Symbiosis - Sermon by Painting

This painting is a sermon.  It’s the foundation and basis for how I think about morality, how I struggle to live and essentially my worldview.  Captured best by the Bible quote, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” symbiosis, or the living together of two different organisms, provides tangible evidence of sorts that cooperation works.  In fact, put better, that cooperation out competes competition.  Far from nature being a ruthless typification of, “Red in tooth and claw,”  these six panels highlight the generosity and love woven throughout life. Explanation of the six panels provided below (from left to right starting with the top row):  

1. Gaia (the Greek goddess of the Earth) is the idea of thinking of the Earth as one massive self-regulating, cybernetic organism.  This idea is also combined with a concept that life promotes life.  E.g., a tree existing in a field makes it possible for squirrels to live in its branches, eat its nuts, birds to nest in it, wasps to pollinate its flowers, the shade provides a moist microclimate for fungi and other plants, etc.  Life promotes life.  Because the tree exists a multitude of life is possible.  The other classic example from the book Gaia by James Lovelock is our atmosphere.  Because life has come before us our atmosphere now is composed of 21% oxygen (a by-product of photosynthesis), 78% nitrogen (a bacterial byproduct) and .0039% carbon dioxide (removed from the atmosphere by photosynthesis).  Without life having proceeded us to make a hospitable atmosphere we'd have a very, very similar atmosphere to our nearest neighbor Mars--95% carbon dioxide (runaway greenhouse).  Life has made our life possible--Gaia.

2. The second panel is about endosymbiosis, which is the concept that the mitochondria within our bodies, who essentially power our body by the production of ATP, are former bacteria.  This should truly hit you if it hasn’t before--the best science out there says that you aren’t one organism.   You’re the combination of at least two different critters that have become so mutually dependant for the last 2 billion years or so that we’re inseparable now.  Evidence for this can be seen that mitochondria has its own set of DNA (a plasmid just like bacteria, which is very important for phylogenetics), that they divide just like bacteria (which is why it’s important for genetics; it passes uncombined with another sex cell from the mother’s egg cell.  Meaning you only have your mother’s mitochondria, not your father’s.), they have peptidoglycan cell walls like bacteria and so on and so forth--basically they are *just* like a bacteria.  Billions of years ago an anaerobic bacteria (“us”) combined with a aerobic bacteria (our mitchondria) to create a cell that could survive in either condition.  We teamed our forces and made all complex life, including us, possible.  Go cooperation!

3. The next panel highlights how we’re a host for bacteria.  I’ve seen vastly varying numbers, but one source said that humans are generally composed of somewhere around 10 trillion cells.  Guess how many bacteria cells you have on and in your body?  Around 100 trillion!!  So, not only are you the combination of at least two different bacteria, but by cell count you are 10 times more actual bacteria than human!!!  Why?  Because that bacteria, generally speaking, majorly benefits us by breaking down organic matter that our body isn't good at breaking up--you can thank bacteria for helping digest carbs, proteins and fats as well as producing essential vitamins like vitamin K and many B vitamins.  We depend on trillions of other organisms just to eat.

4. Maybe around a billion years ago life had a great idea.  Let’s not just cooperate in energy production (endosymbiosis) and structure/division of labor (multicellularity) but also genetically--thus sex was born.  By combining genes the best of one organisms genes can be put with the  best of another’s.  Contrast that with bacteria that mostly evolve through random mutation--which is more often than not quite deleterious.  We sexually reproducing organisms survive and evolve by teamwork.  We pool the best of what we have and create something even better--synergy.

5. The 5th panel highlights the interconnection of our foods--the substances that make our survival possible.  Plants cooperate with bugs to transport their DNA to reproduce in exchange for a tasty, nutritious treat of pollen/nectar.  That’s why flowers exist.  Their beauty is a physical display and celebration of cooperation.  The same is true for fruit. Fruit exists to give nutrition in exchange for seed dispersal.  

6. The final panel focuses on the love of a mother and child.  From a biological perspective that mother needs the child to pass on her DNA and the child needs the mother for nutrition and socially relevant information for future reproduction and survival.  From an experiential perspective the two experience a level and power of connection and love unrivaled in the universe.

The Bible speaks truth--it is more blessed to give than to receive.  Why?  Because it works.  The winnowing pragmatism of evolution proves it.  If we try and live our lives in defiance of this truth we only hurt ourselves.  Cooperation out competes competition.  We ought to make this the basis of every relationship, government, family, economic system.  It works.  To paraphrase Ben Franklin, we shall hang together or surely we shall hang apart.

Cooperation Outcompetes Competition - The Evolution of Morality

When people don't believe in evolution it's never because of science. It's for religious reasons often masquerading as moral reasons:

Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ ideas thus powerfully shaped Stalin’s approach to society. Oppression, self glorification, atheism and murder resulted from Stalin’s rejection of his Creator after reading and believing the evolutionary ideas of Darwin. And the most tragic aspect of all? That while Stalin was turning his back on his Creator, he was building his philosophy on a lie. http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v10/i4/stalin.asp

Hitler’s understanding of the history of life, and that of Marx, Stalin and Mao, was not devised by a German, Russian or Chinese. It was shaped by an Englishman named Charles Darwin. http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v27/i2/darwin.asp

Those quotes are, of course, complete rubbish, but, in some ways, understandable. Humans have an innate fear of nature. Predators, poisonous snakes, spiders and harsh elements eliminated those of our ancestors that weren't afraid of nature on some level. I think it's possible that this evolved fear might be a partial explanation of why people fear evolution - a purely natural explanation of our own origins.

This negative, almost condemning tone, can even be seen in Darwin's choice of words, or more accurately, the public's choices of Darwin's words (since he wrote much on altruism as well) . The full title, often unknown, of Darwin's most well known book is: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The most quoted section of this watershed book ends speaking of the "war of nature, from famine and death.” One can attribute this bellicose view of nature from his contemporary Europe that was in the throws in industrialization, colonization, political turmoil, Marxism, and Malthusian philosophy, poets like Tennyson who spoke of nature being "red in tooth and claw" and even Freud, who in Civilization and Its Discontents spoke of renunciating 'animal' passions.

There's so much more to the story, though! Thankfully, many great scientists/writers are bringing this message to the public (EO Wilson, Kropotkin, Matt Ridley, Frans deWaal, Robert Wright, et al).

Here's why this matters: identity proceeds activity.

Creationists (nor evolutionists) need to be afraid of learning about our past, though. Nature is nice. Evolution is a pragmatist to the extreme and the bottom line is that cooperation works. It's not just polite, it's a smart long term strategy.

Controversial thesis: nearly every major revolution in evolution is the result of cooperation. Let's take a look.

• The First Life - 4 Billion years ago- The first life, our cenancestor, was a community of gene, metabolism, protein sharing organisms. Living came from nonliving as a team.

• Gaia - 3.5-2.0 bya -- Cyanobacteria produce enough oxygen as a by product of photosynthesis that the Earth's atmosphere is drastically change enough that the Earth 'rusted' causing iron in the ocean to dissipate and produce most of today's iron deposits. This 'pollution' also paves the way for future complex aerobic life to evolve.
• What Earth's atmosphere would look like without life:
• 98% Carbon dioxide
• 0% Oxygen
• 1% Nitrogen
• What Earth's atmosphere actually looks like, since life has drastically changed it:
• .00035 % Carbon dioxide
• 21% Oxygen - not too little to be anemic and not too much to have rampant oxidation, mutation and out of control conflagrations
• 78% Nitrogen - highly stable, wonderfully innocuous media
• Source: James Lovelock's Gaia

• Endosymbiosis - 2.0 bya - Scientists like Lynn Margulis looked at mitchondria, the powerhouse of our cells and other eukaryotes, and said, "Gee-whiz, these mitchondria divide like bacteria, have protein making ribosomes like bacteria, have their own unnucleated genome like a bacteria, are structurally shaped like a bacteria...I wonder if they once were bacteria!!??!" When you think about it, it's a shocking proposition. We, and other eukaryotes aren't one thing, we're many things working together. We aren't a human. We're trillions of evolved bacteria working together, bacteria that if you were to separate us from our friends, the mitchondria, we'd quickly die, as would they. This genius idea might have come about as aerobic bacteria (the mitchondria) and anaerobic bacteria (that'd be 'us', so to speak) dividing the labor, became specialists and after billions of years are absolutely, completely, 100% dependent on each other. Marvelous!

 

• 1 bya -- Multicellular life further refines the idea of working as a team of specialists. As oxygen continues to build up in the atmosphere, complex organic molecules like collagen, that use oxygen, can start to stick stuff together to build the vast city scape networks of multicellular life.

“...Astonishing is the thought that a human body consists of 10 trillion cells and that a brain contains about 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses.” --William R Murry in the essay Grandeur in This View

• Sex - 600 mya -- Organisms wise up and start sharing the best of their DNA in exchange for the best of another organism's DNA thus 'spawning' a revolutionary new way of evolving - sexual recombination, the shuffling of genes. Another major advantage is having a bank of reserve genes stored in recessive genes.

 

“DNA in a single cell of our bodies, so small we cannot see it, if stretched out would reach from fingertip to fingertip of our outstretched arms and that there are trillions of cells in a body and that there is enough DNA in those cells to reach to the sun and back, can fill us with profound amazement." --William R Murry in the essay “Grandeur in This View”

• Digestion - 600 mya?-- Simple animals with the first digestive tracts co-evolve with bacteria (and later fungi and protists) to digest food more completely. Consider ourselves. By count, we are more bacteria than human. It's been estimated that a normal person has 10 trillions cell, but on and in us we have100 trillion bacteria cells. Once again, on another level, we are cooperation on legs.

• 500 mya -- Plants colonize the land possibly by the symbiosis of fungi (structure) and cyanobacteria (food production).

  

• 200mya - Mammals - What makes us so different from other organisms? How is that we rule the Cenozoic? Warm blood? No, think of other warm blooded animals like birds and arguably dinosaurs. Is it having fur? Not really. Feathers are probably more effective at retaining heat. Is it our differentiated teeth. Eh. I think what makes us special is the way we take extraordinarily good care of our young - we feed them milk through mammary glands. The child offers a way to pass on the mother's DNA and the mother offers milk. Cooperation, care, maternal love.

• 140 mya-- Which came first? Dinosaurs or flowering plants? It blows my mind that the correct answer is dinosaurs. For hundreds of millions of years there were forests without any flowers or vivid color, just seas of mostly green. Flowering plants evolved using insects as pollinators and animals as seed distributors. They now out number ferns and conifers 20 to 1. Cooperation works. There are 300,000 species of plants and the newcomers, flowering plants, number 250,000. If there were no flowering plants there'd be none of our normal fruit, butterflies, honey bees, cotton, roses, orchids, or us since our ancestors were fruit eaters, frugivores.

These are native to Florida - passion flower!

• 6 mya - 2 mya -- Alloparenting, gives Homo sapiens the ability to provide food for large brained, feeble offspring. "It takes a village to raise a child" really is true for humans. As our brains got bigger, our bodies got smaller (since there were selective forces that were keeper our hips small, like needing to run fast) and our babies started to need so much care that one woman couldn't do it alone, nor could one couple. A whole village was needed - someone to get carbs, like digging up tubers, several men to hunt meat collectively, another to gather fruits and nuts, another to bring water home, etc, etc. Contrast this with wildebeests that have to stand within minutes and join the herds migration or become dinner. Our babies can even raise their head, roll over or walk for a considerable time - often a year before walking!

• You can of course continue this line of thinking including cultural adaptations of cooperation like spoken language, agriculture, government, written language, et cetera.
• Human cooperation written in the fossil record.

Yes, there will always be parasites and heterotrophs using short term strategies that take advantage of other organisms, but there must, necessarily, obligatorily be more cooperation than all out competition otherwise the ecosystem will collapse.

Long term, cooperation out competes competition.

Nature is nice.

Images from here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.
 

Proud to Pollute

We have a right to pollute the Earth.

We have a right to cut down trees, eat meat, have factories, use its resources, enjoy technology, hunt, and fish.

Let me tell you a story.  There is an organism that has put billions of metric tons of toxic gas into the air.  This pollution has caused a mass extinction of organisms across the entire globe and is changing the chemistry of the entire globe.  What organism am I talking about?  Maybe you’re already savvy to my trick here, but I’m talking about the single celled cyanobacteria of billions of years ago.  That gas?  Oxygen.

It’s a important fact to remember that all organisms produce pollution - big, small, simple and complex.  We all impact each other.  There was a time in evolutionary history that oxygen literally caused a mass extinction.  It was a toxin to anaerobes.  Everything poops, pees, farts, belches, exhales, respires and there’s some other organism, somewhere that’s impacted because of it.

Furthermore, all animals hurt some other organism to survive and that’s okay.  A cheetah has a right to eat an impala, a polar bear a seal, a rattlesnake a bunny wabbit and a bunny wabbit, alfalfa.


What's the 'essential' part in 'essential amino acids'?  Essential to all life?  No.  Essential to humans.   Cows have essentially no 'essential' amino acids since they synthesize them quite well themselves.  So, why are we different from other animals that make their own complete amino acids?  In our evolutionary history we had those amino acids in our diet so regularly that mutations could eliminate the ability to synthesize them and we'd still survive (something similar happened with our ability to make Vitamin C.  Boy that'd change the vitamin industry.).

We've evolved to eat meat.  It's why our gut is so small relative to our body weight.  If we were evolved for eating plants alone our gut would look like the other largely vegetarian primates like gorillas and proboscis monkeys - utterly, protrudingly huge pot bellies.  A small set of intestines shows we are made to eat a high energy diet that takes little processing to yield high quality results.  Also, it's pretty universally accepted that eating meat gave us the incentive and means to become as brainy as we are - we're hunters and a hunters diet gives enough fat to power our calorie zapping noggin.  Early stone tools weren't for cutting spinach; I can tell you that much.

You've seen these guilt trip photos showing the leveling of land and the emergence of buildings - the decimation of a habitat.  The message is that's awful.  Is it?  Is it really awful that humans exist?  Or, is it amazing that biology has produced an organism that is doing something amazing, building edifices, cities, nations, technology that have never existed before (to our knowledge).  Is it worth it to destroy some environment to make the Large Hadron Collider?  Yes.  Yes, it is.  If I had to choose between the extinction of the California Condor and the building of the LHC, I'd shoot the bird myself.  Thankfully we don't have to make that decision, but what does it take to make a LHC?  It takes a whole bunch of awful stuff like strip mining, fossil fuels, habitat destruction, and vast societies to pull great minds from.  It takes a lot, but it's worth it.

People like microbiologist Lynn Margulis have helped me see this.  She eloquently pointed out that life is tough, far tougher than we realize.  We couldn’t wipe out life even if we tried.  We could blow up all the nuclear bombs in the world and we still won’t be able to kill life, lives, yes, but not life.  Somewhere, deep within the recesses and bowels of the earth, life would reemerge, recolonize and start the evolutionary process of populating every niche and corner of the planet all over again.

With ‘rights’ come ‘responsibilities’.

During my seminary days, I remember being haunted by this Bible verse: “All things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial.”  What a scandalous verse.  “You can do anything you want, but you’ll have to live with the consequences,” is what it’s saying.  Questions concerning moral permission aren’t usually answered in ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but in ‘not in this way’ or ‘only with wisdom guiding.’

Please recognise that I write this as a reactionary.  I’m reacting to the over-exaggerating, fundamentalist environmentalists that try to scare the world with global warming hell fire and polar ice cap melting apocalypses.  I recognise that I need the planet in working order, as a healthy ecosystem to eat, breathe, flourish and even to enjoy the wonder of nature.

There’s two ways that the manner in which we pollute and destroy is fundamentally different from other organisms: our time scale and our scale of influence.

Time Scale

Life is exceptionally keen at turning water into wine, coal into diamonds, lemon into lemonade.  Any example of pollution that I can come up with produced by an organism has over an evolutionary time scale become a fertilizer, a gourmet dinner, or a breath of fresh air.  We, on the other hand, are presenting pollution in never before seen quantities and types that are posing new obstacles to life.  Can life overcome it? Of course.  Should we wantonly decimate the work of millions of years to test that out?  Well, listen, I love evolution.  I love it on many levels.  I love its pragmatic elegance.  I love the way it comes up with ingenious engineering inventions.  I love the baffling serendipity that it exists.  Life is miraculous.  So, know that it crushes me to lose any of it.  Please hear me say that.  It is a great, weighty, crushing loss.

Scale of Influence

There’s never been another organism that has wielded so much power.  We’ve been to the effing moon for Pete sake.  We have the power not only to destroy other species, but whole ecosystems, and an entire biosphere.  AND we have the power to knowingly do it OR to not.  We are not separate from the system.  When we poison the Earth we are poisoning our drinking well and ourselves.  When we destroy millions of acres of habitat we are destroying the 'lungs', 'heart', and 'guts' of the living Earth.  That's dangerous.  That will have consequences.

Humans don’t do moderation well.  We like either/or scenarios, on/off, right/wrong.  It is vastly easier for us to completely condemn and guilt every act of normal living: being a carnivore, driving, using electricity, etc. than to ask and then answer the tough question of, how much is too much?  So, we condemn any use (See Romans 14 for an interesting Biblical commentary on this right/wrong vs responsibility topic).  We guilt people for existing - like the planet would be better off if humans didn’t live in it.  That’s wrong.  We have a right to be here.  We have a right to live.  It is good that evolution made us.  It is good that we are creating societies and technology that may have never existed before.  It's good that something new under the sun has come about.

It's also wrong to say that we just need to live like the Native Americans.  Let me remind you a little history: they wiped out almost all the mega-fauna in the Americas after they came over the Bering straights.  Not the greatest environmentalist examples if you ask me.  They were constrained in their exploitation by technology far more than their ideology.  All that to say, going back to the Stone Age isn’t the solution.  It’s asking the tough question of:

How much is too much?
How much is enough?
What are our rights?
What are our responsibilities?
What can I do with out?
What can I enjoy?
*What is sustainable?

And, those are tough, tough, gut wrenching questions.