Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

by Sagan, Dorion

  ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD ON FACTS

  I have talked about how the “facts” of symbiogenesis can in some sense be considered superior to the theory of neo-Darwinism. But since I am speaking about scientific facts to anthropologists,19 I should probably be careful, as there is always the possibility that I am projecting cultural ideas onto the data and that all that we see or seem is but a culturally refracted dream.

  According to Alfred North Whitehead, science is the bastard offspring of “irreducible and stubborn facts” (a phrase he took from William James in a letter to his brother, Henry) and the Greek genius for lucid theorizing.20 Whitehead argues that, far from mental gymnastics, an “anti-intellectualist” strain was crucial for science’s development—to protect it from the insular hyperconceptualization of mere academic thought.21

  Science had to move away from the mannerist overdeveloped rational architecture of philosophy. While the Greeks had developed a remarkable ability to think boldly and clearly, and proceed through precise logic, the medieval scholastics, following Aristotle, expanded reason into a self-perpetuating empire out of touch with the real world. And the antidote was not more thinking but engagement with the real world. Of course, for natural science, engagement did not mean observation of other people, their thoughts or practices, but rather of things and organisms.

  Whitehead traces this antischolastic attentiveness, which first developed among some Europeans but belongs to anyone who will have it, in part to, of all things, Greek tragedy—whose essence he says is “not unhappiness [but] the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny . . . This remorseless inevitableness,” which in human dramas “involves unhappiness” but which “pervades scientific thought.”22 In short, for Whitehead the tragic realm of cause and effect has, if not a happy ending, a promising development: the development of modern science.

  Closely observed by attention to facts, the inner workings of fate become reformulated as the laws of physics.

  Interestingly, the Greeks—indeed the same Greek, Empedocles—came up with both symbiogenesis and natural selection thousands of years before Darwin. Empedocles had this great idea: In prehistory, organs, on their own, roamed the earth and recombined with one another. In other words, they symbiotically merged and were naturally selected. Those that persisted made copies of themselves, messily evolving.

  Although Aristotle dismissed Empedocles because his mixed beings suggested irrational Greek myths, and Darwin dismissed Aristotle because Aristotle lumped natural selection with Empedocles, in retrospect Empedoclean biology looks good. If you substitute cells for organs, Empedocles intuited both natural selection and symbiogenesis.

  Alas, he did not engage the empirical. To Aristotle, the wacky misbegotten organs that arose on their own and coalesced to make bodies, the less fit ones dying out, must have smacked of passé myth, the mating of Olympians and humans, chimeras and immortals. For Aristotle, Empedocles’s Dionysian imagination must have seemed a return to chaos, with no respect for observation or classification. The fifth century BCE philosopher of Acragas (now Sicily) was loopy. And for Darwin, who knew Aristotle was aware of natural selection because he mentioned it dismissively in connection with Empedocles, both Empedocles and Aristotle were wrong.

  Yet as the spiral of science turns, what was once recognized as myth sometimes becomes re-cognized as science. This is the case with symbiogenesis. Strong evidence exists that all eukaryotes evolved suddenly by symbiosis and that many other organisms such as lichens, which combine fungi and algae or fungi and cyanobacteria, did also. We speak of brotherhood, but maybe we should speak of “otherhood.” Others come together in aggregates of expanded energy use, economies of scale, and diverse assemblages where combined skills and redundancies prefigure additional developments. Together mingling beings find energy and the substances they need to live. Corals reefs require photosynthetic symbionts. “White ants,” or termites, cannot digest wood without the living hordes in their guts whose visualization Joseph Leidy compared to the outpouring of a “crowded meeting-house.” Cows, “four-legged methane tanks,” collectively add enough of that gas, unstable in the presence of oxygen, into the atmosphere that aliens, outfitted with spectroscopic devices, might be able to tell that there was life on this planet from the presence of microbially produced methane alone. And that’s no bull, though it’s close, literally. (See chapter 10.)

  It is hilarious to contemplate that the methanogens releasing gas in the specialized symbiotic cow stomachs called rumens could signal—with no help from humans—the presence of complex life on this planet. But this point that the archaean nonequilibrium chemistry of our atmosphere could serve as a beacon to aliens is serious, too. And it serves as a nice segue into related facts of life I want to talk about now.

  SENTIENT FLAMES

  Let me turn now briefly to what I consider another evidence-based discourse, a new set of life—and death—facts that may be even less well-known to you than symbiosis but which I consider equally important to understanding life.23

  I don’t think it’s possible to understand life without understanding the role of energy. Life is a complex thermodynamic system. Like a whirlpool or flame, the shape alone stays stable as energy is used and matter is cycled. It absolutely depends on the energy and matter. Deprive a storm system of its atmospheric pressure gradient, an autocatalytic chemical reaction of its chemical gradient, or convection of its temperature gradient, and these disappear: their form is dependent on their function—not necessarily their only function, but their basic one. And the same is, elegantly, true of life: if you deprive cyanobacteria or purple sulfur bacteria or plants of their solar energy gradient, or animals of their food-oxygen gradient, they disappear. The big difference with life is that it has found a way, via the recursive DNA-RNA-protein system, to restart the flame.

  It is a thermodynamic fallacy that we are destined to die because of wear and tear and inevitable entropic dissolution connected to thermodynamics’ second law. In fact, life’s signal operation, as well you know, is to resist normal wear and tear. While writing this essay, I saw a little kid’s face light up when his parents pointed at a Starbucks and pronounced the magic word, “cookie.” He recognized that sugar gradient much as a bacterium swimming toward sweetness or a sunflower following the light. Of course he is much more evolved than a bacterium or a sunflower: He is human. More to the point, taking a break from writing this essay, in the shower, I rubbed my eye and it swelled and reddened something awful. “Miraculously,” however, it restored itself.

  Finding food to support its body and using energy to repair itself, which occurs even at the DNA level, are typical operations of life. But what is life doing in its cosmic context? I would argue, and have, that the metabolic essence of life is to degrade gradients. Inanimate complex systems do this, but staying alive prolongs the process. I consider this a lucid, Greek-style idea. And there are facts to back it up.

  Apoptosis, telomerase-based limits on cell divisions, and sugar- and insulin-mediated genetic mechanisms ensure aging-unto-death in most familiar species. But locusts, mayflies, and other organisms that “come unglued” (experience multiple failure of organs), dying within hours of reproduction, contrast greatly with long-lived ones like sharks, lobsters, and some turtles not known to age. (Sharks, who often devour their twins in utero, may not need to die, as they are exposed to so many death threats.)

  That aging is under genetic control is attested to by the difference between Pacific and Atlantic salmon, the latter of which return upstream for another bout of egg laying. The energy connection here is that populations that grow too rapidly without moderating their growth run the risk of being wiped out by famines and epidemics.24 Death by aging, in other words, is not an accident but an adaptation. The important datum that near-starvation is the surest life-span extender in organisms as distant as apes and yeast (evolutionarily separated by some seven hundred million years) suggests that hunger acts as a signal to slow down agin
g programs, thereby increasing the chances of population and species-level survival. The modulation of aging in the face of environmental signals of scarcity is an example of physiological prudence among cells and compares favorably with conscious human attempts to moderate population growth.

  In addition to the seeming genetic fetters on unrestricted growth in our own bodies, and in populations of aging animals, consider the actual work done by plants. We like to think our symbol making and technology make us superior, but plants are metabolically superior in that they can derive energy from oxygen, which they do at night when sunlight is not available as a source of energy. They can switch-hit like this because they also incorporate those former respiring bacteria, the mitochondria, into their cells along with the plastids, which we never got, making us worry about where to get the next meal.

  And plants are far from inert. The average condensation and precipitation from soil and leaves in midlatitudes during the summer is about six millimeters per hectare. This production of latent heat via evaporation off of leaves is the energetic equivalent of some fifteen tons of dynamite per hectare. Rainstorms are far more energetic. Seeded by evapotranspiration from trees, rainstorms release the equivalent of many megatons of dynamite. But they do it stably. Competing with one another for access to the light that drives their evapotranspiration, trees disperse more energy more steadily than we do even with all our technology.25

  We think we are smarter, but in the long term we haven’t proved ourselves to be. Indeed, we may be heating up the planet, which is a clear symptom of dysfunction in complex systems. Think of your laptop, overheating. Natural complex systems use energy and dissipate it elegantly and have learned to do so in stable ways over millions of years of evolutionary time. It is true that we are Promethean, gifted in our ability to locate and exploit energy gradients. It even happens in our own bodies, whose brains use 40 percent of our blood sugar to spin forth fancies of variable value. But the long-term thinking we pride ourselves on is not in evidence when you consider thermal satellite evidence that rainforests are the most efficient coolers of the planet. These biodiverse collectives naturally use energy, but they dissipate it away from their surface, and do so sustainably.

  In Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, Stefan Helmreich writes: “At the conclusion of The Order of Things, Foucault, in a phrasing that evokes Rachel Carson’s description of the seashore world, suggested that man may someday ‘be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.’ He did not mean,” he adds, “that humanity might be wiped out by oceanic inundation—though such a literal reading is freshly thinkable . . . in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, and growing evidence of global warming. Rather, Foucault speculated that the human—that biological, language-bearing, laboring figure theorized by human sciences ranging from anatomy to anthropology to political economy—might not endure forever, just as archangels, warlocks, and savages are no longer so thick on the ground of our social imagination as once they were, and just as race as a biological category now wobbles between phantom and Frankenstein as it has been set afloat in a sea of genes.”26

  I believe anthropology’s new engagement with the nonhuman may be another example of “the return of the scientific repressed,” but I believe it also represents increasing pressure on us to become more integrated into more biodiverse, energetically stable ecosystems. Populations tend to be most numerous in the generations prior to their collapse. Stem cells and pioneer species spread rapidly but become integrated in slower-growing adult organisms and ecosystems that optimize and sustain energy use. In this light, humanity as a whole seems to be ending the insular rapid-growth phase typical of immature thermodynamic living systems. This view provides a possible new positive interpretation of Franz Kafka’s witty lament, “There is hope, but not for us.”

  CHAPTER 2

  BATAILLE’S SUN AND THE ETHICAL ABYSS

  Late-Night Thoughts on the Problem of an Affirmative Biopolitics

  Nazism treated the German people as an organic body that needed a radical cure, which consisted in the violent removal of a part that was already considered spiritually dead. From this perspective and in contrast to communism (which is still joined in posthumous homage to the category of totalitarianism), Nazism is no longer inscribable in the self-preserving dynamic of both the early and later modernities; and certainly not because it is extraneous to immunitary logic. On the contrary, Nazism works within that logic in such a paroxysmal manner as to turn the protective apparatus against its own body, which is precisely what happens in autoimmune diseases.

  —Roberto Esposito, Bíos

  TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY of the rest of your strife. In thinking about ethics we come up against some of the most difficult problems. One person’s righteous indignation is another’s reactionary oppression. The citizen’s free speech can be the government’s hate speech. The model’s sexy furs are PETA’s incontrovertible evidence of animal slaughter. Your nice iPhone may entail child labor, environmental degradation, and a Chinese worker’s exploitation. Even the seemingly innocent sweep of a linoleum countertop may represent, from another level, microbial genocide. When this example was brought up before a roomful of students in Danville, Kentucky, in the context of a discussion of life’s extent in the context of, among other things, abortion, many in the class raised their hands when asked if they believed microorganisms were not alive. For a sperm and an egg cell, fertilized or not, do not look that different from many microbes. Do they have feelings? Is the male masturbator guilty of wanton destruction of human life? The vegetarian (and Adolf Hitler was one) may think eating meat is murder, but thinks nothing of flying to an environmental conference, thereby adding to global warming that may trigger a wholesale climate collapse. Still others would argue that wiping humankind off the face of the Earth in the long run may be just what the biosphere needs to keep going.

  Somewhere Jacques Derrida writes that all of his work amounts to nothing but graffiti on the base of the monument that is the work of the rabbinical religious thinker Emmanuel Levinas. A friend of Maurice Blanchot and who at first admired Martin Heidegger, Levinas last century recognized that there is no possibility for a prescriptive ethics, a Mosaic tablet of writs set in stone that will guide us as to conduct, what is right to do, as we make our way through the ethical darkness. We need instead a descriptive ethics; we must engage with the other as other, falling without parachute through an abyss without bottom. The pointing finger has three fingers pointing back at the accuser. We have moral dyslexia. Who can guide us? For Levinas, it may be God, or what is left of him after Friedrich Nietzsche. We must be there with the face of the other, accountable, responsible to it. I read large sections of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, and I thought this idea of grounding ethics in the face, before the face of the other, was a fascinating idea. I was in a rush to apply, to appropriate it. I did so, naively no doubt,1 to the face of Earth so that we might have ethical accountability toward the planet, our mother, the biogeochemical matrix from which the flesh of our body comes but also the environment we co-opt and infect in our nonstop proliferation. There is a cool painting that shows a lunar-landed astronaut, the blue Earth reflecting off his visor, obscuring and replacing his face. The Levinasian ethics of the face also seemed to touch on the lack of accountability in technowarfare, dropping bombs on those we don’t see, death at a distance. Recently, however, I learned (during a lecture by Cary Wolfe, the editor of the University of Minnesota Press’s Posthumanities series) that Levinas didn’t even consider animals to have a face. That was strange. Animals don’t have a face? Dogs have no faces? What kind of a face is this? And I’m no Bible scholar, but I can’t help think what I’ve heard—that, although God never shows his face in the Bible, there is a key passage in which he flashes his backside.

  IF NATURE IS AMORAL and religion offers us no reliable moral code, where do we go for our ethics? In reaching for an affirmative biopolitics, I
want to talk about the productivity of the agon and make a few probably unpopular comments about what we call war and the general climate from which it comes. I believe we are in a dysfunctional relationship with Big Brother, and it is nonconsensual. But I don’t agree that the strife that prevents an affirmative biopolitics can be laid simply at the foot of mononaturalism, as Bruno Latour argues, or that its roots are simply human.2

  On the other hand, I think that facing the deep roots of what emerges as violence in the human realm can help us understand if not address it, and that this has a Spinozistic–Madame Curie virtue beyond activism. Curie said that nothing in life is to be feared, only understood; Spinoza argued that, with free will an illusion, true freedom lies on the way of knowledge.

  It is true that contingent human history shapes what we take to be universal scientific knowledge, but this contingent human history also reflects the larger thermo-cosmic evolutionary situation in which we are embedded. I live in a world in my head in the world, said Paul Valéry. We dwell in a nature circumscribed by culture inside nature. Whether that second nature is also inside culture I’ll leave for you to decide.

  I WANT TO MENTION quickly what I think is the basis of the ethical problem of life on Earth. It is twofold. First, sensing, sensation, including the avoidance cues of pain, which we may assume is among the oldest phenomenologically detectable signals, correlates with living beings. Second, Earth is essentially a materially closed thermodynamic system. Like other natural complex thermodynamic systems, material cycles as energy flows, and the system, if possible, grows to use up available resources. Microbes have mastered complete recycling of chemical elements in ecosystems. But if we look at evolutionary history, there comes a time when organisms developed the potential to consider themselves individual selves. I would provisionally locate this potential chronologically with the Ediacaran fauna, among the first organisms to have heads. These beings lived earlier than the trilobites. They may not have been animals at all, but symbiotic organisms living with algae in their tissues. But either they or the animals that followed them recognized each other as gradients. This set up an ethical crisis. Animals not only devour each other—“meat” is the name of that gradient—but their perception and intelligence allowed them to hunt. This is the same awareness that would ultimately allow us to know we harm others to feed, and that someday we will die.