Purpose/4. Life And Exploiting/Endnotes
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1. Darwin used the words “competition” and “competes” frequently in On the Origin of Species. He knew that life is assertive. Tennyson, too, knew what much of life was about, writing, “nature, red in tooth and claw,” when penning In Memoriam.
2. Thomas Malthus, in An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, was among the first to write that life (although he limited his discussion to human life) would continue to grow in numbers unless prevented by external forces. Darwin’s thoughts were influenced by that essay. This chapter takes for granted that Malthus’ principles continue to operate, and apply to all forms of life.
3. Even we “modern” parents do not automatically limit the number of children we have. We use contraceptives only when we consider that additional progeny will curtail, endanger, or affect the quality of our life, or adversely affect the lives of others we care about, or when a restriction is imposed and enforced, such as in China where more than one child per couple is made illegal and penalized.
4. It is precisely because life’s processes are basically chemical processes that we can treat illnesses with chemically synthesized drugs, and can chemically manipulate emotions and genes. (Indeed, genes themselves are simply chemical molecules—and not even very complex ones.)
5. Not all life on Earth depends directly upon sunlight, but all life requires an energy supply of some kind. As earlier noted, many simple life forms living near deep ocean hydrothermal vents or in subterranean rock crevices obtain their energy by chemosynthesis.
6. Attaching atoms to, or releasing atoms from, a molecular complex invariably results in the loss of some energy to the environment; thus the complex cannot simply reuse the same energy it has just released. (It would be a perpetual-motion machine were this not so.)
7. It is likely that this process is ongoing, continually occurring on Earth even today at sub-life levels in fluid environments of sufficient complexity. However, energy-enriched molecules, of any kind, living or dead, make excellent fodder for omnipresent bacteria and therefore would not survive very long.
8. Freeman Dyson, in Origins of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) hypothesized that life began twice; once as a metabolic (or energy-processing) entity, and once as a replicating entity, with the two forms later uniting.
I cannot understand how an entity could replicate without an energy-processing mechanism being involved. (A virus is a replicating entity, but (in many people’s opinion) it is not a living one. It has to control its host’s energy-exploiting mechanisms before it might be said to be living.)
9. See page 20 of Richard P. Feynman’s book, Six Easy Pieces (Reading Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995). Although based upon a series of lectures first presented in 1963, their originality still makes this book very enjoyable reading.
10. Of course, if the world was awash with food and there were few inhabitants, then competition need not be aggressive. Its denizens would still be “exploiting” the resources, but they would have no need to fight each other to gain a share of what is available, and the “less-able” would possibly survive and reproduce as often as the more-capable. This peaceful situation would change as the population sizes increased however, for life does not voluntarily restrict its own procreation.
11. At first glance, this statement may appear to be too sweeping. Indeed, some life forms cooperate symbiotically, and many never come in contact with one another. But, I would argue, symbiotic relationships essentially create single organisms out of two—both are needed to survive. And those who never contact each other still draw upon resources that either directly or indirectly (through growth and spreading, or the distribution of waste products [via movements in the surrounding environments]) would otherwise eventually supply energy to those at a distance.
12. This suggests a direct relationship between perceived population pressure and aggressive human behaviour.
13. I have searched many times for a better word than “exploit” to define what life does. Exploit is a harsh word, and conveys many negative images and feelings. But I can find no other word so descriptively accurate. (We will better understand why this is so as we continue.)
14. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 192-3.
15. Lawrence and Nohria, condensing work conducted by many into one comprehensive theory, state that humans are controlled by four drives: Acquire, Bond, Learn and Defend. This is too many, in my opinion. I think that just two drives can account for the behaviour of all species—Exploit and Reproduce. The compulsion to exploit, to me, contains Lawrence and Nohria’s concepts of Acquire, Defend (what one has acquired), and much of Learn (we learn to better exploit). The urge to reproduce is equivalent to their drive to Bond.
See Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria, Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 2002).
16. If it is life’s basic nature to exploit, then we would be foolish to ignore or deny this fact. Recognizing that life lives through exploiting allows us to explain much, and facilitates the correction of excesses when they occur. We do ourselves no favour by refuting the nature of reality, regardless of how unpalatable it may seem.
17. A billion years ago was near the end of the Proterozoic Eon, when bacteria, prokaryotes, eukaryotes and multicellular organisms existed in the oceans, but the lands were barren. See Chapter Eight for a little more detail.
18. This is why, to quote Ernst Haeckel (a German biologist, 1834-1919), “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” i.e., fetal development restates evolutionary history. Presumably, research will show gene expression successively turning on stored instructions in the same sequence as evolution changed the species. (This also suggests that, sooner or later, body structures become so burdened by their out-grown history that radical change—evolutionary surgery—occurs, and gene expression is turned off.)
19. The brain is a clear example of this. The cerebrum, considered the seat of intelligence where the brain’s most complex functions (i.e. problem solving) are carried out, is outermost. The cerebellum (which co-ordinates movements) and the medulla (which helps to maintain respiration and other involuntary functions) lie underneath, on either side of the thalamus (which directs all sensory signals—except smell sensations—to and from the brain). The hypothalamus (which regulates many basic body functions such as temperature control, sexual and emotional behaviour, urges to eat and sleep, and so on) lies near the centre of the brain. And at the core, the central brain stem carries out the most basic and primitive tasks—those of regulating heart rate, blood pressure, regurgitation and respiration, as well as conducting electrical signals to and from the body’s organs and systems. This construction demonstrates how one complex body structure, the brain, has been formed: modifications that proved useful to survival were outgrowths of earlier ones.
20. Brain imaging provides physical evidence that this occurs. As different portions of the brain control different body functions, imaging its pattern of electrical activity reveals which functions are being called upon. Using this technique, it has been found, for example, that the brains of violinists grow unusually high numbers of synaptic connections in the area which controls the finger movements of the left hand.
21. Applying new understanding may be as mundane as filling in a box on an IQ test sheet, as overlooked as recognizing a face in a crowd from an earlier chance meeting, or as practical as designing a bridge. Intelligence is expressed through actions that result from biochemical flows through neural links consciously formed by an animal.
22. And toward complexity, but its complexity will be that of the mind rather than that of the body. Humans are developing technology that will transform society, and this technology is becoming indispensable. Today we have instant messaging between places anywhere in the world. Tomorrow we will have the ability (via nanotechnology, and perhaps otherwise) to manipulate individual atoms and molecules. This will have immense consequences, affecting everything from genetics to space exploration. The tools and devices of the future will have to be created, used and maintained by minds well-versed in complex matters, a situation likely to create the conditions where mental complexity confers greater opportunities to survive and procreate.
Incorporating electronic circuits into the brain (already being performed to confer hearing and sight, with much more likely to take place within the next decade) will create a different, but possibly equally viable, kind of mental complexity.
23. Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, 675 and 677.
24. Gerald Feinberg, The Prometheus Project: Mankind’s search for long-range goals (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969), 147.
25. Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), xv and 174.
