Lynn Margulis

Discussion

William Irwin Thompson:

"(In the end the person whose work) lifted me up to a new Gaian understanding of the planetary dynamics of microbial life was Lynn Margulis. Margulis is the Distinguished University Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; along with Jim Lovelock, she is the author of the Gaia theory of the evolution of life on Earth. She is renowned for her book Symbiosis in Cell EvoLution, and Freeman Dyson, in his book on the origins of life, calls her one of biology's immortals.

So sensitized have I been by Margulis's work that I now can appreciate how bacteria have been treated like invisible serfs working in the fields while we humans dined in the manor house and talked about the evolution of consciousness as if it were only about the hominization of the primates and the emergence of the human brain. But brains are made up of neurons, and when Margulis looks at the long axons attached to neurons, or at mitotic spindles transporting genes in cellular division, or at spermatozoa attaching themselves to ova, she sees a variant of the biological architecture of the attachment of the spirochete to the larger cell of the protist. So let us begin our story of the evolution of consciousness with the spirochete — that simple helix-shaped bacterium that has neither tail nor head. Margulis has a general theory of evolution in which these ancient bacteria are seen as fundamental building blocks of symbiotic evolution. Bacteria are cells without nuclei, or prokaryotes; the cells with nuclei, the eukaryotes, came later on down the line of evolution and were the product of an evolutionary symbiosis that Margulis has helped us to understand. The simple rods of the bacterial spirochete that pulse in a wavelike motion attach themselves to the surface of larger cells, as well as to the insides of larger cells with a nucleus to become flagellating engines of motion. Margulis is a scientific visionary, and her theory is that this process of spirochete attachment and incorporation is a very general process that branched out in many directions, from the propellant for the protist to the fertilization of the ovum, and even to the development of the long axon attached to the neuron. Her theory is an imaginative vision of the architecture of life, and I was fascinated with it the very first time she described it to me. At that time, I was living in Bern, Switzerland, and she came to pay a visit to me on her way to a scientific conference in Basel. Appropriately for these studies of morphogenesis and life, she was staying in a hotel where Goethe once spent the night — down the street from where Einstein lived when he was working on his Special Theory of Relativity. Of course, I didn't understand Margulis's theory at first, and her quick moves from spirochetes to mitotic spindles to axons was confusing to me. But later when I saw her films of bacteria at the Lindisfarne Fellows meeting in Perugia, Italy, I got it. I saw the rodlike bacteria go "boing!" —like a plucked guitar string —in the films that she showed, and then something went "boing! " in my own imagination as the legendary dying words of Pythagoras popped into my head: "Study the monochord." The image that flashed into my mind was the statue of Pythagoras from the royal portal at the cathedral of Chartres, where we see Pythagoras hunched over in his study of the monochord. Pythagoras studied the monochord to work out the system of ratios and proportions between the length of the string and change in pitch. The physical matter was a catgut string, but the dynamical properties were mathematical. Similarly, in Margulis's films of spirochetes and protists, one begins to see beautiful corkscrew spirals as all the spirochetes attached to the protist begin to synchronize their flagellations. These patterns are what now are called, in the new sciences of complexity, "emergent properties," or examples of "self-organization from noise." Each single spirochete beating against the spirochete next to it knocks about randomly until the incoherence begins to knock itself into patterns, to entrain synchronization, and then these emergent corkscrew spirals bring forth another emergent property of propelling the nutrients in the environment down along the surface of the protist toward its mouth. In the case of the protist Mixotrycha paradoxa — the protist that lives in the hindgut of the termite — this symbiotic arrangement is critical because the protist breaks down cellulose that is indigestible to the termite into an acetate that the termite can digest. So the spiraling corkscrew motion of the thousands of spirochetes attached to the surface of the protist is a beautiful example of patterns of self-organization from noise, and these patterns of spiraling motion are as mathematical as they are material. In the words of the title of Maria Muldaur's song: "It ain't the meat, it's the motion."

Margulis's synthetic theory shows how these spirochetes and other tiny bacterium that once swam at large were absorbed into the living architecture of larger cells. From the wild, unorganized, noisy behavior of bacteria, self- organization began to emerge, and the hitherto free-ranging bacterium became an organelle within a larger cell. Organelles are critters such as mitochondria and chloroplasts. Margulis did all this work in the late 1970s and 1980s, and although it was repeatedly ignored or rejected by her colleagues, it was prophetic of studies of self-organization that were to follow by other scientists such as Manfred Eigen, Francisco Varela, and Stuart Kauffman.

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Now, to understand what all this has to do with the evolution of consciousness, we need to appreciate how large and complex notions like "mind" or "consciousness" are built up out of simple reactions, such as the "attending" of the spirochete to a presence. It is helpful to come to an edge so that one can distinguish between what is mind and what is not. So in taking awareness down to this fundamental level of the form of the first distinction, this primitive reactivity between the nondifferentiated ends of the spirochete, we come to an appreciation of the nature of "form" itself. Buddha did the same thing when he tried to approach an under standing of mind and consciousness. He sat down under the tree and began to perform an archaeological excavation of consciousness in which he stripped layer after layer of mind until he came to the biological bedrock that came before human settlement. Only in Buddha's case, he did not use the word for "layer," but chose instead to use the word skandha, which means "heap" or "pile" or "aggregate." Buddha found that there were five of these aggregates, or skandhas, as one moved downward from complex to fundamental, they were: forms, feelings, perceptions, dispositional attitudes, and consciousness."

(https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Coming_Into_Being)