaia, and how he could tell that this basic, fundamental yet totally telltale sign of life is missing for Mars. As life operates the matter and energy involved increase in quality and intelligence – life is able to build structure, build gradients, and build potential, and again, to do so not only internally to life but also (seemingly) to have this as a kind of beneficial by-product or artifact or export of life to influence the life environment. I say seemingly since we may find that environment is not really external to life at all…and that if we choose a different boundary line to draw around our focal life system we can include life and environment as a unified whole. Much as we do when we study the biosphere or any planet.
Strong evidence of this aspect of life to build order, and to create gradients (which moves away from thermodynamic equilibrium…whereas “spontaneous” (non-living) processes dissipate gradients and decrease order) exist in soils as well as the oxygenated atmosphere. Soils have distinctive gradients when measured for contents of carbon, nitrogen or organic matter from surface layers to deeper layers. This is special and unique. And this is an observable property ostensibly outside the normally drawn boundary of life – the gradients in soil and in far-from-equilibrium atmospheric composition are created in life’s “abiotic” environment!!! Amazing.
The inherent tendency and general action of life to increase order and to build gradients links strongly to SYNTROPY, with necessary links to Fantappie and Feynman who both wrote of “anticipated potentials” which I am not at all clear about. But I do remember that Fantappie (as did RB Fuller) suggested that syntropy is an opposite or complement of entropy. Fantappie says that syntropy is a natural property of the physical universe and it is the one most closely associated to life. It involves life’s ability to anticipate and to build order, increase in complexity, and build structure and organization.
So…
I see these threads as all intimately linked. More weaving to do…as always…
Somewhere and somehow as gravitation and radiation interplay…so do entropy and syntropy…these bring water into a cyclic dance…water pulls in more…many other molecules and atoms join in…and life holons are born at the three scales (organism, ecosystem, biosphere) that all aid each other. And this dynamic trio somehow becomes anticipatory and mainly syntropic. It, they, we begin to build order, to compose and decompose with a purpose in “mind” – to live – and this involves both surviving (like sustained life) and evolving (improving in quality and intelligence). It is a beautiful collaboration…and a community achievement…and a multi-scale 10,000 part harmony. Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan wrote that great quote about life being so powerful due to networking as opposed to combat. I agree.
Happy new sphere! (as in blogosphere, ecosphere, biosphere, noosphere, etc.)
