From: Alan McGowen <alanm@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: alt.native
Date: 12 Sep 92 03:49 PDT
Subject: The Commonwealth of Life
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1308200064:000:4720
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!alanm    Sep 12 03:49:00 1992


In my last article ("the human niche") I suggested that a kind of  
"commonwealth of life" has been established by the long 
coevolution of niches among different species. For example, many 
groups of species evolve to partition their use of resources so 
as to reduce competitive pressures among themselves, sometimes 
establishing ecological "guilds" of similar species 
differentiated along a small number of dimensions, often only 
one: in birds, size of body and beak, and thus size of food item, 
are a common example.  

An odd consequence of competition is that it automatically tends 
to reduce itself in evolution, at least when that is genetically 
possible. This is because species which are in competition have 
population growth in negative feedback with each other to the 
extent that they *are* in competition -- this favors the 
reproduction of those genetic variants of the two species which 
are less in competition in their uses of resources. With time, 
the niches of species in competition tend to contract until they 
no longer overlap, (if that is genetically possible)  -- which 
means that they no longer attempt to use the exact same 
resources: the competition attempts to erase itself. In the 
process the two niches -- and the two species -- are reshaped. 

This is an example of coevolution through competition. 
Coevolution also occurs through predation, as in cheetahs and 
gazelles, or in the caterpillars of butterflies and their host 
food plants. Sometimes a relationship between a plant and an 
insect can become an obligate mutualism, meaning that neither 
can survive without the other: vast numbers of plants are 
dependent upon insect pollinators, for example, a coevolved 
dependence which dates back at least to the origin of flowers, 
some 70 million years ago. And vast numbers of insects are just 
as dependent upon a single species of host plant. 

The whole fabric of the biosphere is woven of such coevolved 
relationships established over millions of years. Niches have 
been fine-tuned to this tension between an outward reproductive 
pressure towards competition and the negative feedback of 
coevolution towards partition and mutualism -- towards 
"cooperation", if you will, albeit unplanned cooperation. This 
network of niches chops up the energy flow of sunlight fixed by 
photosynthesis at the base of food chains: the fundamental 
wealth. It is thus a sensible, workable, "commonwealth" of food 
energy -- a "commonwealth of life".

You see, the idea isn't quite as crazy as it sounds at first.

Even the cells of our bodies are the results of a very ancient 
formation of a commonwealth out of warring factions: the 
mitochondria, and the chloroplasts of plants were once free-
living bacteria which were either eaten by eukaryotic hosts or 
infected them, but became resistant to absorption as food and 
were eventually integrated into the machinery of the cell, giving 
up many of their independent genes to the nucleus in the process. 
These bacterial wars were waged some two billion years ago, but 
the cells of all plants, animals, and fungi that live today still 
contain those old sagas of past genetic Trojan Horses. In the 
end, new commonwealths were formed -- and the terrible problems 
of coordinating all that fusion of alien genomes lead to the 
delicate devices of sex, with its explosive potential for 
recombination, diversity, and new adaptation -- the explosion 
which in the Cambrian produced the modern phyla.

And what does this have to do with us? It seems that we think we 
can subvert the whole process -- have pure competition without 
compromise, expand our niche indefinitely, consume all the 
energetic gold of the commonwealth of life. The result is that 
all other life dies -- and continues to die. 

We dream of escaping this holocaust by clever devices, space 
colonies, turning ourselves into machines, and so on. I think 
that indigenous people -- who have dwindled in numbers from tens 
of millions to hundreds of thousands during this "progress" -- 
might have a special perspective on that question. It is for that 
reason that I keep raising these supposedly irrelevant points in 
this group. I do not think that the connection between the core 
principles of life and the core principles by which humans lived 
before they were overwhelmed by the civilizations which 
metastasized out of the ancient near east are trivial or 
irrelevant. You don't look for the future in a cancer cell, you 
look in a normal cell. Normal cells can live without destroying 
all their neighbors: they are sane citizens of the commonwealth 
of life. And where shall we look for the normal human cells today? 

------------
Alan McGowen