Predrag B. Slijepčević 

Mind is the essence of being alive.
—Gregory Bateson¹

The public often idealize science as a superior way of knowing, fortressed in objectivity and matter-of-fact rationalism. Yet what makes possible this way of knowing are the conglomerates of thirty-seven trillion cells that make up the human body, along with ten times as many microbes that enable our bodies to exist within the invisible microbial cloud that straddles the biosphere.

This is one of the mysteries of the world that remains unexplained: how this scientific rationalism – that over the last 300 years has taken humans from a modest earthly presence to the edge of the cosmos – emerged from the four billion years of microbial evolutionary games that Ernst Mayr, one of the most influential biologists of the 20th century, called ‘stupid’ in a famous dialogue with Carl Sagan.² In other words, how can we reconcile our superior intellectual rationalism with the perceived stupidity of microbes, whose wildness has been tamed and transformed, in the manner of well-trained Shakespearean actors, into powerful brain cells that can scan the cosmos, write love letters, compose the New World Symphony or paint Guernica?

Here is another question, this time directed at those who like to bet. Who is really stupid: people or microbes? Mayr wagered that microbes are champions of stupidity. He used an argument popular amongst futurists: high cerebral intellect always carries with it an existential risk.³ Human technologies, from the steam engine to artificial intelligence (AI), expand our comfort zones enormously, but at the same time they endanger long-term survival. Mayr argued that microbes have neither technology nor intelligence. Their ‘stupidity’ has given them evolutionary longevity – four billion years of carefree monotony.

On the other hand, the microbiologist James Shapiro wagered that we humans are the champions of stupidity. In a paper entitled ‘Bacteria are small but not stupid’, he wrote: ‘Bacteria are far more sophisticated than human beings in controlling complex operations.’⁴ Shapiro’s colleague, Eshel Ben-Jacob, further developed the idea of a collective bacterial mind.⁵ The planetwide bacterial communication network – the bacteriosphere – makes life on Earth possible by controlling biogeochemical cycles of organic elements, even despite multiple evolutionary catastrophes and collapses.⁶ According to Ben-Jacob, bacterial communication exhibits characteristics known to language experts, including syntax (language structure) and semantics (meaning).⁷ The idea of the universal grammar that we associate exclusively with human language is, in fact, a replica of a much older school of communication.

Organism plus Environment

At first glance, Mayr’s position is a progressive one. Science and philosophy teach us that humans are the most intelligent organisms in the history of life. Who would even bother to argue against an attitude so culturally ingrained? Shapiro’s position, on the other hand, is counterintuitive. Evolution appears progressive: the complexity of organic forms increases with evolutionary time. It seems like microbes must be primitive relative to the complex biological designs of mammals, for example.

This book is an ante to Shapiro’s bet. I will tell you a story of biological civilisations, or ‘biocivilisations’ for short, much older than human civilisation. The story of biocivilisations will show that bacteria, other microbes and all other forms of life are not stupid. On the contrary, the planetary bacterial superorganism, or the bacteriosphere, has been running the biogeochemical affairs on Earth for billions of years with a kind of intelligence that may forever remain beyond human capacities.

When Richard Feynman stated, ‘What I cannot create, I do not understand’, he captured the purpose of science in seven words.⁸ The story of biocivilisations, based on the most recent scientific evidence, will create a testable model of life’s true diversity, which is hidden from view by the anthropocentrism of mainstream science. This model may help us understand our place in a world turned upside down; a world in which microbes actually dominate, and animals, like humans, are temporary intruders, tricked onto a dangerous path by an unprecedented sense of self-aggrandisement. Gregory Bateson, a cyberneticist and philosopher, called this dangerous path ‘pathologies of epistemology’. For him, even Darwin was wrong.

Now we begin to see some of the epistemological fallacies of Occidental civilization. In accordance with the general climate of thinking in mid-nineteenth-century England, Darwin proposed a theory of natural selection and evolution in which the unit of survival was either the family line or the species or subspecies or something of the sort. But today it is quite obvious that this is not the unit of survival in the real biological world. The unit of survival is organism plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. If, now, we correct the Darwinian unit of survival to include the environment and the interaction between organism and environment, a very strange and surprising identity emerges: the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind.⁹

Bateson precisely captured the meaning of the term ‘civilisation’: the relationship between organisms and their environments. The relationship is deeply knowledge-based, or mind-like. This natural epistemology is best represented by an analogy: imagine that one neuronal cell in the brain is an organism. The surrounding neuronal cells represent the environment. The ‘wiring’ between a single cell and its environment will lead to all the cells ‘firing’ together as part of brain activities.¹⁰

Biocivilisation, on the other hand, is the emergence of wiring between organisms and their environments that fills the biological world with meaning. Indeed, organisms are constantly challenged by their environments. Bacteria must find a new source of food, ants must protect their fungal gardens from microbial intruders, honeybees must invent more efficient algorithms for nectar collection, etc. Environmental challenges force organisms, or autonomous natural agents, onto the path of natural learning. Through the process of learning – the neuronal-like wiring of autonomous natural agents with their surroundings – organisms construct environments.¹¹ Ultimately, organisms and environments become indistinguishable from each other. For example, the human body is as much an organism (a corporate conglomerate of cells) as it is an environment (a platform for 37 trillion eukaryotic cells and 400 trillion microbes).¹²

In a biocivilised world, there is no difference between human beings and bacteria in the civilising and mind-like process of learning. The historian Niall Ferguson remarked: ‘Civilizations are partly a practical response by human populations to their environments – the challenges of feeding, watering, sheltering and defending themselves.’¹³

One can also, however, replace the word ‘human’ with ‘bacterial’, ‘animal’, ‘plant’ or ‘fungal’ in the above quote. Nothing essential will change. In the world of biocivilisations, human civilisation is just a fragment of the huge spectrum of biocivilisations that together form the planetary biosphere. Applying the Batesonian analogy even further, the biosphere, or Gaia, is a composite biocivilisation capable of self-regulating, a unit mind. As Bateson remarked: ‘Mind is a necessary, an inevitable function of the appropriate complexity, wherever that complexity occurs. But that complexity occurs in a great many other places besides the inside of my head and yours.’¹⁴

The Gaian mind, I will argue in the book, becomes apparent when we discover how individual biocivilisations that are ‘wired’ together, also ‘fire’ together. This enables Gaia, the planetary ecosystem, to regulate itself and survive the challenges brought about by periodic evolutionary catastrophes. Gaia is a fast-thinking and intelligent system, a phoenix that rises from its own ashes. In this system, biocivilisations come and go, but there is one constant. Bacteria have been around since the outset of life on Earth. Lynn Margulis argued that bacteria are the basic unit of Gaia.¹⁵ Indeed, this basic unit may prove indestructible.

The Story

This book has three parts. Part 1, Beyond Humans, is about humanity’s distorted views of the biological world and our so-called planetary dominance. This distortion is embodied in the term ‘Anthropocene’, coined by Nobel Prize–winning chemist Paul Crutzen and his collaborator Eugene Stormer to describe how ‘humans have replaced nature as the dominant environmental force on Earth’.¹⁶

But, in fact, microbes are the dominant environmental force on Earth. Founders of the biosphere, their presence is virtually everywhere – including deep in the oceans, high on mountain peaks, amongst tropospheric clouds, in every kind of forest and even in our bodies – and it is a constant reminder that humans are non-essential by-products of what mostly amounts to microbial evolutionary games. Take humans out of the equation and nothing of significance would happen to the biosphere’s natural trajectory. Indeed, many species would flourish in our absence. Others would go extinct. But none of this would cause the steady beating pulse of the biosphere to so much as skip. By contrast, take microbes out of the biosphere and the whole biosphere would collapse.¹⁷

The human thirst for self-aggrandizement – encapsulated in Yuval Noah Harari’s new label for our species, Homo Deus – is a monumental self-delusion.¹⁸ The biosphere existed without us for more than 99.99% of its history. We are far more likely to remain an evolutionary statistical error than God-like creatures. We have been deceived into delusional fairy tales from bestselling books that hawk the idea of human biological superiority, and we have been sold fantasies about human immortality that will enable us to control the solar system, or even the galaxy, in a not-so-distant future.¹⁹ My argument, on the other hand, is that a humbling, not an aggrandizement, will yield our most valuable lessons, from microbes, fungi, plants and other animals – organisms with far greater evolutionary experience than us.

The 20th-century British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell recognized delusions of this type decades ago; he called it ‘madness’ and was unafraid to point the finger at scientific hubris as the source of such insanity. ‘The philosophies that have been inspired by the scientific technique are power philosophies and tend to regard everything non-human as mere raw material. Ends are no longer considered; only the skillfulness of the process is valued. This also is a form of madness. It is, in our day, the most dangerous form, and the one against which a sane philosophy should provide an antidote’, Russell asserted in his celebrated 1945 book A History of Western Philosophy.²⁰

Viewing Homo sapiens as the dominant environmental force on Earth is not only a form of madness, it could not be further from the truth. The real force of life rests with microbes; the Bacteriocene runs the biological world. Microbial civilisation is the most powerful civilisation that has ever existed on this planet. In the remainder of this chapter, I will describe the basic elements of microbial biocivilisation – language, mind and memory – and show how almost all elements of human civilisation have precursors in the bacterial world.

In Chapter 2 (Against Mechanism), I will outline four principles of life that challenge mainstream biology – the science of life as subservient to physics. You will see that biology subservient to physics is a heavily biased science resulting from a wrong epistemology. In Chapter 3 (Pride and Prejudice), I will challenge some of our anthropic prejudices, from the way we interpret intelligence, to the fallacy of the Anthropocene and our understanding of sentience. I will argue that the attitude of modern biology is wrong. What we call life is a process that operates in a mind-like manner. Exactly as Bateson described: ‘Mind is the essence of being alive.’ We have 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. By contrast, the machine is mindless – a piece of dead matter that will never become alive, despite enormous efforts by futurists of the physicalist persuasion to convince us it will. The three chapters of Part 1 will underpin the central part of the book, Part 2 (Brave New World), the story of biocivilisations.

Part 2 is not an homage to Aldous Huxley and his futuristic novel, but rather a challenge to the kind of futurism that is based on mechanistic science. We have to be brave enough to recognize that many technological achievements, usually taken to be human inventions, existed in the world of biocivilisations long before the human species emerged in the span of evolution. Those biocivilisations can be witnessed every day in forests, fields, oceans and on mountains. The lives and civilisations of plants, termites, bacteria, birds, elephants, honeybees, ants, whales and octopi are replete with amazing and valuable technologies (Chapter 4, Civilising Force). Communicators (Chapter 5), engineers (Chapter 6), scientists (Chapter 7), doctors (Chapter 8), artists (Chapter 9) and farmers (Chapter 10) existed long before human civilisations emerged.

Finally, in Part 3 (Looking Forward), I argue for a new school of thought in the science of life, liberated from the stranglehold of a mechanistic world view. From Descartes onwards, all non-human organisms have been considered mere machines or, in the vocabulary of neo-Cartesians such as Richard Dawkins, dumb ‘lumbering robots’ controlled by selfish genes.21 Indeed, most biologists are accustomed to using the terms ‘mechanism’ and ‘mechanistic’ to describe the inner workings or the behavior of bacteria, archaea, protists, fungi, plants and non-human animals. Although there is some value in reducing biological processes to mechanistic explanations, and there is a promising possibility of identifying common ground between biocivilisations and the mechanistic view of life, this reconciliation must grow from a recognition that life is more than mechanism.

This excerpt is taken from Chapter 1 of Biocivilisations: A New Look at the Science of Life  (2023) by Predrag B. Slijepčević and used with permission from Chelsea Green Publishing. The rest of the chapter will be published in the December 16 issue of Townsend e-Letter.

Published December 2, 2023

About the Author

Predrag B. Slijepčević is a senior lecturer in the Department of Life Sciences at Brunel University London. He is bio-scientist interested in the philosophy of biology. In particular, Predrag investigates how biological systems, from bacteria to animals and beyond, perceive and process environmental stimuli (that is, biological information) and how this processing, which is a form of natural learning, affects the organism–environment interactions. He aims to identify those elements in the organization of biological systems that lead to forms of natural epistemology, or biological intelligence, that might qualify those systems as cognitive agents. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals across all areas of this book. Biocivilisations is his first book.