Chapter 26 5.4 Rocks are slow-paced life

Russian geologist Vladimir Vernadsky was the first to clearly put forward an epoch-making point of view-life directly shaped the physical body of the earth.He summarizes the billions of life forms on earth and considers their collective impact on the earth's material resources. In 1926, he published a book, which called this grand resource system "biosphere" (in fact, Edward Seuss had also coined this term a few years earlier), and set out to conduct a quantitative assessment of the biosphere in the book.The book, The Biosphere, was only recently translated into English. Vernadsky’s explicit comparison of life to a chameleon on a stone mirror offends both sides.He enraged biologists by viewing the biosphere, the home of living organisms, as a gigantic chemical factory.In his view, plants and animals acted as temporary chemical containers in the flow of minerals around the world. "Living organisms are but a special species of rock . . . rocks that are at once ancient and eternally young," Vernadsky wrote.Living organisms are delicate, fragile shells that store these minerals.He once said of the migration and movement of animals, "The purpose of animals is to help the wind and waves stir the fermenting biosphere."

At the same time, Vernadsky's view of rocks as half-lived has aroused strong dissatisfaction among geologists.Since each rock originates from life, their constant interaction with living organisms suggests that rocks are the slowest moving part of life, he said.The mountains, the water in the ocean, and the air in the sky are all very slow-paced life.Geologists, of course, want to discourage this overt mystical view. Two whimsical theories combined into a beautiful and symmetrical system.Life is constantly renewing minerals, and minerals are slow-paced life.They form two sides of a coin.The two sides of the equation cannot be solved precisely; they belong to the same system: lizard/mirror, plant/insect, rock/life, and the contemporary human/machine system.The organism is the environment, and the environment is the organism.

This ancient and sacred concept has existed in the field of fringe science for at least hundreds of years.Many evolutionary biologists of the nineteenth century, such as Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and, of course, Darwin, had an intuitive understanding of this—the physical environment shapes organisms, and organisms shape their behavior. environment.In the long run, the environment is the living things, and the living things are the environment.Alfred Lotka, an early theoretical biologist, wrote in 1925: "What evolves is not just organisms or species, but the whole system of species plus environment. The two are inseparable." Evolving life and The planets constitute a co-evolving overall system, just like the mirror dance of chameleons.

Vernadsky believed that if life were to disappear from the earth, not only would the earth itself sink to a "chemically stable" equilibrium, but those sedimentary clay layers, limestone caves, ore in mines, chalky cliffs, And the characteristic structures that we see as the Earth's landscape will also fade away. "Life is not an accidental external evolution on the surface of the earth. On the contrary, it is intimately connected with the tectonics of the earth's crust," Walnadsky wrote in 1929. "Without life, the face of the earth would lose expression and become as dull as the moon."

Thirty years later, the free thinker James Lovelock analyzed other planets through astronomical telescopes and came to the same conclusion. "Organisms simply cannot 'adapt' to a lifeless world governed only by physics and chemistry. They live in a world made of the breath and bones of their ancestors, which they continue to sustain today." Lovelock's Knowledge of the Early Earth More comprehensive than Vernadsky, and a slightly better understanding of the circulation patterns of gases and matter on Earth.All this leads him to a very serious conclusion: "The air we breathe, and the oceans and rocks, all are either the direct product of living organisms, or are greatly altered by their presence. .”

The French natural philosopher Jean-Baptiste Lamarck predicted this remarkable conclusion as early as 1800, when he had even less information on planetary dynamics than Vernadsky.As a biologist, Lamarck was on par with Darwin.He, not Darwin, was the real discoverer of the theory of evolution.Lamarck's failure to get the credit he deserves is partly because he relied too much on intuition rather than the detailed illustrations that modern science favors.Lamarck deduced the biosphere intuitively and presciently.But because there was not a shred of scientific support at the time, Lamarck's remarks were not influential. In 1802 he wrote: "All the composite minerals which constitute the crust of the earth, in the form of single aggregates, ore-bodies, rock formations, etc., and the lowlands, hills, valleys, and mountains formed therefrom, have lived on the surface of the earth unique products of plants and animals."

The audacious claims of Lamarck, Vernadsky, and Lovelock's ilk may seem absurd at first glance, but they make sense in the context of horizontal causality: everything around us as far as we can see—the snowy The Himalayas, the deep seas from east to west, the rolling hills, the dark canyons of the desert, the delightful valleys—they are as much a product of life as the beehive. Lovelock kept peering into the mirror and found that it was almost a bottomless abyss.In the following years, as he carefully observed the biosphere, he included more complex phenomena in the list of life products.A few examples: Marine plankton release a gas (dimethyl sulfide) that oxidizes to produce submicroscopic sulfate aerosols that form condensation nuclei where water droplets coalesce in clouds.In this way, even clouds and rain are produced by the activities of living things.Summer thunderstorms may be life itself transformed into rain.Some research has suggested that the nuclei of most snow crystals may be decaying plant, bacterial, or fungal spores; thus, perhaps the majority of snow is triggered by life.Only a very small number of people can escape the imprint of life. "Maybe the inner core of our planet isn't immune to life, but I don't think that's a plausible assumption," Lovelock said.

“Life is the most powerful geological force,” Vernadsky asserted, “and it evolves with time.” The more life there is, the greater its physical power.Human beings further strengthen life.We use fossil energy to implant life into machines.Our entire manufacturing infrastructure—like an extension of our own bodies—becomes part of a wider, global-scale life.Carbon dioxide from our industries enters the atmosphere, changing the composition of the global atmosphere, and our man-made mechanical realms become part of life on Earth.Jonathan Weiner was able to say with certainty when he wrote "The Next Hundred Years": "The Industrial Revolution is a thrilling geological event." If rocks are slow-paced life, then our machines are relatively fast-paced slow s life.

It is an old and affectionate saying to compare the earth to mother.But comparing the Earth to a mechanical device is difficult to accept.Vernadsky's view is very close to Lovelock's realization that Earth's biosphere exhibits a law that goes beyond chemical equilibrium.Vernadsky noted that "organisms exhibit a self-managing property" and that the biosphere appeared to be self-managing, but he did not go any further because a key concept—the self-management of a purely mechanical process—was has not yet appeared.How can a mere machine control itself? We now know that self-control and self-management are not unique magical elements of life, because we have created machines that are capable of self-control and self-management.In fact, control and intention are purely logical processes, and they can arise in any sufficiently complex medium, including iron gears and levers, and even more complex chemical pathways.If thermostats and steam engines were capable of self-regulation, it wouldn't be so outlandish to think that a planet could evolve such elegant feedback loops.

Lovelock brings an engineer's sensibility to his analysis of Mother Earth.He's been a tinkerer, an inventor, a patent holder, and he's worked for NASA, the largest engineering company of all time. In 1972, Lovelock proposed the hypothesis of an autonomous representation of the Earth.He writes: "The collection of all life forms on Earth, from giant whales to bacteria, from oak trees to seaweeds, can be regarded as a single life, which can skillfully manipulate the earth's atmosphere to meet all its needs. It also has far more power and energy than its parts." Lovelock dubbed this idea Gaia, and published it for scientific critique in 1972, along with microbiologist Lynn Majliss."Gaia is a bit stronger than coevolution," at least when biologists use the term, Lovelock said.

A pair of creatures co-evolving in an ever-escalating arms race that competes with each other seems to be sliding into an abyss of out-of-control; while a pair of symbionts who love each other and only have eyes for each other seem to be stuck in stagnant solipsism.But Lovelock believes that if there is a big net full of co-evolutionary motives, which envelops all living things and makes them inescapable, living things create the substrate they need to survive, and the substrate creates the living things in it, this co-evolutionary The network then expands around until it becomes a self-sufficient, self-controlled closed loop.The "forced cooperation" of Ehrlich's co-evolutionary theory—whether as enemies or as partners—not only fosters spontaneous cohesion from all sides, but this cohesion effectively mediates its own extreme values ​​in search of its own survival.The relationship of solidarity reflected in the co-evolutionary environment of creatures on a global scale is what Lovelock refers to as Gaia. Many biologists (including Paul Ehrlich) dislike the idea of ​​Gaia because Lovelock expands the definition of life without their permission.He unilaterally enlarged the range of life to have a dominant mechanical organ.In short, this solid planet became the "largest form of life" we know of.It's a monster: 99.9 percent rock, lots of water, a little air, and wrapped in a thin green membrane that surrounds it. However, if the earth is reduced to the size of bacteria and observed under a high-power microscope, can it be more strange than viruses?Gaia is there, a blue sphere under the strong light, absorbing energy, adjusting the internal state, avoiding various disturbances, and becoming more and more complicated, ready to transform another planet at the first opportunity. Later, Lovelock dropped the earlier claim that Gaia was or behaved like an organism, but he reserved the opinion that Gaia was indeed a system with living characteristics.It is a living system.It is a living system, whether or not it has all the properties an organism needs. Even though Gaia is composed of many purely mechanical circuits, that should not stop us from labeling it life.After all, cells are largely chemical cycles; some diatoms in the ocean are just lifeless calcium crystals; trees are hardened sap.But they are all still living organisms. Gaia is a whole with boundaries.As a living system, its inanimate mechanical components are also part of its life."Nowhere on Earth's surface is there a clear distinction between living and nonliving matter," Lovelock said. "From the physical environment of rocks and atmosphere to living cells, it's just different levels of life intensity." On the boundaries of Gaia—either in the thin top of the atmosphere, or in the hot core of the Earth—the impact of life will recede.But no one can say exactly where that border is—if it exists at all.