Cooperation: A Sociable Cosmos
Ecological communities are not simply gladiator fields dominated by deadly competition; they are networks of complex interactions, of independent self-interests that require mutual adjustment and accommodation with respect to both the other co-inhabitants and the dynamics of the local ecosystem. The necessity for competition is only one half of a duality, the other half of which includes many opportunities for mutually beneficial co-operation.
—Peter A. Corning, The Synergism Hypothesis
I’ve always loved watching Steve Nash play basketball. And it’s not because he’s the tallest, the best shooter, the fastest dribbler, or the most effective rebounder. No, Nash, a relatively small, self-effacing Canadian, is a delight to watch precisely because he’s not the perfect specimen of a basketball player. In a one-on-one matchup, he’d lose to Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, or Dwyane Wade every time. But there is a reason why Nash’s Phoenix Suns have been perennial contenders. Basketball is a team sport. The advantage goes to the collective that thrives, not the individual who strives. And Nash’s amazing gift—his adaptive advantage, we might say—is his capacity to transform the disparate individuals on his team into a cohesive unity, to turn five capable players into a sort of superorganism of basketball that can accomplish things five individuals would never dream of. That’s what earned him the NBA’s Most Valuable Player Award two years in a row. And that brings us, surprisingly, to the work of biologist Lynn Margulis.
In 1967, Margulis, a young unknown biologist who just happened to be married to a young astrophysicist named Carl Sagan, published a landmark paper. She argued that millions of years ago, single-celled organisms began to work together, resulting in the development of an entirely new life form—the eukaryote (the first nucleated cell)—that became the basis of all advanced life on the planet. Margulis’s work on this new theory, which she called “symbiogenesis,” was a watershed event in the development of evolutionary biology, helping to shift not only the scientific conversation but also the cultural conversation surrounding evolution from a focus on competition to a new appreciation of cooperation. She helped show how cooperation among organisms—in this case, bacteria—could be a major driver in the evolutionary process. Today that essential insight is being used to understand everything from ancient tribal dynamics to the ongoing march of economic globalization. Just as Sagan helped us appreciate how insights into our cosmic heritage could shed light on the meaning of human life and culture, Margulis has helped us recognize that there are revelations aplenty to be found in the “microcosmos,” as she has dubbed the world of the infinitesimally small. In fact, she has scolded the scientific community for narrowly focusing on animals, organisms that, when all is taken into account, have made a much more recent appearance in evolution’s long story.
“Animals are very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution’s creativity,” writes Margulis. “It’s as if you wrote a four-volume tome supposedly on world history but beginning in the year 1800 at Fort Dearborn and the founding of Chicago. You might be entirely correct about the nineteenth-century transformation of Fort Dearborn into a thriving lakeside metropolis, but it would hardly be world history.”
The breakthrough work on symbiogenesis represents the classic story of an unknown outsider fighting against the scientific establishment to have her work accepted. In 1967, Margulis published her original work in a paper called “On the Origin of Mitosing [Eukaryotic] Cells.” Doesn’t exactly sound like light summer reading material, but in the world of lab coats and microscopes, this paper, like her subsequent book, was a must-read, reframing the origins of multicellular life on the planet. She argued that one of the most critical advances in evolution’s past, the formation of the nucleated cell, which is essential for all higher life forms (sort of the biological equivalent of the discovery of the wheel) was made possible by the cooperation of early bacteria:
My major thrust is how different bacteria form consortia that, under ecological pressures, associate and undergo metabolic and genetic change such that their tightly integrated communities result in individuality at a more complex level of organization. The case in point is the origin of nucleated (protoctist, animal, fungal, and plant) cells from bacteria.
This landmark paper was not exactly embraced by the scientific powers that be. Remember, this is the same scientific community that once described the first eons of Earth’s history as “three billion years of non-events.” They were fascinated by fruit flies and searching for fossils from millions of years ago; they were less interested in the evolutionary relevance of protists and prokaryotes from billions of years ago. After rejection by fifteen scientific journals, Margulis finally got it published, and little by little her “radical” idea won over the scientific mainstream. But the whole process left her bitter about the reigning evolutionary consensus that was more focused on competition between selfish genes than cooperation among symbiotic organisms. Outspoken and provocative by nature, she once referred to the mainstream neo-Darwinian evolutionists as “a minor twentieth-century religious sect.”
I first began to appreciate the work of Margulis through the work of another evolutionary biologist—the self-described “bio-philosopher” Elisabet Sahtouris. Sahtouris and I met at a panel discussion on science and spirit during the 2000 State of the World Forum in New York City. She immediately stood out as someone who had an unusual knack for cross-disciplinary communication. She could wax eloquent about the evolutionary dynamics of the microbial world without resorting to overly technical language and capture the subtleties of science in ways that made them powerfully relevant to contemporary concerns. Yes, Margulis’s 1966 paper may have heralded a major scientific breakthrough, but “On the Origin of Mitosing [Eukaryotic] Cells” doesn’t exactly get the heart racing—at least, not outside the subscription list of the Journal of Theoretical Biology. When Sahtouris took her own shot at describing the creation of the first eukaryotic cells, the result was considerably more, well, engaging. As she explained it:
The tiny archaebacteria, with their specialized lifestyles and technologies, then created the most dramatic event to occur in Earth’s evolution since their own initial appearance out of the Earth’s mineral crust. The nucleated cell—an entirely new life-form about a thousand times larger than an individual bacterium—formed, as the bacteria took on divisions of labor and donated part of their unique genomes to the new cell’s nucleus. Thus, the nucleated cell—the only kind of cell other than bacterial ever to evolve on Earth—represents a higher unity than the bacteria achieved after eons of tension and hostilities, as they engaged in successful negotiations and cooperative evolution. This process—whereby tension and hostilities between individuals lead to negotiations and then ultimately to cooperation as a greater unity—is the basic evolutionary process of all life forms on our planet, as I see it.
In the hands of Sahtouris, bacterial evolution had much more than scientific relevance; it had dramatic flair. Here we have tension and negotiation, new technologies and old hostilities. We even have bacterial “lifestyles,” whatever they might be. We have, in short, the essential characteristics of a story—and a good story, as we shall see—a true triumph-over-tragedy tale of epic dimensions. Sahtouris somehow has a knack for infusing the activities of the microbial world with a kind of contemporary relevance, helping to give us a new appreciation for our original ancestors and the billions of years in which bacteria ruled the planet. She writes:
Before our new wave of knowledge about our single-celled ancestors—bacteria and protists, or nucleated cells—the bulk of evolution was as murky a prehistory as the three million years of human existence prior to what we call the Stone Age. Now, quite suddenly, we are unveiling a surprisingly cosmopolitan ancient (and modern) microworld. Discovering the urban lifestyles of bacteria with all their technologies—from skyscrapers to compass and electric motor, from solar energy devices to polyester, and even to a world wide web of information exchange—is an amazing journey.
The analogy between the bacterial and human worlds only goes so far, but it is fair to say that scientists are continually surprised at just how sophisticated and complex bacterial colonies are proving to be. Their collective intelligence, meaning their inherent capacity to turn aggregate action into intelligent behavior, is off the charts. For example, researchers are discovering, much to the dismay of our health-care system, just how resilient bacteria can be to antibiotics as they are constantly evolving, improving, and reinventing their gene pool. And each of Sahtouris’s descriptions of “technologies”—electric motor, solar energy, polyester, etc.—while designed to be evocative rather than technically accurate, are also based on real capacities and functions within the biofilm communities that continue to impress and surprise researchers who inevitably underestimate the capacities contained in the microcosmos.
What makes this microscopic world so interesting for our inquiry into evolution is that, as unlikely as it may seem, there is a relationship between the dynamics at play in the rough-and-tumble world of globalization in the twenty-first century and the dynamics at play in Earth’s prebiotic soup billions of years ago. This is one of the most interesting aspects of an evolutionary worldview—it allows us to move between the multiple levels and scales of the life process and see the same principles. And one of those principles is this: the spoils of evolution go not to the fastest or the smartest but to those who can find the best relationship between creative individuality and cooperative sociality. Among those ancient bacteria was, we might say, the Steve Nash of bacteria. And as we shall see, somewhere along the line that Most Valuable Protist and others like him helped turn a collection of competing bacteria into a more complex community of creativity and cooperation. We could call it the sweet spot of evolution, that perfect middle place between competition and cooperation that avoids blind self-interest on the one hand and uncreative groupthink on the other. It is the creative tension between the expression of individuality and needs of the collective, as our bacteria ancestors knew at some deep archetypal level almost two billion years ago. As Israeli scientist Eshel Ben-Jacob noted, “The aesthetic beauty of these [bacterial colonies] is striking evidence of an ongoing cooperation that enables . . . bacteria to achieve a proper balance of individuality and sociality as they battle for survival.”
STRESS AND THE SINGLE BACTERIA
A few years ago at an event in Philadelphia, Elisabet Sahtouris quickly had me engrossed as she laid out her understanding of the complex dynamics of living systems. The evolutionary process goes through a seven-stage cycle, she explained, beginning with unity and then cycling through a series of stages laid out in the chart above.
Evolution, in this model, proceeds from unity to extraordinary diversity (individuality), which then leads to a competition for resources. That competition inevitably creates new conflicts and the period of conflict precedes a period of negotiation and eventually leads to a resolution of the resource problems, which in turn moves us back along the cycle to a place of cooperation and unity. Sahtouris’s map is not so much a circle as an ascending spiral, such that the new character and quality of the unity that is discovered after cycling through all of these stages of development has a greater complexity, higher levels of cooperation and differentiation, and therefore, ultimately, greater consciousness.
This evolutionary cycle played out dramatically in one of the great environmental crises to grip the biosphere in its first few billion years of existence. As bacteria differentiated under the various selection pressures of the time, several different species with different functions roamed the prebiotic seas. Today, scientists work their way back to that primordial moment and imagine how one species may have, in its search for food, attached itself to something called a glucose gradient—a border between a more nutrient-rich area and one less dense in nutrients. Here, along these fertile borders in the ancestral soup, was food aplenty. Think of it as bacteria taking up residence in the prebiotic equivalent of a border town, an ancient hub where all kinds of travelers (in the form of food resources and energy flows) were likely to pass through. And it is here that we come across another principle of evolution that was active in the earliest forms of life but that applies equally to the postmodern age as to the Protozoic. Evolution happens at the edges. Evolution happens on the borders, the boundaries, the in-between zones.
This is true whether we are talking about nature or culture. It was the case in ancient glucose gradients that helped spur the creation of eukaryotic cells, as well as in the primordial mud between land and sea where scientists suggest that life first emerged. It’s a principle that can be seen on the border between earth and space where the biosphere came into being, as well as at the edges of the Roman Empire where Christianity took root and flourished. It’s why smart technology companies develop “Skunk Works”—small groups of committed, creative people who develop new innovations on the edges of their own institutions, free of the inhibitive, more conservative structures of normal corporate life. Evolution happens at the edges. Don’t think of it as an absolute law but as a guiding principle that proves surprisingly true again and again and again. My favorite example is that of New Orleans in the nineteenth century. It was here, on the boundary between three or four cultures, that new innovations in music gave rise to the beginnings of jazz.
Let us return to Earth’s earlier days, when glucose gradients provided a gathering point for single-celled bacteria to mix and mingle, work together, trade ideas, and even engage in a little experimental sex—swapping genes and energy. Somewhere along the way, a new innovation arose in the bacterial community, an early form of photosynthesis, as industrious bacteria developed a way to gain energy from exposure to ultraviolet light. But that would prove problematic, as the main waste product of this activity, the excretion of these photosynthetic creatures, was oxygen. Indeed, Margulis’s work suggests a deadly conflict formed between various bacteria, a life-and-death struggle caused by what author Howard Bloom calls the first “toxic pollutant holocaust” in the Earth’s atmosphere. It was akin to an ancient version of climate change. The photosynthetic bacteria’s excretion of oxygen might seem a benevolent activity to us modern, oxygen-loving creatures, but not to the rest of the bacterial realm. The theory is that eventually such large amounts had amassed that a whole new layer of oxygen was formed around the Earth, creating the oxygen-rich chemical composition in the atmosphere that may sustain life today but was deadly to the ancient bacteria. Starvation ensued because bacteria were cut off from essential life-sustaining access to energy and food. Barbarism ran rampant, scientists speculate, and a bacteria-against-bacteria civil war unfolded over food and resources. But even as this great famine deepened, significant new adaptations began to emerge that would shift the conflict and move our one-celled ancestors further along on the evolutionary cycle. In fact, it would lead them to form the first eukaryotic cells, the breakthrough cells that became the critical foundation for more complex forms of life. Margulis describes the events in the following way.
How did the eukaryotic cell appear? Probably it was an invasion of predators, at the outset. It may have started when one sort of squirming bacterium invaded another—seeking food, of course. But certain invasions evolved into truces; associations once ferocious became benign. When swimming bacterial would-be invaders took up residence inside their sluggish hosts, this joining of forces created a new whole that was, in effect, far greater than the sum of its parts: faster swimmers capable of moving large numbers of genes evolved. Some of these newcomers were uniquely competent in the evolutionary struggle. Further bacterial associations were added on, as the modern cell evolved.
Here we have the next two stages of our cycle, negotiation and cooperation, leading eventually to the emergence of the final stage. The new unity in this case was represented by the original eukaryotic cells—small municipalities of working bacteria that were a thousand times larger than their one-celled ancestors. Once aggressive bacterial conflicts evolved into cooperative work associations as organisms took up residence in these new cells—independent bacteria now functioning in microbial partnerships, increasing access to energy and resources. We call them mitochondria. And so this particular circuit of the evolutionary cycle was complete, and a new social grouping was created that would change life on the planet forever. Sahtouris likes to riff on this theme, noting that the trajectory of evolution moves from one-celled creatures (bacteria), to multi-creatured cells (eukaryotic cells) to “multi-celled creatures” (humans), which may soon form new multi-creatured cells (global cooperatives?). Indeed, with the advent of globalization and the ever-growing need to come together in higher levels of organization at a planetary scale, it seems that we are repeating this cycle, working to form a new, multi-creatured global cell.
Sahtouris loves to draw an analogy between the “Great Oxygenation Event,” as it’s called in some science textbooks, and our current global climate crisis. But I was more struck by another point she made. Mark it down as yet another significant principle of evolution learned by studying nature’s smaller creatures, although it’s equally applicable to larger ones: Stress creates evolution. Certainly the emergence of eukaryotic cells is Exhibit A. After all, it was the ecological pressure of the atmospheric calamity that produced the kind of novelty needed for this breakthrough in the evolution of life. “Some of the greatest catastrophes in our planet’s life history,” Sahtouris concluded, “have spawned the greatest creativity.”
I wanted to be sure of her words, and so I approached her after the talk to introduce myself. After some pleasantries, I asked her directly, “Do you really think stress creates evolution?” With a surprising intensity she looked at me and exclaimed, “Stress is the only thing that creates evolution.” Now, she was talking about living systems in biology, but my mind was on a different class of living system—human beings. Stress, challenge, and adversity do indeed create evolution, not just in one-celled bacteria but potentially in the consciousness of the complex, multi-celled creatures that are currently in control of this beautiful blue planet that we (and billions and billions of smaller creatures) call home.
SELFISH GENES OR SOCIAL SCENES?
In order to appreciate just how significant the work of Margulis and others has been in presenting evolutionary theory in a new light, we need to go back and look at the way in which evolution has generally been represented in the culture at large. As evolutionary ideas began to infiltrate the sciences in the nineteenth century, people began to draw all kinds of conclusions about human nature based on the current state of evolutionary theory. They still do so today. This is natural and inevitable to some degree, but dangerous as well. Indeed, I have often been surprised in my own research to see just how closely some theories of human nature tend to follow the outlines of science. However, there is an important distinction between having one’s philosophy of life informed by science and having it be determined by science. An evolutionary worldview embraces the findings of science, but it also gives human agency and free will its due. If evolutionary biology tells me that my nature, biologically speaking, is warlike and competitive, I can accept that truth and let it appropriately inform my thinking without in any way taking that to be the final word in the complex story of our human character. And when science evolves, as it must inevitably do, and lo and behold, it turns out that my nature, biologically speaking, is full of cooperation and altruism, I can let that, in turn, inform my thinking without letting it absolutely determine my worldview. In other words, science is an open-ended story, and any conclusions we draw based on it had better be tentative, temporary, and open-ended as well.
Alas, real life is not always so simple. When Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist, was working with chimpanzees in Africa, she initially thought that these primates, who share at least 95 percent of their genes with humans, were peaceful and cooperative. Chimpanzee society seemed to be free of the warlike behavior so common to human society. But looks can be deceiving. Goodall eventually observed that she was mistaken, that organized aggression is very much part of the social fabric in chimpanzee societies. When she began to report her findings, she received a great deal of resistance from her colleagues in the scientific community. She was even encouraged to suppress her data. The concern was not with the science but with the social consequences of such a discovery. It was a politically incorrect truth. Wouldn’t the revelation that chimpanzees are warlike be a blow to our own efforts to transcend warfare? For some, the answer clearly was yes, because for them, the predilections of the chimpanzees seemed to represent an inherent truth about our genetic predispositions. And they were willing to sacrifice hard-earned scientific evidence to support their social agenda. Of course, if we live inside a reductionist worldview that tells us that human behavior is entirely driven by our genetic makeup and that we are bereft of free will and the power to influence our own future, then Goodall’s discovery that our closest genetic cousins are not gentle pacifists may indeed be cause for despair. But such a conclusion is not inherently scientific.
“A little learning is a dangerous thing,” the poet Alexander Pope famously noted. We would do well to heed his words when it comes to applying the scientific fads of the moment to the complexities of human nature. This was especially true in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when intellectuals around Europe and America began to use the excitement surrounding Darwin and evolutionary theory to imagine how evolution might be applied to economics, social relations, and a host of other issues. There were the now-discredited claims of the eugenics movement (a term coined by Darwin’s nephew), which promoted the idea of selective breeding and sterilization to achieve a more intelligent human race. Supporters of eugenics worried that the poor were outbreeding the rich, and that human civilization might be headed for an evolutionary disaster in which the lesser genes of the maladapted and unintelligent lower classes would somehow crowd out the clearly superior genes of the upper classes. Imagine a world in which the right to conceive children depended upon an IQ chart or one’s income level, as if we could breed superior humans the way we breed faster racehorses.
Even a cursory reading of eugenics should have marked it as the Idea Most Likely to Be Abused of the twentieth century. But this danger was lost on a generation of early Western geneticists who gave their professional support to the notion. They called for the “self-direction of human evolution,” a phrase we hear now in very different kinds of contexts. The term “social Darwinism” has been used to refer to exactly this kind of application, usually misguided, of Darwinian principles of survival and adaptation to the economic and social realities of life. In some quarters, it became a justification for inequality—if I’m rich and you’re poor, it’s just survival of the fittest—and helped contribute to regressive social attitudes and policies.
While our appreciation of the complexities involved in using evolutionary science as a tool for social policy has certainly improved in the intervening years, evolution itself still has a bad reputation. It gets labeled as promoting a dog-eat-dog version of the world, one that implicitly encourages the “red in tooth and claw” aspect of our natural heritage. “Since the origin of evolutionary biology,” writes Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden in her recent book The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness, “Darwinism has been synonymous with competition and selfishness.” Whether this reputation is deserved or not is a matter of some debate, but celebrated Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins certainly hasn’t helped matters with his emphasis on the “selfish gene” as the defining characteristic of human nature. “We are survival mechanisms,” Dawkins enthusiastically declares. “Robot machines, blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” With statements like that, it doesn’t take a genius or a geneticist to figure out what’s wrong with the public conception of biological evolution. It’s not the science; it’s the marketing.
So are we competitive and selfish or cooperative and social? Certainly much has been gained in evolutionary biology by understanding the competitive, genetically driven character of our biological nature. And Dawkins’s theory of the selfish gene is, no doubt, as philosopher Michael Ruse recently described it, one of the brilliant metaphors of the last century. Moreover, no one should suspect for a moment that our emerging understanding of cooperation has somehow smoothed the rough edges of nature and turned mammals into peace-loving team players. My cute and cuddly cat may have a deeply symbiotic relationship with her human family, but she has a bloodthirsty relationship with the local mouse and chipmunk population, and a fiercely competitive one with every other cat on the block. Nature is still, as Ken Wilber likes to say, one big restaurant, with everything eating everything else, and there is plenty of evidence that our biological heritage is full of competitive agents seeking to fulfill their own selfish ends. But in the view of Margulis, Sahtouris, Roughgarden, and others, too much has been made of the selfish drivers of human behavior. This new wave of science looks at the evolutionary process from stem to stern and sees marvelous example after marvelous example of cooperation and sociality in the service of evolution. Their mission is to free evolution from the taint of the selfish-gene metaphor and the resulting confusion about what it means to be human. In putting the emphasis on “social selection,” the evolutionary focus shifts toward the survival not just of the fittest individuals but of the most effective social arrangements. The evolutionary advantage goes to those most capable of good teamwork and most willing to engage in the kind of cooperation that turns a collective of individuals into something more than the sum of its parts. The close historical relationship between evolution and selfish individualism is being decoupled, breaking apart an unhappy marriage that was always more hype than substance. Evolution is evolving, and so is the story we tell ourselves about life and what makes us human.
It’s worth noting that this new story of cooperation transcends the realm of biology. It can be seen at work in the very movements of matter in the primordial cauldron of cosmic evolution. According to evolutionary theorist Howard Bloom, sociality was built into the original formation of life itself because carbon—the miracle molecule on which all of life is based—is uniquely structured to be able to “hook up” with other promiscuous elements in the periodic table.
So no matter where you look in this vast universe, from the lowliest bacteria to the smallest quark to the highest hominid, cooperation and sociality seems to be part of the picture. Once again, that does not mean that competition is dead or that we live in a touchy-feely Hallmark-card universe. Just ask Jane Goodall. Animals still kill, and blood still flows. Humans still do plenty of killing too, for that matter. We don’t have to look far to find reminders that selfishness is indeed written in our genes. Yet somewhere in the midst of that picture there is an unmistakable shift in our understanding of the evolution of life and the cosmic order. We are just beginning to appreciate how the human urge toward friendship, toward connection and camaraderie, toward deep solidarity and true companionship, toward working together in more and more profound ways, has a real and demonstrable evolutionary precedent in the workings of matter and the organization of life itself. Without a doubt, science is evolving. Our view of human nature still has some catching up to do.
HUMANS, HIERARCHY, AND OTHER PROBLEMS THAT PLAGUE POST–SELFISH GENE SCIENCE
In the 1997 blockbuster movie Men in Black, the characters played by actors Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones track down an interstellar fugitive on the streets of New York. This rogue alien is attempting to steal “the galaxy on Orion’s belt” from a rival alien race. In a wonderful Hollywood twist, the galaxy, as it turns out, is not a vast macrocosmic formation in the far-distant sky but rather a marvelous microcosmic galactic world hidden away in the bauble on a cat’s collar. During a pivotal scene, the pug dog alien, who is the source of this revelation, scowls at Will Smith and exclaims, “You humans, when are you going to learn that size doesn’t matter?!”
It occurred to me somewhere in the midst of learning about the microcosmic world of bacteria that this might be a good motto for the evolutionary biologists who make the ultra-small so wonderfully fascinating for the rest of us. Indeed, the more we learn about our biological heritage and the remarkable evolutionary adaptations that have given rise to life as we know it, the more we appreciate just how connected we are to even the smallest and seemingly least among nature’s inhabitants. It is a humbling realization. It is so easy, with all the accoutrements of modernity, to somehow see human life as separate from the natural world—to see our own psychology, sociology, and even physiology as existing independently, free-standing, disconnected from the multibillion-year evolutionary context that has given us life. Margulis, Sahtouris, and other like-minded scientists reconnect us with that history; they remind us that we were protists and prokaryotes and even quarks before we were anything with eyes or ears or thoughts. They undercut our anthropocentricism (and even mammal-centrism) and help us understand our inherent, inextricable connection with the dynamics of the biosphere. Cultural historian William Irwin Thompson described this sentiment powerfully when he noted, “So sensitized have I been by Margulis’s work that I can now appreciate how bacteria have been treated like invisible serfs working in the fields while we humans dined in the manor house and talked about the evolution of consciousness as if it were only about the hominization of the primates and the emergence of the human brain.”
I concur with Thompson’s sentiment, and yet it does invite a question: Once we have properly chastised ourselves for our disconnected consideration of the privileged status of Homo sapiens sapiens and made appropriate adjustments to our worldview, where then does humanness fall in the evolutionary equation? What then is the hierarchy, if there is one at all, in which we can place both bacteria and human beings? How do we measure the difference in moral terms?
This question was brought home to me recently in a conversation one day at a conference in California. I had found myself unexpectedly at a lunch table with three well-known authors in the science-and-spirit field. I was quietly eating my salad when one of them asked me a question about my lunch preferences. I don’t remember the details, only that I mentioned in my reply that I was a longtime vegetarian. This seemed to incite some concern.
“Why are you a vegetarian?”
“Well . . .” I began, only to be interrupted again.
“Don’t you know that plants are conscious too? It’s not like there is a big difference between that salad you’re eating and animal meat.”
“What?!” I exclaimed, momentarily stopped in my tracks. Many times I had heard people question vegetarianism on the grounds that it reflects an overly sensitive relationship to animal life, but never had anyone complained that I was doing just as much harm to plants!
I quickly recovered. “OK, but isn’t there a difference between plants and animals when it comes to consciousness?” I asked. My lunch companions, however, were not to be deterred, explaining to me that all the latest research and experiments show that plants are conscious, and they experience pain. They seemed unanimously convinced that I was doing as much harm to my lettuce as I would to a chicken.
Increasingly bemused, I held my ground. “Whether one chooses to be a vegetarian or not, eating animals is different than eating plants. Animals have a brain, a face; they’re more conscious.”
But it was clear that in the eyes of my fellow diners, I had made an erroneous assumption, one full of ignorance and poor judgment. Only in California, I kept thinking to myself. Only in California would I have to defend myself for eating a salad! And for implying, however subtly, that plants somehow might not have the same ontological status as animals. Only in California would someone argue against vegetarianism on the grounds that plants are conscious too.
Later, when I told a colleague about the event, he reminded me of a statement made by the great Buddhist writer Alan Watts. When confronted with essentially the same question as to why he was willing to eat vegetables but not animal meat, given that both acts killed living things, he is said to have replied, “Because cows scream louder than carrots.” It’s a stark way to frame an important philosophical and moral issue, and one that all Evolutionaries must confront. Anytime we discover an important new insight into the natural world or resuscitate underappreciated parts of our biological (or cultural) heritage, there is a tendency to overstate the case. Simply because we see the tremendous contributions and previously unrecognized complexity of our bacterial legacy does not mean that we can therefore flatten every organism into a unidimensional moral soup. Did my friends in California really believe there was no difference at all between plants and animals? At the risk of being wrong, I actually doubt it. They were reacting to a reductionist worldview that denies the richness of sentience and subjective experience to the least among living creatures, even plants. But in their zeal to tear down a false hierarchy, they were in danger of unknowingly installing a frightening new absence of any hierarchy whatsoever.
We live in a time when false hierarchies are being questioned, in culture and in nature. This is one of the greatest gifts, and greatest potential dangers, of our pluralistic, egalitarian, postmodern worldview. One of those false hierarchies has been the assumption that microbial life was a bit player in the evolutionary drama. Every day, biologists are learning more about how wrong this assumption is. This realization has prompted some environmentalists and deep ecologists who are inspired by the work of Margulis and others like her to jump to the opposite conclusion—that there is somehow no essential difference between human life and other forms of life, including microbial life, thereby suggesting that they exist on the same moral plane.
“Evolution is no linear family tree but change in the single, multidimensional being that has grown now to cover the entire surface of Earth,” writes Margulis. There are often spiritual overtones associated with this point of view, a celebration of the “oneness” and unity of life on Earth or Gaia, as our planet is fondly called. This perspective captures an important truth—that we are deeply connected to and nonseparate from the natural world. It is a vision that calls to mind the mystical insight and spiritual intuition of the Romantic tradition. Indeed, Margulis’s words suggest a sort of nature mysticism and connect us to the visionary poets and writers who gave birth to modern environmentalism—individuals like Thoreau and Muir, who looked out on the wonders of nature and reminded the modern world that there is intrinsic value in the wilds, and that the human connection to nature is something we would do well to heed. After all, we are embedded in and dependent upon the biosphere, and failure to adequately understand or appreciate that insight has taken us down some dubious and dangerous paths in our stewardship of that “single multidimensional being.”
However, there is a subtle yet significant difference between understanding humans as being intrinsic to nature and understanding humans as being intrinsic to a natural evolutionary process. If our attention is on the process, then what we care about is not only the health of the biosphere but also the health of the larger evolutionary process through which the biosphere gave birth to all the wonders of nature—and us. Indeed, Margulis’s words bring home an important ecological fact, but they bypass an equally important evolutionary truth: that the biosphere is not simply a static and stationary Garden of Eden that we appreciate as if it were in suspended animation but a rich, creative cauldron of evolutionary ingenuity that has situated human beings in a unique position. Our human intelligence, our unique capacity to think and reflect, is part of nature too, and we dare not underestimate its worth. I have often been shocked at how many environmentalists who care passionately about the human impact on the natural world somehow forget that our many uniquely human capacities that distinguish us from the rest of the natural world are also part of nature.
I do not mean to defend the environmental record of my fellow humans. But I do strongly mean to suggest that a worldview that merely reintegrates humans as one equal part among the billions of inhabitants of the biosphere will never be enough. We cannot embrace nature and deny evolution. And evolution, by its very nature, implies hierarchy. Indeed, I firmly believe that we can elevate our appreciation for all of the many wonders of nature without simultaneously denigrating the evolutionary advance that human life represents. We are the progressive edge of evolution as far as we know, the creative dynamics of the Earth come alive in human form, and if we want to be able to make the kind of moral distinctions that we need to make in the twenty-first century, we must learn to appreciate that truth, and the responsibility, of that unique position.
If you’re still on the fence about this matter of hierarchy, I’ll leave you with a final example. A few years ago, many of my fellow editors and I were shocked when a respected spiritual teacher suggested that despite the fact that 9/11 was a bad day for humans, it was a great day for bacteria. After all, from the point of view of the bacteria that got to feed on those bodies, it certainly wasn’t a tragedy, so who are we to judge what’s right or wrong? This kind of conclusion is the inevitable result of a world in which everything is flattened out into a false oneness, when you make no hierarchical distinctions between lettuce and lambs, between humans and bacteria, and then follow the moral logic to its natural ends. I hope the absurdity of this example is self-evident. But many today at the leading edges of culture flirt with views not entirely dissimilar, views that question the worth of the human experiment altogether. In the name of combating a false anthropocentrism they embrace a nonsensical egalitarianism. In the most extreme cases, they at least imply that there is no difference between the rights of bacteria and the rights of humans. But we need more than an intuition that this assertion is wrong; we need a worldview that explains why. Admittedly, we have not had an adequate worldview in which the distinctions between bacteria, plants, animals, and humans, can be clearly elucidated. And science alone cannot provide that.
At that California lunch table, the moral issues may seem inconsequential. But they loom large in the increasing concern over the planet’s ecological health and the human environmental impact. In a globalizing world, where the circles of our interdependence seem to be growing bigger every day, how are we to negotiate the moral, spiritual, and economic lives of seven billion human beings? How do we deal with the fact that many of those individuals are living with beliefs and worldviews that are incompatible with many of the others, not to mention those who have adopted lifestyles that are incompatible with the biosphere and the other forms of life that share our planet? There is simply nothing in our cultural history that adequately prepares us for the evolutionary challenges we now face, challenges that will demand more robust and sophisticated answers to the question of how human beings are actually related to the natural world out of which we have emerged.
Given these unprecedented realities, I think we can safely say that the bar has been raised when it comes to cooperation. We are facing a moral, spiritual, and interpersonal challenge that will test and transcend everything evolution has ever learned about how to make a community—large or small; bacterial, mammalian, or human—work. Our success, and even our survival, may depend on how we are able to walk the delicate line between cooperation and self-interest as the cycle of evolution takes a new turn, embracing the extraordinary interconnected diversity of our global community.