The Grammar Of Being

By PETER MURRAY

The best thing to do in life, it is rightly said, is to know oneself first -- in order to know others.

It’s the only way we can address the vast complexities of daily social life. More so, because, we human beings do not constitute the entire biological universe!

We all know that we are only one of the species of millions now inhabiting our planet. We co-exist with organisms that are vastly different from ourselves.

It’s this understanding about life that has led us to think of life as a “linguistic trap” that could not possibly arise from plain observation. This also explains why Lynn Margulis, a natural scientist, presents a grand spectrum of life -- of both biological and intellectual variance.

Here is her model. There are microbes for which oxygen is an invite to doom. This is not all. You also meet others that feed on hydrogen and carbon dioxide without using energy from sunlight! You encounter bacteria exchanging genetic materials, as a way of preference, even after epochs of evolutionary separation. This is all, in its essence, a systemic work of art of the whole external face of Earth as a single mega-living system. Fascinating isn’t it?

To go back a bit, and fast-forward. If Charles Darwin tutored us all that life, in its sum total, descended from a single common ancestor, Margulis tells us of an amazing fact: not only have our own mammalian, nucleated cells alighted from ancient bacteria, they are also apparently a fusion of a host of different strains of bacteria!

Margulis’ idea is an outstanding departure from traditional biological tenets, yes. It is also, at the same time, a revolution of sorts -- the conception of a logical, yet courageous, explanation that human cells have most, if not all, of their DNA “installed” in a cellular nucleus.

Life is a most intricate material phenomenon. It shows the usual chemical and physical properties of matter, but with a twist. Beach sand, for instance, is usually silicon dioxide. So is the “heart” of a computer. Yet, a computer isn’t a pile of sand. Similarly, life is distinguished not by its chemical constituents, but by the behaviour of its chemicals. Life repairs, maintains, recreates, and outdoes itself. It is a surge of activity that not only applies to cells and animals, but also our Earth’s entire atmosphere.

In like manner, mind is an evolutionary phenomenon. In sufficiently expressive human beings, the process underlying living organisation makes itself manifest even outside of the body. Life is, therefore, a material process sifting and surfing over matter like a strange, slow wave. It is also a controlled, artistic anarchy -- a complex set of chemical reactions so dazzlingly complicated that more than eighty million years ago it produced the mammalian brain that now, in human form, composes love letters and uses silicon computers to calculate the temperature of matter at the Origin of the Universe.

Life is a part of the time and space continuum, too. We human beings are, therefore, not special, and independent, but part of a continuum of life encircling and embracing the globe.

This is not all. Researchers also tell us explicitly which kind of bacteria fused to form the original nucleated cells -- our cells. In so proposing, they now present a pioneering envelope: a case for an even earlier evolutionary fusion of bacteria species. They also convince us that such symbiotic origins of novel life forms are a tradition that emphasise co-operation, not just competition, in the evolutionary process.

In other words, this means being aware of our own existence, and also think exponentially about life’s diversity and evolution’s surplus.

Of a web of life that is so much under threat from ourselves.