Cosmic Gnome
2009-05-27 21:22:05 UTC
Life on earth is doomed, according to the biologist Peter Ward in his new
book The Medea Hypothesis. This book is meant to be polemical and
provocative; I lack the knowledge to evaluate its particular scientific
claims. But just as a thought experiment, it is bracing.
Ward's book is a critique of the quite popular Gaia Hypothesis, originally
developed by James Lovelock, which claims that the Earth as a whole, with
all its biomass, constitutes an emergent order, a self-organizing system,
that maintains the whole planet - its climate, the chemical constitution of
the atmosphere and the seas, etc. - in a state that is favorable to the
continued flourishing of life. Essentially the Gaia Hypothesis sees the
world as a system in homeostatic equilibrium - in much the same ways that
individual cells or organisms are self-maintaining, homeostatic systems.
Gaia is cybernetically, or autopoietically, self-regulating system:
continual feedback, among organisms and their environments, keeps the air
temperature, the salinity of the sea, the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, etc., within the limits that are necessary for the continued
flourishing of life.
Ward's Medea Hypothesis directly contests all these claims. According to
Ward, the ecosphere is not homeostatic or self-regulating; to the contrary,
it is continually being driven by positive feedback mechanisms to
unsustainable extremes. Most of the mass extinction events in the fossil
record, Ward says, were caused by out-of-control life processes - rather
than by an external interruption of such processes, such as the giant meteor
hit which supposedly led to the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of
the Mesozoic. The great Permian extinction, for instance - the most
catastrophic of which we have knowledge, in which 90% of all species, and
99% of all living beings, were destroyed - was caused by "blooms of sulfur
bacteria in the seas," which flourished due to greenhouse heating and
poisoned the oceans and the atmospheres with increased concentrations of
hydrogen sulfide, which is extremely toxic.
More generally, Ward claims that life processes have destabilizing effects,
rather than homeostatic ones, upon the very environment that they rely upon
for survival. This is largely because of the Malthusian basis of natural
selection. Traits that give any organism a selective advantage over its
rivals will spread through the gene pool, unless and until they overwhelm
the environment and reach the limits of its carrying capacity. An organism
that is too successful will ultimately suffer a crash from overpopulation,
depletion of resources, and so on. The success of sulfur bacteria means the
poisoning of all other organisms; or, to give another example, the rise of
photosynthetic organisms 2 billion years ago poisoned and killed the
then-dominant anaerobic microbes that had composed the overwhelming majority
of life-forms up to that time.
Now, biologists in recent years have given careful attention to the
evolution of cooperation and altruism as means of averting these dangers.
For instance, in an environment of cooperating organisms, a cheater will
outperform the cooperators, and through natural selection will eventually
drive them into extinction, thus leading to an environment of cheaters who
no longer have access to the benefits for all of cooperation. But this
prospect can be averted, and altruism can be maintained within a group, if
the cooperators evolve mechanisms to detect, and punish or otherwise
discipline, the cheaters. Scenarios like this have led to something of a
revival of the once-discredited notion of "group selection" (a group all of
whose members benefit from cooperation will be able to outperform a group
dominated by cheaters).
Be that as it may, Ward does not see any evidence that cooperation or
altruism can evolve on a meta-, or planetary, level. He argues,
counter-intuitively but with impressive statistical analyses, that in fact
the total biomass, as well as the diversity of species, has been in decline
ever since the Cambrian explosion. And he suggests that life on Earth is
doomed to extinction long before the heating and expansion of the sun make
the Earth too hot to live on. The depletion of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, leading to the extinction of all plant life, the decline of
atmospheric oxygen, the consequent extinction of all animal life, and
finally the evaporation and loss to outer space of the oceans, could happen
as little as 100 million to 500 million years from now - a span far less
than the 1.5 billion or 2 billion years we have before the sun roasts the
planet to a cinder. The Earth will end up much like either Venus or Mars -
both of which initially had conditions that were favorable to the origin and
sustenance of life, but no longer do (in this regard, it would be quite
interesting if we were to discover, as has often been hypothesized, that
Mars once did have life but no longer does).
Now, even 100 million years from now seems too far off in the future for us
to worry about today. And, as Ward points out, our current problems - for
the next century or so - have to do with too much carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, even if ultimately the Earth will die from too little.
Nonetheless (and regardless of whether or not the book's arguments stand up
in their scientific details, which is something, as I already said, that I
am unable to judge), Ward's replacement of Gaia (the good mother Earth) with
Medea (the ultimate bad mother, who murdered her own children) makes an
important point. In critiquing the Gaia Hypothesis, it is really questioning
our contemporary faith in self-organizing processes and systems.
I use "faith" here in as strong a sense as possible. The widespread
contemporary belief in "self-organization" is almost religious in its
intensity. We tend not to believe any more in the Enlightenment myth (as it
seems to us now) of rationality and progress. We are skeptical of any sort
of "progress" aside from technological innovation and improvement; and we no
longer believe in the power of Reason to dispel superstition and to make
plans for human betterment. The dominant ideology in these (still, despite
the economic crisis) neoliberal times denounces any sort of rational
planning as "utopian" and thereby "totalitarian," an effort to impose the
will on matter that absolutely resists it. This also entails a rejection of
"grand narratives" (as Lyotard said in the 1980s), and an overall sense that
"unintended consequences" make all willful and determinate action futile.
Instead, we turn to "self-organization" as something that will save us. The
anarchist left puts its faith in self-organizing movements of dissidence and
protest, with the (non-)goal being a spontaneously self-organized
cooperative society. Right wing libertarians, meanwhile, see the "free
market" as the realm of emergent, spontaneous, self-organized solutions to
all problems, and blame disasters like the Great Depression of the 1930s,
and the current Depression as well, on government "interference" with the
(allegedly otherwise self-equilibrating) market mechanism. Network theory, a
hot new discipline where mathematics intersects with sociology, looks at the
Internet and other complex networks as powerfully self-organizing systems,
both generating and managing complexity out of a few simple rules. The brain
is described, in connectionist accounts, as a self-organizing system
emerging from chaos; today we try to build self-learning and self-organizing
robots and artificial intelligences, instead of ones that are determined in
advance by fixed rules. "Genetic algorithms" are used to make better
software; Brian Eno devises algorithms for self-generating music. Maturana
and Varela's autopoiesis is taken by humanists and ecologists as the clear
alternative to deterministic and mechanistic biology; but even the harcore
neodarwinists discover emergent properties in the interactions of multiple
genes. Niklas Luhmann, in his turn, applies autopoiesis to human societies.
This list could go on indefinitely.
Now, it is certainly true that many phenomena can be better understood in
terms of networked complexity, than in those of linear cause and effect. It
is rare for an occurrence to be so isolated that linear models are really
sufficient to explain it. And it is also certainly true that unexpected
consequences, due to factors that we did not take into account (and in some
cases, as in chaos theory, that were too small or insignificant to measure
in advance, but that turned out to have incommensurably larger effects),
interfere with our ability to make clear predictions and to impose our will.
The best laid plans, etc. But still -
I think that we need to question our reflexive belief - or unwarranted
expectation, if you prefer - that emergent or self-organizing phenomena are
some how always (or, at least, generally) for the best. And this is where
Ward's Medea Hypothesis, even if taken only as a thought experiment, is
useful and provocative. Lovelock is almost apocalyptic in his worries about
environmental disruption; his recent books The Revenge of Gaia and The
Vanishing Face of Gaia warn us that human activity is catastrophically
interfering with the self-regulating and self-correcting mechanisms that
have otherwise maintained life on this planet. For Lovelock, human beings
seem entirely separate from, and opposed to, "nature," or Gaia. From Ward's
perspective, to the contrary, human beings are themselves a part of nature.
Human-created climate change and ecological destruction are not unique;
other organisms have caused similar catastrophes throughout the history of
life on earth. All actions have "unintended" consequences; these
consequences may well be destructive to others, and even to the actors
themselves. Presumably bacteria do not plan and foresee the possible
consequences of their actions, and discursively reason about them, in the
ways that we do; but this does not mean that ecological catastrophes caused
by bacteria should be put in a fundamentally different category than
ecological catastrophes caused by human beings. [I am enough of a
Whiteheadian that I am inclined to think that bacterial actions have a
"mental pole" as well as a "physical pole" just as human actions do, albeit
to a far feebler extent; there is definite scientific evidence for bacterial
cognition.] Rather than separating destructive human actions from "nature",
Ward suggests that "nature" itself (or the organisms that compose it)
frequently issues forth in such destructive actions. The mistake is to
assume that the networks from which actions emerge, and through which they
resonate, are themselves somehow homeostatic or self-preserving. Rather,
destructive as well as constructive actions can be propagated through a
network - including actions destructive of the network itself.
Of course, on some level we are already aware of this destructive
potential - as is witnessed in discussions of the propagation of both
biological and computer viruses, for instance. Yet somehow, we tend to cling
to the idea that positive self-organization somehow has precedence. And this
idea tends to arise especially in discussions that cross over from biology
to economics. Both Darwinian natural selection and economic competition tend
to be celebrated as optimizing processes. Stuart Kauffman, for instance, the
great champion of "order for free," or emergent, self-organizing complexity
in the life sciences, has no compunctions about claiming that his results
apply for the capitalist "econosphere" as well as for the biosphere (See his
Reinventing the Sacred, chapter 11). The highly esteemed futurist Kevin
Kelly, a frequent contributor to Wired magazine, has long celebrated
network-mediated capitalism, analogized to biological complexity, as a
miracle of emergent self-organization; just recently, however, he has
praised Web 2.0-mediated "socialism" in the same exact terms.
But the most significant and influential thinker of self-organisation in the
past century was undoubtedly Friedrich Hayek, the intellectual progenitor of
neoliberalism. For Hayek, any attempt at social or economic planning was
doomed to failure, due to the inherent limitations of human knowledge, and
the consequent prevalence of unintended consequences. In contrast, and
inspired by both cybernetics and biology, Hayek claimed that the "free
market" was an ideal mechanism for coordinating all the disparate bits of
knowledge that existed dispersed throughout society, and negotiating it
towards an optimal outcome. Self-organization, operating impersonally and
beyond the ken of any particular human agent, could accomplish what no
degree of planning or willful human rationality ever could. For Hayek, even
the slightest degree of social solidarity or collective planning was already
setting us on "the road to serfdom." And if individuals suffer as a result
of the unavoidable inequities of the self-organizing marketplace, well that
is just too bad - it is the price we have to pay for freedom and progress.
Hayek provided the rationale for the massive deregulation, and empowerment
of the financial sector, of the last thirty years - and for which we are
currently paying the price. But I have yet to see any account that fully
comes to terms with the degree that Hayek's polemical argument about the
superiority and greater rationality of emergent self-organization, as
opposed to conscious will and planning have become the very substance of
what we today, in Europe and North America at least, accept as "common
sense." Were the anti-WTO protestors in Seattle a decade ago, for instance,
aware that their grounding assumptions were as deeply Hayekian as those of
any broker for Goldman Sachs?
I don't have much in the way of positive ideas about how to think
differently. I just want to suggest that it is high time to question our
basic, almost automatic, assumptions about the virtues of self-organization.
This doesn't mean returning to an old-fashioned rationalism or voluntarism,
and it doesn't mean ignoring the fact that our actions always tend to
propagate through complex networks, and therefore to have massive unintended
consequences. But we need to give up the moralistic conviction that somehow
self-organized outcomes are superior to ones arrived at by other means. We
need to give up our superstitious reverence for results that seem to happen
"by themselves," or to arrive "from below" rather than "from above." (Aren't
there other directions to work and think in, besides "below" and "above"?).
Whitehead says that every event in the universe, from the tiniest
interaction of subatomic particles up to the most complex human action,
involves a certain moment of decision. There are no grounds or guidelines
for this decision; and we cannot characterize decision in "voluntaristic"
terms, because any conscious act of will is a remote consequence of decision
in Whitehead's sense, rather than its cause. Decisions are singular and
unrepeatable; they cannot be generalized into rules. But all this also means
that we cannot say that decision simply "emerges" out of a chaotic
background, or pops out thanks to the movement from one "basin of
attraction" to another. No self-organizing system can obviate the need for
such a decision, or dictate what it will be. And decision always implies
novelty or difference - in this way it is absolutely incompatible with
notions of autopoiesis, homeostasis, or Spinoza's conatus. What we need is
an aesthetics of decision, instead of our current metaphysics of emergence.
book The Medea Hypothesis. This book is meant to be polemical and
provocative; I lack the knowledge to evaluate its particular scientific
claims. But just as a thought experiment, it is bracing.
Ward's book is a critique of the quite popular Gaia Hypothesis, originally
developed by James Lovelock, which claims that the Earth as a whole, with
all its biomass, constitutes an emergent order, a self-organizing system,
that maintains the whole planet - its climate, the chemical constitution of
the atmosphere and the seas, etc. - in a state that is favorable to the
continued flourishing of life. Essentially the Gaia Hypothesis sees the
world as a system in homeostatic equilibrium - in much the same ways that
individual cells or organisms are self-maintaining, homeostatic systems.
Gaia is cybernetically, or autopoietically, self-regulating system:
continual feedback, among organisms and their environments, keeps the air
temperature, the salinity of the sea, the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, etc., within the limits that are necessary for the continued
flourishing of life.
Ward's Medea Hypothesis directly contests all these claims. According to
Ward, the ecosphere is not homeostatic or self-regulating; to the contrary,
it is continually being driven by positive feedback mechanisms to
unsustainable extremes. Most of the mass extinction events in the fossil
record, Ward says, were caused by out-of-control life processes - rather
than by an external interruption of such processes, such as the giant meteor
hit which supposedly led to the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of
the Mesozoic. The great Permian extinction, for instance - the most
catastrophic of which we have knowledge, in which 90% of all species, and
99% of all living beings, were destroyed - was caused by "blooms of sulfur
bacteria in the seas," which flourished due to greenhouse heating and
poisoned the oceans and the atmospheres with increased concentrations of
hydrogen sulfide, which is extremely toxic.
More generally, Ward claims that life processes have destabilizing effects,
rather than homeostatic ones, upon the very environment that they rely upon
for survival. This is largely because of the Malthusian basis of natural
selection. Traits that give any organism a selective advantage over its
rivals will spread through the gene pool, unless and until they overwhelm
the environment and reach the limits of its carrying capacity. An organism
that is too successful will ultimately suffer a crash from overpopulation,
depletion of resources, and so on. The success of sulfur bacteria means the
poisoning of all other organisms; or, to give another example, the rise of
photosynthetic organisms 2 billion years ago poisoned and killed the
then-dominant anaerobic microbes that had composed the overwhelming majority
of life-forms up to that time.
Now, biologists in recent years have given careful attention to the
evolution of cooperation and altruism as means of averting these dangers.
For instance, in an environment of cooperating organisms, a cheater will
outperform the cooperators, and through natural selection will eventually
drive them into extinction, thus leading to an environment of cheaters who
no longer have access to the benefits for all of cooperation. But this
prospect can be averted, and altruism can be maintained within a group, if
the cooperators evolve mechanisms to detect, and punish or otherwise
discipline, the cheaters. Scenarios like this have led to something of a
revival of the once-discredited notion of "group selection" (a group all of
whose members benefit from cooperation will be able to outperform a group
dominated by cheaters).
Be that as it may, Ward does not see any evidence that cooperation or
altruism can evolve on a meta-, or planetary, level. He argues,
counter-intuitively but with impressive statistical analyses, that in fact
the total biomass, as well as the diversity of species, has been in decline
ever since the Cambrian explosion. And he suggests that life on Earth is
doomed to extinction long before the heating and expansion of the sun make
the Earth too hot to live on. The depletion of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, leading to the extinction of all plant life, the decline of
atmospheric oxygen, the consequent extinction of all animal life, and
finally the evaporation and loss to outer space of the oceans, could happen
as little as 100 million to 500 million years from now - a span far less
than the 1.5 billion or 2 billion years we have before the sun roasts the
planet to a cinder. The Earth will end up much like either Venus or Mars -
both of which initially had conditions that were favorable to the origin and
sustenance of life, but no longer do (in this regard, it would be quite
interesting if we were to discover, as has often been hypothesized, that
Mars once did have life but no longer does).
Now, even 100 million years from now seems too far off in the future for us
to worry about today. And, as Ward points out, our current problems - for
the next century or so - have to do with too much carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, even if ultimately the Earth will die from too little.
Nonetheless (and regardless of whether or not the book's arguments stand up
in their scientific details, which is something, as I already said, that I
am unable to judge), Ward's replacement of Gaia (the good mother Earth) with
Medea (the ultimate bad mother, who murdered her own children) makes an
important point. In critiquing the Gaia Hypothesis, it is really questioning
our contemporary faith in self-organizing processes and systems.
I use "faith" here in as strong a sense as possible. The widespread
contemporary belief in "self-organization" is almost religious in its
intensity. We tend not to believe any more in the Enlightenment myth (as it
seems to us now) of rationality and progress. We are skeptical of any sort
of "progress" aside from technological innovation and improvement; and we no
longer believe in the power of Reason to dispel superstition and to make
plans for human betterment. The dominant ideology in these (still, despite
the economic crisis) neoliberal times denounces any sort of rational
planning as "utopian" and thereby "totalitarian," an effort to impose the
will on matter that absolutely resists it. This also entails a rejection of
"grand narratives" (as Lyotard said in the 1980s), and an overall sense that
"unintended consequences" make all willful and determinate action futile.
Instead, we turn to "self-organization" as something that will save us. The
anarchist left puts its faith in self-organizing movements of dissidence and
protest, with the (non-)goal being a spontaneously self-organized
cooperative society. Right wing libertarians, meanwhile, see the "free
market" as the realm of emergent, spontaneous, self-organized solutions to
all problems, and blame disasters like the Great Depression of the 1930s,
and the current Depression as well, on government "interference" with the
(allegedly otherwise self-equilibrating) market mechanism. Network theory, a
hot new discipline where mathematics intersects with sociology, looks at the
Internet and other complex networks as powerfully self-organizing systems,
both generating and managing complexity out of a few simple rules. The brain
is described, in connectionist accounts, as a self-organizing system
emerging from chaos; today we try to build self-learning and self-organizing
robots and artificial intelligences, instead of ones that are determined in
advance by fixed rules. "Genetic algorithms" are used to make better
software; Brian Eno devises algorithms for self-generating music. Maturana
and Varela's autopoiesis is taken by humanists and ecologists as the clear
alternative to deterministic and mechanistic biology; but even the harcore
neodarwinists discover emergent properties in the interactions of multiple
genes. Niklas Luhmann, in his turn, applies autopoiesis to human societies.
This list could go on indefinitely.
Now, it is certainly true that many phenomena can be better understood in
terms of networked complexity, than in those of linear cause and effect. It
is rare for an occurrence to be so isolated that linear models are really
sufficient to explain it. And it is also certainly true that unexpected
consequences, due to factors that we did not take into account (and in some
cases, as in chaos theory, that were too small or insignificant to measure
in advance, but that turned out to have incommensurably larger effects),
interfere with our ability to make clear predictions and to impose our will.
The best laid plans, etc. But still -
I think that we need to question our reflexive belief - or unwarranted
expectation, if you prefer - that emergent or self-organizing phenomena are
some how always (or, at least, generally) for the best. And this is where
Ward's Medea Hypothesis, even if taken only as a thought experiment, is
useful and provocative. Lovelock is almost apocalyptic in his worries about
environmental disruption; his recent books The Revenge of Gaia and The
Vanishing Face of Gaia warn us that human activity is catastrophically
interfering with the self-regulating and self-correcting mechanisms that
have otherwise maintained life on this planet. For Lovelock, human beings
seem entirely separate from, and opposed to, "nature," or Gaia. From Ward's
perspective, to the contrary, human beings are themselves a part of nature.
Human-created climate change and ecological destruction are not unique;
other organisms have caused similar catastrophes throughout the history of
life on earth. All actions have "unintended" consequences; these
consequences may well be destructive to others, and even to the actors
themselves. Presumably bacteria do not plan and foresee the possible
consequences of their actions, and discursively reason about them, in the
ways that we do; but this does not mean that ecological catastrophes caused
by bacteria should be put in a fundamentally different category than
ecological catastrophes caused by human beings. [I am enough of a
Whiteheadian that I am inclined to think that bacterial actions have a
"mental pole" as well as a "physical pole" just as human actions do, albeit
to a far feebler extent; there is definite scientific evidence for bacterial
cognition.] Rather than separating destructive human actions from "nature",
Ward suggests that "nature" itself (or the organisms that compose it)
frequently issues forth in such destructive actions. The mistake is to
assume that the networks from which actions emerge, and through which they
resonate, are themselves somehow homeostatic or self-preserving. Rather,
destructive as well as constructive actions can be propagated through a
network - including actions destructive of the network itself.
Of course, on some level we are already aware of this destructive
potential - as is witnessed in discussions of the propagation of both
biological and computer viruses, for instance. Yet somehow, we tend to cling
to the idea that positive self-organization somehow has precedence. And this
idea tends to arise especially in discussions that cross over from biology
to economics. Both Darwinian natural selection and economic competition tend
to be celebrated as optimizing processes. Stuart Kauffman, for instance, the
great champion of "order for free," or emergent, self-organizing complexity
in the life sciences, has no compunctions about claiming that his results
apply for the capitalist "econosphere" as well as for the biosphere (See his
Reinventing the Sacred, chapter 11). The highly esteemed futurist Kevin
Kelly, a frequent contributor to Wired magazine, has long celebrated
network-mediated capitalism, analogized to biological complexity, as a
miracle of emergent self-organization; just recently, however, he has
praised Web 2.0-mediated "socialism" in the same exact terms.
But the most significant and influential thinker of self-organisation in the
past century was undoubtedly Friedrich Hayek, the intellectual progenitor of
neoliberalism. For Hayek, any attempt at social or economic planning was
doomed to failure, due to the inherent limitations of human knowledge, and
the consequent prevalence of unintended consequences. In contrast, and
inspired by both cybernetics and biology, Hayek claimed that the "free
market" was an ideal mechanism for coordinating all the disparate bits of
knowledge that existed dispersed throughout society, and negotiating it
towards an optimal outcome. Self-organization, operating impersonally and
beyond the ken of any particular human agent, could accomplish what no
degree of planning or willful human rationality ever could. For Hayek, even
the slightest degree of social solidarity or collective planning was already
setting us on "the road to serfdom." And if individuals suffer as a result
of the unavoidable inequities of the self-organizing marketplace, well that
is just too bad - it is the price we have to pay for freedom and progress.
Hayek provided the rationale for the massive deregulation, and empowerment
of the financial sector, of the last thirty years - and for which we are
currently paying the price. But I have yet to see any account that fully
comes to terms with the degree that Hayek's polemical argument about the
superiority and greater rationality of emergent self-organization, as
opposed to conscious will and planning have become the very substance of
what we today, in Europe and North America at least, accept as "common
sense." Were the anti-WTO protestors in Seattle a decade ago, for instance,
aware that their grounding assumptions were as deeply Hayekian as those of
any broker for Goldman Sachs?
I don't have much in the way of positive ideas about how to think
differently. I just want to suggest that it is high time to question our
basic, almost automatic, assumptions about the virtues of self-organization.
This doesn't mean returning to an old-fashioned rationalism or voluntarism,
and it doesn't mean ignoring the fact that our actions always tend to
propagate through complex networks, and therefore to have massive unintended
consequences. But we need to give up the moralistic conviction that somehow
self-organized outcomes are superior to ones arrived at by other means. We
need to give up our superstitious reverence for results that seem to happen
"by themselves," or to arrive "from below" rather than "from above." (Aren't
there other directions to work and think in, besides "below" and "above"?).
Whitehead says that every event in the universe, from the tiniest
interaction of subatomic particles up to the most complex human action,
involves a certain moment of decision. There are no grounds or guidelines
for this decision; and we cannot characterize decision in "voluntaristic"
terms, because any conscious act of will is a remote consequence of decision
in Whitehead's sense, rather than its cause. Decisions are singular and
unrepeatable; they cannot be generalized into rules. But all this also means
that we cannot say that decision simply "emerges" out of a chaotic
background, or pops out thanks to the movement from one "basin of
attraction" to another. No self-organizing system can obviate the need for
such a decision, or dictate what it will be. And decision always implies
novelty or difference - in this way it is absolutely incompatible with
notions of autopoiesis, homeostasis, or Spinoza's conatus. What we need is
an aesthetics of decision, instead of our current metaphysics of emergence.
