Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (14 page)

While life’s desires are ultimately focused more on devouring chemical and photosynthetic gradients than on using gravitational ones, the tendency for things to reach their end in the natural world is something we understand, intuitively.

In 1759 Laurence Sterne, in
The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman,
has a character, Corporal Trim, who drops his hat:

The world may be meaningless, yet have a direction. It may have a story, but not the story we want to hear.

When Sterne tells us of the hat that “his hand seemed to vanish from under it;—it fell dead,” we are not sure what he means; when was his hand ever under the hat, did he mean the hand fell dead or the hat, and if the hand, did it stand for the head? Or perhaps he meant to convey Susannah’s view, and from hers the drop of the hat obscured the corporal’s hand, which was behind him after the fall of the hat, creating the disappearance effect. We mistake agency, jump at our shadows, find patterns, and attribute motives after the fact even to ourselves. Language itself is a teleological nexus that, with its telic prepositions, its “fors” and “tos,” draws us in; it pulls us far more than we push it. English, for example, is subtle, supple, a deep and accommodating crowd-sourced reserve of wisdom that we do well to follow, along ancient paths of polysemy, rather than try to impose on it with academic jargon and neologisms. The telic character of language brings forth its own stories.

A vivid example occurred in the notes I made for a biosemiotics conference at the Rockefeller Medical Center on Front Street in New York City. I wanted to talk about how biosemiotics, with its emphasis on language, forms a welcome bridge between the humanities and the science, but that talks in the former are generally read whereas scientific talks are usually spoken. I wanted to say that I found this difference ironic or paradoxical because it should be the other way around: scientists who assume language is a transparent medium to convey unitary knowledge would want to be more careful by writing what they intended to say, while humanities types aware of the inconstancy of language and its irreducible metaphoricity should not worry so much. Practically speaking though, I would like to be able to do both: reading a text can put people to sleep. Thus in my notes, wanting to make the above point extemporaneously, I wrote:

The break between
as
and
leep
was not a typo nor was
leep
a misspelling. Rather, my handwriting had a discontinuity in the word
asleep.
Still, reading my own writing, it seemed to say something else entirely, a kind of haiku in which someone falls asleep, but the fall that takes them there turns into a leap (misspelled). In fact, my note was merely a prosaic reminder to tell people that although I would prefer to ad lib (as is more common in science talks versus humanities presentations), a written text was for me a safety net against losing my way in the forest of extemporaneity. I didn’t write out the whole note so as to force myself to speak it. But when I went to look at my note before my talk, the “safety net” in the written text looked like the place at the bottom of a poem where the sleeping faller would be caught in a net of dreams.

“Fall as leep”: what I had not tried to do looked more purposeful, and certainly more beautiful, than what I had.

BIOSEMIOTICS

Those still smarting from Snow’s scolding may want to look to biosemiotics. Biosemioticians are interested in healing the Cartesian cut, the rift between body and mind that overlaps roughly with that between the humanities, concerned with thinking, words, people, spirit, literature, and art, and the sciences, concerned with matter and things.

So what is biosemiotics? According to Wikipedia, biosemiosis is “sign action in living systems.” But I am arguing that semiosis, or the natural telos from which it forms and which structures it, is more prevalent than life, that semiosis exists in an unconscious, inchoate form in complex systems generally.

“Particular scientific fields like molecular biology, cognitive ethology, cognitive science, robotics, and neurobiology,” Wikipedia continues, “deal with information processes at various levels and thus spontaneously contribute to knowledge about biosemiosis [which] may help to resolve some forms of Cartesian dualism that is still haunting philosophy of mind. By describing the continuity between body and mind, biosemiotics may also help us to understand how human ‘mindedness’ may naturalistically emerge from more primitive processes of embodied
animal
‘knowing. ’”

Biosemioticians are interested in pursuing the rich tapestry of signification systems in living organisms without foregoing, as might be said of Continental philosophy, a reality beyond and independent of such systems. There is an interesting historical connection here as Heidegger, who is so influential in Continental philosophy, was deeply influenced by a figure foundational to biosemiotics, the protobiosemiotician (as Sebeok called him), Jakob von Uexküll. But there was a fork in the road of Uexküll’s influence, as Heidegger, whose notion of
Dasein
seems largely lifted from Uexküll’s notion of an organism’s life-world, or
Umwelt,
turns it into something especially human.

Heidegger argues that man exclusively dwells in the house of language, that Friedrich Hölderlin is wrong in thinking that animals, even a lark flying across the sky, have access to “the open”
17
—that is, Being as a whole rather than an environment. Heidegger asserts that the human hand is vastly different from a monkey’s paw. Heidegger considers all nonhuman animals together. Apparently almost any animal will do—he chooses a bee—to stand in for the essence of “the animal.” Heidegger, who mentions Uexküll more than any other scientist, and though he gets the idea of
Umwelt
from him, says that animals are poor in world, separated from us language-dwellers by an “abyss.”

So Heidegger takes Uexküll in a distinct direction, running with his important exploration of meaning making, purposeful behavior, and the inner worlds of various organisms, but then applying them almost solely to man. Biosemiotics takes a different fork in the path, expanding Uexküll’s insights to all animals and even to the chemical process of life itself. Wendy Wheeler, for example, in her book on biosemiotics and culture, cites approvingly Hoffmeyer’s notion that life’s basic unit may be the sign and that semiosis and living coincide precisely.
18

I think that biosemiotics does provide a way not to deny mind, or mindlike processes, in nature. I agree with this spirit of connectionism exemplified by biosemiotics in its effort to exorcise, with profound realism, the ghost of Cartesianism that haunts science. Jablonka et al. describe heredity, signification, as “four-dimensional”: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and human-style symbolic messages are sent across the generations.
19
In epidemiology and psychoneuroimmunology, there is evidence that declines in our social status can shorten our lives, presumably through some sort of signal, that our attitude can affect our immune system, sickening or strengthening us depending on the conscious and unconscious messages we send ourselves. Candace Pert identified peptide receptors in the brain and shows how chemical messengers pass between the endocrine, nervous, gastrointestinal, and immune systems.
20

Sign systems work not only inside our bodies in cells but outside them in ecosystems. We now know that genes exist that ensure timely aging unto death. Apoptosis, telemorase rationing, and sugar intake are all involved in ensuring death in aging organisms. (Not all organisms age, which seems strange to us because we do, but, if you think about it, life has already “figured out” the way to maintain as a complex system, basically by directing energy to genetic replication—“restarting the flame” as Schneider says.) The signals for aging are partly mediated by food intake, which is why near-starvation diets allow animals to increase their health and life. Josh Mitteldorf and John Pepper argue that aging behaves like a program that maintains genetic turnover and stabilizes population flux in ecosystems subject to crashing. This program seems to turn off when populations are low on food, which is why organisms of various species can live longer and even become disease resistant by lowering their intake. Caloric restriction is thus an example of ecosemiosis. The ecosystem talks directly to our genes, normally without us consciously realizing it, and science is just beginning to overhear this fascinating conversation.
21

Clearly semiosis and life are connected.
But
I would argue that the basic signification we see in responsive life, with its naturalistic teleology—the plant reaching for light, the animal shivering to stay warm—has deep roots in the
non
living world. An insulator who uses powdered dust to watch air escaping in a leaky house told me of his surprise to see a streamer go halfway across a ceiling before doing an about-face and returning through the holes of the electric outlet whence it came: even near-equilibrium systems with nothing an ordinary person would remotely call alive seem to “figure out” how to accomplish their natural telos. Prigogine and Stengers, in discussing the coherence of an only slightly more complex thermodynamic system, a Bénard or convection cell, discuss how the parts seem to be “communicating.”

Hoffmeyer writes: “This inversed arrow of time (future directedness) immediately sets functions apart from other kinds of mechanisms that always refer backward along some chain of causation [in] explaining how the feature occurred.”
22
I believe this to be the crux of the issue, as humans conflate function, sign-making processes (semiosis and biosemiosis), and conscious or “purposive” processes.
23
Immanuel Kant, in the
Teleology of Judgment,
showed that teleology (like causality, space, and time) is a mental category that we bring to the world. Indeed, it is not so easy to distinguish
consciousness
from this kind of “future directedness [that] immediately sets functions apart from other kinds of mechanisms [that instead] refer backward along some chain of causation”—“mechanisms” here referring to phenomena such as natural selection and Newtonian-style action-reaction.
24
While it may be anathema to biosemioticians to extend sign-making behaviors beyond the realm of the living, consider the evidence: Nonliving complex systems such as hexagonal-shaped thermal convection cells, intricately changing chemical (e.g., Belousov–Zhabotinski) reactions, and typhoons multiplying over the Pacific also originate, maintain, and grow only within gradients (that they implicitly—and semiotically—sense). The differences are in temperature, chemical concentration, electron potential, and barometric pressure. Hurricane wind speeds, part of cyclically organized storms (to which humans, granting kinship, give first names), are directly correlated to atmospheric pressure gradients.

Whether we like it (in the sense of finding it flattering to our vaunted sense of human specialness) or not, such behaviors, whose natural teleology (or purpose) is to reduce ambient gradients, are genuinely
future-directed.
But, contra Kant and modern self-organization theorists, such future-directedness does not so much “emerge” as
inhere
in the fundamental telic nature of energetic matter, as described by thermodynamics’ second law.
25

In
Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative,
Peter Brooks talks about the “Freudian master plot”: apart from, behind, and informing all the complex meanings of a text or novel is a movement toward equilibrium, which for us as
individuals
means death.
26
I think we have to bracket the conflation of awareness with meaningful, patterned behaviors to understand what is going on here.
Living is a form of extending the energy degradation process,
and I don’t think it takes anything away from us to see how our behavior grows out of this higher or lower realm of energy transformation and data processing, which may or may not itself have a deeper meaning. The death wish, as I explore briefly in the conclusion, stems from this protosemiotic or ur-semiotic drive to return to equilibrium. But living, which makes use of death, is even better, as it sustains and expands the open systems that produce more entropy.

CHAPTER 9

LIFE GAVE EARTH THE BLUES

NATURE IS NOT JUST RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW
but green with symbiotic chloroplasts, yellow with chrysophyte algae, and flamingo-pink with ingested carotenoids. It is an amazing psychedelic display of spiraling foraminifera, radiating radiolaria, and diatomaceous earth-making diatoms. It is not just hemoglobin red with the blood of animals but nacreous and jeweled with strange partnerships, luminous microbes illuminating deep-sea animals, floating cathedrals of calcium and silicon, oceans full of miniature filigreed and fragile pillbox, star-shaped, and coin forms. On land, hordes of green beings alchemically transform sunlight and dirt and animal exhaust into fruit and flowers and, at another remove, lovers and meat, their shining, glistening, mutually orgasmic bodies a billion-year refrain of triumphant partners, a buoyant rejoinder to chromatic oversimplification, a multicolored splendor. Life is not all roses, but neither is it the opposite. A more profound poet than Lord Tennyson, William Blake, said, “Exuberance is beauty” and “Energy is Eternal Delight.”

EARTH IS NO ORDINARY PLANET. We may pride ourselves on our scientific instrumentation, our thermal satellites and X-ray diffractometers, our magnetic resonance imagers and gas chromatographs determining the atomic composition of crystals and the chemical composition of stars. But the biosphere uses more ancient, distributed self-growing and self-repairing instruments to recognize and maintain its manifold operations. Global humanity is a modern variation on an ancient theme. The biosphere builds an endless variety of biomolecular concentrators and redistributors, organo-devices such as water scorpions (family: Nepidae) with built-in fathometers, plants with gravity sensors and exquisite animal behavior–modifying compounds, algae with barium sulfate and calcium ion–detection systems. Magneto-sensitive bacteria detect true magnetic north, homing pigeons and bees fly home on cloudy days. Electric fish generate and sense, via electroreception, magnetic fields, which they use to locate and communicate with one another.

It is a psychedelic planet and life lights it up. It parties with fireflies, luminous fish, glow-in-the-dark algae in Vieques Island’s bioluminescent bay, and
Gonyaulax
that flash circadianly wherever they are. Green plants, red algae, and cyan-colored bacteria join us and most animals in perceiving the visible slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, which extends from 400 to 700 nanometers in wavelength, and which we see as the colors of the rainbow spanning from purple (the shortest wavelength) to red (the longest). But pollinating insects detect pretty patterns of petals visible only to those that espy within the ultraviolet range at wavelengths below 400 nanometers. Honeybees navigate by polarized light. Pit vipers such as rattlesnakes track their warm prey via infrared. Dogs detect ultrasound; bats not only detect but emit it at ultrahigh frequencies, some 100,000 cycles per second. Together we living beings make and sense and alter the composition of the soil, ocean, atmosphere, and even lithosphere, where microbes that live in the rocks, endoliths, live. Everyone alive has a history of uninterrupted life that goes back for more than three billion years. That includes you, but it also includes inchworms and
E. coli
. In that sense, there are no extant “highest” or “lower” organisms: although they may not act like it, each present-day life-form represents a successful track record of some 3.8 billion years of evolution.

The numinous feeling of aliveness we get in seeing our blue sphere from space finds support in multiple lines of evidence that show that global life is
physiological.
The continuous use of matter and energy by multifarious living beings combines to impose regularities and boundaries of action on the planet’s oceans, land, and air. Biospheric life is not an organism, technically, because organisms don’t completely recycle all their available atoms; they share them with other organisms in ecosystems. Earth is thus a kind of superorganismic being or, more academically, a global ecosystem. A kind of closed causal nexus, the blue planet not only reacts but responds, including to its own plentiful inhabitants/constituents.

The notion that Earth is a rock with some life on it is part of our historical heritage and an example of Cartesian dualism: here, on the planetary
rock,
we have matter; while over here, in moving organisms, we have
life.
But life and its environment are so tightly wound, it’s wrong to speak this way. In fact, life and the environment form a single system, an energetic phenomenon of chemistry and movement, connected to the sun, at Earth’s surface. “Life” is a kind of substance, one we feel from the inside, but which consists of cosmically available elements organized in regions of energy flow. From a materialistic standpoint, living matter is a peculiar moving mineral made mostly of water. It is, indeed, an impure form of water.

“I am as pure as the driven slush,” said Tallulah Bankhead in that louche and ultimately cosmic quip. It’s no insult that she boasted of her impurity, her promiscuous materiality. The processes of living organize many minerals on Earth’s surface. Human teeth, for example, are converted toxic waste dumps: Evolutionarily, my teeth derive from the need of marine cells to dump calcium waste outside their cell membranes. Calcium is a mineral that will wreak havoc with normal cellular metabolism. Trucking this hazardous waste across cell lines in ancestral colonies of marine cells may well be the basis of all present-day shell- and bone-making, including the apatite, a combo of calcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, calcium fluoride (not the same as sodium fluoride added to drinking water), and other compounds, in a smile. Prevalent calcium minerals such as calcite, aragonite, carbonate, phosphate, halite, gypsum, and so forth are also the dominant media used in biomineralization. Opal, a semiprecious type of silica known for its iridescent play of colors, comes next. The magnetic mineral magnetite caps the teeth of chitons but is also found inside the cells of bacteria, in swimming forms of algae, and in minute quantities in the brains of migratory fish, birds, sea turtles, and honeybees where it may act as a compass. Opossum shrimp use needle-shaped fluorite crystals to avoid the light. Like the found objects a junk artist turns into beautiful works, calcium ions once poisonous to marine cells are now arranged in crystalline lattices to make shells and bones including those of our ancestors with spines and central nervous systems, including, that is, those of the junk artist himself. Beautifully symmetrical marine microbes known as radiolarians deplete the oceans of amorphous silica and strontium to produce their ornate skeletons. The dried leaves of a New Zealand shrub,
Hybanthus floribundus,
contain up to 10 percent of nickel, a greater percentage than some mineral sources currently being mined.
1
The concentration of vanadium in marine animals known as ascidians rivals the concentration of iron in ours. The chambered nautilus, related to the squid and octopus, has a powerful aragonite “beak” capable of crushing bones. Its shell is also aragonite, while its balancing organ is formed of calcite crystals in a “pinpoint mineralization”; and it has normal kidney stones made of phosphate minerals, inclusions shared even by nautilus-type organisms whose kidneys have lost their function. Their inclusions continue to serve, however, as reservoirs used to store the raw skeletal materials calcium and phosphate within the organism. Mediating cell-to-cell interactions as part of the putative neurological basis for motor reflexes and thinking, calcium is lethal to cells in a free ionic state; but although calcium ions are ten thousand times more prevalent in the oceans than is the poison cyanide, calcium itself has been incorporated into the very marrow of life, into its skeletons and shells, and in physiological processes ranging from blood clotting to thinking.

The elements incorporated into the psychedelic biosphere’s flowing functional design include silicon, the second most common element in Earth’s crust after oxygen. Ninety percent of the minerals in Earth’s crust are silicates. As silicon dioxide, this element composes glass, agate, tiger’s eye, and rose quartz. The technology industry has found it useful, as it is used in the silicon chips of our computers and cell phones. But if we recognize it in the stained glass of our churches, we should also note it as the tiny beautiful exteriors of diatoms (which can look like stained glass!), radiolaria, sponges, and other organisms. And silicon is only one example. Life has been biomineralizing its environment for thousands of millions of years, turning its house into a home and its home into a body as it assembles ever more complex bioarchitectures from its “nonliving” surroundings. Clarice Lispector, who said she felt happy only when she was writing—that is, being a conduit between the graphite tip of a pencil and the photosynthetically produced surface of a page or, rather, in her case, being the incarnadine agent that touches the key of a metallic typewriter that imprints and scars earthly matter in a memorable way—remarked that when she was young, before her mother died so young, books to her appeared to be natural things, like fruit or babies. In a geophysiological sense we must admit that the little Clarice was right: an extraterrestrial, looking at Earth’s mineral flows without access to the awareness of the beings within those flows, would no doubt consider books another example of Earth’s boggled body of transformative biochemical processes. We come out of Earth like books come out of us; technology and biology are different aspects of a single process.

THE ENTIRE COSMOS is not composed mainly of water, but is made mostly of one of water’s ingredients: hydrogen. So is life. The hydrogen of the universe appeared from the beginning in the big bang some thirteen billion years ago. Hydrogen, the basic stuff of the entire visible sky, is converted to helium and other heavier chemical elements in the center of those natural nuclear reactors known as stars. We recognize hydrogen on Earth mostly in its combined form as the elemental component, the one that besides oxygen makes up water. Yet some hydrogen on Earth does persist in a purer form; it is a colorless, odorless, lightweight gas (H
₂
) that, as in a balloon, easily escapes from Earth’s gravity. Life, when active, is always composed mostly of water. But life’s ubiquitous H
₂
O, water, is not the elusive H
₂
(hydrogen) gas. H
₂
, the stuff of stars, makes only a cameo appearance on Earth. Gas hydrogen, when sparked, is violently reactive; to find it in nature one must crouch in the mud or descend into the smelly depths of the Black Sea. For hydrogen’s energetic reactivity is valuable, and, unlike water, it is easily converted into organic matter by particular kinds of life under the Sun’s energizing rays. “Organic matter” is merely a simplified name for millions of chemical compounds, many of them foodstuffs, made of hydrogen bound to carbon.

On our arm of the galaxy, the Sun and its companions ignited from a cloud of gas concentrated by gravity over four billion years ago. At that time, most of the hydrogen atoms—those that failed to remain in the Sun—escaped to the outskirts of our solar system. Today hydrogen exists mainly as cold gas and hydrogen-rich ices (of methane, CH
₄
, and of ammonia, NH
₃
) of the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) and of their moons that retained gaseous atmospheres. But here, in the inner solar system, the bodies of the rocky planets, Mars, Earth, and Venus, have not been massive enough to retain this atomic constituent of water, this lightest of elements. Hydrogen, the light stuff of stars, mainly has escaped to outer space from Mars and Venus, our planetary neighbors. Here on Earth, hydrogen lies hidden in one massive disguise: inside the three-thousand-meter layer of water on the surface of our planet. (The average depth of the world’s oceans is three kilometers.) Mars, too cold, and Venus, too hot, both lack any open bodies of liquid water and have retained, on their surfaces, less than a single meter of water as vapor or ice!

Although our three kilometers of hydrogen have had billions of years to escape, we suspect the element has remained tenaciously on Earth for only one reason: the incessant thirst of highly active living matter. Life, which originated in water, remains composed of water. Cyclically making itself and remaking itself, life may be as much the reason that water remains on Earth as water is the reason why life remains on Earth.

WHEN HUMANKIND ACCOMPLISHED ITS EPIC GOAL, landing on the moon in 1969, what was not immediately seen was that the territorial move to conquer space for America had a windfall pointed in the opposite direction: that of the planet we left, rather than of the satellite that was visited. As in a trip, sometimes the most fateful and educational part of the journey is the homecoming. It may have been impossible to see that Earth’s surface formed a single ecosystem before landing on the moon or investigating to see if there was life on Mars. But in retrospect we realize that our view of our home has forever changed: we now see the artificiality and anthropomorphism of the European colonial view of Earth as a color-coded globe divided into nation-states—and the relative magnificence of a profound blue orb, engulfing us but itself a tiny drop in the immensity of space. And we exist as a tiny part of that tiny drop, with great potential perhaps but no proven staying power.

Over 99.99 percent of the species that have evolved on the Earth’s surface have become extinct. The longest-living ones are those that entered other cells, providing them with services such as the ability to metabolize oxygen or the power to use light to make food that came from symbiotic transformation. For us to make the transition to a long-term viable life-form is by no means assured. But if we do, we’ll probably have to be like those symbiotic transformers that formed close alliances with other, very different beings, lending them our special skills to make a more powerful union. In retrospect we realize that life does not just exist on Earth like a snake, say, slithering over the face of a rock. Rather, life exists not just on Earth but
in
the Earth and
as
the Earth’s planetary surface, including its oceans and atmosphere.