Nature's Organs: Transcending Species (Part 3 in Article Series)
By Mandela Shabazz
"Alienation from nature and the loss of the experience of being part of the living creation is the greatest tragedy of our materialistic era."
-Albert Hoffmann
In the previous essay I asked the reader to consider the non-infinite and non-chaotic structure of the cosmos. The design of this existence is very specific and in this essay I want to talk about how this applies to the life forms found within it. You see, evolution is not a cold and soulless mechanical process; that is merely Darwinism. Darwin described a part of evolution but actual evolution is just as strange and complex as the history of life on earth; you cannot simply boil it down to death and sex if you hope to understand why we are here.
Lets make sure we are on the same page in regard to what life is. First of all, life is a natural occurrence in the development of the universe. By this I mean that we did not will ourselves into existence, we are supposed to be here as much as atoms, molecules, and galaxies are. With that simple acknowledgment, you must also agree that the diversification of species is also a natural phenomenon. By this I mean that there is nothing unnatural about mutation; it is part of what life is intended to do. If life were not meant to mutate, our genetic coding would have been more robust to withstand the levels of radiation that naturally occur in the universe. If you accept that, then you must also accept that the dispersal of lifeforms throughout their environment is also going quite according to plan. By this I mean that life naturally pushes its populations to the edges of the habitable environment. Life has been able to cut a niche in what are to us incredibly inhospitable locations (such as the bottom of the ocean and inside of volcanoes).
But what is the real difference between what we call animate and what we call inanimate? I don't know; I've not yet been able to consult the inanimate perspective. But that is exactly the point. "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" I'm not going to dance around the ultimate point that this proverb makes, so here it is directly: The purpose of existence is experience. All this vastness and complexity is nothing without something to perceive it. A book is just paper and ink if no one reads it, a song is just variations in air pressure if no one hears it.
So what life does is it gradually gathers inanimate matter into self-perpetuating and self-replicating organic structures that can, to some degree, perceive the existence around them. Through reproduction, these lifeforms spread throughout their habitat and when they encounter a barrier, they evolve new forms as an attempt to surmount the obstacle. It seems so simple, right? It's almost an unthinking, physical force. Of course it is not that simple; a lot of bizarre things have happened in the history of life on Earth but as we go over some of them I want you to keep in mind that it is all perfectly natural.
I'm not claiming to know how life actually started, but using a little logic, I think I know how it functioned once it got going. First, you would have life forms that fed off of their environment; lets call them plants. They would employ processes like photosynthesis or chemosynthesis; I've even heard there are mushrooms that can feed directly from radiation. Plants peacefully spread through the frontiers of their environment and eventually came to populate the seven seas. However, with that task accomplished, their genetics still drove them to reproduce at a level intended for conquest. This is when the age of proliferation ended and the competition for resources began.
Imagine a sprout straining to catch falling sunlight upon its leaves while taller plants around it eclipse the Sun with larger leaves. This is not how it really happened, because at this point life was still constrained to the ocean, but it must have been this kind of scarcity of inanimate energy sources that precipitated vampirism amongst early life forms. But do not look upon competition as a detrimental influence, it was an inevitable variable that drove evolution along a path that eventually lead to our complex intelligence.
Consider that once the early herbivores had sapped the life out of neighboring plants, they would need to find a way to relocate or face starvation. Movement. Life now had cause to move. To successfully move, a life form first needs some kind of spatial perception. Plants may have already had this to a limited degree due to the presence of the Sun above, but herbivores would need a finer perception of their immediate environment to be able to seek out food. Secondly, the herbivores would now need bodies capable of moving towards the food that their sense(s) located. And thus, the golden age of the herbivores came about. But wait, once the edible plant life in a given region begins to run low, competition would again set in. With an abundance of herbivores, the prosperity of those willing to cannibalize was ensured. These carnivores would need to develop superior senses, bodies, and especially intelligence if they were to pursue prey that could actually flee.
Carnivores arrived in the primordial ocean before multi-cellular life evolved; amoebas were hunting other bacterium long before there were creatures with complex brains and sense organs. Murder and parasitism are natural developments in evolution. However, do not mistake this for a justification to not be vegetarian, quite the opposite in fact. Vegetarianism is one of many practices that we could adopt to improve our sustainability, yet many people side with absurd luxuries and temporary convenience that only serve to exacerbate the frailty of our infrastructure. Our brains are home to around 100 billion neurons and this is supposed to allow us a finer appreciation and understanding of our world than a single-celled organism. So if our brains are advanced enough to comprehend and make predictions about the state of our global resources, how can they not be advanced enough to override the ego-centrism that we've inherited from single-celled life? Enough tangent, back to evolution.
Lets look more closely at that point in the history of life on earth where we jumped from single-celled organisms to multi-cellular life. This aspect is particularly interesting to me, unfortunately science has not yet been able to answer all of my questions regarding that evolutionary paradigm shift. Could it have been a pseudo-conscious development wherein a culture of bacteria found it easier to avoid being eaten by amoebas if they did not disperse, but instead banded together like a herd of zebra? Or was it simply a mutation where a bacterium failed to fully divide when it reproduced? Whatever the case, they didn't remain colonies of individuals. What had once been entirely independent life forms now began to network together in increasingly complex ways. It's as though the bacteria realized that they were one larger organism and their behavior fundamentally changed to acknowledge and perpetuate the design of the greater entity.
How is it that we can go from talking about individual cells to individual organisms without yet mentioning the occurrence of individual organs? It's all part of the greater organization of this essay. Where before, competing cultures of bacteria would go to war whenever they encountered each other, now there were multiple, genetically diverse colonies working together and fulfilling separate tasks for the well-being of the greater organism. Our brains depend on the other organs for life support and the organs depend on the brain to keep them out of harm's way. Of course it is far more complicated than that, which only adds to my point. Our bodies are microcosms of the harmonious cooperation of trillions of cells. The bacteria were enlightened enough to dissolve notions of "self" and "other" and the result is an organism that in terms of scale, life span, intelligence, and potential is literally a God when compared bacteria.
I have a fractal understanding of the cosmos, by this I mean that I look for similar occurrences at greater and lesser scales. It was a spiral that sparked this perspective; the spiral that is found in sea shells, hurricanes, and galaxies. If the single-celled organisms were able to give up their narcissism and xenophobia and dedicate themselves to cooperation, perhaps that is a glaring indication of the evolutionary path that we are intended to carry on. That would be beautiful, wouldn't it? A world at peace with itself and a coordinated population that held the self-actualization of the super-organism as its primary endeavor.
We need to stop looking at the kingdom of life in terms of separate species; it is very misleading. At the very least we are all cousins in a family that is nearly 4 billion years old. I guess it's not exactly a new idea, the Gaia model is a way of looking at the earth as a single organism. Plants would be its means of digesting the nutrients from the sun, animals already play all kinds of important roles in the upkeep of the environment and ecologies, and then, if we humans can get our shit together in time, we could be the brains of this operation. I get the impression that nature's organs are woefully disappointed in our performance thus far.
But sometimes it seems like things have to go wrong first to ensure that they get it right later. That's the back-swing to survival of the fittest; the destruction of the unfit. There was actually an entirely separate branch of multi-cellular life that we are not descended from; they were called the Ediacara. What are the chances that complex multi-cellular life would evolve once, die out, and then evolve again shortly thereafter? And why hasn't it happened a third time? Nature is learning, evolution is a learning process. It is always important to learn from your mistakes.
The comet that catalyzed the death of the dinosaurs also catalyzed the proliferation of mammals, which lead to you, me, and the entirety of human history. Was it an accident? No, nothing is unnatural and that comet was on a collision course with earth since the moment matter was set in motion. Following this logic, I, in no small way, owe my existence to slavery, Nazism, and the KKK. It's a twisted way to look at things, but those horrors were a natural occurrence in the history of human cultures just as murder and parasitism developed in the early stages of bacterial cultures. Realizing the role they played in my individual creation in no way dulls my desire to eliminate such things. In reality, I'm here because of many other things that are not ideologically opposed to my existence or freedom. We can all accredit our lives primarily to innumerable generations of love shared between males and females of many species across billions of years.
Why would I bring up such a depressing perspective in the second to last paragraph? While there can be no retroactive justification for any such atrocities, if we can use them as motivation to end such outmoded and primitive behaviors, then we've at least initiated the healing process if not set ourselves on the path towards evolutionary apotheosis. If you don't like bigotry, genocide, xenophobia, and sadism, then you need to find a way to contribute to an evolution in our consciousness that allows us to surpass such things. That's what i've decided to do with my life; in conversations, in my jobs, in essays, and especially through art.
