Trees of Life

What's the difference between a pile of wet dirt steaming in the sun, and a tree?

I've asked people this question before and have gotten that is-he-off-his-meds look from them. But it's simple enough: a tree and a pile of wet dirt are composed of the same stuff. The difference is that the tree is alive, has life, is a life. That means it takes the moisture and dirt and air and sunlight and transforms it through self-sustained processes into a structure, a form. In effect, the life of the tree takes the raw materials - literally earth, water, air and fire - and uses them to assemble a form to realize or manifest itself.

The form it takes is a branching fractal, and in fact a tree is the paradigm for all such geometric shapes; for example, a chart that shows the branching of lines of descent from an ancestor is known as a family "tree."

Which brings me to the next question that tends to elicit "that look" from people: Where does life come from?

I hasten to add that I'm not asking about the origin or ultimate source of all life; rather, simply this: If we look at a specific living thing, where did its life come from? And the simple answer is: from another living thing. Life comes from life.

What a family tree shows, from this point of view, is the history of transmission of life through successive generations, as it branches, re-branches and multiplies.

Trying to trace these lines of transmission, as I indicated in my last post, can get to be a pretty complex task. And it gets even more complex if you consider that your personal family tree is just one of billions of sub-branches of the overall human family tree, which in turn is just a sub-branch of the mammalian family tree, which again is a sub-branch of a yet-larger "tree of life."

Here's one attempt to represent this situation graphically (click to enlarge; right-click to open in a new browser window):


(Source: Wikipedia)


Drastically simplified as this picture is, it does get the basic idea across, with special emphasis on the tree-like nature of the relationships.

This next one is much more scientifically up-to-date and gives a better picture of how complicated these life-connections have become over time:

(Source: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press)

Even this diagram, however, exhibits a tree-like branching structure that fans out from a single point of origin. Now, there's obviously a lot of room for debate about the exact nature of that point of origin - was it an act of divine creation, or a chance combination of organic chemicals, or the arrival on earth of some existing simple organism from the far reaches of space? - but we can safely ignore that question for now. The point is that all subsequent life consists of an uninterrupted transmission from that one original source.

Here's one more example of a tree-like branching fractal structure:



(Source: U.S. Geological Survey; photo of Selenga River delta on the southeast shore of Lake Baikal, Russia.)

What does this river delta have in common with a tree, apart from a branching structure? I would argue that both can be thought of as objects created by a type of outflow. That's obvious in the case of the river, but perhaps not so obvious with regard to a tree. But I think it's a true way of looking at a tree's growth: The life within the tree is creating a flow up into the sky by assembling its outstretching branching structure, just as the gravitational energy of the river causes it to flow into the sea, depositing a similar structure as it does so.

In the very same way, the tree-of-life diagrams above chart the outflow over the eons of life itself. What we see in these diagrams, in other words, is the history of the flow of a single stream with many branches, just like the one in the satellite photo.

In short, all life on earth is one life flowing from a single wellspring through myriad branches. From that perspective, each individual living thing is related to every other living thing in the same way as the separate leaves on a gigantic tree, or as the fingers of one individual human's hands: distinguishable as objects of a kind in themselves, but impossible and meaningless without their connection to a larger life.

I suggested last time that when we stand in line at the grocery store, there's a fair chance that the cashier or some of the other customers may be our cousins. But clearly, our relatedness is ultimately much closer, much more intimate: There is only one life, a single self-same life, in all of us. It enlivens each of us for a time as it flows through us from its unknown past toward its unguessable future.

Knowing that, how can I possibly regard you or any other living being with ill-will?

Darwin vs. Darwinism

One of the many things I find exasperating about our culture is the so-called conflict between science and religion. I think the conflict is only between one restrictive, narrow-minded vision of science and one equally (and similarly) restrictive, narrow-minded vision of religion. I consider the partisans on both sides of this divide equally fundamentalist, and I would very much like to see more of us who hold more moderate positions gain attention in our public discourse (i.e., the media). But as it is now, only the extremists get air time.

I’ve done a little chipping away in this blog at the fixed positions on both sides of this polarized debate, and while I’m not interested in a frontal assault on either position (I was raised literally in the middle of a Civil War battlefield, so I know the futility of that tactic, even if I hadn’t read Sun Tzu), I want to step up the opposition to the hijacking of our intellectual life by extremists.

So here’s the first barrage:

One of the great crises of spirituality in the Western world was precipitated by the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s book “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” The spritual crisis was precipitated by the fact that because this work seemed to imply that a literal interpretation of Judeo-Christian scripture was erroneous, there was a widespread belief that “Darwin has disproven the Bible.” As a result, some people abandoned their Christian faith and others hardened theirs. (This was, in fact, what gave birth to the fundamentalist movement, which originated among a group of Baptist ministers who decided that the best answer to the challenge of science to the scriptures was to declare the scriptures right and science wrong.)

Interestingly, the word “evolution” doesn’t appear anywhere in the first edition of Darwin’s book. In fact, the only place in it where any form of the word “evolve” can be found is at the end, the final word of the final sentence of the book:

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

In the sixth edition, published in 1872, “evolution” is much more prominent, mainly in describing Darwin’s supporters and his responses to his critics. For example: “It is admitted by most evolutionists that mammals are descended from a marsupial form; and if so, the mammary glands will have been at first developed within the marsupial sack.”

In short, during the 13 years since the publication of the first edition of “Origin of Species,” Darwin has shifted from making observations of nature and drawing conclusions from them to defending his theories against the onslaughts of his many critics – mainly the religious establishment – and aligning himself with partisans who support him.

Given that there were so many who believed that “Darwin has disproved the Bible” and more generally that “Science has disproved God,” it’s interesting that Darwin made only one small change to that final paragraph reproduced above. Here it is again, with the one small change highlighted:

“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”