Life, It's the Little Things
The Industrial Era was forged by Newtonian physics, a simple understanding of the movement of matter. The technologies derived from this understanding, fired by abundant and relatively inexpensive coal, oil, and natural gas, reshaped the ecology of the planet. Our understanding of ecology, that is biology, is relatively new. Technologies derived from biological science promise to more radically alter the life of the planet.
Just as Newtonian physics has always been understood by far too few, biology is understood by even fewer. Most alarming, those understanding life's history—evolution—number even less, disturbingly including those designing biological technologies. Bringing a little light to these matters is Paul Falkowski's, Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable, a nice, well written, short history on the foundational life of the planet, and their and our evolution.
Microbes are single cell organisms, such as bacteria, visible with microscopes. Biologists estimate there are 10 to the 24th, that's a 1 followed by 24 zeros, microbes alive on the planet at any moment. To our minds, these numbers are inconceivable. Microbes are part of all life, even your own body comprised of 30 or so trillion cells, is home to a similar number of microbes, without which we wouldn't be able to live.
All life on earth evolved from first microbe(s) originating approximately 3.5 billion years ago. Over that time, in a course of hundreds of millions of years, these microbes changed the atmosphere of the planet. Their “waste,” oxygen, created the atmosphere allowing oxygen dependent life, including us, to evolve over the last six hundred million years.
In these early microbes, structures developed still common to all life, such as DNA. Also developed were life's basic molecular configurations for energy production and transfer, internal structures common to all living cells today. These are the “engines” of the book's title. Falkowski's mechanical metaphors are a little disconcerting, but, here we are, at the end of the Industrial Era, and that is what we know.
Microbes also evolved community, where single cell organisms share a common organizational structure comprised of many individuals, from which each individual cell derives mutual benefit. The basic components of community are much much older than us. All microbe organization is decentralized. No one cell controls the actions of other microbes when acting in concert, in fact just the opposite, every cell contributes equally. Ancient order that we today experience little of in our established corporate hierarchies or other social organizations.
The most important thought in Falkowski's book deals with evolution and our developing bio-technologies. Falkowski writes a pithy accurate definition of evolution, “Mistakes continuously and spontaneously occur in all genes in all organisms, and sometimes they are beneficial. If the mistake allows an organism to out compete others in acquiring energy or expanding the range it lives while still reproducing viable offspring, it is said to confer a selective advantage(italics his).”
What we are doing with bio-technology, including gene tampering, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and antibiotics is making deliberate, supposedly knowledgeable alterations to life. The larger process of evolution looks at these changes no differently than mistakes made in gene replication. None of this technology stops evolution.
Falkowski warns of our bio-technologists, “We have become tinkerers of microbial evolution—and we don't know what we're doing. Most synthetic biologists do not concern themselves with earth systems...the lack of understanding of the unintended consequences for the evolutionary trajectory of life is very seldom considered.”
This should be especially concerning to a species presently dealing with the consequences of two-hundred years of headlong industrialization. And even more so with our most recent virus experience, it is still unclear from where that developed. Falkowki adds,
“In the course their evolutionary history, microbes have made this planet habitable for themselves and, ultimately, us. We are only passengers on this journey; however, we are tinkering with the organisms at the controls. It is only a matter of time that, without restraining ourselves, we will inadvertently design and release microbes that can fundamentally disrupt the balance of electrons in the global market. (another unfortunate metaphor) That would potentially be disastrous.”
Our politics, our value systems are completely devoid of any thought, process, or organization to deal with these matters. Instead of all the current blather about saving democracy, it'd serve democracy well to start figuring out how we create organization and processes, as we have none, to deal with these issues – start at the literal beginning.