I’d like to introduce myself and my purpose here on this first blog post. The purpose is easier and more organized than I am, so I will begin there. This whole website, actually serves to introduce, explain, cajole, inspire, delight and entice the visitor with the...
It is crucially necessary to develop understanding of and relationship with Earth. This is a path for individuals and, though talent and vision are unequally distributed, persistence and patients are needed by all, and some level of vision is possible for anyone. The...
Learning about cultures that have lived sustainably with Earth for a long periods of time can be helpful to our understanding of this complex system. We look at two cultures in particular: the Australian Aborigines, and the Kogi of Colombia. Over at least...
The author’s internal reflections have revealed several attitudes that hinder a larger understanding of Earth. While not necessarily shared to the same extent by everyone, these attitudes may be worth describing. The first is the unstated assumption that Science has...
We come now to the time that humanity lives on earth. We have seen that Nature has developed two tendencies from the beginning. The first is the development of awareness or “mind”, present even in the very first self-generating metabolism. This awareness has clearly...
In order to catch a glimpse of the current balance and complexity of feedback loops, we look at the coccolithophore, a marine algae, resident of the layer of the ocean plankton. This thin layer of tiny, drifting creatures in the top several feet of the ocean, is the...
The workings of stage five are far more complex and interconnected than the previous four stages. Instead of killing whole plants and eating them, insect and mammal predators have been engaged to take only portions of a plant and to help the plants in return. ...
Similar to life in the ocean, life on the land has gone through a succession of larger ecological forms. The first of these five stages was described in the last chapter. The next three are described in this chapter. The stage we are in today will be looked at in the...
About 400 million years ago a single celled algae began to cooperate with others of its kind to create larger, multicellular forms. Using the bacterial invention of cellulose for structure, the red, brown and green seaweeds evolved. They are not plants because they...
Life came to the land as an extension of the cooperative community in the ocean. This community may have lived in the water between grains of decomposed rock, as the first soil; or it may have lived as the hardy symbiosis between fungus, algae and bacteria that is...
The new cooperatively formed eukaryotic cells began themselves to cooperate fairly quickly. Evidence of chains of algae cells goes back almost to the beginnings of these cells themselves. The road to the next cooperative organism ends in multi-cellular creatures - a...
About 1.2 billion years ago a new kind of cell arose. From the work of Lynn Margulis, it is now accepted that this came about through symbiotic cooperation between several kinds of bacteria. A kind of bacteria came to produce the cellular energy exchange medium, ATP. ...
We pause on the path of the unfolding of life and take a step back to take in the whole, both as it has been seen so far, and how it will develop. Several characteristics of the journey can be seen from this point of view. Life is a journey in discrete stages. The...
After its fiery Hadean beginning, Earth seems to have spent up to a billion years covered completely in a world ocean. Volcanoes and small islands probably broke through the surface, but life's first few 100 million years were probably underwater. Simple...
In the 1990s James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis. This proposes that the whole of life on Earth acts as a single system, maintaining both the composition of the atmosphere and the temperature at the surface. Both conditions seem to be maintained by negative...
Less than 1% of the bacterial species, about 4500, can be cultivated in the lab. Most of the research on bacteria has therefore been done on a tiny fraction of the bacteria. Slava Epstein, at Northeastern University in the US, has been able to cultivate about...
Once cooperation had evolved the first cell there were apparently metabolic processes inside of it that could not simply keep getting bigger. Instead, the growing cell divided, and then kept on dividing. There were few limits in the early ocean. Two questions are...
How does cooperation work in the creation of the first cell? We go into the molecules of water itself to find a place where this process may have begun. In the traditional view, molecules of water can be tightly organized in ice, loosely collected in liquid...
This chapter focuses on the idea of cooperation and looks at examples in the “nonliving” world, before beginning to talk about the self-generating systems from which life arose. An important function of cooperation is that it creates a new, quite real, entity out of...
Although compounds of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen can be found in the large molecular clouds that are the nurseries for solar systems, it is a long, long journey from them to even the simplest kinds of life. The simple bacterium is thought to be one of the first...
The story of life begins with a much larger cooperative process: the self generation of our Solar System. Pieced together from thousands of examples across the Galaxy, astronomers have constructed a “movie” that begins in a swirling large molecular cloud of gas and...
Looking into several things in the world around us, a process can be seen creating them. A sand dune, a lichen and a small company are looked at. All three are seen to be composed of moving pieces that work together to create a larger form. In each case there is a...