North of permanent freeze, caribou run in herds, rabbit and tundra fox find growth enough to gorge on. Extreme south swells with seals, krill, birds. Inland Antarctica, the least habitable place on earth, has its wingless insects, lichen, mold, even two flowering plants that wait the narrow window of weeks when they can colonize this waste. Living membrane can withstand the absence of energy: nematodes have been kept for days close to absolute zero and thawed out happily.
Newts requisition caves, go pink, lose their eyes. Lungfish solve the formidable flux of tidal flats. Seeds carried in the intestines of migratory birds convert virgin volcanic island. Life lives even inside other forms of itself. Large mammals are walking bestiaries of fungi, mites, fleas, bacterial colonies. A single square inch of my skin hosts ten thousand cells of one bacterium alone. Life survives even my killer city. Dozens of houseguests rustle my cupboards, spread across the shower curtain, bless my bed, raid a refrigerator designed to deny entry. Marsupials knock over my trash cans at night. Peregrine falcons nest under the Verrazano-Narrows.
Some variant of the self-rewriting program succeeds everywhere. Imperialism lies at the heart of my classification problem: life is as particular as each locale it has a foothold in. Any nomenclature I consider founders on the cartographer’s one-to-one-scale solution to “How many places are there?” The program ports itself to all four corners, stopping to seed every intermediary, driven by the universal firmware kernel buried inside it. Nothing exceeds like success. Excess of issue. Surplus of offspring. More applicants than vacancies. Overproduction—duplicate, superfluous: waves of generations testing themselves against the landlord. The milt of trout turns whole streams milky. Shrimp are hauled from the ocean in solid blocks. One male ejaculate—on the swings in a dark abandoned playground—releases 300 million half-lives.
I’m convinced of an infinitely moldable instruction set. Shape may be an artificial classification, but how many forms can duplication take? What range of phenotype? After long abstinence, I rediscover the organic paradox, the extremes of living design. Blossoming chaos: a rough estimate of chestnut proteins runs into the tens of thousands. But no algorithm, however long, begins to describe how this tree branches.
Radial, bilateral, transverse; symmetries that change over a life; radical asymmetries. Sea shells unfurl by Fibonacci. Horn, bark, petal: hydrocarbon chains arrange in every conceivable strut, winch, and pylon, ranging over the visible spectrum and beyond into ultraviolet and infrared. Horseshoe crab, butterfly, barnacle, and millipede all belong to the same phylum. Earthworms with seven hearts, ruminants with multiple stomachs, scallops with a line of eyes rimming their shell like party lanterns, animals with two brains, many brains, none. Trees whose limbs root, whose roots blossom, whose leaves become needles, beakers, flesh traps, detachable emigrants. Animals that expel their organs to eat, that—split down the middle—become their own Siamese twins. Organisms that bud, divide, cross-pollinate. Sedentaries that sprout free swimmers that mate to make sedentaries. Things that breed once and die, that birth perpetually even as they sleep. Females that grow up to become males. Males that convert to females in hard times. Dwarf males that live in the bellies of their mates. Males that bear young. Hermaphrodites.
Extremes in size? I find a figure for my own class: weight difference between blue whale and pygmy shrew. My desk encyclopedia says that Balaenoptera musculus reaches 600,000 kilograms. Suncus etruscus, on the other end, must eat constantly to keep up its gram and a half. The largest mammal is 400 million times heavier than its smallest cousin. And there are creatures 400 million times smaller than the pygmy shrew, smaller than the wavelength of visible light, detectable only in the scatter of electrons. Several thousand could fit inside one human blood cell. Giant sequoias, excluding the immense roots, are three and a half times the longest whale. The Great Barrier Reef is longer than Europe: a composite mass of two hundred species of polyp a fraction of an inch long, a living superspecies spreading in sovereign continent visible from outer space.
Genomes range from a few thousand base pairs for the simplest self-replicating element to a few billion for humans. Genotype spread, less extreme than phenotype ratios, is more dramatic. The length of the program does not express the ripple effect of increasing complexity. The entire genome of a bacteriophage—so simple it only just slips into the most liberal definition of life—could be printed in a book the size of a grocery-store romance. Yesterday, I thought it would be only a matter of time before we mapped out the entire program of such a creature. Today, I discover the feat is already years old: Sanger et al., 1977: the complete 5,375-nucleotide text for the ΦX174 virus deciphered. The simplest-known, perhaps the simplest-possible living program, but a universe beyond the most complex inanimate matter. Nine proteins long, the viral bible is written with an ingenuity beyond the most sophisticated human hackers. The sequence coding for one protein hides the sequence for another, the way the phrase “a lisp in a chromosome” embeds the name of a leafy green.
How much more complicated can the card deck get? My molecular research only begins to hint. Bacteria trap energy, metabolize and manufacture compounds, sense their environment, go dormant indefinitely, synthesize their own enzymes, Xerox themselves. Their leap beyond viruses is larger than viruses’ from in-animate compounds. Larger than the leap from my amateur’s notes to Ressler’s knowledge.
I read how cells develop distinct nuclei and organelles, acquire the trick of mashing other cells and recycling their parts. I struggle with an unthinkable threshold: the formation of limited partnerships, shared responsibilities. You float, you sting, you prop, you flex, you digest: we feed. Geometric increases in complexity: anagenesis exists. Something rises, flies in the face of entropy. Not better or wider or finer fits; bacteria can already live locked in ice, hot springs, even stratosphere. The code simply learns to do more with the place.
The arrangement of cells into bureaucractic corporations takes me two tiers above ΦX174, itself nine proteins beyond my comprehension. I move into a mystery uninterpretable even in outline. Form—the ravelins of a starfish, the rococo redundancy of crabs—reveals itself as mere vessel for behavior, infinitely more varied. Evade this stimulus. Fly in this formation. Migrate at this moment. Build this burrow. Train your young.
The message, which at the low end of taxonomy began as a simple impulse toward excess, learns to communicate, first to constituent parts, then to coordinated cells within an organism. Up a second slope—classes, orders, families of behavior—the text learns to pass itself between organisms. One more minor magnification lights upon language—a newcomer in the garden dashing off transcripts, elaborate travelogues to no one.
Maybe I’m not congenitally adrift after all. I watch a videotape of the famous gorilla Koko reading a children’s book, signing learned hand-words into the empty air. Signing the way I scribble here, for an audience long gone. These notes, my evolving, catch-all phylum, live and die, propagate their own excess. I arrange them, perpetually revising, inventing writing as I go, assembling a classification system large enough to name what Ressler already knew.
How high is the biosphere? How wide? I list degrees and kilometers. I’d do better to steal from Wallace Stevens; classification, after all, is just a record of neighboring plagiarisms. “Life consists of propositions about life.” Shape and behavior are guesses at the place where they’ve been set down. Eons-long accumulation, the organism itself is only a theory of what it might still be. My hyperactive classroom screams out its answers, constantly recanting, amending, reaffirming, anything but silent and archived, fired by the same single fact that keeps me revising. However many unclassifiable ways there are of being alive, there are infinitely more ways of being dead.
B. ECOLOGY
Death too, at the heart of variety. Every message I turn up whispers it in code. There’s only so much to go around. The splintering catalog rushes after the same circuit of available energy. Not all miracles make it. Each excess program copy is shaped
by limit. Checked by scarcity, populations are pruned in constant edit. And pruning makes the garden proliferate. Death is the mother of experiment.
The earth is a differential engine—gradients of heat, cold, dry, wet, fat, lean. Some terrains snicker at all hope for a meal; others rain continuous free lunch. Even this asymmetry shifts. Currents churn up cold; mountains buckle, wear down in an era or two. Seas recede; poles reverse. The pool is played on a table so warped that players can either shoot or wait for a change in the rules.
The game, I figure out, is to figure out the game. My runaway catalog’s every proposition is about the propositional calculus. Two strange succulents, one African, the other Arizonan, converge by distant routes. Each is a lab transcript, a probe of local conditions. Living diversity maps the diversity of available space. The race for the curve of best fit fractures at every rapid into an alluvial fan.
I pose the naif’s Q: Which of these million unclassifiable experiments is the most successful? A first, satellite glance gives the hat tip to my own chromosome set. Five billion, from Sahara nomads to Antarctic scientists. Flexible, omnivorous environment shaper, top of the food chain. But almost upon arrival, it crests in oversuccess, chokes on its own effluent.
My second candidate is grass. As widespread as man, greater in biomass. And it rarely annihilates its own niche. A good enough solution to have diversified into five hundred genera, five thousand species: corn, wheat, rice, bamboo, sorghum, reed, oats, timothy, fescue, Kentucky blue. It encourages others to cultivate it, the sweet, sugarcane smell of global success. But even grass is colossally one-upped by Insecta. I trace a range greater than grass and man combined. Undivertable clouds, a single species can outnumber all humans a hundredfold. And Insecta contains as many different species as there are humans in Lower Manhattan.
Then I discover bacteria. They coat every cubic meter of the planet. A gram of soil can contain 100 million. Every cycle required for life involves them integrally. They have remained essentially unchanged since emergence, three billion or more years ago. They make their way inside every large organism. The successes of the pyramid’s cap depend inextricably on success at the base. Their success is the success of the animate code, the living engine’s linchpin. Supremacy of the sheet of cells spread passively over earth’s surface is measured in tens of thousands of duplicating tons per second.
“Success” mutated from Ur-roots sub and cedere, to follow after. Its hold on my English mind is a loaded model where B competes with, bests, and replaces A. The word warps my research. Scarcity undeniably demands competition, but living success does not mean beating out all comers. Cooperation of ever tighter skeins ties the web together, interanimates the nets of success. Emerson came remarkably close for an American: “All are needed by each one; /Nothing is fair or good alone.” That one I learned as a schoolgirl. Successful hunters are not too good at killing, and successful prey must be pared and pruned.
The word I need is not “to follow after.” I need another etymology: parasitism, helotism, commensalism, mutualism, dulosis, symbiosis. Local labels for the ways one solution requires another, from the bribes of fruit trees to the bacteria in my gut. Joint solutions everywhere, from ants and their domestic aphid farms to lichen, a single plant formed of two organisms that feed and water each other, breed and reproduce together.
One remarkable night, snowed solidly into a New Hampshire cottage, Dr. Ressler laid it out. “Mimicry is also an interlock. A snapping turtle’s tongue depends on the shape of a fly. The beetle that borrows the look of a thorn lives off the rose’s solution. Half a dozen harmless snakes ape the bands of a coral without paying to produce the poison. Jammed frequencies of passed semaphores, real, faked, intercepted, abused: everybody trafficking on the river dabbles in this pidgin.” His speech was soft because the night was late, the kerosene flame revealed the blanketed world outside, and we knew we were going nowhere the next day.
“Every animal cell is itself a contract. A primitive cell may have coopted a bacterium, enslaved it as the first mitochondrion, a genetically independent cell enclave. Believe me, we’re all in this together. No cheating this economy. The books must balance. No,” he said, breathing, his face obscured by the lamp, on the far side of the room where Frank and I lay touching. “The world is a single, self-buffering, interdependent organism. Or has been until this moment. Individual persistence is not the issue. Neither is species stability. If permanence were the criterion, nothing in the animate world could come close to the runaway success of rocks.”
I would trade what’s left of my savings to hear his monologue again, to jot down even a draft of a rough transcript of what he said. But he and his words have gone the way of probabilities, back into the loop. Death has returned him to school. I mimic him now, live off his solution.
“Why can’t we speak that pidgin more fluidly than we do? Speak it the way everything else lives it? The definition of life we’ve lived with for too long is flawed. We presuppose the ability to tell haphazard from designed. The whole community is about to go under, pulled in by our error. Why do we want to revoke the contract, scatter it like a nuisance cobweb, simplify it with asphalt? Because we still believe, despite all the evidence, that the place was made. And what’s made, by definition, can be improved. But suppose the whole, tentative, respiring, symbiotic message is no more improvable than chance. The superorganism takes its local shape—each part at the mercy of all others—because that is the configuration that chance conditions permit. Design might benefit from human ingenuity. Conditional fit cannot.
“Oh, it’s worse than you think. Worse for us. Worse for you two.” He looked at us as if at two crosses in a French cemetery dated a day after V-E. “Your generation, everyone from now on, faces the most serious shake-up in history. Because my generation,” oblique mention of his departure from science, “has already killed life for you. I mean the old definition, the vitalist idea. We did something twenty years ago that people haven’t gathered yet. It’s all mechanism now. Self-creation. The game has changed. Only we haven’t responded.”
The night was silver and deepest blue. Outside, in the drifted conifers, owls sat dusted in branches, their eyes night-wise to the least run of rodents beneath them. Foxes scoured the surrounding hills. Tufts of grass poked above the snow like dangerous shoals, while rock outcrops were slowly digested by a two-celled limited partnership. All the while, underground, below the frost line, life waited its rechance. That night Dr. Ressler telegraphed me a part of the genetic code I just now unfold. All of this soft, conjoined precision—mutable, always slightly mistaken—was self-assembling, self-adjusting, self-nurturing information.
I thought I had the gist, on that oil-lamp evening, snow-bound. I thought he was faulting science for letting the gene out of the bottle, disenchanting the natural kingdom, turning the impenetrable magnificence of the ecosystem into spent anagram. Two years later, alone, with time to think, I see he was saying the opposite. We’ve dismantled the biosphere out of fear. We suffer not from too much science but from terrified rejection of observation. Pattern can produce purpose, but it does so without final causes. Destination, design, is a lie stripped off twenty years ago. The only ethic left is random play, trial and error. We go on in shock, not yet disabused of success, not yet ready to save ourselves by looking.
Hopeless, he hoped that we might reconvene on higher ground, in an ecology of knowledge. Learning to hear the underwriting tune might at last affirm our own derivation from the theme. Adenine, thymine, a hundred thousand commensal genes, owls, foxes, the silver and blue forest of pines. His hope was simply that learning the layout of the place, the links—identifying how matter made its escape from matter and passed irretrievably through this spreading gene—might rejoin us to the superorganism at the source. Life, ordered irregularity, aperiodic crystal, signal in a field of noise, required that wonder and reverence, both coded for, beat out success if anything is to survive.
He hinted at a new discourse, a
new definition. But tonight it feels like a recovery. The only, truly unequivocal success is the aperiodic crystal itself. Accustomed from long training to viewing life from the molecular level, my friend based his hope on our acquiring an awareness of the explosive potential of the genome, its implausible beauty. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear would know that the string is big, an ample world for expression. And anyone who once adds up the living number must act ecologically, commensally forever.
I read a throwaway bit that, like the last tumbler waiting to turn over, brings home the idea for good. Huge stretches of code called introns—in fox, owl, grasses, lichen, cabin captives—have no identifiable function. They’ve been carried along inside, a free rider, for a billion years. I suddenly see DNA as an ingenious parasite, a creature that has struck up symbiosis with every scaffolding it has ever invented; organisms are only the necessary evil, the way DNA has hit upon to make more DNA. To get out and see the world. Which is the most successful strain of life? A defective question, one I now relegate to the bin of exhausted fits. Life is the sole strain, perpetually becoming, a single, diversified proposition that succeeds altogether or not at all.
I check the etymology for his “pidgin.” Thought to be an English derangement of the Chinese pronunciation of the English word “business.” But if this business is a business at all, it must be a lending library—huge, conglomerate, multinational, underfunded, overinvested. Ecology consists of identifying, checking out, poring over, marking up, and returning all existing solutions. Passing them around. Running down another reference, another key, another published breakthrough. No competition, no success, no survival of the fittest. The word I am looking for, the language of life, is circulation.
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