It bears remembering that we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. The puzzlement is so immense exactly as a result of the boundary between us and not-us is profoundly permeable — we grow to be ourselves via communion and conviviality with what is just not us. That is as true existentially as it’s evolutionarily, for symbiosis — not competitors — is the mightiest propulsive power of evolution.
To this fact the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis (March 5, 1938–November 22, 2011) devoted her life, crystalized in her influential Gaia speculation — the notion that organisms work together with their setting to make of Earth a synergistic, self-regulating crucible of life.
In her ebook Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (public library), Margulis — who understood uniquely the spirituality of science — writes:
Residing beings defy neat definition. They struggle, they feed, they dance, they mate, they die. On the base of the creativity of all massive acquainted types of life, symbiosis generates novelty. It brings collectively completely different life-forms, at all times for a motive. Usually, starvation unites the predator with the prey or the mouth with the photosynthetic bacterium or algal sufferer. Symbiogenesis brings collectively not like people to make massive, extra advanced entities. Symbiogenetic life-forms are much more not like than their unlikely “mother and father.” “People” completely merge and regulate their copy. They generate new populations that grow to be multiunit symbiotic new people. These grow to be “new people” at bigger, extra inclusive ranges of integration. Symbiosis is just not a marginal or uncommon phenomenon. It’s pure and customary. We abide in a symbiotic world.
Correctly understood, the biology of symbiosis undermines our most tightly held intuitions in regards to the nature of the self as a definite entity separate from different selves — an illusory separation dissolved within the organic actuality of all residing beings, however rendered most clearly seen in among the easiest. A era after Lewis Thomas wrote so lyrically about the symbiotic life of a jellyfish and a sea slug — which stays the best factor I’ve ever learn on the paradoxes and mysteries of the self — Margulis particulars one other residing antidote to what Pablo Neruda rightly indicted as our phantasm of separateness:
In Brittany, on the northwest coast of France, and alongside seashores bordering the English Channel is discovered a wierd form of “seaweed” that isn’t seaweed in any respect. From a distance it’s a brilliant inexperienced patch on the sand. The patches slosh round, shimmering in shallow puddles. While you choose up the inexperienced water and let it slip via your fingers you discover gooey ribbons very similar to seaweed. A small hand lens or low-power microscope reveals that what appeared like seaweed are actually inexperienced worms. These plenty of sunbathing inexperienced worms, not like any seaweed, burrow into the sand and successfully disappear. They had been first described within the Twenties by an Englishman, J. Keeble, who spent his summers at Roscoff. Keeble known as them “plant-animals” and diagrammed them splendidly within the colour frontispiece of his ebook, Plant-Animals. The flatworms of the species Convoluta roscoffensis are all inexperienced as a result of their tissues are filled with Platymonas cells; because the worms are translucent, the inexperienced colour of Platymonas, photosynthesizing algae, reveals via. Though pretty, the inexperienced algae will not be merely ornamental: they reside and develop, die and reproduce, contained in the our bodies of the worms. Certainly they produce the meals that the worms “eat.” The mouths of the worms grow to be superfluous and don’t perform after the worm larvae hatch. Daylight reaches the algae inside their cellular greenhouses and permits them to develop and feed themselves as they leak photosynthetic merchandise and feed their hosts from the within. The symbiotic algae even do the worm a waste administration favor: they recycle the worm’s uric acid waste into vitamins for themselves. Algae and worm make a miniature ecosystem swimming within the solar. Certainly, these two beings are so intimate that it’s troublesome, with out very high-power microscopy, to say the place the animal ends and the algae start.
The residing world, Margulis observes, is rife with such symbiotic bonds that problem the notion of the place one self ends and one other begins. There’s the Plachobranchus snail, inside which is an internal backyard of inexperienced symbionts so completely organized in neat rows that they seem planted by an invisible hand; there may be the Mastigias jellyfish with its tiny inexperienced umbrellas animated by single-celled zooxanthellae; there may be the enormous clam, Tridacna gigas, which orients ints total colossal physique towards the sunshine for the good thing about the greenhouse of algae residing inside it.
Then there are, after all, we — we who contain multitudes, our microbiome residing as a transportable universe inside us. “Lots are impolite, lame, unmade, pernicious of their calls for and affect,” Emerson inveighed. “I want… to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw people out of them.” However the patron saint of self-reliance was tragically antiscientific in his philosophy — within the residing world, people as such merely don’t exist. There are solely plenty, a few of whom transfer about with the phantasm of individuality. Margulis writes:
We animals, all thirty million species of us, emanate from the microcosm. The microbial world, the supply and well-spring of soil and air, informs our personal survival. A significant theme of the microbial drama is the emergence of individuality from the neighborhood interactions of once-independent actors.
With an eye fixed to our evolutionary future, itself a vista of large humility, she provides:
The tendency of “impartial” life is to bind collectively and reemerge in a brand new wholeness at the next, bigger degree of group. I believe that the close to way forward for Homo sapiens as a species requires our reorientation towards the fusions and mergers of the planetmates which have preceded us within the microcosm.
Complement with Iris Murdoch on how art unselves us and Helen Macdonald on the total solar eclipse as an instrument of unselfing, then revisit Margulis on the interconnectedness of life across time, space, and species.
