Simon G. Powell - Darwins Unfinished Business: The Self-Organizing Intelligence of Nature

DARWINS UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Simon G. Powell forcefully but gently demonstrates that intelligence (modes of being that acquire information, learn, and meaningfully respond to larger contexts) is intrinsic to our natural world. People who deny the intelligence of the living (microbes, plants, other animals) are abysmally, indeed dangerously, ignorant. They literally ignore our ultimate, planetwide sources of joy, air, water, food, and energy. Read this informative, science-packed, yet accessible book and enjoy its wisdom.

LYNN MARGULIS,
AUTHOR OF SYMBIOTIC PLANET, MEMBER OF NATIONAL ACADEMY
OF SCIENCES, AND PROFESSOR AT UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS
AMHERST, DEPARTMENT OF GEOSCIENCES

A treasure trove of interesting material.

EDWARD GOLDSMITH,
ECO-AUTHOR AND FOUNDER OF THE ECOLOGIST

DARWINS UNFINISHED BUSINESS

The Self-Organizing Intelligence of Nature

SIMON G. POWELL

Foreword by Dorion Sagan

Park Street Press

Rochester, Vermont Toronto, Canada

To my mother and father

I would like to thank Inner Traditions for continuing to support and publish my work. Thanks also to my furtive friend and collaborator Albert Catt and his assistant Morgan Russell. I am also indebted to Iain Lewis for many long and fruitful discussions concerning the core ideas outlined in this book. And many thanks must be given to Dorion Sagan, who encouraged me right from the start.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

By Dorion Sagan

When we look back in time over the evolutionary landscape of the Earth, we find something surpassingly strange: the primitive and would-be antiquated beings of yesteryear outdo us in so many ways. Indeed they do so with such technical prowess that we may be forgiven the suspicion that their artistry is superior to ours not only in direct skill but also in both the dependable application and graceful concealment of such skill. Thus, we precocious apes jabbering about the surface of the planet, as we commandeer electromagnetic means to broadcast pictures of our bullying and semi-clad bodies, appear like a species in the thrall of a global inferiority complex, trying to compensate by calling attention to ourselves. Dont believe the hype. We are not so smart. The brittle star species Ophiocoma wendtii may seem primitive, but this relative of the starfish eludes predators by means of a crystalline lattice of calcite integrated into its skeleton. A marvel of optical computing far beyond the designs of artificial vision labs, O. wendtiis entire body acts as a compound eye focusing light and seeing.

Over three billion years ago bacteria evolved and linked ecosystems of sulfide oxidizers and sulfide reducers, thereby solving a problem of living without polluting the environment. Bacteria also evolved ecologically balanced nitrogen fixation (compared to which human agribusinesss use of fertilizer looks like a bad joke), worldwide gene trading (a kind of combination of the Internet and genetic engineering to help evolution along), and the ability to grow a mile beneath the surface of the Earth in rock by means of making use of ambient chemical reactions.

The discipline known as DNA computing began when scientist Leonard Adleman solved a mathematical conundrum known as the Traveling Salesman Problem (which involves working out the shortest path that takes in all points on a given route). By generating DNA sequences representing all possible routes and mixing them in a test tube, Adleman was able to answer a problem that had eluded the most powerful supercomputers, whose few thousand processors pale next to the natural intelligence of DNA. Similarly, ciliates such as paramecia, which trade their nuclei, appear to have pioneered certain robust information management techniques to search and preserve connected data long before the advent of computer programmers; the DNA of these organisms can be a thousand times more per cell than for bacteria. It has even been theorized (by my mother, National Academy of Sciences member biologist Lynn Margulis) that our brains make use of tubulin protein-mediated neural processing systems once used for locomotion in anaerobic bacteria known as spirochetes. The notion of natural intelligence for which Simon G. Powell so eloquently argues in this volume must be taken as more than metaphor.

But if a close look at the evidence reveals that we cannot separate ourselves from other life-forms by our creative intelligence, so too would it be foolhardy to single ourselves out as agents of Zoroastrian evil, somehow endowed with supernatural powers of destruction. Some mushrooms, tempting insects to eat them, have genetically arranged to sprout through the organisms bodies, using the insect head as a fungal flowerpot. As the frightening use of bioterrorism makes clear, bacteria can be powerful agents of destruction. Arthromitus bacteria, normally found in the hindguts of termites and wood-eating cockroaches, with a slight genetic change become spore-forming anthrax bacilli. The bacteria are not very adept at living in the bodies of mammals; if they were they wouldnt be so destructive of the hosts that support them, which is why they stay holed up in the ground, doing nothing for ages in the form of spores. Frightening as it is, their mode of propagation, causing sickness and mass hemorrhaging, and thus being returned to the ground in animals blood, is not very efficient. Even with technological inducements they are far less virulent than smarter organisms that have learned to grow together symbiotically.

In light of these instances of lifes innovation and creativity, what scientific justification is there for regarding ourselves as the smartest or most destructive or most conscious species? Prudence is inimical to the bluster and rampant growth we display as individuals, cultures, and a species. Persistent species may have wild youths, but eventually they must find a more stable place in Nature. Simon G. Powells book may be a wake-up call showing us our true place in a Nature abundant in intelligence and sentience, if not consciousness.

DORION SAGAN is a science writer, essayist, theorist, and author of sixteen books, including The Sciences of Avatar, and coauthor of Death and Sex and Into the Cool.

I speak about universal evolution and teleological evolution; because I think the process of evolution reflects the wisdom of nature. I see the need for wisdom to become operative. We need to try to put all of these things together in what I call an evolutionary philosophy of our time.

JONAS SALK

PROLOGUE

Darwins Evolving Legacy

Over a hundred and seventy years ago an observant young man named Charles Darwin began to formulate a scientific theory that would dramatically change our view of life on Earth. Darwins bold assertion that life has evolved over time through a gradual process of natural selection proved to be so controversial that its veracity is even now being fought over tooth and nail. Darwin verily rocked the world, and things have yet to settle down. Evolution is an issue that has had everyone from the Pope to Supreme Court judges earnestly debating its merits as a principle that can account for the existence of complex life. Despite the accumulation of evidence in favor of biological evolution (e.g., the existence of mutable DNA within all organisms, common anatomy, vestigial organs, the fossil record, etc.), people remain divided. Science avidly champions evolutionary theory, whilst many religious people avidly rally against it. Indeed, in the USA apparently half the population refuses to believe that the human race arose through an evolutionary process.