Sloucho's Full Review: Lewis Thomas - Lives of a Cell: Notes Of A Biology...
When I was nineteen, I went through a period that I categorized at the time as "intellectually rigorous." It was an important period for me, though I eventually emerged from it with a clearer understanding of the limitations of the scientific method. At the time, however, I was profoundly intolerant of any assertion that couldn't be demonstrated to me. Above all else, I hated the power of rhetoric, the way that it made people swallow unfounded propositions.
I decided that I couldn't forgive Jefferson for saying that "The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of revolution." Moreover, I thought that any good Marxist would have censored Marx for asserting that a violent revolution was necessary for "purging the muck of ages." After all, there is no such thing as a tree of liberty. And the 'muck of ages' sounded more like a bourgeois construct than anything that Marx's opponents could have come up with.
I agreed with Marx about being determining consciousness. I saw thoughts and personalities as the necessary and inevitable products of electro-chemical reactions in individual brains--brains that really could, in the final analysis, be reduced to carbon and hydrogen and so much electricity.
I thought it was foolish to talk about the tree of liberty and the muck of ages because such rhetoric made it sound as if there was some kind of larger-than-human thinking going on out there. I thought that thinking had to be localized to individual brains capable of thought. When people started to talk about the ways in which we collectively think as a species or a society, I lost all patience. "Show me the societal brain," I would say. I wanted to see a physical organ responsible for the kind of thinking that people are forever attributing to Jung's collective unconscious.
I was a little uptight, I guess.
But sometimes being uptight is a good thing, as it was the uptight part of me that led me to explore the books recommended by the University of Chicago's Great Books Program. The first scientific text recommended by the poster promoting the program (a poster that I saw back in 1988, so forgive me if I'm no longer up-to-date) was Lewis Thomas' Lives of a Cell. I picked it up at a used book sale and meant to read it for years and years until I finally found time for it a few months ago.
In the meantime, I had figured out that the relationship between being and consciousness is far more complicated than I had ever imagined it could be. Frankly, though, it had taken me years to learn that lesson--a lesson that I could very easily have learned simply by reading through Thomas' marvelously compelling, accessible, and beautifully written book.
Lives of a Cell consists of a series of essays that are all more or less related to a central theme concerning the way that cells act like bodies act like species act like ecosystems.
Thomas' extensive medical background is impressive. He served as dean both at Yale Medical School and at the New York University-Bellevue Medical Center and as president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. We can hear his biological training (and perhaps some personal distress) coming through when he says, "My cells are no longer the pure line entities I was raised with; they are ecosystems more complex than Jamaica Bay." Importantly, however, he writes this book not from the perspective of a physician, but of what he very tellingly calls "a biology watcher."
He urges us to look critically--but also wonderingly--at the living world in which we live. The more closely we look at the things that we consider individual and indivisible, the more profoundly obvious it becomes that there is no escaping connectivity. Sometimes the connections are physical, as in the case of tissues; sometimes they are abstract, as in the case of language; but sometimes they are downright metaphysical, as in the way that beehives and anthills act more like single organisms than like societies.
A bee is less like an individual member of the hive than it is like a cell in the body of the hive. The queen bee may be recognized as the head of the hive, but she does not think for the hive. The hive somehow thinks for itself and reacts to stimuli in self-preserving and self-perpetuating ways that cannot be explained in terms of the cognitive capacity of an individual bee.
Ants are the same way. Wolves are the same way. And by extension, humans are the same way.
"Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves. . . . They exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television."
We imagine that we can understand ourselves and our place in the universe through discussion and analysis. But our species will always do things that puzzle its individual members.
"The bacteria are beginning to have the aspect of social animals; they should provide nice models for the study of interactions between forms of life at all levels. They live by collaboration, accommodation, exchange, and barter. They, and the fungi, probably with help from a communication system laid on by the viruses, comprise the parenchyma of the soil."
In many ways, we understand our humanity precisely as well as a bacterium understands its own bacteria-ness--which is surprisingly well, particularly when we fail to consider (as we so often do) that our cells appear to be born with a knowledge of what they are supposed to do and how they can most successfully work together. Our understanding of community, society, mutuality is perhaps more deeply instinctive than we recognize. It shouldn't surprise us if we can't demystify it, as we can't seem to demystify it with regard to termites either:
"Termites are even more extraordinary in the way they seem to accumulate intelligence as they gather together. Two or three termites in a chamber will begin to pick up pellets and move them from place to place, but nothing comes of it; nothing is built. As more join in, they seem to reach a critical mass, a quorum, and the thinking begins. They place pellets atop pellets, then throw up columns and beautiful, curving, symmetrical arches, and the cystalline architecture of vaulted chambers is created. It is not known how they communicate with each other, how the chains of termites building one column know when to turn toward the crew on the adjacent column, or how, when the time comes, they manage the flawless joining of the arches. The stimuli that set them off at the outset, building collectively instead of shifting things about, may be pheromones released when they reach committee size. They react as if alarmed. They become agitated, excited, and then they begin working, like artists."
I sometimes wonder about my compulsion to contribute to epinions. There are better-paying and more personally rewarding things that I could be doing with my time. And yet there is a compulsion, something of an invisible hand that pulls me to the computer and urges me to make the attempt to submit something each day. Epinions exerts the pull of a sort of societal super-intelligence on me, a feeling that I am doing something whose significance I cannot appreciate, but which insists upon being done nevertheless. Could it be that we termites have reached a critical mass and feel the need to build a nest simply because that's the way our cells react to one another?
The point of Thomas' book is perhaps best articulated when he says, at the beginning of chapter 11, "When social animals are gathered together in groups, they become qualitatively different creatures from what they were when alone or in pairs." Now I know that point is hardly going to come as a surprise to anyone. So why bother reading the book?
Because Thomas is nothing short of masterful at explaining the implications of the extremely obvious observations that he makes. You might at first be inclined to snap, "So what?", but Thomas will show you exactly "what" and help you to understand why it really is pleasurable--if not useful--to think about the difference between being an ant and being a citizen of the hill.
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This review is my contribution to the Darwin Day write off, a collection of science-themed reviews hosted by the irrepressible Hypotenuse. Be sure to become a more well rounded termite by reading the contributions of the other participants: gracef, lagavulin, auntieemma, eplovejoy, msiduri and brendahm. Links to their contributions can be found at the following address:
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