The biophysicist Harold Morowitz questions whether individuals are even real, “because they do not exist per se but only as local perturbations in this universal energy flow.” He uses the analogy of a whirlpool in a river. The whirlpool does not exist as a separate entity; rather, it is made of an ever-changing collection of water molecules, facilitated by the energy of moving water. “It exists only because of the flow of water through the stream. If the flow ceases the vortex disappears,” he says. In the same sense, living things like Red-wings and you and me “are transient, unstable entities with constantly changing molecules dependent on a constant flow of energy to maintain form.” You don’t just go with the flow—you live by it. The loss of the inbound flow is death. Death is merely life unplugged.
While an individual is a real entity in some meaningful ways, blurring the edges of our sense of self gives a more accurate picture. We’re less like crisp photographs and more like impressionist paintings. Our material makeup is constantly changing. We are made individuals by our genes— which make us each a bit different—and by our unique actions, memories, and histories. But our histories are largely shared. All the creation myths that intuit a single origin for people are essentially correct. All life is of the same kind: a DNA framework and its consequent window dressing. There is one tree, one family of life, no other.
Albert Einstein went further, saying, “A human being is part of the whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison.”
If you still believe you are distinct from your surroundings, try reading the next three pages while holding your breath. The point is: you are not just an entity; you are an interchange.
A living thing is a knot of passing time, flowing material, and continuous energy. From dust, air, and water, energy assembles itself into the wood, leaves, bone, and muscle that we recognize as living. All lives depend on how energy pushes matter through plants and animals. Often the matter, like carbon, nitrogen, and water, cycles from one living thing to the next through the whole community. We are these dynamic processes in relationship to one another. We are a relationship to the world.
Ecology—the term was coined by the German Zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866 from the Greek word for household—blurred the individual further. Ecology investigates how all living things depend on other living things, and on that flow of energy and materials. Ecology reveals a world where each individual seed, each creature, is an experiment, testing the waters with its own uniqueness, striving for a fit. But the chances of surviving to adulthood range from under 10 percent—for most mammals and birds with highly developed parental care—to as low as one in millions, for example for big fish that lay immense numbers of eggs.
How can so harsh a world brim with life? The whole thing works because nature preserves not individuals but the enterprise by which life struggles to survive and adapts to changes. In other words, individuals disappear, species disappear; what survives is the process. The living enterprise continues because the process continues. To keep life alive, what’s important is this: preserve the process. Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity’s relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we’ve learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is—more than anything else—a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time, and various living things. It’s not just about human-to-human interaction; it’s not just about spiritual interaction. It’s about all interac tion. We’re bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we’re in—and reality’s implications—we’ll face big problems."
Wrote by Carl Safina in The View from the Lazy Point
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