Nature
This note discusses the concept of nature, especially human interpretations and prejudices about it.
Myths and Misunderstandings
- Nature goes beyond safe thresholds, at least locally. "all animals tend to multiply beyond their means of subsistence", in The Descent of Man.
- Suffering
Properties of Nature
Misuse. Darwin on structurally similar creatures having very different habits in nature. Woodpeckers with no trees and geese that never swim.
Opportunism and the lack of optimality. Many organs are used for more than one function in some species as the process is still in transition. Some organs get completely repurposed like bladder in fishes into lungs (Darwin) As an example of opportunism. So our food can fall into lungs by mistake. In insects organs for respiration were converted into the organs for flight.
Redundancy (we can see this as a negative and a positive). Nature is redundant in that it produces multiple solutions for the same problem. Eg pollination in plants. No solution is optimal and they are in competition. Darwin
Greed. The purpose of all living creatures is to multiply to occupy all liveable space. So nature is greedy. Darwin.
Lack of Innovation. Nature is Prodigal in Variety, though Niggard in Innovation. Henri Milne-Edwards Both of these naturalists were struck by the lack of dramatic innovation in the evolution of living things, and the preponderance of minimal variation and refinement of traits across species and time.
Natura non facit saltum nature does not jump
Actually, it is not true that nature does not jump. Consider the puncture equilibrium theory, consider horizontal gene transfer and rapid development of antibiotic resistance, consider the jump from prokaryotes to eukaryotes with their mitochondria, etc. Ribosome as an invasive organism in endosymbiosis.
Wastefulness. Modifications of structure can be useful to organisms or their progenitors and thus wasteful. Darwin in the chapter on difficulties.
Out of date. Many structures have no direct relationship to the current habits of life. Darwin.
Beauty. Sense of beauty (read: arbitrary preferences). Darwin. Similar sense of beauty runs through the whole of animal kingdom. Butterflies, birds sexual reproduction.
Satisficing at the local level. Darwin. Natural selection will never produce absolute perfection. Just enough to be on part with the local context.
Lack of perfection. If our reason leads us to admire with enthusiasm a multitude of inimitable contrivances in nature, this same reason tells us, though we may easily err on both sides, that some other contrivances are less perfect.
Contradictions and the lack of harmony. One might say that nature has taken delight in accumulating contradictions in order to remove all foundation from the theory of a pre-existing harmony between the external and internal worlds. Helmholtz in Darwin
More on satisficing. Nature tends only to make each organic being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitants of the same country with which it comes into competition.
Wilderness. Darwin defines wildness as the fear of men. Big birds are wilder because they have been hunted more.
Darwin: uniform conditions of life are detrimental to any species. So, how can people preserve species via conservation?
Extinction. Permanence of extinction. Darwin: when a group disappears it does not reappear for the line of descent has been broken.
Darwin. Most recent forms are also the most improved. Really? What about interruptions in the cone? But if so, do people want to stop the evolution? Is this possible? How? Can only parts of be stopped? Especially as under special circumstances the changes are very quick. In artificial breeding a couple of generations of breeders makes for a strong change. In unconscious breeding some hundreds of years. Natural evolution is slower but what of it remains natural? Also, as conditions change would not the vectors of improvement also change possibly pointing into the opposite directions to those from before in some, possibly rare, cases. Also, looking at how easily some species become very problematic pests in new locations, maybe these are not that much improvements but idiosyncrasies responding to the local conditions? Darwin says that the species from the areas with more competition will likely to dominate because more improved, like from large continents etc.
Darwin. Atavistic or vestigial appendages. Hooks on seeds of plants living on the islands with no mammals. Shrivelled wings of some insular beetles. "For instance, in certain islands not tenanted by mammals, some of the endemic plants have beautifully hooked seeds; yet few relations are more striking than the adaptation of hooked seeds for transportal by the wool and fur of quadrupeds. This case presents no difficulty on my view, for a hooked seed might be transported to an island by some other means; and the plant then becoming slightly modified, but still retaining its hooked seeds, would form an endemic species, having as useless an appendage as any rudimentary organ, for instance, as the shrivelled wings under the soldered elytra of many insular beetles." Rudimentary atrophied
Rudimentary, Atrophied, and Aborted Organs
Darwin "ORGANS or parts in this strange condition, bearing the plain stamp of inutility, are extremely common, or even general, throughout nature. It would be impossible to name one of the higher animals in which some part or other is not in a rudimentary condition. In the mammalia, for instance, the males possess rudimentary mammæ; in snakes one lobe of the lungs is rudimentary; in birds the “bastard-wing” may safely be considered as a rudimentary digit, and in some species the whole wing is so far rudimentary that it cannot be used for flight. What can be more curious than the presence of teeth in fœtal whales, which when grown up have not a tooth in their heads; or the teeth, which never cut through the gums, in the upper jaws of unborn calves?"
Mundanity. No need to wonder at imperfections. Darwin. The current moment is unlikely to be unique in history. So, how can we presume that it is the perfect balance?
Impermanence. Darwin on distant futurity. "Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups within each class, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length."
The life on Earth seems opposite to the idea of Gaia, all extinctions appear to be self-induced, according to the current state of evidence, even the meteor that killed the dinosaurs seems to have struck an already struggling ecosystem. Thus, life is tinkering and inventive but not self-supporting or self-regulating. With time it can recover and fill in the opportunity spaces. However, with losses, inefficiencies, etc.
Bjornerud, Marcia. Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.
Superorganism
For bacteria, human life is deep time.
Compound terms:
- Holobiont: “permanent coexistence of various bionts”
- Hologenome: “hologenome is the sum of the genetic information of the host and its microbiota”
- Holobiome: “the sum total of the component genomes in a eukaryotic organism; it comprises the genome of an individual member of a given taxon (the host genome) and the microbiome (the genomes of the symbiotic microbiota)”
Lamża, Łukasz. ‘Superorganisms of the Protist Kingdom: A New Level of Biological Organization’. Foundations of Science 26, no. 2 (2021): 281–300. https://doi.org/10/gn389t.
A foundational book on the topic: bacteria are all one organism.
Sonea, Sorin, and Maurice Panisset. A New Bacteriology. 1980. Reprint, Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1983.
References
On horizontal gene transfer and the non-reality of the tree of tree of life: Species, individuals and the tree are all not unitary.
Quammen, David. The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.
Doolittle, W. Ford. ‘Phylogenetic Classification and the Universal Tree’. Science, 25 June 1999. https://doi.org/10/fjvz76.
Castree, Noel. Making Sense of Nature. London: Routledge, 2013.
Ducarme, Frédéric, and Denis Couvet. ‘What Does “Nature” Mean?’ Palgrave Communications 6, no. 1 (2020): 14. https://doi.org/10/ghd6kb.
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