“In the arithmetic of life, One is always Many.”

Lynn Margulis, biologist and Distinguished Professor of Geosciences, composed a grand and powerful view of the living and the non-living.  Integrating the work of obscure Russian scientists, DNA pulled from cell organelles, computer-generated daisies, and the hindguts of termites, her vision was wider in scope and more profound in depth than any other coherent scientific world view.  At the time of her death on November 22nd, 2011, it is a vision that remains misunderstood and misconstrued by many scientists.

Much of this view came from her uncanny ability to first lean forward and see the smallest inhabitants of the Earth; to hover there, and then to leap back at the speed of thought to conceptualize the entire planet. Lean forward, then stand back.  This inner movement, this seeing from soil to space, marked a unique scientific endeavor.

This perspective was earned only through walking through diverse areas of study — geology, genetics, biology, chemistry, literature, embryology, paleontology.  Those fields, are sometimes separated by an untraversed distance at universities: they are housed in separate buildings which may as well be different worlds.  In Margulis, they found agreement and discussion with each other; they were reconnected, just as they are intrinsically connected in nature.

This journey led her to emphasize in all her scientific work two phenomena — the fusing of distinct beings into a single being: symbiosis; and the interaction of organisms and their environments to create relational “loops” that led to regulation of many Earth systems: Gaia Theory.

Taken separately these concepts have the ability to redefine, respectively, how we understand organisms and the environment.

Taken together, they can redefine our consciousness.

* * *

After the Earth was born, give or take a few hundred million years, there were bacteria.  Bacteria were here first and are with us still, comprising a major part of the biosphere.  They are unseen with the naked eye, they lack nuclei (for this reason, they are called prokaryotes — “pro” = before,  “karyon” = nucleus). Their forms were legion and their metabolisms were (and continue to be) strange.

Where life could exist, it did exist in these tiny forms.  One of these forms,  thermoplasma, was an amorphous blob. It enjoyed heat and sulfur.  The stuff we now associate with the devil, this bacterium was quite fond of.  Another bacterium was the spirochete.  Familiar to us now as the type of bacteria that cause syphilis and Lyme disease, the spirochete is a curl of an organism; a tremulous and crooked line with no front or back.  Margulis studied these strange beings through literature and microscope.  From some corner of her intellect, they called to her.

The thermoplasmid and spirochete of early Earth were neighbors and, in a sense, enemies.  Each one would try, when it encountered the other, to consume it.  This was a popular notion at the time: meet and consume. Soon enough, encounter after encounter between the two beings led to an unprecedented event: The beings came together to eat each other and decided on marriage instead. Just what changes happened to cause this friendly ingestion is still unknown.  What is known is that the spirochete didn’t digest the thermoplasmid and the thermoplasmid did not digest the spirochete.  As Margulis was fond of saying, “1 + 1 = 1.”  There was a union of the two, resulting in an entirely new being.  They were inseparable, literally.  The thermoplasmid had a rotor now, and the spirochete had a “head”.  A head and a tail: for the first time, beings haddirection.  Cultural philosopher William Irwin Thompson examines this emergence in his book, Coming into Being. It isn’t that spirochetes couldn’t pursue a coordinate before — but the asymmetricality of the new, combined entity, resulted in a new way of being, completely without reference in the history of life:  One end, distinct in form, ingested the food; the other end did the rowing.  Both absorbed the nutrition.  This was a giant step in the evolution of consciousness, and is echoed by all true evolutions in consciousness:  the rise of a new way of being, inconceivable to the world that came before.

And soon, other mergers were taking place.  Soon, oxygen-breathing bacteria were incorporated by endosymbiosis into this being.  Where once oxygen was poison, now it flowed through without harm.

Cyanobacteria, green and photosynthetic, were incorporated in some of these cells as well.  Both these symbioses remain visible today — as the mitochondria in all cells (the oxygen-breathing bacteria that became mitochondria) and chloroplasts in plant and some animal cells (the cyanobacteria that led to chloroplasts).  These are ancient partnerships that have never dissolved, and which continue to pulse with rhythm, and our existence depends upon them.  Human cells reflect these unions, and we breathe plant-respired oxygen.

Margulis, inspired by the work of little-known biologists, revealed and proved these mergers for us.  At first, her worked was rejected and scoffed at.  It did not fit the still-dominant neo-Darwinian paradigm that tells us all evolutionary novelty comes from natural selection acting on genes and the gradual accumulation of random genetic mutation.  But eventually these symbioses were accepted because they could not be ignored.  In a stunning display of reluctance, despite mounting evidence, the spirochetal origin of the undulipodium (sometimes incorrectly called or mistaken for the “flagellum” — though the undulipodium and flagellum are not similar either chemically or structurally) is still contested and sometimes dismissed.

What is unquestionable: bacteria make up the living architecture of our bodies.

They evolved into our cells, and also remain “free-living” in our digestive system.  Their spiraling remnants are in our gums, our brains.  This means our physical selves are universes composed of the movemenst, biological agreements, and interactions of these beings.

What can this mean for the individual?  What happens when we are simultaneously songs and compositions of notes?  “Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves…” Margulis once stated, with her colleague Ricardo Guerrero.

And what happens when we are notes, songs, and the notes again?  What happens when we shift our perspective and see that we are cells made out of cells?

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