CHAPTER 16
Creation’s Epic Journey
The dynamic dance of nature is ever conscious at every level, from the tiniest particle to whatever its currently largest configuration or holon is. That is my basic assumption about the living universe, no stranger than any of the assumptions of physics. It is shared by all the indigenous cultures I have come in contact with, as well as all esoteric traditions.1
Elisabet Sahtouris
Life is planetary exuberance, a solar phenomenon. It is the astronomically local transmutation of Earth’s air, water, and sun into cells.… It is matter gone wild, capable of choosing its own direction.2
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
Creation reveals itself to humans in many ways. It spoke to the ancients through the inner voices of the mystics. It speaks to our time through scientists who plumb the secrets of matter, living organisms, and the evolving cosmos. Strip away the scientific dogma that denies the existence of spiritual intelligence, and we can see that the cutting edge of scientific knowledge provides a rich source of ever deepening insight into the purpose of Creation, life, and the human species.
A CONTEMPORARY CREATION STORY
The 14-billion-year story of Creation, based on the available scientific evidence, goes something like this:
Long ago a new universe flared into being in a massive burst of energy that dispersed tiny energy particles across the vastness of space. With the passing of time, these particles organized themselves into atoms that swirled into great clouds that coalesced into galaxies of countless stars 268that grew, died, and were reborn as new stars, star systems, and planets. The cataclysmic energies unleashed by the births and deaths of billions of suns converted simple atoms into more complex atoms and melded them into molecules — each stage transcending the stage before in definition and capacity to create ever more wondrous possibilities.
It took 10 billion years to prepare the way for the seed of life to gain a foothold on the planet we now call Earth. To this day science knows not from whence life came.
Microscopic in size, the early ancestors of all Earth life were single-celled bacteria so simple they lacked even a cell nucleus. Yet these modest creatures proved to have a capacity for learning that gave them remarkable creative potential. The planet’s first chemists, they learned to build new kinds of proteins, including new enzymes, to invent new molecules, and to exchange genetic material through their cell walls to share their learning with one another.
As the fruits of life’s learning multiplied, individual cells evolved to become more complex and diverse. New bacteriological strains emerged as individuals learned to exploit new ecological niches by cultivating different lifestyles and expertise. The arts of fermentation, photosynthesis, and respiration were discovered in turn, with individual strains specializing in one or another in a competition for food and resources. Each advance allowed the whole to gain greater advantage from the available resource base and prepared the way for the emergence of more complex organisms of still greater potential.
Eventually some of these early competitors reached an accommodation with one another by binding together to create supercells that combined the abilities of individual strains. Over a period of roughly a billion years, these tiny single-celled creatures rearranged the materials of Earth’s crust and transformed and stabilized the chemical composition of the entire planet’s atmosphere to open the way for yet more extraordinary accomplishments.
Up to this point DNA strands floated freely within the walls of individual cells. Then, some 2 billion years after life first appeared on the planet, the partnerships that had created the supercells led to the clustering of DNA into a nucleus, creating a single nucleated cell a hundred to a thousand times the size of the individual bacterium cells of which it 269was composed. This in turn prepared the way for the emergence, roughly 900 million years later, of the first multicelled plant and animal life in the form of seaweed, jellyfish, and flatworms.
All the varieties of plant and animal life followed in due course —including dinosaurs, birds, apes, and humans. Step by step, life converted the matter of the planet’s surface layer into a splendid self-organizing web of complex, choice-making multicelled organisms, each with capacities far beyond those of their individual cells. Continuously experimenting, interrelating, creating, building, the evolving web of life unfolded into a living tapestry of astonishing variety, beauty, and ever growing capacity for intelligent choice.
Then, 4 million years ago, Creation embarked on its most ambitious and daring experiment. It took a first step toward bringing into being a species with the capacity to reflect on its own consciousness, to experience with awe the beauty and mystery of Creation, to articulate, communicate, and share learning, compose symphonies, build cathedrals, reshape the material world to its own ends, and anticipate and intentionally chose its own future.
The hominids came first, followed 1.4 million years later by Homo habilis, larger-brained species that developed skills in hunting and in using stone tools. It took another 2.4 million years to arrive at the next step — a species with a capacity for intentional choice far beyond that of any other. That was a mere 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. We call ourselves human.
The science of the past hundred years has made a seminal contribution to our knowledge of the sequence of events that marked the creative unfolding of the universe and all its wonders. The patterns of that unfolding suggest that the cosmos, and all within it, are the manifestation of a great unifying spiritual intelligence engaged in an epic quest to know itself through the discovery and actualization of its unrealized possibilities. If this is so, then all being exists both as a product of this quest and as a co-creator in the continued unfolding. As it is for all being, so is it is for all of life, including humans.
LIFE IS THE POWER TO CHOOSE
As a young student of psychology, I was required to read the work of B.F. Skinner, a well-known behavioral psychologist of that time famous for his theory that free will is an illusion. By Skinner’s reckoning, all 270behavior is the result of what he called operant conditioning. In essence, our response to any given stimulus depends on what consequences followed from our previous responses to similar stimuli, not as a matter of conscious, intelligent choice, but simply as a mechanistic conditioned response. It is a curious thing that a science dedicated to reason would deny the human capacity for reason, which is by extension a denial of human intelligence and free will. It seemed to me at the time a rather limited view of human possibility, but among academic psychologists seeking to gain respectability for their discipline as a legitimate science, it was quite a popular theory—and certainly not one I was in a position as an undergraduate to openly question.
Science still has difficulty with questions of will, consciousness, and intelligence, in part because it continues to operate from a mechanistic premise. Thus, I was struck by the boldness with which Lynn Margulis, one of the world’s foremost life scientists, and her son, science writer Dorion Sagan, proclaimed in their extraordinary book What Is Life? that life “is matter gone wild, capable of choosing its own direction.”3 It is one of those simple, obvious, and yet deeply profound observations that turn a long-established worldview on its head. Life is matter with the capacity to choose, and among the species known to humans, our capacity for choice exceeds that of all others.
Free will does not mean we are free to do anything we want. The realities of an interdependent world bind our actions. Every choice we make is shaped by our context and in turn revises that context. Yet the range of the choices available to us is substantial.
From the perspective of conventional wisdom, an individual human life begins in a mother’s womb some nine months prior to physical birth and ends at the time of physical death. From a deeper evolutionary perspective, however, we are each expressions of an unbroken flow of the choices made by living organisms since intelligent life energy first began to express itself on planet Earth some 4,000 million years ago.4
We can only speculate as to what happens to the individual soul after physical death. We do know, however, that each life is immortal in its contribution, no matter how modest, to shaping life’s continued unfolding into the infinite future. Each flower we pick, each seed we plant, each thought we communicate, sends its ripples forward in time through the unfolding fabric of Creation, leaving its mark —positive or negative, large or small—on the biosphere and the collective human consciousness that the Catholic priest and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 271called the noosphere. Herein lies the great responsibility of our gift of choice. The choices we make determine whether the mark we leave enhances or diminishes the human contribution to Creation’s great quest to actualize its possibilities. We matter. Our choices make a difference.
LIFE IS STRUGGLE
For many years, I imagined the ideal life-centered society to be a place of peace, cooperation, and contentment in which the basic needs of all are met and humanity lives happily ever after. It was perhaps an image evoked by dim memories of life in the womb before birth. It is a widely shared image similar to that of the popular image of heaven—a place of effortless eternal bliss.
Thus, I was a bit put off when I read in John and Linda Friel’s book on human maturity, The Soul of Adulthood, that “we can only experience life through struggle.” My initial reaction was that the authors must have a warped view of life. Then my mind connected the Friels’ statement to an observation by Margulis and Sagan that the existence of life’s extraordinary ability to invest matter with the capacity to choose depends on life’s success in a continuing struggle against the incessant entropic forces of the material world.5 That idea unlocked for me another profound truth: life is, by its nature, a cooperative struggle for the freedom to choose against the life-denying forces of entropy. Struggle is an inherent condition of living. It is not a curse inflicted on us by a spiteful God. It is, if you will, God’s own struggle manifest through us.
The second law of thermodynamics—the law of entropy—is a formalized observation that all physical systems run down as their useful energy is dissipated, ultimately decaying into the disorganization referred to as thermodynamic equilibrium. It is the way of all mechanical objects. Leave an automobile unattended, and eventually it will disintegrate into a pile of useless rust. By extension, the second law declares the physical universe to be dying, as the inexorable processes of entropy play themselves out toward disorder and loss of potential. Life, by contrast, appears to defy the second law by creating order out of disorder. Life thereby presents science with a troubling enigma.
Molecular biologist Mae-Wan Ho, who studies the processes by which living organisms resist the force of entropy, notes that living systems do not actually defy the second law. They do, however, have the 272ability to maintain themselves in a sustained thermodynamic disequilibrium of negative entropy, which in the sometimes perverse terminology of science means that they maintain themselves in a state of active positive energy potential. The processes involved depend on the ability of the organism to engage the continued and highly efficient intake, storage, and throughput of energy and material in continuous exchange with its environment. Living organisms have learned to be “anti-entropic” for so long as they are alive.6
In other words, life observes the classic laws, but it has learned to use these laws to maintain energy in an active flow state through constant exchange and recycling, thereby achieving a sustained state of potential far from the stasis of thermodynamic equilibrium. The what of the process is well documented. The how, however, remains largely beyond the limits of scientific understanding—perhaps because standard science rejects out of hand the possibility of will or intent.
Those scientists with the courage and humility to accept the rather obvious fact of life’s capacity for intelligent, willful action sometimes find it necessary to turn to poetic expression to describe the wonder of the process they observe, as in the following excerpt from Margulis and Sagan:
Thermodynamic systems lose heat to the universe as they convert energy from one form to another. Living matter frees itself from ordinary matter only by perpetually basking in the sun. Confronted with dissolution and destruction, life suffers a permanent death threat. Life is not merely matter, but matter energized, matter organized, matter with a glorious and peculiar built-in history. Life as matter with needs inseparable from its history must maintain and perpetuate itself, swim or sink. The most glorious organic being may indeed be nothing but “temporarily identifiable wiggles,” but for millions of years as life has been racing away from disorder autopoietic [self-directing] beings have concerned themselves with themselves, becoming ever more sensitive, ever more future oriented, and ever more focused on what might bring harm to the delicate wave of their matter-surfing form. From a thermodynamic, autopoietic perspective, the basest act of reproduction and the most elegant aesthetic appreciation derive from a common source and ultimately serve the same 273purpose: to preserve vivified matter in the face of adversity and a universal tendency toward disorder.7
Think of each cell as a packet of self-directing energy potential shielded from entropy’s downward pull by the thin wall of its outer membrane. The cell is a bounded system with the ability to recycle energy within itself and slow the dissipation of that active energy into the environment beyond. Unable, however, to eliminate the dissipation entirely, its survival depends on a constant balancing act by which it must regularly capture new energy potential from its environment to replace that which is inevitably lost.
The complexity and dynamism of the thermodynamics of life are breathtaking. Each individual cell is itself a complex interacting web of thousands of ongoing chemical reactions among its individual molecules, each itself engaged in a constant process of renewal within a nested multilevel holarchy of cooperative, self-organizing, self-renewing systems. As explained by molecular biologist Stephen Rose:
The complex macromolecules, the proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides and lipids within each cell have life cycles of their own, continually being broken down and replaced by other, more or less identical cells. The average lifetime of a protein molecule in the body of a mammal is around a fortnight. In an adult human, proteins constitute some 10 percent of body weight, so some 24 grams of protein are being broken down and a fresh 24 grams synthesized every hour of every day—half a gram, or more than a billion billion molecules of protein a minute, throughout our adult life. Why this ceaseless flux?… The answer is simple:… living systems need to be dynamic if they are to survive, able to adjust themselves to the fluctuations which, even in the best-buffered internal milieu, their cooperative existence as part of the greater unity of the organism demands.8
LIFE IS MUTUAL EMPOWERMENT
The key to the secret of life’s success in populating Earth with ever larger, more complex, and more capable organisms is its ability to self-organize into complex subsystems of cyclical processes that link reactions 274requiring energy with those that yield energy. Energy flows continuously and simultaneously in a never ending dance of cooperative exchange between the substructures of each individual cell, between the cells of multicelled organisms, between the multicelled organisms of individual ecosystems, and between the ecosystems of a living planet. Through these frugal, self-renewing, and interlinked processes, living systems are able to at once conserve energy and maintain it in an active and immediately accessible state.
These mutually empowering processes are the foundation of life’s struggle to create and maintain new potential against the constant pull of entropy. The cooperative imperative of this struggle explains why life exists only in relationship to other life, that is, in community. The organizing principle of life is partnership, not domination. Indeed, partnership is one of life’s imperatives.
The individual cell or multicellular organism can no more exist without the larger community of life than the community of life can exist without the individuals it comprises. Life is a process of mutual empowerment enhanced by balanced growth and diversification, and it therefore can be understood only in terms of communities of relationships. The more complex, diverse, and coherent the relationships internal to a living system, the greater the potential of the system and each of its component members.
At its most elemental, we see the principle of interdependence at work in what biologists call symbiotic relationships, the mutually beneficial interaction of two organisms that live in close association. Every child is familiar with the example of the flower and the honeybee. The flower provides the honeybee with sweet, life-giving nectar, and the honeybee pollinates the flower to facilitate its reproduction. In this simple example, the relationship is directly reciprocal.
The real wonder of life is found, however, in complex patterns of mutual service that go far beyond such tit-for-tat market-style reciprocity. Much of this complexity eludes our normal awareness because it occurs at a microscopic level; we can perceive and understand it only by using powerful tools of scientific observation to track the multilevel dynamics of whole ecosystems over long periods of time.
As you read the following stories of life’s extraordinary capacity to self-organize, note that there is no counterpart to the hierarchical command systems we humans have come to believe are essential to maintain coherence and order in human societies. Do the lowliest bacteria 275possess some innate sense of responsibility for the well-being of the whole that eludes us humans? As you read these stories, consider these questions: How long would the forest ecosystem survive and prosper if its individual organisms lived by the neoliberal economic principle of unfettered competition for short-term individual advantage? What might we learn about the possibilities of human societies from how living organisms organize themselves into healthy forest ecosystems?
LESSONS FROM A FOREST ECOSYSTEM
Some of our most advanced insights into the dynamics of natural ecosystems come from studies conducted in the Andrews Forest in Oregon. Science writer Jon R. Luoma relates some of this fascinating research in The Hidden Forest: Biography of an Ecosystem.
The Nitrogen Cycle
Think of the forest as a self-reliant living economic system engaged in converting available resources into products and services essential to sustaining the life of the forest and each of its individual participants. Start with a simple maple leaf. Each leaf is actually a system of individual living, self-directing cells that capture pulses of energy radiating from the sun and bundle them into a neat biochemical package, a molecule of sugar. Using little more than a combination of water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide, a healthy mature maple tree will silently produce during the course of one growing season about two tons of sugar and a substantial quantity of oxygen. The energy of the sun is thus stored for hours or even years in molecular form to support the growth and maintenance of the tree. The tree also supports a host of other organisms, including “the mite chewing on tiny bits of the stem, the predatory spider that eats the mite, the flycatcher that eats the spider… the fungi pulling sugar out of the tree’s roots on the forest floor… [and] the squirrel or vole or deer that eats a bit of fungus.”9
Each of the organisms served by the tree in turn contributes services to other organisms, including many on which the tree itself depends. To produce sugar, the tree needs nitrogen, an element abundant in the atmosphere. However, trees, like most other organisms, cannot use the free nitrogen of the air directly. They rely on specialized bacteria to “fix” the nitrogen by turning it into nitrite and nitrate compounds. Typically, 276these nitrogen-fixing bacteria live in nodules formed by particular species of plants—such as lichens, and the root systems of legumes and red alder trees—that protect and nourish the bacteria. The plants that host the bacteria, however, have their own problem: They require abundant sunlight. When the forest canopy shades out these plants, it kills the host that sustains the bacteria that supply the nitrite and nitrate compounds on which the whole system depends.
Life’s solution to this problem reveals an extraordinary capacity for mutuality and adaptation—not only in the moment, but with a sense of foresight that may span a century or more. When fire, volcanic eruption, or a violent windstorm creates an open space in the forest, plants that harbor nitrogen-fixing bacteria colonize the area initially to produce nitrogen in sufficient quantities to support the growth of the trees for as long as two hundred years.
After the forest canopy shades out the nitrogen fixers and the stored nitrogen is exhausted, the trees would be doomed to death except for a dynamic found only in old-growth forests. As the trees reach their hundredth year or so, nitrogen-fixing lichens begin to establish themselves in their upper reaches, where sunlight is abundant. Over the second hundred years of the tree’s life, these lichens grow in increasing abundance, creating a forest canopy that functions as a powerful nitrogen-fixing factory. By the time the mature forest is in danger of suffering a nitrogen deficiency, the living canopy is producing and shedding nitrogen-rich waste matter to the ground at a sufficient rate to renew the soil and supply most of the nitrogen required by the entire system.10
Beneficial Infection
Another example of complex mutuality is found in the relationship between the evergreen trees of the Andrews Forest and a specialized fungus named Rhabdocline parkeri that lives inside their needles. When the Andrews Forest researchers first discovered this fungus, they were surprised to find no indication the tree suffered any ill effect from what they would normally consider a fungal infection. Eventually they discovered that the tree provides the fungi with the energy-rich sugars and starches on which they feed in exchange for the fungi’s service of protecting the tree from defoliating insects by producing poisonous alkaloid compounds whenever the tree becomes threatened. 277
The fungus, it turns out, is remarkably frugal and respectful of the host tree’s resources. Its spores initially lance their way into a fresh green needle and wait. They grow virtually not at all, and thus place no burden on the tree, until the time comes for the needle itself to die as part of the tree’s natural cycle, at which time the fungus draws energy from the dying needle, matures, and releases its own spore to find and “infect” a fresh green needle. In the meantime, if the needle happens to be attacked by insects, the fungus poisons the insect and then prospers by tapping the dead insect rather than the needle for nutrients.11
One might reasonably ask why the tree does not develop its own chemical defense against insect pests. The simple answer speaks further to life’s complex intelligence. Insects are short lived, with an ability to rapidly evolve defenses against toxic threats. The similarly short-lived fungi are equally agile in their ability to reformulate their toxins to overcome those defenses in a way the long-lived tree species could not. Here we see another striking example of how life flourishes through the power of partnership.12
The Living Soil
Insects, which are abundant not only in their numbers but also in their variety, have essential roles in rebuilding forest soils. Each insect species makes its distinctive contribution to chewing up and processing the waste matter of a dead tree or plant, with many insects of different species ingesting, processing, and evacuating the material in turn in a highly complex recycling process. In simple language, the poop of one becomes the food of another. Indeed, the soil of the forest floor is composed almost entirely of the bodies and feces of microbes and insects.
Biologists believe our planet may be host to as many as thirty million insect species, each of which occupies its own ecological niche. Each maintains itself by performing a distinctive service on behalf of the whole. Scientists are only beginning to sort out the essential roles they play in the health of the forest ecosystem—and by extension in the maintenance of the health and fertility of all the soils so essential to planetary life.13
These stories demonstrate the complexity of the relationships underlying the coherent function of a major ecosystem. Each organism contributes to the whole through patterns of relationships that involve 278loops of reciprocity that may cycle through thousands of species and take a century or more to close.
At every turn, we see evidence of life’s astonishing ability to organize for mutual self-empowerment without evident central control or direction. The rain forest ecosystem is one example. Our own bodies are another.
LESSONS FROM THE HUMAN BODY
The creation of an individual human person begins with the joining of two microscopic cells—a sperm and an egg. This merging of genetic materials to create a single composite cell begins a profoundly complex self-directing process of cell division and differentiation. Communicating with the other cells, each individual cell makes the appropriate decision at the appropriate moment to divide or to take on the specialized functions of a brain, liver, or blood cell as the body’s specialized organs and structures take on form and function.
A generalized map is embedded in the genetic structure shared by all the cells of a given body. Although there is no dominator cell instructing each of the other cells what action to take at any given moment, each cell, through processes still only dimly understood, makes the right decision at the right time in support of the emergence of the whole body. Countless such individual decisions result ultimately in the growth and division of the two initial cells into a complex organism composed of more than thirty trillion self-directing, self-renewing cells—an organism with the capacity for intelligent, self-reflective choice able to contemplate eternity and to join with similar organisms to reshape the planet and reach out to the stars.
Renewal, Sharing, and Adaptation
The processes of self-renewal that continue throughout the human life span compound the wonder of the human organism. Each minute three billion of the body’s cells die—each reliably replaced by a living cell of like kind. The stomach lining replaces itself every five days, the liver every two months, and the skin every six weeks. Ninety-eight percent of the atoms in the body are replaced each year.14 Except for the occasional error, each of the body’s cells has the same genetic coding. Yet they differentiate into many specialized functions, sensing and 279responding to intercommunication among the cells to take whatever action is appropriate to the needs of the emerging organism. The identity and dynamic coherence of each organ, the body as a whole, and the conscious self with all its memories and intellectual abilities are sustained throughout.
Equally extraordinary is the ability of the body’s trillions of cells to move energy instantly from wherever it is stored to wherever it is needed in the event of injury, illness, or a physical threat from the environment. As Elisabet Sahtouris points out, the muscle doesn’t tell the heart, “Nothing more until you settle your past due account.” It sends what is needed. If necessary, it starts breaking down its own tissues to release additional energy. Nor does the heart say to the muscle that needs an extra measure of oxygen to mobilize the body’s flight from an attacker, “Hey, business is business. What’s it worth to you?”
Decision Makers Every One
It all makes for an organizational challenge of breath-taking complexity and raises the question of who or what is making the decisions. Genetic programming, the brain, and the central nervous system play their roles, but the essential answer is that the decision-making capacity and responsibility are distributed throughout the body’s every cell, microbe, and organ—each sensing and responding to complex flows of information from its environment—suggesting that many levels of self-regulating intelligence may be involved.
These many intelligences are parts of an interdependent whole. The failure of any one part has the potential to destroy the whole, but no individual subsystem, not even the neocortical brain that is the seat of consciousness, is able to dominate the others in the sense of an overall hierarchy of command and control.15
Given that healthful bodily function requires the making of billions of decisions each second, it is for good reason that the self-aware consciousness we experience in our waking hours is not in direct communication with these many other centers of awareness and decision making. Because the masses of information involved would quickly overwhelm our conscious mind, most of the processing is handled by the unconscious mind or occurs at the cellular level and does not involve the brain at all. 280
Each human life in turn depends on the support of the infinitely complex and dynamic web of self-directing, self-regulating relationships that make up the life of the planetary biosphere. The performance of these external systems is as essential to our individual survival and well-being as the performance of our internal systems. Each of these systems is engaged in its own pulsating dance of adaptation and renewal, creating constant variations in air and water quality, temperature, and nutrient supply to which the individual human body and all its complex internal processes must continuously adapt.
In the face of such complexity and foresight, the idea that evolution is nothing more than the playing out of a competitive struggle for dominance seems hopelessly simplistic. More credible is the theory that life is intelligent and purposeful and that each living system embodies many levels of conscious intelligence.
Is self-interest involved? Certainly, but it is the mature and inclusive self-interest of the mutually empowering relations of partnership that come naturally to the highest orders of human consciousness and that constitute the foundation of mature democracy.
Although science remains captive to the premise that reality can be explained entirely by a combination of chance and material mechanism, the story of Creation’s unfolding to ever higher levels of complexity and consciousness points to the existence of a profound intelligence engaged in an epic journey of self-discovery. By giving matter the capacity to choose, life accelerates the pace of the journey. Engaged in a cooperative struggle to maintain its choice-making potential against the downward pull of entropy, life exists only in living communities of diverse and mutually interdependent species. For life, partnership is more than an organizing principle; it is its very essence.