Biocivilisations

In introducing Predrag Slijepčević’s Biocivilisations, I can do no better than quote from the foreword by Vandana Shiva, who calls it a vital book for our times. I couldn’t agree more, and have had copies sent to a number of thought leaders within the Network. Vandana writes:

’It provides the ontological and epistemic foundation for the transition we need to make as a species to sow the seeds of a liveable future. The roots of various ecological crises, a global food crisis, and growing chronic health crises lie in a fallacy underpinned by anthropocentric arrogance: that humans are separate from nature and superior to other species, which have no intrinsic worth, value, intelligence or creativity. Rather than sentient beings, other species are reduced to objects that can be owned, manipulated for profit and pushed to extinction.

This worldview is incorrect and at the heart of our troubles.’

As far back as 1988, I organised the May Lectures on From Mechanism to Organism: Reanimating the World, in 1989 The Ecological Crisis as an Evolutionary and Spiritual Crisis, and in 1990 Evolutionary Crossroads. Speakers included Dr Mae-Wan Ho, Prof Brian Goodwin, Prof Henryk Skolimowski, Dr Rupert Sheldrake and even Prof Richard Dawkins; and in 1990 I arranged a Gaia Lecture series covering Gaia and evolution, climate, forests, oceans, and also covering values and sustainable development. Here we are, a generation later, and the same mechanistic mindset predominates in mainstream biology and in relation to Nature. This is why Predrag’s book is so important and timely. A few contemporary thinkers are now articulating a similar message, which had its origins in the interdisciplinary work of Gregory Bateson (‘mind is the essence of being alive’), C.H. Waddington, Lynn Margulis and A.N. Whitehead reaching back to Goethe’s qualitative approach. More recently, John Dupre, Stuart Kauffman and Iain McGilchrist have highlighted the centrality of process and relationships in their work.

Predrag goes even further than this with his concept that Gaia is the totality of all biocivilisations, a term ‘that describes the orderliness running through the river of life and all its constituents, from microbes to human beings.’ (p. 72) Far from subscribing to the hubristic arrogance of the Anthropocene, he sees humanity as a late arrival and outlier in the Gaian river of life where microbes are in fact the dominant environmental force on Earth. The Anthropocene is also Necrocene, and Gregory Bateson is quoted as stating that ‘The unit of survival is organism plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself.’ (p. 5) Likewise, Lynn Margulis wrote that we cannot put an end to nature; we can only pose a threat to ourselves. Predrag’s mission is ‘to liberate biology from the grip of the mechanism and acknowledge that no organism is a machine. Each organism is a unit of mind – a holon integrated into the global Gaian mind.’ (p. 8) He views Gaia as a creative artistic system, ‘a huge evolutionary theatre of perpetual mind-like mergers of organisms and environments over the course of 4 billion years.’ (p. 19)

The chapter entitled Against Mechanism lays out the basis of his argument. Predrag is right to assert that ‘the key manifestation of mechanism in biology is reductive materialism.’ Genes are seen as ‘pieces of biological software, cells as molecular factories, organisms as organic robots and nature as a giant mechanical system accountable to physics and mathematics.’ (p. 21) However, the Gaian mind resists the metaphorical reduction of organisms to mechanisms. It is crucial to understand the consequences of this category error where the mechanistic model is taken for reality with its corresponding exploitative values. Even more deep-rooted since the 17^th century is the idea that humanity is separate from nature and should seek to dominate rather than enter into partnership. Predrag lays out four principles of non-mechanistic biology: universal flux, agency, symbiosis and mind.

Central to his argument is the significance of autopoiesis (self-creation) embraced by all leading holistic biologists. Autopoietic systems are structurally coupled with their environment, and also capable of cognition. This is very different from the idea of environment causally determining conditions for organisms, to which they have to adapt by means of competitive natural selection. Creativity is a feature of living systems, while life is a process of permanent change. It is important not to confuse two types of cognitive systems, artificial and natural: ‘While computers simulate cognitive actions, organisms live through the process of cognition.’ (p. 38) The computational or artificial is by definition a simulation, the point made by Sir Roger Penrose when he insists that consciousness cannot be computational. This is another category error, analogous to the confusion between organism and mechanism.

The practical consequences of failing to understand complex systems result in a confusion between cybernetics and autopoiesis. As Charles Eisenstein also points out, climate science uses cybernetic models, and it is thought that Gaia can be manipulated and modified accordingly with mechanistic proposals such as geo-engineering. This is a further category error, as autopoiesis involves creative response than mechanical feedback – so outcomes are inherently unpredictable. (p. 133) As Predrag puts it: ‘The bottom line is that autopoietic systems cannot be modelled by feedback control systems. Living systems are not machines that can be modified by input-output cybernetic models.’ The trouble is that modern science is entirely based on mechanistic cybernetic models and largely ignorant of autopoiesis. All this demonstrates the magnitude and potentially catastrophic consequences of the mechanistic category error. We have also got ourselves out of balance in terms of the assertive and integrative capacities of Arthur Koestler’s holons with our emphasis on mastery and control and our failure to acknowledge that we are within rather than above Nature. Predrag argues that evolution is not survival of the fittest in the Darwinian sense; rather, ‘Evolution is survival of the most intelligent in the Lamarckian or Batesonian sense, whereby intelligence is a balancing act between assertive and integrative tendencies.’ (p. 48)

The middle section of the book interprets life as a civilising force with a model of five kingdoms and differentiated biocivilisations in terms of communication/semiosphere, engineering/technology, science/problem-solving medicine/self-preservation, art/aesthetics of doing, and agriculture/population feeding. Communication is much more complex than we realise, while engineering can be understood in a wider sense where techne originally meant both technique and art. Humans are not in fact masters of natural processes, despite their enormous destructive power. Predrag highlights the important distinction between information in a biological and an engineering sense, where the first is semantic relating to meaning and the second syntactic. Hence, natural and machine learning are fundamentally different processes. (p. 123) Medicine has also been colonised by mechanistic thinking and institutional ‘Big Science’ dominated by money. We are set up in a war against microbes that ignores our common co-evolution and the self-preserving capacities of our immune systems. Likewise, ‘Big Ag’ operates on the same basis of failing to distinguish between the organic and the mechanical, working autocratically against rather than with Nature.

The last part looks forward, offering five arguments to help us see ourselves in a true light given that ‘Gaia regulates the Gaian river through its decentralised autopoietic mind, and our position within the river of life is insignificant; we are a tiny stream in a huge river.’ (p. 194) He advocates a Copernican turn away from an exclusive focus on our own intelligence, recognition of nature as creative, mind as the essence of being alive, life as symbiosis, and putting biology ahead of physics. I agree that the real human predicament ‘lies in our mechanical minds, programmed by the dominant techno-scientific outlook.’ (p. 200) For this reason, a change in our way of thinking is vital to our very survival. As Predrag puts it, ‘Our mechanising attempts counter the logic of life. Life is a process of ceaseless creativity that precludes mechanism as the driving force. Yet mechanism dominates the current structure of science.’ This is due to the primacy of physics, when biology cannot in fact be explained on this basis. However, neo-Darwinism also exerts a hegemonic influence in biology that is now being questioned by a movement called The Third Way, of which this book is an elegant articulation. It is a must-read for the essential reformulation of a new organismic, relational and processual worldview in science.