25 Apr 2005 @ 14:07, by swanny
Well the web is a many splendored thing...
at times...
I was thinkin about my complexity theory
and orderly motion and I pondered if there might
be an "ideal" orderly motion, and then it occurred
to me that nature and we humans have the dance
and the dances that perhaps reflect a desire for such
an ideal and hence as well I googled "The Dance of Life"
and came up with the following excerpt
enjoy
alfie
quoteEARTHDANCE:
Living Systems in Evolution
Elisabet Sahtouris
copyright © 1999 by Elisabet Sahtouris
The Dance of Life
It was in the search for life on other planets that we discovered what a live planet is and that we ourselves are part of the only live planet in our solar system.
The first astronauts to see the whole Earth with their own eyes were astonished by what they saw. Although they couldn't see any of the living creatures they knew to be on it, the Earth itself looked very much alive -- like a beautiful glowing creature pulsing or breathing beneath its swirling, veil-like skin. Their pictures helped us in imagining Earth's evolution as a film.
Scientists, of course, cannot simply trust the way things look. After all, science was built on the discovery that the Earth is not the unmoving center of the universe, much as it looks to be just that. Nevertheless, it was seeing our planet from afar for the first time, and noting how its appearance differed from other planets, that inspired new ideas and studies of Earth, such as Gaian science.
Long before we saw our planet in this new way, scientists had adopted the view that the Earth with its various environments is a nonliving geological background for life, living creatures having evolved upon it by accident and having adapted to it by natural selection. The Scottish scientist James Hutton, who is remembered as the father of geology, was virtually ignored when, in 1785, he called the Earth a living superorganism and said its proper study should be physiology. A century later the Russian philosopher Y. M. Korolenko told his nephew, Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, that the Earth was a live being, and though it is not clear that Vernadsky believed this himself, his studies of Earth took a very different view of life than did those of other scientists.
Vernadsky called life "a disperse of rock," because he saw life as a chemical process transforming rock into highly active living matter and back, breaking it up, and moving it about in an endless cyclical process. Vernadsky's view is presented in this book, as we say life is rock rearranging itself -- like music come alive -- packaging itself as cells, speeding its chemical changes with enzymes, turning cosmic radiation into its own forms of energy, transforming itself into ever-evolving creatures and back into rock. This view of living matter as continuous with, and as a chemical transformation of, nonliving planetary matter is very different from the view of life developing on the surface of a nonliving planet and adapting to it.
While Vernadsky's view stimulated much research in the Soviet Union, it never became widely known in the West. The biologist G. E. Hutchinson was one of the very few Western scientists of this century who took an interest in and promoted Vernadsky's view that life is a geochemical process of the Earth.
Later the independent English scientist James Lovelock, who assisted NASA in its search for life on Mars, shocked the world of science by suggesting that the geological environment is not only the product and remainder of past life but also an active creation of living things. Though he did not know Vernadsky's work at the time, he said that living organisms continually renew and regulate the chemical balance of air, seas, and soil in ways that ensure their continued existence. He called this idea -- that life creates and maintains precise environmental conditions favorable to its existence -- the Gaia hypothesis, at the suggestion of his Cornwall neighbor, the novelist William Golding.
The Gaia hypothesis is now recognized as Gaia theory, but it is still controversial among scientists. Lovelock, like his predecessor Hutton, calls Earth-as-Gaia an organism or superorganism and claims its proper study is physiology. Yet he also calls Gaia a self-stabilizing mechanism made of coupled living and nonliving parts -- organisms and physical environments -- which affect one another in ways that maintain Earth's relatively constant temperature and chemical balance within limits favorable to life. Lovelock describes this mechanical system as a cybernetic device working by means of feedback among its coupled parts. Thus it maintains Earth's stable conditions in the manner of a thermostat-controlled heating system that maintains house temperature, or an automatic pilot that keeps an airplane on course. This concept of Gaia as a cybernetic device has been far more acceptable within the mechanical worldview that is still strong among scientists than is the concept of Gaia as a live organism, though this is changing.
For Lovelock, organism and mechanism are equally appropriate concepts, but in fact the two concepts contradict each other logically, and this causes confusion around the whole issue of Gaia theory. The concept of life, by any definition, including the autopoietic definition (of self-producing and self-renewing living systems, as introduced in Chapter 3), is not logically consistent with the concept and reality of mechanism.
For one thing, life cannot be part of a living being; life is the essence or process of the whole living being. If Gaia is the name given to the living Earth, then it would be as meaningless to say that life creates its own environments or conditions on Earth as it would be to say that life creates its own environments or conditions in our bodies. Life is the process of bodies, not one of their parts, and in this book we maintain that the same is true for Gaia-Earth -- that life is its process, its metabolic system, its particular kind of working organization, not one of its parts.
We can of course say that organisms within Gaia create their environments and are created by them, in the same sense that we say cells create their own environments and are created by them in our bodies. In other words, there is continual and mutually creative interaction between holons and their surrounding holarchies. But, in this book's story, we do not divide living bodies or holarchies into life and non-life.
If we accept the autopoietic definition of life, we see another contradiction between Gaia as a living being and Gaia as a mechanical system in which life and non-life are coupled parts. An autopoietic system is self-producing and self-maintaining. It must constantly change or renew itself in order to stay the same. Your body renews most of its cells within each seven years of your life, for instance, and its molecules are turned over far faster. No mechanism can do this, because it does not invent and build itself, it must be invented, built and repaired by external beings. It is not autopoietic, it is allopoietic (not self-produced, but other-produced).
A mechanism cannot, and therefore does not, change itself by its own rules, and that one fact points out the essential difference between living systems and mechanical ones, including even the most sophisticated computers and cybernetic robots. All of them must be programmed by outsiders to do what they do, no matter how intelligent they appear to be. We will say more on this subject later, especially in Chapter 15. For now, let us just note the contradiction that arises if we define Gaia at once as a living organism and as a cybernetic device, because this contradiction is causing confusion about Gaia theory among scientists.
The position of this book, then, is that the Earth meets the biological definition of a living entity as a self-creating autopoietic system, and that only limited aspects of its function -- never its essential self-organization -- may be usefully modeled by cybernetic systems. For example, we can usefully model aspects of our own physiology (for instance, temperature regulation, or blood pumping) as cybernetic feedback systems, knowing all the while that these systems would not function like machines apart from their embedding holons' physiology.
Notice that calling the Earth alive, by definition, is more than proposing a new metaphor to replace mechanism. It is also different from proposing a Gaia hypothesis or a Gaia theory. There is nothing to be proven once we decide that Earth fits the autopoietic definition of life, as it simply revises our conceptualization from mechanism to organism. And, as such, it provides fruitful ground for many new hypotheses and theories about how its physiology works. Note, by the way, that autopoiesis as a definition of life does not include growth or reproduction, though these are features of many living entities. One can be alive without reproducing, perhaps an important recognition in an overpopulated world.
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