A Species is Not an Organism

Sometimes, I speak of a species as one organism. But it is not. A species is a collection of organisms that evolved according to Darwin's Five Laws.

Nonetheless, sometimes the `one organism' metaphor is useful. Just as an organism needs to eat and reproduce, so does a species.

Sadly, the metaphor may also be misleading. A friend of mine recently employed the metaphor to argue against human wars: just as one leg in a human should not fight the other, so one country should not fight another. According to the metaphor, humanity as a species was like a single organism.

However, under various circumstances, species' virtues are different from organisms'.

This is not to say that metaphors cannot be useful. They are. More to the point, we often understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another. Indeed, as far as I can see, much thinking involves metaphor, as does all abstract thinking.

More abstractly, George Lakoff and his collaborator, Rafael E. Núñez, ¹ wrote in reference to mathematics that metaphors are a

... mechanism for allowing us to reason about one kind of thing as if it were another.

The key is to separate the map from the territory: to understand that much of our understanding comes through metaphor, and that metaphor is useful, but also dangerous.

Just as it is useful to think of either a single human society or a group of human societies as a Von Neumann machine, it is useful to think of an organism or a species the same way. It is easier to think more clearly about an imaginary self-replicating, robotic factory than to think of your own society or of your food supply.

When you imagine an ecology as consisting of many self-replicating, robotic factories ², the mapping is straight forward. Each biological organism is equivalent to a self-replicating, robotic factory, or equivalent to two such factories that must cooperate to reproduce.

The correspondence is somewhat less straight forward when you imagine a complete species as a Von Neumann machine. The correspondence becomes even more distant when you imagine a complete ecology, made up of many species, as one self-replicating, robotic factory.

But in these two situations, another aspect comes to the fore: the requirement that a Von Neumann machine have a source of energy and a way to radiate or excrete consumed energy or materials, that it have blue prints so it can reproduce itself, that it have the ability to re-duplicate itself, which implies internal transport, communications, and effectors. Moreover, a self-replicating factory must be able to sense its surroundings, to avoid trying to gain energy when there is none, to avoid danger, and to enable it to head towards better sources of supply. Such actions mean dropping one activity and undertaking another. This implies some sort of central or distributed processing unit that can transform sensed inputs into action.

It goes without saying that a self-replicating, robotic factory has a boundary: part of the universe are its parts and part is the rest of the universe. Also, it goes without saying, even with the best error correction protocols, some re-duplications will exhibit more or less error. Or the factory will try out different designs.

It is fairly easy to see how these concepts transfer to that of a society or single biological organism. It is harder to apply these concepts to an ecology as a whole.

But we can do this:

For ecologies on the Earth, the primary source of energy is the sun, although a few organisms rely on chemical energy from volcanic vents in the ocean. Predators makes use of the secondary source of energy, which consists of those entities that have gained their energy from the sun or chemicals, directly, as in the case of herbivores, or indirectly, as in the case of carnivores. This sequence is an `energy chain'. (In most ecological texts, the `energy chain' is called the `food chain'.)

Likewise, we can note that an ecology contains its instructions or blue prints to reproduce itself in the genes of the various organisms that make up the ecology. The data store is distributed.

Does an ecology possess a central or distributed processing unit? This is a big question. People who speak of `Gaea' often presume it does. Certainly, ecologies respond to changes in their environment: for example, parts of it die when glaciers come. Clearly, a freeze, like the development of `Snowball Earth' before the Cambrian, kills many.

From an outside point of view, the response is not necessarily very intelligent. When the planet cools, fewer entities transform carbon in the air into molecules that eventually sink into the ocean. Since volcanos continually release carbon dioxide, the amount in the atmosphere increases. Eventually, the `greenhouse effect' leads to warmer times. (I don't know how much of the increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases comes from biological action or from the non-biological weathering cycle. Both go on at the same time. From a human point of view, the changes are slow, taking millions of years.)

In any event, this response suggests that the processor within an ecology is at least as smart as that of a human thermostat: not very smart in human terms, but enough to do a job.

But, as I said, the metaphor (or model, if you prefer that term) must be used carefully. In a system with distributed data stores, those data stores that survive end up living longer than those that do not. (This sentence sounds like a tautology. Nonetheless, it contains the key insight of Darwin's Laws.) Consequently, the carriers of different data stores will fight each other when the resources are insufficient to support both. Those that do not fight, do not live so long. Their blue prints do not stay around, so they become more and more a minority.

On the other hand, when a new ecological niche opens up, regardless of reason, there is no need for carriers of different data stores to fight; indeed, they are all more likely to survive when they cooperate. So we should expect to see intra-species cooperation as well as intra-species hostility. The blue prints for cooperation will also continue.

The latter concept, intra-species cooperation, corresponds well with the `single organism' view of a species. But the former notion, intra-species hostility, does not.

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