Gaia's evil twin

(This is a repost of comments I recently made in New Scientist online.)

Life Finds A Way

Tue Jun 23 23:52:42 BST 2009 by Wade Schuette

I read with interest Peter Ward's article "Gaia's evil twin" (New Scientist, 20 June 2009, p28-31), but perhaps rather than pursuing its own demise, life is on a hard path to survival.

Life forms collectively pool forces to create larger life forms with a type of life of their own -- cells comprising "humans", or humans (and computers) comprising corporations.

The elimination of an entire species could be simply refocusing energy on a stronger direction - good for the whole but rather hard on the parts.

If that process is to continue indefinitely, meta-life must expand off the Earth. At that point, loss of the Earth is akin to leaving behind the cocoon as higher life emerges and departs.

Indeed, we see today the destruction of our human habitat by the indifferent actions of today's meta-life forms: corporations and governments. As many in the artificial life community have warned, we may be the first species to actively create our replacement.

Incidentally, this model incorporates the three variants of the Gaia hypothesis if the negative feedback episodes are seen as part of optimizing the habitat -- but optimizing it for the evolution of new meta-life, not for the survival of the legacy actors.

=====

Incidentally, whether the Earth is a super-organism or not, I'd say it's "unscientific" to assert that it could not ever become so, based on the fact that said design pattern works for the super-organism of cells we call "humans".

Is there some physical law I'm unaware of that would prohibit a super-organism from reaching that scale?

Or is it that scientists cannot bear the thought of super-organisms far above the scale of humans, because that is getting dangerously close to the core assertion of religions?

It took a long time for the concept of "microbes" to be accepted, and "macrobes" may be similarly disdained because they make us feel less important, despite the fact that there is increasing evidence that humans are, psychologically and therefore physiologically, far more tied into each other than "we" thought.

I can't accept the idea that "science" must be restricted to only looking "down" on things, which seems more like a definition of "ego".

Indeed, if we want things to look up, perhaps we should be calibrating scientific tools for looking upwards with more seriousness. The current tool-set for detecting "culture" or "social capital" or interlocking feedback control loops is far to primitive. Besides, science should not have taboo subjects.

============================

Interesting speculations along this line are at:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/10/evidence_of_a_g.php

Since the term "life" is so overwhelmed with meanings, I prefer the term "MAWBA", which I define as something that "May As Well Be Alive", in that it consumes energy, is goal-seeking, can replicate itself, etc. This avoids a linguistic and religious battle over what constitutes "life" and "when" it begins, etc.

We are totally short of words to even describe diffuse intelligence, let alone diffuse interlocking control loops necessary for MAWBA.

Do a Blogger Search in this weblog above on the term "mawba" to find my other posts along these lines.