We left the last part considering the very basic nature of action – how is it that we can do anything at all, such as lift a hand and turn a finger, let alone the deeper and more complex considerations of “see a target and throw a ball at it?”
Where has this all come from originally, this capacity for action which ultimately, as it would have to be, a capacity for communication between different parts of an organism? Godfrey-Smith suggests that it is in fact, even with some of the simplest and smallest forms of life, this already is demonstrated in a substantial capacity.
Even in the earliest work on E. coli, though, it seemed that something else was going on. They were also attracted to chemicals they could not eat….This may not sound like much, but it opens an important door. Once the same chemicals are being sensed and produced, there is the possibility of coordination between cells. We have reached the birth of social behavior
We do not usually think of clumps of bacteria as societies. And yet, in many ways, they are – even beings firmly without anything resembling a brain nonetheless have to survive through coordination. This might seem like spontaneous action, but it is spontaneity with purpose, and it can reveal itself in surprisingly complex behavior.
An example is quorum sensing. If a chemical is both produced and sensed by a particular kind of bacterium, it can be used by those bacteria to assess how many individuals of the same kind are around…Bacteria living inside a Hawaiian squid produce light by a chemical reaction, but only if enough other bacteria are around to join in. The bacteria control their illumination by detecting the local concentration of an “inducer” molecule, which is made by the bacteria and gives each individual a sense of how many potential light producers are around. As well as lighting up, the bacteria follow the rule that the more of this chemical you sense, the more you make…
When enough light is being produced, the squid who house the bacteria gain the benefit of camouflage. This is because they hunt at night, when moonlight would normally cast their body’s shadow down to predators below. Their internal lights cancel the shadow. Meanwhile, the bacteria seem to benefit from the hospitable living quarters provided by the squid.
One thing which I took away from this and which has very much stayed with me is the varying understanding of the concept of communication, which I think has very much in casual use is limited to rather human-centric forms: speech, words, perhaps the use of color such as flashing reds to indicate immediacy, danger, and attention. But communication is fundamentally the expression of information, and often it is below the conscious level: the fact that bacteria utilize an inducer molecule to indicate information to others, the methodology of electrical signals and hormones within our body(such as ghrelin to indicate hunger), or the vast array of olfactory phenomena utilized by many animals all serve to convey information. Communication is in seemingly everything and is affected meaningfully(however minutely) by innumerable factors – from the color of text that I’m using now, the size of the text, and the fact that it is text rather than, say, audio.
At any rate, it is good time to return from our digression and note something from the excerpt. The squid benefits from the bacteria as it allows it to project light and hide itself for better hunting, a form of aggressive action. Other actions often undertaken involve flight and evasion, a response to aggressive action.
Perhaps, then, the entire presence of an active neural system is initiated by the existence of this form of competition. Godfrey-Smith would argue that it is even more fundamental. Perhaps the very presence of bodies as we know of, is predicated by the beginning and existence of predation, from the development of what was once a peaceful world into one of a predatory world. From a world of mostly stationary filter feeders:
A more standard interpretation is that some Ediacarans, like Kimberella, were members of familiar animal groups, while other fossils represent abandoned evolutionary detours, together with ancient algae and other kinds of life. One theme that has emerged fairly consistently, though, is that the Ediacaran world was a rather peaceful one, a world largely without conflict and predation.
…But some of the most conspicuous forms of interaction between one organism and another do seem to be absent. In particular, there is no evidence of predation – no half-eaten animal remains. This was no sense a dog-eat-dog world. Instead, in a prhase coined by the American paleontologist Mark McMenamin, it seems ot have been the “Garden of Ediacara.”
Peaceful, as noted, might not be quite the right word – as much as it was one where the animals has little enough to do with each other. And so, they often seem to have little investment for anything that resembled senses, let alone the ability to make actions on those sense.
There are no large eyes, no antennae. Almost certainly they had some responsiveness to light and chemical races, but they made little investment, as far as we can tell, in this sort of machinery. There are also no claws, spikes or shells – no weapons, and no shields with which to fend weapons off. Their lives seem not to have been lives of conflict and complicated interaction; they certainly didn’t evolve the familiar tools used for in such interactions. It was a garden of relatively self-contained and self-possessed beings. Macarons that pass in the night.
With the rise of communication between living beings, comes also the rise of cooperation and competitiveness and murder for energy. And all of that requires a body. The first bodies, most likely resembles jellyfish with its radial symmetry. But then, an innovation happened.
But humans, fish, octopuses, ants and earthworms are all bilaterians, or bilateral symmetrical animals. We have a front and a back, and hence a left and a right, as well as a top and a bottom.
It was a very exciting form – well, perhaps not at first, looking something a bit like the sad little creature on the right. As Godfrey-Smith notes:
I have given the animal eyespots on each side of its “head,” though this is controversial (and those eyes are exaggerated in the picture— they would probably have been tiny). I am being generous to the early bilaterians.
It’s not much to look at, and yet it seems to have led to an explosion of activity – and life, for after the Garden of Ediacara comes the Cambrian Age, or as it is sometimes called the Cambrian Explosion for the sudden increase in life and capability.
Fundamentally, the existence of a bilateral body shape is designed for mobility, and with mobility comes the opportunities to pursue, and to evade pursue. We see the results in the fossil record. There becomes much more communication – much more interaction with other animals, and a great deal of it is positioned around the mortal.
Behavior became directed on other animals— watching, seizing, and evading. From early in the Cambrian we see fossils that display the machinery of these interactions: eyes, claws, antennae. These animals also have obvious marks of mobility: legs and fins. Legs and fins don’t necessarily show that one animal was interacting with others. Claws, in contrast, have little ambiguity.
Claws are not, as one might suggest, for cuddling. And in a time of claws, comes the need for actions that require a coordinated response, and ultimately, develops a thing which could be called a mind.
In the Ediacaran, other animals might be there around you, without being especially relevant. In the Cambrian, each animal becomes an important part of the environment of others. This entanglement of one life in another, and its evolutionary consequences, is due to behavior and the mechanisms controlling it. From this point on, the mind evolved in response to other minds.
When I say that, you might reply that the term “mind” is out of place. In this chapter, I won’t argue with that. Fine. What is the case, though, is that the senses, the nervous systems, and the behaviors of each animal began to evolve in response to the senses, nervous systems, and behaviors of others. The actions of one animal created opportunities for and demands on others. If a yard-long, fast-swimming anomalocarid is swooping down toward you, like a giant predatory cockroach with two grasping appendages on its head poised and ready, it’s a very good thing to know, somehow, that this is happening, and to take appropriate action.
Perhaps the appropriate action here is screaming.
In this post, we’ve considered the beginnings of communication and interaction, from how simple bacteria organize into societies to beam light, and how communication can mean may kinds of mortal peril and predatory consumption, and yet how this is, in many ways, the birth of the body and the birth of the body leads to the birth of the mind.
And when they coordinate – with senses that feel danger or opportunity, neurons that coordinate parts of the body to inflict or mitigate from damage, and with behavior to maximize the possibilities of both, we find ourselves soon with animals with complex active bodies. We will explore that in Part 3.
And yet, before we leave here, I want to explore yet one more notion inspired by this combined awareness of senses, instincts, behavior, muscles, neurons, and so on – with humans, surely, we have added more tools into mix, with things like culture and memetic spread of information.
To really think about this, we have to ask more questions. What is an organism, a single being? A cell? A human being is made of many cells. A group of genetically related cells? A human being contains a host of symbiotic bacteria on our skin and significantly in our guts, and once argued almost that the human body has more foreign life than native life. The definitions, held to a strict limit, because ever more difficult, and the boundaries ever more fuzzy.
I will challenge the above notion once more, inspired by the brilliant E.O. Wilson and his concepts of sociobiology. If humans are made of a collection of cells, foreign and native and is an ecosystem, then society is an ecosystem made up of human and informational and technological elements, and each form of society – a city, a nation, and so on – could be seem as a kind of of synthetic organism that communicates with others for its continued existence. And as we observed above, communication is interaction and interaction is often mortal.
War is, then, if not inevitable, than perhaps nonetheless an essential engine of innovation – the mechanism that both consumes lives and if one is to argue that innovation is essentially an invaluable form of existence, the mechanism that creates life.
Because as the Cambrian creatures discovered, claws create life. Claws might not cuddle and they may not create eggs, but in choosing who is slain and who is slaying, by influencing the flows of energy, they very much do create life.
