Integration

Enfolded into the prokaryotic cell is each of the successive levels from the initial undifferentiated energy to now, that becomes explicit in the more complex entity we call the prokaryote or cells without a nucleus - bacteria. The prokaryote is also exquisitely integrated with its environment or context and is sustainable over enormous periods of time (four billion years so far) and over large variations in environment, thus forming a very stable deep structure upon which all living things are based. Prokaryotic cells are the hydrogen of living systems.

Step 5: Reiteration

… life: the iterative production of complex entities from a component whose design repeats at ever greater scales (Margulis & Sagan, 1995:15).

The process then repeats itself over again…

Step 1: Differentiation

The evolution from prokaryotes to eukaryotes was a symmetry break that catapulted life to a greater level of complexity and gave it different potentials and risks (ibid:91).

The undifferentiated prokaryotic cells, of which there must have been one type before there were many, began to be shaped and honed by the forces of

natural selection. As these cells were widely diffused over the planet they adapted to a wide range of environmental conditions – different contexts. Differentiating to the point whereby they began to eat and live off or depend on each other. Eventually one of the ingested prokaryotes and the host

developed a symbiotic relationship, and eukaryotic, or cells with a nucleus (the ingested prokarote), emerged. Just as hydrogen and helium are the basic constituents of all matter, so the prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells are the basic constituents of all life.

Step 2: Connectivity

Just as the first protists were multicreatured cells formed by cooperative teams of bacteria [prokaryotes], the first multicelled creatures are formed as colonial cooperatives of protists (Liebes, Sahtouris & Swimme, 1998:103)

Eukaryotic cells do not survive in isolation – rather they are found in large colonies where connectivity is increased over enormous amounts of time. More complex sustainable structures emerge as a result of the increasing connectivity between the increasingly differentiated structures. The increasing connectivity eventually allows some structures to integrate with other

structures to form more complex sustainable structures.

Step 3: Emergence

Eventually proto-organisms emerge with certain cells taking specialised functions within the group of cells. These specialised functions are basically sentience information processing systems with the organism. A good example of this is the Slime mould. At one stage of its life cycle, its individual cells are spread out over the forest floor – however, as the available food supply on the forest floor is depleted, the cells come together to form a slug-like creature. The slug’s movement is coordinated by a group of cells that convert to a primitive central nervous system or sentience information processor. The slug moves to a new area of the forest floor, where its food supply is more

abundant, and then sprouts a mushroom-like head that releases new individual cells / spores who begin feeding on the forest floor again and the cycle

repeats. A whole new era of these proto-organisms, the Ediacaran era, has recently been discovered in the geological record (McMenamin, 1998), just prior to the emergence of complex multi-cellular organisms at the beginning of the Cambrian era.

Step 4: Integration

Eventually some organisms learn to bypass the individual cell stage and reproduce themselves as full copies with specialised cells adapting and integrating within organisms to give them a broader range of functions and adaptability characteristics – freedom, within the varied contexts /

environmental conditions:

Over time, different molecular collectives self-assembled to form the first structures with specialized functions – the forerunners of present-day organelles - which then combined with one another to create the first simple cells. These cells then produced proteins that self-assembled to form extracellular matrix-anchoring scaffolds that, in turn, promoted self- assembly of multicellular tissues. Organs developed from the self- assembly of tissues, and complex organisms arose through combination and progressive remodelling of different organs. Indeed, the

development of an embryo from a sperm and an egg recapitulates all these stages of self-assembly. And … throughout all this time [4 billion odd years] the rules guiding the process of hierarchical self-assembly remained essentially unchanged (Ingber, 1998).

Step 5: Reiteration

And the so the process repeats with structures of increasing complexity emerging at different phase transitions.

Structure of the Living Universe

… organisms do basically two (and only two) kinds of things: they engage in matter-energy transfer processes, and they reproduce (Eldridge, 1995:184).

Ecologists use the word biomass to describe the matter-energy transformation which basically means the amount of living matter that a certain area of the planet (biomass per hectare), or the planet as a whole, can support. It turns out that with each increase in complexity of life that evolves up the trophic levels, there is an increasing vulnerability for the organism seen as

dependency on an ever-increasing area of the planet’s surface that it takes to support them.

A simplified model demonstrates this:

• Level One consists of the bacteria that convert dead organic matter into nutrients and soil that are then recycled by the next level up – plants; • Level Two consists of the plants that convert the soil nutrients into

fibrous matter that is then used by the next level up, the herbivores, to support their life processes, and detritus level feeders such as beetles and other insects that help break down the dead organic matter into soil again;

• Level Three consists of all the herbivorous animals that convert the fibrous tissue of the plants into energy that supports their life processes and builds bone, fat and muscle tissue which in turn supports the next level up – the first level carnivores;

• Level Four consists of all the carnivorous animals, with the omnivores in between, that convert the herbivores' meat into energy to support their own life processes; and

• Level Five then consists of second level carnivores of which there is only one species – humans, who manage to use all of the preceding levels to support their life processes.