Hidden Connections Integrating the Biological, Cognitive, and Social Dimensions of Life into a Science of Sustainability

One THE NATURE OF LIFE Before introducing the new unified framework for the understanding of biological and social phenomena, I would like to revisit the age-old question "What is life?" and look at it with fresh eyes. I should emphasize right from the start that I will not address this question in its full human depth, but will approach it from a strictly scientific perspective; and even then, my focus will at first be narrowed down to life as a biological phenomenon. Within this restricted framework, the question may be rephrased as: "What are the defining characteristics of living systems?" Social scientists might prefer to proceed in the opposite order--first identifying the defining characteristics of social reality, and then extending into the biological domain and integrating it with corresponding concepts in the natural sciences. This would no doubt be possible, but having been trained in the natural sciences and having previously developed a synthesis of the new conception of life in these disciplines, it is natural for me to begin there. I could also argue that, after all, social reality evolved out of the biological world between two and four million years ago, when a species of "Southern apes" (Australopithecus afarensis) stood up and began to walk on two legs. At that time, the early hominids developed complex brains, toolmaking skills and language, while the helplessness of their prematurely born infants led to the formation of the supportive families and communities that became the foundation of human social life. Hence, it makes sense to ground the understanding of social phenomena in a unified conception of the evolution of life and consciousness. Focus on Cells When we look at the enormous variety of living organisms--animals, plants, people, microorganisms--we immediately make an important discovery: all biological life consists of cells. Without cells, there is no life on this Earth. This may not always have been so--and I shall come back to this question--but today we can say confidently that all life involves cells. This discovery allows us to adopt a strategy that is typical of the scientific method. To identify the defining characteristics of life, we look for and then study the simplest system that displays these characteristics. This reductionist strategy has proved very effective in science--provided that one does not fall into the trap of thinking that complex entities are nothing but the sum of their simpler parts. Since we know that all living organisms are either single cells or multicellular, we know that the simplest living system is the cell. More precisely, it is a bacterial cell. We know today that all higher forms of life have evolved from bacterial cells. The simplest of these belong to a family of tiny spherical bacteria known as mycoplasm, with diameters less than a thousandth of a millimeter and genomes consisting of a single closed loop of double-stranded DNA. Yet even in these minimal cells, a complex network of metabolic processes is ceaselessly at work, transporting nutrients in and waste out of the cell, and continually using food molecules to build proteins and other cell components. Although mycoplasm are minimal cells in terms of their internal simplicity, they can only survive in a precise and rather complex chemical environment. As biologist Harold Morowitz points out, this means that we need to distinguish between two kinds of cellular simplicity.6 Internal simplicity means that the biochemistry of the organism's internal environment is simple, while ecological simplicity means that the organism makes few chemical demands on its external environment. From the ecological point of view, the simplest bacteria are the cyanobacteria, the ancestors of blue-green algae, which are also among the oldest bacteria, their chemical traces being present in the earliest fossils. Some of theseCapra, Fritjof is the author of 'Hidden Connections Integrating the Biological, Cognitive, and Social Dimensions of Life into a Science of Sustainability', published 2002 under ISBN 9780385494717 and ISBN 0385494718.