The Living World:
From the Many, One
What if mind, rightly understood, is not a species property
of humankind, but is rather a property of the earth itself—
a power in which we are carnally immersed.
The view of consciousness I have developed is in harmony with many of our mystical traditions. One general word for this view is “panpsychism”: that consciousness in some form is a fundamental and universal dimension of reality. Skeptics challenge those of us making such claims with a puzzle. How can universal mental phenomena produce ourselves and the other individuals we encounter daily, individuals who experience themselves as separate from others?
The “combination problem”
We see the most amazing number and variety of individual entities, as well as experiencing ourselves and those we know as individuals. We see colors, hear sounds, and feel and smell in ways pointing to a world of duality, of me and not me—and not just duality, of a remarkably varied duality. Other beings see colors differently and have senses of smell dwarfing our own. Additionally, some have senses we do not, such as a bat’s ability to navigate quickly through echolocation, or a shark’s ability to use electrical fields in finding prey. All these beings appear to have selves, and therefore some sense of individuality. But if consciousness is a fundamental dimension of reality, and individuals only became possible after life arose, how does individuality emerge from unitive awareness? In 1890, William James. a pioneering explorer of psychic and religious phenomena from a modern point of view, succinctly described this problem: Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence. We talk of the “spirit of the age,” and the “sentiment of the people,” and in various ways we hypostatize “public opinion.” But we know this to be symbolic speech, and never dream that the spirit, opinion, sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other than, and additional to, that of the several individuals whom the words “age,” “people,” or “public” denote. The private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind (James, Principles of Psychology).
How, then, might such minds emerge from it? More fundamentally, perhaps, how can tiny mental elements become larger ones at any level?
Philosopher David Chalmers suggests: “It may be that the constraints imposed by the combination problem are so strong that the challenge cannot be answered” (Chalmers, “The Combination Problem,” 211). Many panpsychists have responded to this challenge, and I think they have done so effectively (Orr, The Wakeful World, 165–71; de Quincey, Radical Nature, 230–36). Emma Restall Orr offers a clear description of the position I believe solves this issue, and accounts for what we are discovering in the sciences of life. Orr explains: “Every creature, every tree and beetle, every lake and mountain, every atom and galaxy, is its own pattern of being, integrated within the community of its evolving environment. Further, every being is composed of or interconnected with numerous other individual beings, each of these also existent within its own web of communities, while at the same time firmly held within nature’s universal soul … the fabric of nature is made up of interactions-internal and external” (Orr, The Wakeful World, 238).
As a practical matter the combination problem is continually solved all around us. Orr explains that “there is no need for a theory of aggregation to create coherent minds. What we do need, however, is an understanding of why patterns come into being, as they do within the whole, like eddies and currents within the ocean …” Integral to understanding patterns is the related term of community (Orr, The Wakeful World, 191). The connections in meaning between communities and ecosystems are patterned phenomena arising out of relationships: “We are talking about ecosystems, but only if we understand ecosystems as existent at every level of being from the micro to the macro, shimmering with the wakefulness of mind … A community, then, is a pattern of relationships, within each pattern there are countless smaller patterns, and each pattern itself is a part of a larger pattern and a part of other different patterns” (Orr, The Wakeful World, 192).
Unitary selves emerge from relationships among simpler unitary selves, and do so “all the way down.” Modern science has demonstrated this insight without the need to describe just how this happens. While we may not be sure how it is solved, it is solved, and at many readily observable levels. Once we see how this process unfolds, it is only a small step to apply it to polytheistic experiences. When combined with the discoveries of quantum physics, this argument supports the view our world is alive in some sense “all the way down” and “all the way up.”
We can begin with William James, who concluded that if consciousness is treated like a thing or a noun, it does not exist. But it clearly does. James suggested the problem was not consciousness, but rather how it was usually described. He preferred describing consciousness as a process or a verb (de Quincey, Radical Nature, 64–5). Experience is not a point in time, it is an ongoing process which may or may not be remembered.
But then how might this insight and the rise of life connect?
Scientists’ traditional argument for how life arose requires enormous spans of time or a very lucky accident to generate the first living cell out of the almost unimaginably great number of nonliving chemical reactions that could happen in a lifeless world. Conservative monotheists generally claim this is statistically impossible. Therefore a creator god was necessary, at least to begin the process. Such a deity is far removed from most monotheistic conceptions of a personality actively engaged with the world, but fits the deist idea of a god that created the world and then ceased being involved, perhaps observing what arose as we would observe a tank of tropical fish.
Secular scientists countered that, given enough time, and with millions or trillions or even gazillions of planets in an unimaginably big universe, eventually the equivalent of a monkey randomly typing Romeo and Juliet would occur, and life would arise. It obviously happened, and here is where it happened. While modern physics demonstrated “matter” was dynamic, most scientists believe mechanistic passivity remained true at scales larger than the quantum level, and life’s origins were matters of time and luck.
My last chapter suggests this convenient assumption is as false as the divine engineer supposedly needed to get the ball rolling. Quantum influences can shape phenomena at much larger levels, including living beings. These findings appear to support a smaller number of scientists and philosophers who argue the Creator/lucky accident dichotomy is a false one. Matter does not simply respond passively to laws external to it, and under suitable conditions could spontaneously develop into physical life, and from there, into ever more complex forms of it. One general term for this outlook is “emergence.”
Emergence and dissipative structures
“Emergence” refers to how complex orders can arise “spontaneously,” without anyone being in charge. Neither chance nor creator are needed, for the dice of the universe are loaded. The self-organization of simpler elements in relation to one another leads to the emergence of qualities that could not be predicted by examining the qualities of their parts. In this sense the new emergent whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The term’s origins lie in the early social sciences during what we call the “Scottish Enlightenment.” David Hume and other Scottish thinkers were equally skeptical of religious claims that order was designed by God and other Enlightenment philosophers’ claim that reason alone could create social order and morality. They were challenged to describe how order in society could exist if God did not create it and it was too complicated for us to deliberately design.
Their solution provided a basic foundation for the social sciences. Whether in customs, language, or the economy, complex networks between people shaped by what we today call “feedback” evolved over time, even with no one in charge. There is a direct line of connection between these discoveries and Darwin’s applying similar insights to evolutionary theory. “Self-organization” describes the process; “emergence” describes the outcome.
Until Ilya Prigogine’s work on what he called “dissipative structures,” emergent phenomena seemed confined to the biological world. The division between life and not-life seemed firm and clear. At least beyond quantum phenomena, what was “not life” was understandable purely mechanistically. Then, in 1984, Prigogine (1917–2003) and Isabelle Stengers’ (b. 1949) book Order Out of Chaos explored emergent processes in the nonliving world (Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos).
Dissipative structures, as Prigogine called them, are ordered patterns whose elements consist of continual exchanges of energy and matter from their larger environment. In the process, what initially appears disorderly gradually assumes a coherent pattern that persists so long as enough energy is applied, which it then dissipates as heat. This is why these physical or chemical systems were described as creating “order out of chaos.” Prigogine ultimately received a Nobel Prize for demonstrating how complex patterns existing far from chemical equilibrium could be generated and maintained in nonliving systems.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, as time progresses, energy tends to disperse or diffuse, increasing what is called entropy. For example, in a cold room, hot coffee cools down, and ice cream melts in a warm one. In both cases the temperature differences between coffee or ice cream and their rooms decline, as heat is dissipated, cooling the coffee or melting the ice cream, while also infinitesimally changing the temperature of the rooms in the opposite direction. With enough hot coffee or ice cream we would also notice the rooms warming up or cooling down. In short, as time progresses, energy tends to spread out and structures dependent on heat differentials within their environment disappear. Over time entropy increases because there are more ways for energy to spread out than for it to be concentrated.
Prigogine discovered that when energy was added to some chemical systems new structures could emerge (hence dissipative structures) due to internal self-reorganization. As the existing energy dissipated out, like a cooling cup of coffee, so long as energy continued being added, new, more complex and stable patterns would arise.
A clear example for most of us would be hurricanes, which maintain their patterns so long as their environment feeds them sufficient energy. When a hurricane no longer travels over warm enough water, it dissipates. Dissipative structures are in sharp contrast to better understood orderly physical structures existing at chemical equilibrium, such as a quartz crystal, which does not depend on external energy to persist in its form. Hurricanes do. External energy enables them to be self-organizing.
Prigogine argued that as long as certain kinds of systems receive energy and matter from an external source, dissipative structures can go through periods of instability after which a coherent pattern emerges, resulting in a more complex system whose specific characteristics cannot be predicted except as probabilities. They do not need to be alive for this to happen.
Living beings such as ourselves are also such systems. We require sufficient energy from our environment to live. In living, we emit heat, and require additional nourishment to replace the energy dissipated as heat, maintaining sufficient internal warmth to live. When we die, this pattern breaks down as the energies associated with life cease shaping its physical components, and our bodies begin to decay back into equilibrium with their environment.
Prigogine and Stengers recognized three similarities between living systems and nonliving dissipative structures:
1. Both require outside energy to maintain their pattern.
2. In both cases overall patterns are predictable but not the precise details. Within a culture or organism, every detail could change, while new energy replaced what had been released, and yet the cultural patterns survive and the organism still flourishes as an individual. Dissipative structures are nonliving patterns maintained in some sense the same way: every physical component within them might change while their patterns continue.
3. Concepts of feedback, instability, perturbations, and chance within complex systems had long been features in the life sciences, and, with Prigogine, now could be applied to the physical sciences.
A long-accepted boundary between living and nonliving phenomena was breached.
New insights into the rise of life
One key difference between living and inanimate things is that living organisms are better at using energy to maintain their structure than are nonliving processes. And living structures are more complex than dissipative physical ones.
Physicist Jeremy England of MIT argues that a group of atoms driven by an external source of energy and surrounded by a heat bath can gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. As this happens it becomes an increasingly efficient dissipative structure. England suggests that, under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires a key physical attribute associated with life, and such an outcome could happen if solar or chemical fuel is surrounded by an ocean or atmosphere, into which energy dissipates.
England believes his work suggests that “clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environment” (quoted in Wolchover, “A New Physics Theory of Life”). England’s theories can be tested, and as of 2017, the initial tests support his case (Wolchover, “First Support”). These discoveries do not create life, for they still shed no light on how “proto cells” became living cells, or how a genetic code arises. But proto cells, within which life could develop, are not unusual occurrences. What makes England’s discovery so important is that it suggests life would arise whenever the appropriate conditions existed for it, rather than depending on a series of extraordinarily improbable coincidences. Biological physicist Carl Franck has been convinced by England’s work that “the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp” (Marcus et al., “Three Dimensional Vortices”). England’s findings undermine arguments that life emerges from some improbably happy combination of molecules or a deity no longer involved with the universe. The alternative that life emerged from rolls of “loaded dice,” as Nagel suggested, rather than by chance or divine interference, has powerful supporting evidence.
Emergence in biology
In biology, “emergence” describes how complex patterns arise “spontaneously” in evolution and ecosystems. Not being controlled “from above,” emergent processes possess decentered or distributed authority. In the human world it explains how languages grow and develop; how the internet remains useful to everyone seeking information on it; how the market economy coordinates billions of people making trillions of exchanges; and how science hangs together and grows even though no scientist knows more than a tiny fragment of the whole—and much more (diZerega, “Outlining a New Paradigm”). This concept will prove central to my discussion of polytheism in Chapter 9, but for now let us consider examples somewhere short of the gods.
Think of our language. No one designed English, no one decides to add some new words and not others, or how a word changes its meaning, as “wicked” is doing today, or “democracy” did from the time of our founding to now. Most of us are not even aware of the grammatical rules we follow as we speak. Sometimes we say things we never said before, or hear things we have never heard before, and everyone involved understands what was said. How English maintains itself, and changes, is something over which every English speaker exercises some tiny influence, but no one exercises much. And yet it all holds together. Order emerges, and we generally have little trouble communicating with one another.
Impressive orders, intricate variety, and spontaneous adaptation occurs without any central authority or directing hand in language, ecologies, science, the market economy, the World Wide Web, and much else. To the degree the term has any meaning at all, “authority” is distributed among all participants within any of these orders. What emerges are kinds of order far too complex for any person to plan deliberately, and they are taken for granted in our daily lives.
Darwin breached the boundary between human beings and the rest of life. Prigogine challenged the boundary between life and non-life, from the side of life. England added to the dissolving of this boundary, again by showing that processes associated with life were also present in the nonliving world. Age-old boundaries are dissolving, and doing so by expanding processes associated with living systems into the nonliving world. In all these cases emergent processes were replacing reductionist mechanical ones.
Lynn Margulis, individuality, and symbiosis
Western society is captivated by a particular concept of the individual as some kind of irreducible unit. God created us as individuals, each with a unique soul. Protestantism, and the science it helped enable, strengthened this image, conceiving of human individuals as not only separate from nature, but radically separate from one another. Today this conception of an individual is dissolving before our eyes, at every level.
When I was a student in the 1960s, the usual way biologists viewed multicellular life was as complexes made up of many individual cells, very much like physical things were viewed as ultimately made up of atoms. How these cells came to be was considered one of the mysteries of life. That was then.
Today the accepted picture is much different. Beginning with her dissertation in 1965, and many subsequent books, Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) made a powerful case for what is now called a theory of endosymbiosis. Its central idea is the importance of symbiotic relations rather than competitive ones. Traditionally, evolutionary theory had emphasized the central role of competition, and symbiotic relations were considered rare and relatively unimportant. Margulis argued that they were not rare, and arguably were more fundamental to life as we know it than competition.
Margulis’ basic argument explained an important distinction between two different kinds of cells: prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Prokaryotic cells, such as bacteria and archaea, do not have a nucleus or specialized organelles, a term describing a cell’s equivalent of organs. Eukaryotic cells, such as those making up our bodies, have a nucleus as well as specialized organelles: the mitochondria and chloroplasts. From ants to redwoods, all multicellular organisms consist of eukaryotic cells, and scientists had long been puzzled how these building block cells ever came to be.
Margulis argued that eukaryotic cells originated out of symbiotic relationships between once separate prokaryotic cells, some of which in time became the eukaryotic cell’s mitochondria, chloroplasts, flagella, and other organelles. These new, much more complex cells possessed qualities not found in simpler prokaryotes (Margulis, Origin). While her argument was initially mostly rejected, within ten years genetic analysis had convinced most biologists that Margulis was correct.
The individuality of eukaryotic cells emerges from relationships between prokaryotes, who to some degree continued to retain their own individuality. The cells making up our bodies consist of simpler cells that had merged to become more complex organisms while still to some degree maintaining their own identity. Amazing as Margulis’ research was at the time, no one then imagined how far this breakdown of what we regarded as irreducible individuality would eventually go.
Tissues, viruses, and jumping genes
There are huge differences beyond scale alone between an amoeba and a fish, although the amoeba is a single eukaryotic cell and a fish is composed of innumerable such cells. Fish, and other complex multicellular organisms such as ourselves, are made possible through their cells’ ability to form different tissues. Cells forming muscles, nerves, bone, and skin are very different from one another, even though all had a common origin in a single cell arising from a fertilized egg, and share the same genome. How did this ability to differentiate arise?
Embryonic stem cells are an organism’s first cells, from which all more specialized cells eventually descend. When a stem cell divides, each new cell might remain a stem cell or become a specialized cell, such as forms a muscle, red blood, or a neuron. But how can copies of the initial cell “know” that in some cases they may need to develop into a heart, in others into skin, and in others, nerves?
Recent discoveries indicate the origins of cells’ capacities to form tissues such as skin and bone are derived from viruses (Slezak, “Origins of organs”). Upon infection by a virus, parts of it were incorporated into a cell, giving it new capabilities, one of which apparently made tissue formation possible. By invading cells in order to reproduce, viruses can change them so dramatically as to be a major force in the evolution of life. Scientists, such as Dmitri Petrov (Genetics Society of America, “Viruses revealed”), believe viruses drive the evolution of cells even more than other evolutionary pressures, such as predation or environmental conditions. As Margulis wrote, “Viruses today spread genes among bacteria and humans and other cells, as they always have … We are our viruses” (Margulis, Symbiotic Planet, 64). Viruses, and possibly bacteria, accomplish this by transferring DNA that can copy themselves throughout an organism’s genome from one organism to another. This DNA is called a “jumping gene.” They were first identified around fifty years ago, in Barbara McClintock’s studies of maize (Keller, A Feeling for the Organism). Most scientists were initially skeptical of her discovery, but since then jumping genes were found to be in almost all organisms and usually in large numbers. They make up approximately 50 percent of the human genome and up to 90 percent of the maize genome. Initially they were thought to exist only within a species.
Now we know jumping genes sometimes ignore traditional ideas of species separation. In 2005, the same jumping genes were reported to have been found within rice and millet, two different species of plants (PLOS Biology, “Jumping Genes”). More recently, one jumping gene first discovered in cows has since been discovered in reptiles, frogs, bats, elephants, and marsupials. They also appear to have had a significant impact on how at least some species evolve, for 25 percent of the genome of cows and sheep came from jumping genes originating elsewhere.
The vector in this transfer may be a virus.
We usually think of viruses as harmful, but scientists have discovered that viruses also apparently play important positive roles in biological evolution. On the borderline of life and not-life, viruses cannot reproduce on their own. They must invade a cell and use its resources to reproduce, using nearly every function of a host organism’s cells to replicate and spread. Sometimes the host cells die from viral infection, but if they do not, sometimes elements of viral genomes can become part of its host’s genome, and in so doing, change its characteristics.
The transfers probably take place through ticks, mosquitoes, and other organisms that prey on, but do not kill, different species, and thereby spread bacteria and viruses from one organism to another. But investigation of this phenomenon is still in very early stages. David Adelson observed, “Even though our recent work involved the analysis of genomes from over 750 species, we have only begun to scratch the surface of horizontal gene transfer.” He explained “There are many more species to investigate and other types of jumping genes” (Science Daily, “Jumping Genes”; Ivancevic et al., “Horizontal transfer”). One implication of these discoveries is that the scope for horizontal gene transfer may be the entire biosphere, with bacteria and viruses serving both as intermediaries for gene transfer.
Continuums all the way down
Sometimes, two species will have existed so intimately in relation to one another for so long that at least one member can no longer live independently. This is so with some fungi that ants cultivate, and for the corn we grow. Sometimes, this dependency is mutual, so that each needs the other to reproduce, as is the case with yucca moths and yuccas. But this process can go further.
In some cases, organisms can become so mutually dependent they become a separate individual in their own right, as happened with eukaryotic cells. Consider lichens, composed of a partnership of algae and fungi. In recent years some lichens have been found to include separate species, a fungus, an alga, and more recently discovered, also bacteria and archaea. These kinds of relationships have been discovered to be far more common than once was imagined.
The world’s great coral reefs are perhaps the largest structures on the planet produced directly by life. It turns out corals are also collective organisms of algae, the polyps, and a wide variety of bacteria. Among other things, this gives coral the ability to develop immunity to disease, even though the corals do not possess a system of cells that learn what pathogens look like and respond immediately if encountered again (Fraser, 2015). Discoveries such as these support Margulis’ “Hologenome Theory of Evolution.” She argued the true unit of natural selection is often an organism and all the symbiotic microorganisms living with it, not just the organism considered separately from this intimate context (Margulis and Fester, 1991). The holobiont (host organism plus its endocellular and extracellular microbiome) can be considered a distinct biological entity on which natural selection operates. This would seem to be another example of group selection as E. O. Wilson discussed with eusocial organisms (Wilson, The Social Conquest of the Earth, 142–7, 170–88). Eugene Rosenberg and Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg report that recent experiments demonstrate microbiota can play an initial role in speciation of organisms. Rapid changes in the microbiome genome could allow holobionts to adapt and survive under changing environmental conditions, thus providing the time necessary for the host genome to adapt and evolve (Rosenberg and Zilber-Rosenberg, “The hologenome concept”).
The end of species?
Genesis 1:25 described God as making “the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds.” Biological science accepted this basic division in kinds, even after it had long left biblical accounts of their genesis behind. But the more biologists examined what made a form of life a species, the more difficult it became to make clear distinctions. Frank Zachos’ 2016 book, Species Concepts in Biology, listed thirty-two different conceptions of what constituted a species existing in modern biology, and in the years since, Zachos said, two more have arisen (Barras, “The End of Species,” 37).
As biologists struggle with the lack of a unifying pattern in what constitutes species, and as the work of Margulis and others suggests a species may be better defined as an organism and its immediate context of microorganisms, perhaps the entire concept should be jettisoned. Some biologists now argue the term be replaced by “clade” which means a “group sharing a common ancestor and so comprising a separate twig on the tree of life” (Barras, “The End of Species,” 39). For example, instead of calling ourselves, Neanderthals, and Denisovans separate species, we should be classified as separate clades, but what constitutes a clade varies with the scientist’s intent. Clades are nested, one in another, as each branch in turn splits into smaller branches, so, for different questions, we, Neanderthals, and Denisovans can be considered common members of a clade that split from the great apes. Lineage, not genetics, is what matters.
Chimeras
In 1998, Karen Keegan needed a kidney transplant. She was tested for compatible donors within her family, and the results indicated she was not the biological mother of two of her three children, even though she had clearly given birth to them. This seemed impossible.
Additional research revealed that soon after conception, the egg that was to become Karen fused with another female egg that, had this not happened, would have become her twin. The fused egg contained two separate DNA blueprints. She had originated from two different genomes, one of which gave rise to her blood and some of her eggs while the other genome was carried in other eggs. Her “twin” was the biological mother of two of her children, even though, because of this fusion, she didn’t have a twin. Biologically, Karen was more than one person, she was a “chimera,” a single organism composed of cells with different genotypes.
In 2002, Lydia Kay Fairchild applied for state benefits for herself and her children. DNA tests were made on both her and the father of her children. It turned out their father was who he said he was, but she was not their mother. A normal DNA test proving a mother-child link would show a 50 percent match between their DNA patterns, but Fairchild’s DNA did not match theirs at all. The state suspected welfare fraud, and ultimately monitored her third pregnancy, taking a blood sample from the newborn as soon as it arrived. According to the sample, she was not its mother either. Except she obviously was.
We now know many people, particularly women, possess genomes from multiple people. Mothers and fetuses apparently frequently exchange DNA as well. Sometimes when twins begin to develop within a womb, one absorbs the other, as happened to Karen Keegan. As it does, a part of its potential sibling’s genome, and the tissues it formed, becomes integrated into its own body. Biological individuality is not the same as psychological individuality (Zimmer, “DNA Doubletake”).
But what is psychological individuality?
Even our minds …
We are now ready to examine the evidence that, however limited our understanding of how the “combination problem” described by David Chalmers may be, it is solved all around us on a daily basis, even to help create our minds.
Scientists recently discovered that certain bacteria can significantly increase the intelligence of mice, once they are exposed to them (Science Daily, “Can bacteria make you smarter?”). These bacteria are commonly present in the soil, and so, most mice have been exposed. In a fascinating experiment, specially raised, completely sterile mice were taught to run a maze. After learning how, they were exposed to these bacteria. They ran the maze faster. When the bacteria were eliminated, their speed declined to its previous level. At least with respect to running mazes, the collective organism mouse-plus-bacteria was more intelligent than mouse-minus-bacteria.
The intelligence of mice, and presumably other mammals, can be enhanced by radically different organisms that are also able to live independently from them, in the soil. This discovery adds a fascinating possibility as to why kids like to eat dirt. It also adds an even more fascinating question as to the nature of our own individuality, since what is more “us” than our minds?
Greater apparent intelligence was not the only difference in these mice. Normal mice are social; mice raised to be bacteria free are not. Bacteria free mice preferred isolation to interacting even with mice they already knew (O’Donnell, “Cryan Explains Gut Feelings”).
Apparently, we are as open to this kind of symbiotic relationship as are mice. The bacteria within our guts can make good health possible, and can even influence our minds for the better. Bacteria and our brains are intimately connected, and our minds are in part the result. In Scientific American, Charles Schmidt writes that scientists increasingly believe “the brain acts on gastrointestinal and immune functions [helping] shape the gut’s microbial makeup, and gut microbes make neuroactive compounds, including neurotransmitters and metabolites that also act on the brain” (Schmidt, “Mental Health”). We also know gut bacteria can make the chemicals brain cells use to communicate. As in cases of more traditional coevolution between interdependent species, microbes have been within us throughout our evolutionary history. Human and bacterial cells evolved, as Laura Sanders put it, “like a pair of entwined trees, growing and adapting into a (mostly) harmonious ecosystem” (Sanders, “Microbes”).
It’s not just bacteria
For good reason, mice are afraid of cats. Wise mice stay out of their sight and actively avoid places where cats have recently been. However, a mouse infected by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii is fearless, easily moves out into the open, and is attracted to the smell of cat urine. To complete its life cycle the parasite needs the infected mouse to be eaten by a cat, and because it influences their behavior, infected mice are far more vulnerable to cats (Mcauliffe, “How Your Cat is Making You Crazy”). Is it the mouse that is acting? The parasite? Or the relational entity, mouse + parasite?
T. gondii also infects human beings. Unlike cats, those infecting us cannot reproduce, but they can survive. An infected woman can pass the infection to her fetus, and sometimes toxoplasmosis causes neurologic or ocular disease in the child. The threat is not great; about one-third of the world’s population is infected, and these dire results are rare. But they can happen. Otherwise, scientists long thought that T. gondii did not impact healthy people.
New evidence suggests T. gondii may influence human behavior much more than suspected (Mcauliffe, “Your Cat”; Flegr et al., “Induction of changes”; Flegr, “Influence”; Science Daily, “How common cat parasite”; Flegr, “Effects of toxoplasmosis”). A recent study indicates infection by toxoplasmosis is linked with entrepreneurial business activity. Starting a business is risky, and most new businesses do not survive for long. On balance, entrepreneurs are less averse to taking risks than are non-entrepreneurs. The authors report that T. gondii infection influenced both individual- and societal-scale entrepreneurship activities. Students testing positive for T. gondii exposure were significantly more likely to major in business and even more likely to emphasize “management and entrepreneurship” over other business-related subjects. Among business professionals examined, T. gondii-positive individuals were also significantly more likely to have started their own business compared with others.
These findings may shed light on large-scale cultural differences. Depending on the population examined, infection rates among human beings from T. gondii range from 20 percent to 80 percent. The parasite might even affect cultural development, altering trajectories between cultures where infection is high and those where it is low (Medical News, “Toxoplasma”). Nations with higher infection rates had fewer people citing “fear of failure” in discouraging new business ventures (Johnson et al., “Risky business”). Apparently, this is yet another example of individuals being the unifying mental pattern emerging out of a network of relationships with other individuals, rather than some kind of irreducible entity entering into relationships that remain external to it. Are infected human beings acting as individual human beings as traditionally conceived, or as something more complex? While a parasite in a mouse, T. gondii’s status in human beings is more complex. It is dangerous for pregnant women but might benefit would-be entrepreneurs. Might the individual uninfected human plus the individual T. gondii collectively create a new, more complex, individual that integrates both?
What is an individual?
We are learning that bacteria form essential components of our own bodies, performing tasks necessary for us to live, such as synthesizing vitamins, digesting food, and protecting us against pathogens (Kolata, “In Good Health?”). They also interact with our nerves. We might not be able to survive without bacteria to perform these tasks, and in turn, many of them cannot survive outside us. Each person has perhaps one thousand species of benign to beneficial bacteria living within us. Collectively they possess far more DNA variability than our strictly mammalian body.
These patterns of relationship are so far from traditional ideas about individuals that many biologists suggest we should be considered ecosystems, which takes us to Emma Restall Orr’s observation about communities and ecosystems early in this chapter. An ecosystem reaches a state in which it remains more or less unchanged, in spite of the fact that the species that make it up are continuously substituted by others, even to the point
that a complete change of organisms can take place, similar to the change that occurs inside a human organism. “In short: the species change, but the structure does not,” comments Professor José A. Cuesta (Science Daily, “Species are to ecosytems”). Other biologists prefer describing us as superorganisms (Sleator, “The human superorganism”). I usually prefer this term because, unlike an ecosystem, an organism possesses a center of action. Organisms are in some sense aware. Ecosystems are not passive. They can create and sustain conditions that favor some organisms over others. Given what I have argued so far, an ecosystem might have a systemic “presence” that is in some ways a coherent consciousness, but we have no reason to think ecosystems can act to choose an outcome in any deliberate sense. The issue here rests on the degree of awareness an ecosystem has as a whole.
However, as centers of action, we had no awareness of the complexity of our own bodies until this was discovered by science, and in this sense the ecosystem term fits as well. Who we are as an organism emerges from networks of relationships between other organisms that do not themselves intend such an outcome. Individuals at every level are emergent phenomena.
Individuality and relationship
The traditional idea of individuals as having firm boundaries is dissolving in front of us, transforming what we think of as physical individuality, even including our most individual characteristic: our minds. I am not questioning whether individuals exist or not; I am questioning how we think about them/us. We very much exist as individuals, but we are different kinds of individuals in different contexts. In addition, the boundaries of our biological individuality do not match those of our psychological individuality.
In theory, the distinction between individuals is clear. Individuals can possess a coherent sense of self, while communities are simply a form within nature without interiority. Communities do not have unified minds even when they act as a whole. In addition, unlike individuals, their boundaries are often indistinct. But, as evidenced in the question of whether we are organisms or ecosystems, “where nature’s actuality is in play, such distinctions blur—because nature is fundamentally a series of interactions, not a population of subjects” (Orr, The Wakeful World, 217). We are not simply organisms living in an external environment, we are also constituted out of at least some of the relations making up the environment. We also often think of species and environments as distinct, but species can be the most important part of the environment or ecosystem. They can even transform the original ecosystem into another, as happened on some Aleutian islands, where introduced foxes ate once-abundant ground-nesting birds. With the birds gone, the islands’ soils, once fertilized by their droppings, became impoverished due to frequent rains leaching out these nutrients. In time rich grasslands became scrubby brush.
The linkage between species and ecosystems flows both ways. Given enough time, and geographical separation, an introduced species will diverge from its original migrants, as was demonstrated by the race of dwarf mammoths that once lived on Wrangell Island (Wade, “The Woolly Mammoth’s Last Stand”). In fact, a single species can even diverge while coexisting within the same ecosystem if it supplies enough possible niches for them to specialize, as Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands memorably demonstrated. Sometimes female preference alone can lead to such differentiation (Mayhew, Discovering Evolutionary Biology, 9–12). This distinction does not align with whether the relations are between biological organisms, or between such an organism and abiotic phenomena. Usually an ecologist does not need to pay attention to wind-blown dust from parts of Africa, but sometimes this more inclusive frame is important, because not only is the dust an important source of phosphorus for the Amazonian rainforest (NASA, “Satellite Reveals”), it appears to have made the Caribbean’s coral reefs and Bahama islands possible by fertilizing the ocean with otherwise rare nutrients (Main, “Saharan Dust”). Saharan dust nourishes the cyanobacteria that then make nitrogen available for the aquatic ecosystem, enabling them to create the carbonates that corals use to create reefs, and even the Bahama islands.
Individuality at every level is an expression of relationships, some of which are traditionally considered external to the individual examined. Some of these relations are tightly coupled, as in the eukaryotic cell made up of what were once prokaryotic cells. Others are looser but still tightly bound, as with the gut bacteria on which we depend and which depend on us, but, unlike in endosymbiosis, maintain a separate individuality. Then there are bacteria that can live separately from us, and we from them, but which might be essential for a truly human mind, as the mouse and soil bacteria research suggests. Finally, there are very loosely coupled but still connected organisms, such as plants, which create the air we breathe and which we animals in turn help to survive. The division between the tightest and most loosely coupled organism is not a boundary, it is a continuum of connections within a network of breathtaking complexity.
It is clear that, as a practical matter, the combination problem that opened this chapter has been solved. Individual organisms, with their own kinds of awareness, can combine into larger more complex organisms that have new features and forms of individuality not present in their components, and may not even be aware of the individuals that, collectively, make up their own individuality.
This research demonstrates that any individual is itself a kind of community of other individuals. As in a dissipative structure, what makes that community an individual is “a continuity of patterns, provoked by and provoking further repetition of interaction” (Orr, The Wakeful World, 224). Life is an entwined network of selves down to the cellular level, and awareness is apparently a feature in some form down to the quantum level, becoming a self as soon as biological individuality emerges at the cellular level.
From the simplest cell to the most complex human individuality, the entire biological world, from our bodies, to our minds, to our selves, to our environments, is constituted out of relationships. Biology demonstrates we are deeply integrated with many forms of life existing in varying degrees of independence and dependence. What seems to distinguish individuals from ecosystems is not that one has firm boundaries and the other does not, but rather that individuals have selves, and ecosystems do not.
Orr explains: “As the subject becomes self-defined it asserts a measure of control, adjusting its perception of its external and internal context, honing the coherence of its own part of nature’s mind. The inner community of minds develops the capacity to respond as a coherent interiority of mind” (Orr, The Wakeful World, 202–3). We are self-aware, creative, beings made possible by fundamentally cooperative relationships at every level. As theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli puts it, “The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events—networks of kisses, not of stones” (Rovelli, The Order of Time). If the universe is an interconnected quantum system, and quantum phenomena can influence living beings, as quantum biology suggests, and all individuality emerges from relationships between simpler individuals, the phenomena I and so many others encountered within spiritual and psychic realms are far less confusing.