by Guy Murchie
Another advantage in schooling is improved efficiency through specialization. Fish swimming at the edges of a school, for instance, serve as the "eyes" of fish in the center, so the latter neither have to hunt for food or be wary of danger so long as they can respond within about one sixth of a second to any change in direction or speed initiated by the "eye" fish - one sixth of a second having been clocked in a California laboratory as the average fish school's response time. School specialization furthermore sharpens the awareness and effective intelligence of the school as a whole so it can avoid a net or migrate to a safe spawning ground more successfully than any member fish alone. And in its transcendent superiority it knows both how to move slowly and compactly to decrease the chance of meeting a predator and, when hunting, to accelerate in looser formation to increase the chance of meeting prey.
The fact that the fish school, like the bird flock, is essentially leaderless is further evidence that it is transcending in the general direction of a superorganization of selfless cells, none of which any longer has any real will of its own. Mackerels, herrings and similarly shaped fish indeed are observed to become so ingrained in schooling that they lose the power to make certain unusual or irregular movements such as swimming backward, a limitation that only enhances school conformity and discipline, probably increasing its survival value. Certainly it is a trait to reinforce the crystalline texture of the well-established school that is so stable in structure that two large schools of halfgrown fish have been seen passing straight through each other at different angles with no more apparent disruption or interaction than if they had been two puffs of smoke.
While most formations have their members arranged either in rectangular rows, nose to nose, or in quincunx patterns, staggered at oblique angles, surprisingly many school fish, when alarmed, instinctively break ranks to huddle into a compact mass called a pod, in which they literally touch each other in tight layers. This curious performance comparable to the Greek phalanx, has been known to save lake fish from an attacking loon. And mullet, when spent and spawning in very cold water, have been seen to pod perhaps for warmth or reassurance. Such pods normally have the random grain of plastic wood, as each fish retains some independence of motion, but when they are evading a common enemy they are more likely to be polarized like iron in a magnet, the thousands of individuals aligning themselves so perfectly they can swim as a single unit whose overall shape often resembles an individual fish, for the logical reason that it is composed of the same numbers (of fish) in length, breadth and depth.
As for birds, they are known to find more food when in a big flock than when scattered, because flocking birds stimulate one another to forage. And dense populations in general control their environments more easily than sparse ones, as when honey bees air-condition their hives with a mass beating of wings, when flatworms shade themselves against strong sunlight by clustering, when goldfish precipitate poison out of their water through the stirrings and exudations of concentrated numbers. But it may be in its defense against natural enemies that social organization pays off best of all. A covey of quail roosts at night on the ground in a protective circle with tails inward and heads outward, a collective organism alert to danger from any quarter, its members sleeping in turns. A herd of 1000 migrating caribou intermittently excretes stragglers to the wolves, yet its able-bodied majority, moving as a unit, protects itself without much worry. And I have read an odd but convincing report that when the hindmost fish of certain kinds of fish schools is seized by a predator, the victim's skin has been known to exude a pheromone potent enough to diffuse so rapidly through the water it can overtake and forewarn the rest of the school.
TRANSCENDENT COLONIALISM
All such cases pointedly suggest the way social gatherings of individuals evolve and transcend into superorganisms through the survival value of their collective advantages. These shouldn't be confused with nonsocial gatherings, such as moths flitting about a candle flame at night (each insect responding individually to the light), which obviously are not superorganisms. Yet it is not uncommon for social gatherings to be composed of creatures of more than one species (say blackbirds, cowbirds, grackles and starlings) and for such flocks to integrate into remarkably stable superorganisms. And sometimes the differing members are joined symbiotically on some basis such as commensalism (in which one of the partners benefits without harming the others), like the long trumpet fish who uses a school of yellow surgeon fish for camouflage; mutualism (in which each partner helps the other), like the egrets that pick ticks off the backs of cattle; parasitism, like the dog-flea relation; domestication, like the ant-aphid relation; or slavery, the lord-serf relation.
In all this discussion of the self and individual creature selves combining and transcending in various ways into larger and larger societies, we haven't yet, as you may have noticed, considered any society as basic and closely knit as a sponge. But this family of colonial animals not only has its fascinations but, I would say, is something we urgently need to know about if we are to comprehend transcendence.
The bath sponge seems about as integral as a bush but, as many a bather will be surprised to learn, it is in fact not a vegetable at all and, along with 15,000 other species of sponges, starts life as an invisible speck or, more often, a mist of countless specks that are actually freeswimming animal cells. In other words a sponge may grow from one cell that settles on the bottom before putting out branches and buds, or it may accumulate from several, from hundreds, thousands or even millions of separate cells.
It has long been known that if you squeeze a sponge through a fine silk sieve, which converts it into a cloud of millions of cells and tiny clusters of cells swimming individually like amebas, that it will later find and reorganize itself if left in a container for a few days. In one well-known experiment, in fact, the juices of two different-colored, freshly sieved sponges were thoroughly mixed, yet they easily sorted themselves out, each cell discriminatingly clinging only to others of its own color and species, until both sponges were whole again with all their specialized cells in their appropriate places.
Exactly how the separated sponge cells find their proper places is not yet known, but find them they do. One of the commonest cell types is the flagellated collar cell that lines a sponge's internal chambers, tirelessly lashing and propelling the currents of water that bring in the vital oxygen and food. Deftly it extracts its payment in morsels of passing plankton, swallowing its personal due while shunting the rest to fellow cells that form pores, outer covering, internal jelly, skeletal spicules or sperms and eggs. Almost as individual as ants are these various cells, and about as cooperative and self-sacrificing - and still completely innocent of any central nervous system, for neither sensation nor pain is conveyed from cell to cell and the sponge as a whole seems considerably less responsive than an ant colony, even though its skeleton of calcium carbonate binds it physically much more firmly together.
Speaking of skeletons, the biggest one around belongs to the little coral polyp, a mere wisp of a creature who nevertheless is a lot more advanced than the nerveless sponge and who, like the termite, excretes extraordinary fortresses that dominate his own life, shaping the society within as much as shutting the enemy without, and only incidentally creating whole coral archipelagoes (perhaps ultimately continents) of a beauty and significance he himself cannot begin to conceive.
And most significant of all, in a review of the cell-society relations in life, may be the soil ameba Dictyostelium discoideum, which lives anywhere there is rotting wood or dead leaves and feeds most of the time as millions of separate, independent, invisible cells that can be considered immortal because they don't have to die. Occasionally, however, when it has had enough of its bacterial food, this nebulous population swarms into a dense, coordinated, visible, mortal mass to ooze about in the form of a small garden slug before suddenly sprouting into a thin-stemmed flower full of spores. There is still a good deal of mystery as to just why this so-called slime mol
d goes through its
peculiar routine of shifting from the immortal microcosm to the mortal macrocosm and back again, but it is known that an evanescent social hormone or pheromone called acrasin, exuded by the separate amebas, attracts them to each other, while the tiny whiffs of carbon dioxide they exhale include an enzyme that inhibits them just enough to regulate their progression. Then as they march sluggishly on, the ameba cells sort themselves continually by size and speed like minnows in a school, the bigger, faster ones gravitating to the front (eventually to rise as the stem), the smaller, slower ones lagging to the rear (to be turned into spores). And when the spores have at last been cast to the winds, the cycle continues as the stem slowly thickens again, pulling the crown back down into the shape of a slug whence it disintegrates once more into its constituent amebas in order to feed.
Is such a flowering slug in any sense a single organism? If so, it is obviously one who must disintegrate out of sight into the microcosm at every mealtime only to reappear whenever it gets the yen to flower. Or is it more like a well-drilled army of soldiers who spend most of their time browsing in leisure at home, only occasionally being "called up" to go through their paces on the parade ground? For all I know it could be either, neither or both, for there is no clear, absolute line of demarcation between the macrocosm and the microcosm, between mortality and immortality. Nor is there any infallible boundary between an animal and an army, between a creature and a crowd, all of which are made of cells.
TRANSCENDING CELLS
Cells, it so happens, are the unit bricks of life and, I surmise, of all life's transcending organisms. Close study of them almost inevitably leads to the age-old philosophical question: do germs control diseases or do diseases control germs? And that is part of the more general question: do atoms shape matter or does matter somehow give order to its atoms? Which leads to: can creatures steer the world or does the world really create and influence its creatures?
I suspect the cause and effect work both ways, but just where and how much is almost impossible to find out. An interesting recent discovery in this field is the fact that colon bacilli actually build bowels in the developing young of many kinds of animals and man. And related biological research is making it more and more certain that organisms of even more diverse orders of life, including vegetables, are physically assembled by their own inhabitants, from submicroscopic viruses to ultramacroscopic symbionts. The electron and other subdivisions of the atom are part of this synthesis of course and, when Einstein once cryptically remarked that "particles are nothing but geometry," he seems to have been preparing his heirs in science for a new mathematical concept to be known as "superspace." It actually emerged, I note, about a decade after his death and is now beginning to unite cosmology with particle physics through definitive macro- and micro-cosmic factors in the geometric structure of creation. Superspace, by definition, has an infinite number of dimensions and innumerable probable and improbable histories depending on the sequences of cause and effect among its subatomic particles. And since in quantum physics almost any given particle may expend its energy in any of several ways, in effect every particle seems to possess something like a choice and thus collectively, rather incredibly, it may steer the universe!
If matter really does influence the universe in some such wise, even slightly, the fact jibes nicely with the concept of transcendence. For feedback polarity is surely part of it along with abstraction, interrelation and omnipresence. Indeed the combination of all these principles and more seems essential to the working of the universe, just as it takes the integration of countless sorts of specialized cells to create and maintain the average living organ or organism. Furthermore, in the process I like to think every cell willingly, if not gladly, surrenders the independence that nature expects it to surrender, this being the most crucial of sacrifices in the making of a world. It is also the sacrifice that ultimately transcends the finitudes of this mortal node of being, that lifts life everywhere - because single cells as free organisms necessarily handle all their own vital functions of sensing, moving, metabolizing, reproducing - but when they become parts of multicellular organisms, they may comfortably specialize in one single function with a resulting gain in efficiency, to say nothing of a heightened potential in mind and spirit.
In the realm of thought of course there is a potent cell structure, as major successes result from many minds working on the same problem at the same time, perhaps half in competition, half in parallel, probing for the crack that leads to the break that makes the breakthrough. In waves and music too there is a social interaction and a resonance in the sinews, with unnumbered small benefits, like the Chinese stevedore's ancient chant that men sharing heavy burdens sing back and forth to each other in a rhythm tuned to the frequency of their breaths, their strides. It lightens the load, lubricates the heart and in some mysterious way - perhaps through the consonances of still unimagined vibrations - adds resilience to the whole being.
If you look at a man you can see at a glance that he is materially made for cooperation: he has feet that share the ground and take turns stepping, hands that work hand in hand, eyes that see eye to eye, teeth that cut and grind like matched millstones, organs of sex that eloquently bridge the gap between male and female, between ancestor and descendant. And while each cycle of gene circulation (as we saw in Chapter 13) takes about a millennium to saturate mankind on Earth, the mental cycles or waves of cultural evolution diffuse much faster, often permeating the civilized globe within a few centuries in ancient times, averaging perhaps one century in medieval times, a few decades in the eighteenth century, less than a decade in the nineteenth, and sometimes less than a year in this twentieth century of air travel and television (something we'll be looking at more closely in Chapter 22).
Clearly this must be how the ancient luxuries of Solomon and Kublai Khan have so easily been surpassed by the now familiar extravaganzas of the modem mail order catalog, how a billion people today enjoy "necessities" that were undreamed "miracles" to the richest kings of yesteryear. According to the law of conservation of matter and energy, the material world cannot decrease as a whole, and the mental world (now pooling its knowledge on a vast scale) can only increase, while the spiritual world gives signs that it will soon blossom forth as never before.
At the same time, I see, most of the nonhuman world plods on its accustomed way regardless. The lice who live out their lives inside the feathers of curlews and thrushes and larks, for example, cannot know that they are passengers aboard beautiful flying creatures who court each other and sing and lay eggs and navigate by stars hundreds of light-years away. Nor are the birds aware of the lice except as an occasional itch. Yet these worlds within worlds are all parts of the mysteriously interrelated and unfolding finitudes of Earth that are gradually but inexorably transcending toward the unfathomed plenitudes of Infinity.
THE NATURAL LAW OF COOPERATION
Evolutionists seem to have completely accepted the natural law of Survival of the Fittest, which many interpret as meaning "kill or be killed." But all too few yet realize that nature also has an opposite principle at least as strong and potentially much stronger: the natural law of cooperation. Religionists call it the Golden Rule and it not only pervades nature but is at the heart of transcendence from self to society, from singular to plural, from finitude to Infinitude, from indulgence to love. The late Carl Akeley, African explorer, saw it when threatened herds of elephants formed a ring in which the younger, stronger bulls surrounded and protected the females, babies and weak older ones. It happens when animals huddle together for warmth and encouragement, when they groom each other and when they treat each other's sores by licking them clean. An experiment in which hundreds of planaria worms were exposed to ultraviolet radiation demonstrated a hitherto unknown evolutionary advantage in cooperation. All the worms that stayed away from other worms died within about forty minutes of receiving this short-wave light while worms allowed to crowd together to the point of shadin
g each other survived more than eight hours. In the case of fish, sociability actually inhibits cannibalism, for bass in weedy ponds are known to swim alone and eat smaller bass, while those in clear ponds swim in schools where they get to know their younger relatives and learn to regard them as mates rather than meals.
The same principle holds through all the kingdoms of life, in particular the human, as Darwin explicitly recognized (in The Descent of Man) when he wrote that "as man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him." And "this point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races." Thus the Father of Evolution crowned the material Law of Survival of the Fittest with the spiritual Golden Rule.
I am aware that spirit is a fuzzy abstraction to most scientists, who, not knowing how to measure it, doubt its power if not its existence. So teleology is something of a dirty word to them and evidently they assume that, should the universe turn out to be progressing in any significant way, it must be doing so at random, mechanically and blindly. Yet some of the more philosophical physicists at least sense what Einstein called "the rationality of the universe," implying that it has a purpose or direction to whatever it is doing. And there are a few like Jean E. Charon, physicist president of the Association pour La Cooperation de Ia Jeunesse Mondiale of France, who has declared that "each living element has an awareness of the final goal to be attained" and specifically that every cell in the human body makes an "independent and spontaneous effort to advance toward a known goal that promotes the order of the whole."