Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (33 page)

17
. Although truth may be stranger than fiction, fiction is often truer—if only because its claims to represent truth are less strident. Mythopoetic realities are freely generated within the realm of science fiction. A living planet thrives in Isaac Asimov’s book
Foundation and Earth.
In the Polish writer Stanisl´aw Lem’s
Solaris,
a planet is inhabited by a giant ocean capable of copying human artifacts and even human beings. In R. A. Kennedy’s novel
The Trinuniverse,
Mars divides into something like a giant cell and begins feeding on other planets. In
Born of the Sun,
the science fiction writer Jack Williamson portrays the planets of our solar system as ova laid by the Sun, Earth being the first to hatch. In my book
Biospheres
(see next note), a putative work of science nonfiction, I extended the Gaian metaphor of aliveness to the point of reproduction. In this logical extension of the Gaian trope of a live Earth, I pictured the surface planetary environment as a neuter being (rather than a “goddess”) on the verge of potentially stellar reproduction (but not necessarily self-conscious of that fact). Such stellar reproduction borders on the incredible and, partly because of that, illustrates a noble lie of the Gaian kind.

18
. Dorion Sagan,
Biospheres: The Metamorphosis of Planet Earth
(New York: Bantam/McGraw-Hill, 1990).

19
. The group (Space Biospheres Ventures) initially in charge of the Biosphere 2 project was a scientifically pathetic “cult” on a “bogus journey.” See Marc Cooper, “Take This Terrarium and Shove It,”
Village Voice,
April 2, 1991, 24–33, and “Profits of Doom: The Biosphere Project Finally Comes out of the Closet—as a Theme Park,”
Village Voice,
July 30, 1991, 31–36.

The biggest problem, apart from leaching of atmospheric oxygen from inside the structure by its cement (making inhabitant “biospherians” so weak they could not ascend to the library [where there was a copy of my book
Biospheres
]), was that the company took pains to conceal the fact that the structure was not completely sealed and even required an electric generator in its basement. Now, however, Biosphere 2 is a scientific research facility owned by the University of Arizona.

20
. Bataille,
Accursed Share,
29.

21
. Sorin Sonea and Maurice Panisset,
The New Bacteriology
(Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1983).

22
. See
chapter 1
for the startling findings of the biologist Kwang Jeon, who witnessed the transformation of infectious bacteria into the needed organelles of a new species of amoeba. Jeon may be the only person in human history to have actually witnessed, at least at such closeness and so single-handedly, the evolution of a new species in the laboratory.

23
. See, for example, Mariel Emrich, “Cancer Cell Mitochondria,”
Science Friday, Talking Science,
http://www.talkingscience.org/2012/01/cancer-cell-mitochondria/
.

24
. Sorin Sonea and Leo G. Mathieu,
Prokaryotology: A Coherent View
(Montreal: Les Presses de L’Université de Montréal).

25
. The Homeric epics never mention a body—the flesh-enclosed entity usually taken for granted as the definable material self—but speak only of what we would think of as body parts, corporeal fragments such as “fleet legs” and “sinewy arms”; see Bruno Snell,
The Discovery of the Mind,
translated by Thomas E. Rosenmeyer (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 8. “The idea of the self in a case,” Norbert Elias has written, “is one of the recurrent
leitmotifs
of a modern philosophy, from the thinking subject of Descartes, Leibniz’ windowless monads and the Kantian subject of knowledge (who from his aprioristic shell can never quite break through to the ‘thing in itself’) to the more recent extension of the same basic idea of the entirely self-sufficient individual” (
The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners
, trans. E. Jephcott [New York: Urizen, 1978], 252–53).

26
. James E. Lovelock,
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

27
. James E. Lovelock, “Life Span of the Biosphere,”
Nature,
April 1982, 561–63.

1
. Erwin Schrödinger,
What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944).

2
. Guiseppe Trautteur, “The Illusion of Free Will and Its Acceptance,” in
After Cognitivism: A Reassessment of Cognitive Science and Philosophy,
edited by Karl Leidlmair (New York: Springer, 2009), 192–203.

3
. For full Einstein poem, facsimile, and discussion, see
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=127828
.

4
. Masao Matsuhashi and Mark Hallett, “The Timing of the Conscious Intention to Move,”
European Journal of Neuroscience
28 (2008): 2344–51.

5
. Heinrich Von Kleist, “On the Theater of Marionettes,” in
Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist
(Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2009), 265–74; online translation by Idris Parry,
http://southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm
.

1
. Cited in Richard Doyle,
Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 74.

2
. Lynn Sagan, “Communications: An Open Letter to Mr. Joe K. Adams,”
Psychedelic Review
1, no. 3 (1964): 355.

3
. Ibid., 354.

4
. Doyle,
Darwin’s Pharmacy,
73.

5
. Gerald Schueler, “Chaos and the Psychological Symbolism of the Tarot,”
http://www.schuelers.com/chaos/chaos7.htm
.

6
. Ironically perhaps, this paean to the miraculous nature of books was not written but televised, in episode 11, “The Persistence of Memory,” of the
Cosmos
series.

7
. The noösphere refers to the “thought-sphere” of humans and technology around the Earth. The term is associated with the Catholic evolutionist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but both he and
Édouard Le Roy
attended lectures at the Sorbonne by Vernadsky, who used it more secularly. The geologist Eduard Suess in 1875 coined the term
biosphere,
placing life in the context of other material spherical systems at Earth’s surface: the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the geosphere. Vernadsky and Chardin met, but the latter was more focused on seeing a Singularity-like teleology in evolution’s future, a final state when man could achieve his goal and blend into spirit (again): the so-called Omega Point. Vernadsky, more subtly I think, looked at it as an extension of the linked mineral and thermodynamic transformations worked by life with the Sun’s energy. Before Earth was seen from space, Vernadsky recognized life as a global phenomenon. In fact, he popularized the term
biosphere.
Whether the human transport of munitions or biblically reported locust clouds transmuting fields of grain into flying mountains, life was a geological force. To the mineralogists and crystallographer Vernadsky, global industry and telecommunications was a material extension of the biosphere.

8
. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in
Dissemination,
translated by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

9
. Terrence McKenna,
Food of the Gods: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution
(New York: Bantam, 1993).

10
. E. O. Wilson,
The Social Conquest of Earth
(Brooklyn: Liveright, 2012).

11
. Jacques Derrida,
Paper Machine,
translated by Rachel Bowlby (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 6.

12
. Jacques Derrida,
Of Grammatology,
translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

13
. Eric D. Schneider and D. Sagan,
Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

14
. Geoffrey Miller,
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
(New York: Anchor, 2001).

15
. Jeffrey Wicken,
Evolution, Thermodynamics, and Information: Extending the Darwinian Program
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

1
. Sharon E. Kingsland, “The Beauty of the World: Evelyn Hutchinson’s Vision of Science,” in
The Art of Ecology: Writings of G. Evelyn Hutchinson
, edited by David K. Skelly, David M. Post, and Melinda D. Smith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010).

2
. E. D. Schneider and J. J. Kay, “Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics,”
Mathematical Computer Modeling
19 (1994): 25–48.

3
. Aldous Huxley,
The Perennial Philosophy
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1946).

4
. J. Scott Turner,
The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); see also Turner, “Gaia, Extended Organisms, and Emergent Homeostasis,” in
Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century,
edited by Stephen H. Schneider, James R. Miller, Eileen Crist, and Penelope J. Boston (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004), 57–70.

5
. E-mail message to author, May 5, 2012.

6
. Stephen Jay Gould,
Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1999), 3.

7
. Heinz Von Foerster, “On Constructing a Reality,” in
Environmental Design Research,
vol. 2, edited by Wolfgang F. E. Preiser (Stroudsburg, Penn.: Dowden, Hutchinson, and Ross, 1973), 35–46. As with Twain’s comment on the exaggerated news of his own death, we should not be too quick to pronounce benedictions over Cartesianism’s body. A fascinating, still relevant book, advocating self-improvement through reprogramming one’s own mind, is Maxwell Maltz,
Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life
(Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1960).

8
. Stefan Helmreich, “
Homo microbis
and the Figure of the Literal,” Culture@Large 2011, “Theorizing the Contemporary,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2012,
http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/511
and
http://vimeo.com/37271969
.

9
. Sigmund Freud,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(New York: Norton, 1989), 45–46.

10
. Jacques Derrida,
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
, translated by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 19–20.

11
. Ibid., 35.

12
. Isaiah 45:17, quoted in Pir Zia Inayat-Kahn, “A Hidden Treasure,”
http://www.sevenpillarshouse.org/article/a_hidden_treasure
(accessed May 20, 2012).

13
. Derrida,
Archive Fever,
2.

14
. Kim TallBear, “Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints” (2012),
http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/510
; and vimeo,
http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/509
. Link also includes responses by Myra Hird and Augustin Fuentes to essay 1.

15
. Bruce Scofield, “Gaia: The Living Earth. 2500 Years of Precedents in Natural Science and Philosophy,” in
Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century,
edited by Stephen H. Schneider, James R. Miller, Eileen Crist, and Penelope J. Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 151–60.