Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (22 page)

Sociologically, Gaia ties into animism, native Americanism, and ecologism, and it provides a sort of immanent goddess that for many at last suggests a welcome departure from a transcendent God. Phenomenologically, the switchover to a Gaian worldview, to a perspective in which one inhabits not a static environment but the responsive tissues of a planet-sized complex organism, can hardly be overemphasized. The greatness of the being within which we dwell even provides an explanation of our relative ignorance of it. Gaia theory has also been threatening to philosophers and scientists, for it has occasionally served as a platform for a new age joy slide into the muck of planetary personification. If biocentrism is currently a prime grove for the culling of noble fictions, then certainly the tree of Gaia, at the very best, bears some of the most tempting fruit.

Gaia theory has been attacked on several fronts: as unscientific, “as either trivial or untestably metaphoric from the viewpoint of analytical philosophy,” as an antihuman polemic, mere Green politics, industrial apologetics, and even as ecological “Satanism.”
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Yet Gaia theory thrives as a cross-disciplinary science so new the amniotic blood of the mythopoetic still adheres to its newborn skin, announcing its status and making it vulnerable to attacks from the established sciences of geology, biology, and atmospheric chemistry.

Seductive and enchanting, Gaia theory had a poetic genesis. When NASA prepared for the
Viking
mission that landed on Mars in 1976, scientists were asked to design experiments that could detect life on the red planet. Lovelock had already invented a mechanism by which minute concentrations of chlorofluorocarbons (said to disrupt the ozone layer) are detected at concentrations as scanty as a few parts per billion. Lovelock, already passionately observing the effects of life on the atmosphere, suggested that the absence of life on Mars might be detected from Earth. Earth’s atmosphere, he pointed out, differs greatly from those of Mars and Venus, which are both more than 95 percent carbon dioxide—that is, stable, unreactive mixtures of gases predictable from laboratory experiments.

Earth’s atmosphere, by contrast, is inherently unpredictable, containing volatile gases such as methane and hydrogen, which should not normally be found with oxygen. Lovelock reasoned that the atmosphere, far from being a sterile container for life, is inseparable from it, like the shell of a tortoise or the nest of a bird. The atmosphere is at once life’s circulatory system and its skin; if life existed on Mars, its natural chemical processes would drive the Martian atmosphere away from equilibrium. But because the gases of the Martian atmosphere are in equilibrium, he argued, there was no need to go to Mars to show it was devoid of life. Needless to say, NASA, on the verge of liftoff, was not overly thrilled.

Lovelock proposed that life on Earth must have monitored its environment on a planetary scale. How else could the gases that comprise it remain in such an unstable situation? The oceans and air of Earth appear to be continuously
physiologically
stabilized, as are the body chemistry, internal temperature, salinity, and alkalinity of many organisms. Views of Earth from space, by astronauts or in kitsch postcards, have literally changed our perspective. The essayist Lewis Thomas, contrasting the Earth seen from space with the dry-as-a-bone moon, has called Earth the only “exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos,” a turquoise orb with the “organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.”
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Lovelock asked his country neighbor, the novelist William Golding, for a “good four-letter word” to express the idea that Earth has, beyond just a physical chemistry, a physiology. Golding proposed the Greek earth goddess Gaia, mother of the Titans.

The use of a mythological title to describe a serious subject for scientific study is fraught with dangers and opportunities not unlike those of Sigmund Freud’s borrowing of the Narcissus and Oedipus myths for use in elaborating psychoanalysis. Save for the Catholic Virgin Mary, mother goddesses have virtually vanished from the modern West; the unconscious association of the reappearing goddess Gaia with Mother Mary, however—if true, a kind of overcompensation for the transcendent phallocentrism of Judeo-Christianity—would help account for some of the shrillest among Gaian new ageists, whose moralistic slogans and puritanical admonitions are marshaled to save a (supposedly) pristine Earth. Yet, as Mary Catherine Bateson points out, it is of little use to treat Earth as a living body while living female bodies themselves still do not command cultural respect. Perhaps considering Earth a Narcissus-like extension of the human self works better than a neo-Christian feminization.

Although satellites had been envisioned as providing us with a view of “the whole earth,” in fact, what has been provided is only one-half of the surface, the “face” of Earth. And although they depend on personification, mythology, and the forever unfinished and eroticized nature of human symbolization, such ideographic or iconic chains—Narcissus, earth, expressive surface—enhance the ethical status of Earth by giving it (a) face. The alternative is to save (this) face by considering Earth as faceless—inanimate, insensible, and unresponsive—and therefore ourselves as unaccountable to it.

It is also possible to argue that “unprovable” Gaia is a species of noble lie, a “narrative integration of cosmology and morality,” and that, Western intellectual and moral biases against deception aside, Gaia is simply environmentally useful whether or not it is true. If this is the case, then describing Gaia theory as geophysiology may confer on this infant discipline the nominal equivalent of scientifically correct swaddling clothes. The culturally valuable noble lie (or ironic commentary thereon) dates back at least to Plato’s advocacy of a myth of metallic origins in the
Republic.
Like the topology-violating magician who slides a ring onto a knotted loop of string, the well-told noble lie seduces the beholder into believing (in) it despite knowing better.
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In my book
Biospheres,
I argued that “artificial” ecosystems—containing humans, technology, and the requisite elements for long-term recycling in materially closed environments—are not all that artificial but, rather, the first in a batch of planetary propagules whose proliferation is in keeping with prior epochal evolutionary developments (e.g., bacterial spores, animal bodies, plant seeds).
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Despite the exposure of the scientific inadequacy of the initiators of the world’s biggest closed ecosystem,
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Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona, other recycling ecosystems—including one that had been planned at the world’s biggest cathedral, Saint John the Divine in New York City, which would have digitally transmuted atmospheric gas measurements into music—will likely eventually be built. Already, greenhouses and buildings with central air conditioning represent a step in the direction of closed ecosystems large enough to contain human beings; the next step is the ability to completely recycle gaseous, liquid, and solid wastes.

Fully recycling self-enclosed ecosystems may first be built by the Japanese, whose limited space, island history, and technological prowess are sure to keep them interested in a project whose lucrative applications include pollution control and space station design. Farther in the future, functional biospheres may become necessary because of spoilage of Earth’s shared atmosphere. I believe that the pollution-engendered, technology-fostered cropping up of biospheres (already in its initial phase) will have represented the appearance of individuality at the planetary level. This level represents a natural continuation of the microcosmic level of the prokaryote and the eukaryote made from prokaryotes and of the mesocosmic level of animal and plant bodies made from reproducing eukaryotes.

Taking his cue from Vladimir Vernadsky (who popularized the term
biosphere
), Georges Bataille writes:

Vernadsky was a kind of “anti-Lovelock,” who, far from imagining the Earth to be alive, considered life a kind of mineral. Yet these two scientists, Vernadsky and Lovelock, are linked by their heuristic dismantling of the boundary between life and its environment, biology and geology—what Lovelock calls academic apartheid. But from either perspective, the appearance of materially closed ecosystems capable of recycling carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, oxygen, and other elements necessary to a total system of life, including human life, merits attention. Supererogatory biospheres, in Bataille’s schema, extend the limits of growth. Within that general economy beginning with solar radiation and bacterial photosynthesis, “bonsai” biospheres make use of the solar-driven material surplus generated by what Vernadsky has called the pressure of life. Bonsai biospheres funnel into a new form of life the metabolic reserve whose lavish squandering Bataille has described as a fundamental feature of cultures less acquisitive and profit-oriented than our own. The appearance of closed ecosystems within the general planetary ecosystem makes clear that the biosphere has a fearful symmetry of its own.

BACTERIAL OMNISEXUALITY

Bacterial omnisexuality refers to the genetic exchanges among bacteria considered promiscuous in the sense that they do not delimit these exchanges with species barriers.
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Theoretically, any bacterium can at any time in its life cycle give a variable quantity (rather than exactly half, as occurs during the meiotic sex of plants and animals) of its genes to any other bacterium, although it may require intermediaries such as plasmids or viruses to do so. Bacterial omnisexuality was the first type of sex to appear on the planet, some three billion years ago. It was always crucial to the biota’s ability to react quickly to environmental changes and emergencies, since the
lateral
transfer of useful traits among rapidly reproducing bacteria is of far greater environmental consequence than the slow, vertical inheritance of meiotically reproducing organisms. (Although bacteria are termed asexual, this refers only to their means of reproduction.)

After the evolution of eukaryotic cells from symbiotic bacteria, bacteria omnisexuality became important as a way of genetically “locking” together once diverse groups of prokaryotes. We are accustomed to thinking of them merely as germs, but most bacteria are harmless to humans. Bacteria are biochemically and metabolically far more diverse than all plants and animals put together. The natural history of bacteria is so bizarre that they would have excited huge interest had they been discovered in outer space rather than beneath our feet. All things considered, bacteria appear crucial to the upkeep of Gaian systems of sensation, feedback, and physiological control. Indeed, Gaia may have appeared on Earth some three billion years ago basically as an emergent phenomenon of bacterial crowding.

Four-fifths of the history of life on Earth has been solely a bacterial phenomenon. Moreover, all plants, animals, fungi, and the miscellaneous eukaryotic kingdom known as protoctists are bacterial in nature. The nucleated, mitochondria-containing eukaryotic cell on which all nonbacterial forms of life are modularly based is itself the result of symbiosis and bacteria recombination (omnisexuality). The xenic origins of the eukaryotic cell have major implications for the self, the body, and a vulgar Darwinism that equates evolutionary success with competition. With respect to the bacterial colonization prerequisite to Gaia and its global metabolism, animals including humans are epiphenomenal. There seems little doubt that even full-scale nuclear war could not destroy the bacterial infrastructure.

Eukaryotic cells evolved through a process known as endosymbiosis. Perhaps the simplest model of endosymbiosis is for one organism to swallow another without digesting it. In microbes especially, because of their lack of an immune system, organisms may be eaten that are likely to survive within their hosts. A more complex form of endosymbiosis is bacterial infection: in this case, too, death does not ensue but, rather, the invading organisms successfully reproduce inside, and in some cases may have become absolutely required by, their hosts.
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Not only the origin of new species but the origin of the metakingdom Eukaryotae as well, comprising all nonbacterial organisms, occurred not through gradual accumulation of mutations but through endosymbiosis; we may owe our very existence to the ancient “failure” of Lilliputian vampires, oxygen-respiring bacteria similar to modern-day
Bdellovibrio,
to kill the hosts whose bodies they had invaded. This was of course a Pyrrhic victory, since these organelles now energize our entire bodies. They are now generally well behaved, although cancer is noteworthy as the enhanced activity of mitochondria, which provide energy for tumor growth.
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Technogenetic manipulation of bacterial strains, which promises huge financial returns from the biomedical market and, ultimately, a radical refashioning of the human genome into new species,
is
bacterial omnisexuality—bacterial omnisexuality ministered, “engineered” by human hands. If eukaryotes could trade genes as fluidly as do bacteria, it would be a small matter for dandelions to sprout butterfly wings, collide with a bee, exchange genes again, and soon be seeing with compound insect eyes. Bacteria are able to trade variable quantities of genes with virtually no regard for species barriers. Indeed, despite a lingering Linnaean nomenclature, bacteria are so genetically promiscuous, their bodies are so genetically open, that the very concept of species presents us a false conceptual shackle falsifying the genetic fluidity of these ancestral life-forms.