Regarding nature, despite its complexity, simplicity is an emergent property. Let’s take a human body: 100 trillion cells. Every cell in the human body has 100 trillion atoms, right?
Inside each cell there are 23,000 genes. They are now mapping the proteins encoded by these genes. 92,000 proteins and counting.
. . So they are still discovering new ones.
This complexity reaches such a magnitude that it can be compared to the dimensions astronomers deal with. I even coined an expression for this: I call the human being “a moving galaxy of cellular systems”. Not of solar systems, rather, cellular ones, because we are a galaxy.
We are not aware of it. So this brings us to our subject: the simplicity atop the complexity. This simplicity that arises from the fact that there is an underlying complexity supporting the whole of being, of existence, the consciousness, the breathing.
. . I don't have to think about what my tongue does inside my mouth when I put a spoonful of food in there.
But it does. And it is incredibly efficient at doing it. We see that the processes of life generate complexity.
And here we are going to enter the main focus of what I was supposed to go to Rio de Janeiro, to speak about, at the Selvagem event. If you look at it in terms of complexity and it's not complication, it's complexity, which are very different. That is, if you look at it in terms of the richness of structures, for instance in molecular biology, in biochemistry or life structures, all structures.
. . You will see that there is always an arrow, as we say, a vector coming from the simple towards the complex.
You will always find that in any process where life operates. And this vector shows, or suggests, let's put it this way, that there is some kind of biological law, or a law of life. The fact that this arrow points to increasing complexity shows that the classic Darwinian mechanism, of the process of evolution with survival of the fittest, generates an arrow in the opposite way, one of simplification.
So according to classical theory we have a sytem in which variation would occur at random, then natural selection would act by selecting those better adapted and these ones would then be successful, leaving fertile descendants. . .
It’s a logic that is quite, say, convincing. So if you think about it on its own, without making any external links, it makes sense. But if you take, for instance, a very classic relationship used in population studies, the relation of Lotka Volterra, which is the one between predator and prey, you will see a force acting in a way to simplify the system.
We see this mechanism at work in capitalist societies. In all economic systems where the survival of the strongest, or the fittest, gives some ‘players’ competitive advantages, and these players develop a lot and expand. So this mechanism described by classic Darwinism, it does exist.
This is why we verify it, right? You can see it happening. But where that mechanism acts solely, in its terms of variation, selection, variation, selection, the system goes into impoverishment, as we see in the capitalist system.
Yet when I look, for instance, to an area that was cleared in the Amazon, where a natural process of regeneration is taking place. . .
What will happen in the regeneration process? Initially the system is poor in comparison to what it was before. Then if you go back to the same place 200 years later, you find significant diversity and still growing.
Let us then compare these two realities: On one hand, a capitalist system that applies a quite literal method for the survival of the fittest. On the other hand, a natural system that applies mechanisms inherent to natural systems, that is, to Life. And the arrows point to opposite directions: one increases in complexity, the other decreases.
For that reason alone, these many years, decades or even century, should have sufficed to make biologists observe and ponder, to make them think about this. Darwinism doesn't meet it. It doesn't hold the power it means to hold, you know, it really doesn't.
So, let’s put aside this perspective and look instead to Planet Earth. Earth is an incredibly exceptional planet, so exceptional that we don't know any other like it. Our planet, with its conditions, we call Goldilocks conditions, which are optimal conditions.
. . the distance from the sun, the planetary size, its mass, its material composition, with the right elements to produce different surface layers, generating what Bruno Latour calls the "Gaia film”.
That obviously prompts us to talk about the theory created by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, that managed to grab something from observation. As for Gaia, by comparing the Earth with other neighbouring planets and analysing the structural chemistry of surface layers, especially the atmosphere, Lovelock and Margulis reached the conclusion that Earth has a system of self-regulation, homeostasis, which is the same we have in our bodies. The Earth, when observed from space, and today we have satellites observing Earth from space, shows this exact feature.
But it doesn’t have it just now, it has had this feature for the last 4 billion years, which makes it even more challenging to explain. For in 4 billion years Earth has gone through countless cataclysms and through metabolic evolution. And it took a very long time for Earth to finally get to its present composition, through a process in which the biosphere participated.
This participation was not casual or by chance. It was not random. It did not unfold with a prospect of producing this effect, a teleological perspective, when you already know the end so you go back to the start, knowing where you want to go.
We do not invoke that. . .
This possibility that there was a previous plan considering Earth would be a certain way that it eventually turned out to be. However we deny the possibility that inside the very natural laws there might exist an imbedded plan. Within natural laws, in themselves, as their innate nature, there is a plan of generating syntropy, of generating complexity.
And that process goes far beyond random variation, selection and survival of the fittest. It goes much further. Today, in many fields it is being demonstrated how far this process reaches, allowing us today to observe in retrospective, and that's the main message I want to convey, that the laws of nature are actually opposite to those promoted by the neo-Darwinian perspective.
They are the opposite. While the Neo-Darwinism states it is about the survival of the fittest. In a way, establishing “the selfish gene”, right?
Thus highlighting or ennobling selfishness, as if backing the idea that I should take care of myself and the world should take care of itself, and the system is totally random, natural selection works selecting the best, the most competent, the strongest, that will then leave fertile descendants and the process stops there. It’s like a powerful initial truth, but it is only true as a starting point. And it has shown itself, over the past decades, not only to be powerful.
powerful in a way of being pratically ill, since it has brought humanity to a condition of self-annihilation. This is my perspective today. I see it as a dogmatic, fundamentalist and in a way irresponsible understanding.
Often as the expression of something non-rational, impulsive and intolerant, classifying as unscientific anything that deviates from its logical truism. And more, it comes with an ideological surveillance on top of it. Before exposing the Theory of Gaia, Lynn Margulis published or tried to publish her Endosymbiosis theory.
It said that the complex cells, called eukaryotic, are a result of the association of other simpler cells. She took 15 rejections with the dogmatic argument that it was “heresy”. They came to the point of using such a word, heresy, a word of religious stamp.
Neo-Darwinians rejected her work and called heresy the idea that organisms could help each other. Eventually she managed to publish it in a non ‘top’ magazine from the time, and shortly after, really shortly after that, "the plasmids" were discovered, which are DNA that stay mitochondria of the maternal line DNA, not the same as the nucleus DNA. And this in a way was a proof that her idea of endo symbiosis was somehow right.
So if a Nobel prize in Biology existed, Lynn Margulis should have won it, with her spectacular discovery. So what was the big historical mistake, reported here by Lynn Margulis, so poignantly? This truistic view that Darwinism proposes has built up something like a fence you cannot leave.
Then we get to Gaia. The Gaia hypothesis states that Earth is a living organism and it has all the qualities of a living, homeostatic organism. Firstly there was the realization that the planet has climatic stability not explainable only in terms of geophysics or geochemistry.
It was necessary to have the bio: biogeophysics and biogeochemistry. Without the bio, without having the biosphere, it’s not possible to explain what we see, because the whole history of the Earth is engraved on the rocks. So you can go and check, there are 3.
8 billion years old rocks. The neo-Darwinian community’s reaction to the Gaia hypothesis was the worst possible. Nowadays we already know enough about Gaia’s metabolism, because there is this euphemism created out of the indecent attack from neo-Darwinians towards Gaia.
They attacked it so violently that it became a bad thing. If you talk about Gaia, then “oh, you must be a religious person, because you believe in Gaia” They created an understatement called called Earth System Science. This department here is called Centre of Earth System Science, but it’s Gaia Science.
Because Gaia is a reality. Now the Gaia theory has regained respectability and there is this interesting thing about it, because back in 1980, this guy Ford Doolittle published an article in a magazine called Coevolution Quarterly. The article is called "Is nature really motherly?
" after this idea from the Gaia hypothesis that the nature takes care; it sustains itself. And he argued in that article that nothing in the genome of individual organisms could provide the feedback mechanisms proposed by Lovelock, and therefore the Gaia hypothesis did not propose any plausible mechanism. “And so”, he concludes, “it is not scientific”.
It was like that from the very start. I call this approach “pharisaic”, because it's a pharisaic approach. .
. If there was no mechanism, why to affirm it was not scientific? This kind of attack that the Gaia hypothesis massively suffered, especially in the 1980s, made a lot of people say something like "Oh, this Gaia thing is dangerous”.
Very much like what the Inquisition did to people who had some knowledge about plants, etc. It was such a massive attack that everyone was saying like "Get out, whoever believes that is a witch”. Nowadays there is no one working with Earth science who is not a Gaian, since the biogeochemistry, biogeophysics, paleoclimates, and climatology itself.
. . the models already start to include mechanisms, "loops of re-stabilizers", which we call negative feedback.
It is indisputable. The Earth is a living planet, it is a self-regulating planet. And this relationship of regulation or stability for over billions of years has a single explanation.
. . it is called life.
There can be no other explanation. Then the very neo-Darwinians who were the ones who prevented this perception from maturing, who held back in a religious way, as Lynn Margulis accuses them, now come back and say "Let us 'darwinize' Gaia". "Let us show that it is possible".
But in the meantime we lost the planet. We lost the planet. If back in the 80’s the Gaia hypothesis had become.
. . had advanced, alongside with questions.
. . I'm not in favour of accepting anything new like "Oh, ok, so it must be like that", no.
Let us raise questions. But not the way it was done. That was an actual inquisition.
The neo-Darwinians blocked it completely; they demonized the Gaia hypothesis to the point of it becoming a bad name. They created an euphemism, "Earth System Science", so as to not having to use the name Gaia because it was dirty by so much poo that the neo-Darwinians threw on it. And then what happened.
. . The climate changes came, climatologists began to warn of climate change, about the seriousness of the situation, but there was no theory to explain why the climate changes were taking place.
The only theory available showed that we were emitting gases. But to the other part, what has regulated gases in the atmosphere for 4 billion years? It was the biosphere.
Because of the demonizing of the Gaia hypothesis by the neo-Darwinians that path was blocked. So climatologists had to keep saying "Oh, there is an increase in CO2 a radioactive trapping of heat takes place so the Earth heats up". .
. a linear thing. Given that there is no such linearity in a complex system.
It is totally non-linear and this non-linearity has a name, it is called life. But it is extremely self-correlated, that is, life regulates the planetary system by an inconceivably complex way. It’s not just “do away with CO2”.
A binary thing. So, what happened? Climatologists could have, had they endured the campaign that was made, they could have a theory of Gaia already in the late '80s, we are talking about 15 years after it was proposed, with the potential evolution of knowledge, there could have been something strong then.
. . Perhaps not as we have today, since today we already have very advanced clarification due to orbital observation data and fifty million things that came up in the meantime.
They would already have a strong theory, and then what could have happened? That is my reconstruction of History, supposing the neo-Darwinians had not promoted an inquisition against Gaia. .
. What would have happened? Climatologists would’ve had a much more powerful story.
And Neoliberalism, that used the weakness of global warming claims, which posed a threat to dirty industry interests, entered into a supernova explosion. Also the oil industries, as it is becoming evident now, and knowingly because the proficient researchers from Exxon, from Shell, they had warned internally that the biggest threat to their business was global warming. So they spent billions of dollars in counter-science.
And here we are, in 2019, almost losing Planet Earth. So this is no small thing, it's not something like “there is no scientific consensus”. Now one of those pharisees, that Ford Doolittle, from the '80s, who threw the Gaia hypothesis in the garbage, says "Oh, I found a way to darwinize Gaia".
Now when we are about to lose the planet. These people should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Today we know that natural selection has a role.
it’s an important role, but it’s just one role. It is a safety net. You know, like the acrobats in the circus.
Sometimes these rather elaborate, complex evolutions they make fail, and they fall. So the safety net prevents them from dying. That is natural selecion.
But it is a rescue system, not a system that creates new knowledge or new solutions. It reinforces, as a benchmark, to try and test solutions, okay, and literature holds vast documentation on how natural selection plays an important role. But that’s just it.
As Ernst Götsch and several colleagues who are researchers say, such as Paul Stamets, fungi researcher, his work is extraordinary, Simard, a researcher on the interaction between trees in forests there in British Columbia, they are showing that there is in unconditional love in nature. Unconditional. This is the main line of the way natural systems work; it is about taking care of one another.
When selfishness arises in the system, something is not working properly. I’ll give an example, and with this one we conclude. We have approximately 37 trillions of individual cells in our body.
And also so many others, I don’t know how many, some 50 trillion prokaryotic cells the bacteria that live in our microbiome, mainly within the digestive system. This cosmos, this ambulant galaxy of cellular systems, which is the human body, works on an absolutely collaborative basis. Why is it absolute?
Because if a single cell of the body decides not to collaborate anymore, there’s a name for it. When it doesn't collaborate anymore, it is the focus of study from a field of medicine called oncology, because it is a tumour. Firstly, the cells that are specialized, our somatic cells, all of them, they exercise only a small part of their genetic potential, because every eukaryotic cell in our body, each cell that’s actually ours, has the complete genome.
There you will find the chromosomes, the entire genome. But if it’s a skin cell, it produces keratin, so only a small part of the genome that one which encodes for keratin, is active. So all these cells are acting in a lesser way, smaller than their maximum potential.
They don't have what we call in economy the exuberance, infinite growth. . .
They operate within a prescribed niche for the functioning of the whole set. If for any reason one of them gets damaged and becomes selfish, and it then wants to grow and multiply, the cells of the immune system, the lymphocytes, they are an anti-selfishness police. They go and flip a little switch in that cell, making it commit suicide, the “apoptosis”.
This is how the natural system works. The natural system. .
. the most powerful natural selection is that of the immune system. Zero tolerance to selfishness.
There can be no selfishness, because it degrades the system natural. It is entropic and not syntropic, the selfishness. And what do we have in our social system?
We have prizes for the selfish ones! We live in a completely tumoral society! In all senses.
The whole sports system, everything favours this culture of selfishness and of the survival of the fittest, the strongest, etc. And if we look at nature, whenever a structure like this emerges, it means the system is sick, terminal. It’s in a very bad state.
And when it’s healthy, it is unconditional love. Unconditional love, which is the greatest force that exists in the Universe. In my prediction, the arising subject is that there will be an exponential progression in this catalysis of knowledge.
I don't want it either to have it registered that I made a religious speech against the religious ones of Darwinism, of Neo-Darwinism, because I see that they are changing positions now. Belatedly, but still they are changing. I just do a historical review so that we don’t fall again into this trap of religion, belief, dogma, even if scientific dogma, whatever.
But it's really bad. Look at what has happened in relation to Gaia. And now what’s coming is an enormous acceleration of the awareness processes, so we have to make use of this moment and put, under the collective consciousness, this new perception.
It’s not really new, because the Indigenous had peoples have had this perception that in nature reigns collaboration. Collaboration prevails. Without collaboration there is no complexity and complexity is the basis to our existence.
Without complexity there is no self-regulating system. And complexity can only exist through collaboration. We don't need to be afraid of talking about love.
. . I have already been accused, by people who say disparagingly "Antonio is a romantic researcher", which I take as a compliment, because I believe that love is a force of the Universe, a merging force.
And this force has an incredible capacity of rescuing. And today, on Earth, what we have is a terminal situation. We have got a multiple failure of planetary organs.
We need to cultivate love. We need to cultivate respect for our neighbours. We need to cultivate the recognition that the functioning of an individual only for his own purposes is an anomaly, an anomaly in nature, and a carcinogenic anomaly.
This needs to end, its time is over. It has produced a lot of damage and threatens the whole of existence, our existence. Without Gaia there is no human being, there is no economy, no culture, no science, nothing.
We need Gaia. Gaia is a fundamental need. It is essential.
And there is no other possible alternative.
