by Guy Murchie
OMNIPRESENT LIFE
Thus from the virus to the universe - or possibly from below the virus, perhaps even from below subatomic particles, which, some physicists have hinted, seem to be "indeterminate" to the point of willfulness - there are signs of life and the omnipresence of life, all of it interrelated and all made of the same elemental stuff. In a real sense, therefore, you are made of stars, of star dust and most surely of atoms given off by stars. Most of the matter in the universe in fact is now known to pass at some time through the caldron of the stars. You can occasionally see actual streaks of star particles in flowers - as, for example, a trace of white in the petal of a dark red rose caused by a mutation created by a cosmic mote out of Sirius or Alioth or Mizar! Besides, the phenomenon we call life is, in large perspective, just part of the quality of stars and therefore must exist potentially everywhere. Certainly it has no proven limits in size in either direction, large or small. It is omnipresent and universal and its progressive dimensions overlap in a continuous telescoping hierarchy of magnitudes, as shown by the fact that some atoms are bigger than some small molecules and some giant molecules are bigger than some tiny organisms, while other organisms (such as a whale) are bigger than some very small islands and larger islands (such as Borneo) are bigger than some asteroids (such as Hermes). There are also asteroids (such as Ceres) bigger than some moons (such as Phobos), moons (such as Ganymede) bigger than planets (such as Mercury) and planets (like Jupiter) bigger than stars (such as Sirius B) - and so on from giant stars (like Epsilon Aurigae I) to star clusters (small and big), galaxies, supergalaxies and the universe.
When you can really grasp the universality of such relationships you have gained a new insight into the ancient Serbian proverb: "Be humble for you are made of dung. Be noble for you are made of stars." Because you will have come aware by then that a cross section of the world sits on your table in the sense that every slice of bread and butter you eat brings you all three of the common kingdoms through vegetable grain, animal fat and mineral salt, while the mere fact that you are alive ensures you Earth's three states of matter, since you breathe the gaseous sky, drink the liquid rain, and your flesh and bones share molecules with the solid soil and rock of your planet.
In a way of saying, then, there is no borderline between you and the world. You are of it and it is of you - a kinship that reaches both ways and everywhere, genetically, mentally, spiritually, chemically, even gastronomically. For you are food for the world about as much as the world is your food. You are world food through all the earth's interconnecting food chains and pyramids of predation, through your excretion and ultimate decay and of course also potentially through almost any carnivorous creatures you meet from probable viruses and mosquitoes to improbable sharks, hyenas or vultures. Even carnivorous plants will gladly devour human flesh, as I once found out by teasing the palate of a Venus' s-flytrap with some of mine.
A different understanding of how the three kingdoms participate in us all can come from reflecting that the developing human embryo reenacts the progressive dimensional phases of evolution: starting its unfolding like an inert mineral with the positional geometry of centro-symmetrical packing around one point, then furrowing into a vegetable with a symmetrical line or stalk sprouting from roots buried in the "soil" of the uterus, and finally splitting into an animal with handed bilateral symmetry astride the plane that halves its mobile body.
Thus the point-line-plane progression of symmetries unites the kingdoms through the dimension of time. But their interactions in the mind and spirit are far more subtle. How does it happen, for example, that a rose is beautiful to a human? Could the answer perhaps ultimately be found somewhere in the flower's delicately sensuous balance between the soothing and the fascinating in this human-vegetable cousinhood that unites two so different creatures?
THE LAW OF EMPATHY
It is said that primitive man did not recognize any enemy smaller than a flea or larger than a storm, and that his real sympathies barely extended from the size of a puppy to that of a tamed reindeer, while beyond these near-human magnitudes in both directions stretched the great insulation of dimensions. By a sort of tradition or a natural law, it seems man empathizes with creatures like himself but tends to feel less rapport toward any that are very different in size, shape or speed of reaction. Thus men and women can feel close to a chimpanzee, a dog or a horse, even an elephant or a rabbit and sometimes a mouse. But "bugs" appeal much less to them, particularly if small and moving either very fast like a fly or very slow like a slug. And even a five-foot cockroach would not likely be greeted with open arms by the most ardent of animal lovers. It works the other way too, for evidently an insect is not capable of becoming a real pet (although I have heard of spiders who seemed to enjoy touching human flesh) because an insect cannot recognize the existence of a fellow being so different in size as a human. Humans are just earthquakes or storms to it, or perhaps (in the insect mind) humans embody "acts of God" so unpredictable, if not improbable, as to be of no concern. This presumably is why an ant accepts a descending human foot as an unavoidable stroke of fate like a hurricane without any evident comprehension of what, if anything, might be directing the foot.
Furthermore the very multiplicity of Earth's tiny creatures, aside from the difficulty of seeing them accurately, makes it almost impossible for a man to know them as individuals. Fleas are only specks to him and germs but invisible contamination. As for vegetables, we commonly consider certain trees and flowers beautiful, but their slowness of response makes them appear unfeeling if not virtually "dead" to most of us. Yet, without undue worrying about whom I may be stepping on in the field or woods, intuition somehow whispers to me that an attitude of total disregard for my less conspicuous fellow passengers on this sphere amounts to surrendering to a primitive provinciality that can be considered a sort of blindness that education or spiritual enlightenment should be able to overcome, and that, as we gain a deeper perspective, we can actually throw off our old illusion that only beings close to us in size and tempo are really alive - or that finite space-time proximity to man is the universal criterion of being. Should one not, moreover, be humbled rather than shocked to realize that more creatures live on a normal man than all the men living on Earth? And should one not be awed by the evidence that these creatures live in a more stable balance with nature than men do and more than likely with a better moral reason for what they are doing to man than man has for what he is doing to Earth?
IS THERE A NONLIFE?
The varieties of evidence of similarity, parallelism and oneness in life continue on and on, seeming never to end. No sort of atom is peculiar to life or nonlife, and it is a remarkable fact that, although the genetic code was deduced mainly from studies of the colon bacillus, the code has turned out to apply equally well to plants, animals and humans. Of course this reflects the fact that some kinds of protein molecules have been conserved almost unchanged for billions of years, as they slowly diffused outward from the simple common ancestors of all "living" things into the complex evolving kingdoms we see today. It also explains something about a biologist named Von Baer who once got dozens of vertebrate embryo specimens in his laboratory mixed up and, in trying to sort them, discovered it was almost impossible to tell them apart, particularly in their early stages before snouts had differentiated from beaks, flippers from fins and hands from hoofs or wings. Somewhat surprisingly, where such creatures have similar ways of life in similar environments, even the adults of classes as different as fish, reptiles and mammals look much alike, showing that it must be the planet itself which, through its nature, largely molds its own creatures so they can maintain themselves and interact.
The abstract universality of life might be further exemplified by the five-year-old who found a "lonely worm" and, upon compassionately cutting it in two, was heard to say, "There, worm! Now you have a friend." Evolution also seems to have evolved a vital negative side in that the empty places left by individuals who die, or by s
pecies who become extinct, are inevitably filled by others who, just by doing so, turn the negative into a positive. This is true as well for negative memory or forgetfulness, because one of the sources of oak trees must be the acorns that squirrels bury a few inches underground but forget to dig up and eat. Here again the negative factor has survival value and even helps the squirrels themselves in the long run by providing the descendants of the forgetters with more oaks to live in and more acorns to bury for vital future winter food or for forgetting at least often enough to ensure the perpetuation of the oaks and squirrels.
In chewing over this abstraction, I think I can begin to see life, as an acquaintance suggested, functioning something like a leaky bucket of water that got filled up when it was dipped into an invisible sea at the moment of conception. In this analogy, life's essence of course is the water, which at first seeps very slowly into the bucket but, as the months and years go by, increases its flow, developing currents and eddies and occasionally some real splash. And after the water level rises to the top and overflows, the leaks increase and the influx decreases until the opposing currents reach a working balance, a congruent maturity of life that lasts until the outflow sooner or later begins to exceed the inflow, progressively lowering the level again, eventually draining the bucket to the bottom at death, when the water has all merged back into the sea whence it came.
This is plainly an analogy of mortal life on Earth, the metabolic process at work upon three dimensions of concrete matter and one of abstract time, all four dimensions naturally applying to the water while it is bounded by the bucket, but no longer applying after it shifts from mortality to immortality on being liberated back into the boundless sea. The analogy holds good also for mortal raindrops that wax and wane as they oscillate in the sky, now merging and mating as they grow up, now disintegrating as they fall and die. And it applies almost equally well to lakes, rivers, oceans, stars and even galaxies, to say nothing of dust motes in space or colloidal particles in a primeval swamp. All such bodies naturally metabolize as what you might call proto-organisms, at the same time moving about and competing with their rivals, the stronger outdoing the weaker, gaining more sustenance, more independence, more potency, more expectancy and more of the quality usually ascribed to life.
In this way life shows itself as a relative state, not absolutely distinct from nonlife and differing from it only in degree without any precise boundary between. Indeed life generally seems to be an attribute of alignment, of order, of crystallinity, improbability, complexity, indeterminism ... When atoms combine into molecules and become arranged in some larger, more or less stable pattern, they may find themselves part of a snowflake, a geode, a snake's nest, a bubble of methane, a planet - and they may progress from one state or kingdom to another. Lodged in a solid, mineral material such as a brick, they appear quiet and predictable, presumably because any population of septillions of reasonably homogeneous atoms is bound to average out its random impulses into a statistical calm. But atoms inevitably drift about a good deal, especially when warm, and as they work into more complex and heterogeneous societies like soil or pond water or a gnu's hoof, they increasingly diversify and specialize, leavening pervasively from inorganic to organic molecules, increasing their biological division of labor and, most significantly, proliferating more and more of the double-spiral molecules now recognized as DNA which preside in the nuclei of living cells as the supreme specialists of the microcosm: the elite corps of genes that direct the common masses of molecules in a manner not basically different from the way mayors run cities or tycoons boss industries.
This, it seems, is how life is wont to emerge from its background dust, imperceptibly at first but, by little and little, unfurling nothingness into somethingness. In sum, in its mystic way, life may be nothing but the stirring and musing of the world. For, as a poet might say, it begins in snows and silent stones... and grows in the reachings of trees and bones. Life is everywhere: slithering with the snake through nodding reeds, threading the parched desert with the kangaroo rat, swimming with the ameba in a drop of rain. Even if we project our musings beyond the world, life quickens the planets, binding them without rope to moons, to suns, to the Pleiades ...
MECHANISM OR VITALISM?
If this line of poesy is high-flown, its elevation may at least raise the question of the viability of atoms and their long-presumed inanimate parts. Also it can hardly help but revive the age-old debate between the two classic theories of life: (1) the mechanistic concept that life derives solely from the automations of molecules as they combine into more and more sophisticated complexities of material organization and (2) the opposing vitalistic view that life's essence resides in abstract forces not only beyond matter but completely outside the laws of physics and chemistry.
It is not an easy issue for, as has been said before, if vitalism challenges man's reason, mechanism disturbs his soul. And the resolution of this conflict is intimately bound up with the mystery of the whole universe.
The still prevailing view that atoms and their parts are without senses or other attributes of life is of course an assumption inherited from classical physics and typified by Lucretius' statement that "every creature with senses is nonetheless composed only of particles without senses." It is an assumption modern physicists have not to my knowledge tried to defend, presumably because it has never been seriously challenged. Yet, should they ever decide to defend it, there is increasing reason to doubt that they will succeed in view of several provocative new avenues of inquiry in science and philosophy.
One of the earliest of these was Douglas Fawcett's book Divine Imagining, which suggested in 1921 that the world is a psychical continuum connecting matter with mind, and blessed with a kind of incomprehensible diffusion of "Divine Imagining," which somehow so leavens the constituents of all material things that, however great the sums these parts add up to, the wholes they compose are inevitably greater still.
The astrophysicist Sir James Jeans, a few years later, really made an impact on hundreds of thousands of intellectual readers by intimating that the universe may no longer be viewed as just a great machine, as Newton portrayed it, but more aptly as a great mind. And it was Niels Bohr, the physicist, who obligingly brought the concept down to Earth by proposing that the newly discovered dual aspects of the microcosm (particle and wave) are analogous to the long-known dual aspects of the macrocosm (matter and mind). If you recognize this as a fundamentally revolutionary idea you are not alone, for it immediately provoked philosophical speculation among advanced thinkers that atoms and molecules can no longer be taken for granted as merely the nuts and bolts of the complex vehicle called a living organism. In fact it began to be realized that, from now on, all such parts right down to the level of single electrons must be looked upon as potentially, if not intrinsically, alive and almost inevitably serving in their respective ranks as vital units of the sublimely hierarchical structure of the living body-mind.
ESSENCE OF LIFE
If we accept this extraordinary intuition of Bohr's as true, then we acknowledge that the dual body-mind aspects of all living creatures derive directly from the dual aspects of the atoms composing them. Which would make the "wave" function of an electron essentially a subdivision of the "mind" of whatever living organism that electron is part of. Understandably this is an apocryphal, if not shocking, concept to most physicists and even many biologists but, I ask you, why can't an electron be alive? I don't mean "alive" just by stretching the definition of life far enough to include it, although that is a factor, but alive in the sense that there is no verifiable line demarking it from the rest of life.
After all, no one needs to ask why a wire charged to a dangerous voltage with electricity is called a live wire. For electrons are far from inert. They not only have never heard of sleep but literally get around in the fastest company imaginable, careering all over the world in electric currents at 186,282 miles a second. They are endowed with a charge, a magnetic field, an ability
to gravitate, resonate and even perhaps to choose their own path (within limits) under the law of physics known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Their almost unbelievable rotation rate is something like a quadrillion times a second while "at rest" and "unexcited," which is more oscillations in that second than all the waves that have beat upon all the shores of all the earthly oceans in ten million years. This one-way megawhirl moreover gives them a kind of gyroscopic bias, the torque of "mind" that is actually a micro-version of the "desire" of the spinning top to hold its axis upright, a yearning made manifest en masse as magnetism, that macrocosmic force recognized through history in the patient polarity of the lodestone (Fe3 O4), called by the ancient Chinese "the stone that loves" because it attracted iron and gave the compass needle its soul. Any particle that can display all these functions, it would seem, must be quickened by a "wisdom in the inward parts" mysterious not alone to you and me but emanating from a Source far beyond human comprehension.