Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science by Dorion Sagan Read Free Book Online Page B

history also reflects the larger thermo-cosmic evolutionary situation in which we are embedded. I live in a world in my head in the world, said Paul Valéry. We dwell in a nature circumscribed by culture inside nature. Whether that second nature is also inside culture I’ll leave for you to decide.
    I WANT TO MENTION quickly what I think is the basis of the ethical problem of life on Earth. It is twofold. First, sensing, sensation, including the avoidance cues of pain, which we may assume is among the oldest phenomenologically detectable signals, correlates with living beings. Second, Earth is essentially a materially closed thermodynamic system. Like other natural complex thermodynamic systems, material cycles as energy flows, and the system, if possible, grows to use up available resources. Microbes have mastered complete recycling of chemical elements in ecosystems. But if we look at evolutionary history, there comes a time when organisms developed the potential to consider themselves individual selves. I would provisionally locate this potential chronologically with the Ediacaran fauna, among the first organisms to have heads. These beings lived earlier than the trilobites. They may not have been animals at all, but symbiotic organisms living with algae in their tissues. But either they or the animals that followed them recognized each other as gradients. This set up an ethical crisis. Animals not only devour each other—“meat” is the name of that gradient—but their perception and intelligence allowed them to hunt. This is the same awareness that would ultimately allow us to know we harm others to feed, and that someday we will die.
    Thus somewhere in the evolutionary history of animals, after they diverged from fungi some seven hundred million years ago—and according to James Watson, 40 percent of yeast proteins are still homologous to ours—there came a point where, with their sensory organs concentrated at one end, they recognized their fellows as a rich energy gradient. Of course they didn’t at first realize, as we vegetarian, vegan, Jainist, and pepperoni pizza eaters do, that those fellows were feeling beings like themselves. But this primordial carnophagy, as Derrida calls it, set up the conditions for an ethical crisis from which we still have not recovered.
    We come from a long line of naturally self-centered ancestors. As Alan Watts, the greatest popularizer of Eastern philosophy we have ever had in the West, puts it, the “shape alone is stable. The substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other.” The tubes “put things in at one end and let them out at the other. . . . [This] both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. [But this part isn’t true, as I will explain.] So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube.”
    All this seems “marvelously futile,” says Watts, adding that it is “more marvelous than futile.” 3 Watts is right, although it is actually a bit worse from an ethical standpoint because his assumption that the tubes must wear out turns out to be wrong. In fact, they are killed off by what we could call an “inside job”: multiple