More Bio-metaphors

- The Medusa and the Snail - Lewis Thomas
- Slime Mould - Arthur Koestler
- Slimeworld.org
- Additional links

We've never been so self-conscious about our selves as we seem
to be these days. The popular magazines are filled with advice on things
to do with a self: how to find it, identify it, nurture it, protect it,
even, for special occasions, weekends, how to lose it transiently. There
are instructive books, best sellers on self-realization, self-help, self-
development. Groups of self-respecting people pay large fees for three-
day sessions together, learning self-awareness. Self-enlightenment can
be taught in college electives.
You'd think, to read about it, that we'd only just now
discovered selves. Having long suspected that there was something alive
in there, running the place, separate from everything else, absolutely
individual and independent, we've celebrated by giving it a real name.
My self.
It is an interesting word, formed long ago in much more social
ambiguity than you'd expect. The original root was se or seu, simply the
pronoun of the third person, and most of the descendant words, except
"self" itself, were constructed to allude to other, somehow connected
people; "sibs" and "gossips," relatives and close aquaintances, came
from seu. Se was also used to indicate something outside or apart, hence
words like "separate," "secret," and "segregate." From an extended root
swedh it moved into Greek as ethnos, meaning people of one's own sort,
and ethos, meaning the customs of such people. "Ethics" means the behavior
of people like one's self, ones own ethics.
We tend to think of our selves as the only wholly unique creations
in nature, but it is not so. Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of
living things that there is really nothing at all unique about it. A
phenomenon can't be unique and universal at the same time. Even individual,
free-swimming bacteria can be viewed as unique entities, distinguisable
from eah other even when they are the progeny of a single clone. Spudish
and Koshland have recently reported that motile microorganisms of the
same species are like solitary eccentrics in their swimming behavior.
When they are searching for food, some tumble in one direction for
precisely so many seconds before quitting, while others tumble differently
and for different, but characteristic, periods of time. If you watch them
closely, tethered by their flagellae to the surface of an antibody-coated
slide, you can tell them from each other by the way they twirl, as
accurately as though they had different names.
Beans carry self-labels, and are marked by these distinctly
as a mouse by his special smell. The labels are glycoproteins, the
lecins, and may have something to do with negotiating the intimate and
essential attachment between the bean and the nitrogen-fixing bacteria
which lives as part of the plant's flesh, embedded in the root nodules.
The lecin from one line of legume has a special affinity for the surfaces
of the particular bacteria which colonize that line, but not for bacteria
from other types of bean. The system seems designed for the maintenance
of exclusive partnerships. Nature is pieced together by little snobberies
like this.
Coral polyps are biologically self-conscious. If you place
polyps of the same genetic line together, touching each other, they
will fuse and become a single polyp, but if the lines are different,
one will reject the other.
Fish can tell each other apart as individuals, by the smell
of self. So can mice, and here the olfactory discrimination is governed
by the same H2 locus which contains the genes for immunologic self-marking.
The only living units that seem to have no sense of privacy at all
are the nucleated cells that have been detached from the parent organism
and isolated in a laboratory dish. Given the opportunity, under the
right conditions, tow cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell,
say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei
will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into
monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to
have and sense of self.
The markers of self, and the sensing mechanisms responsible for
detecting such markers, are conventionally regarded as mechanisms for
maintaining individuality for its own sake, enabling one kind of creature
to defend and protect itself against all the rest. Selfness, seen thus,
is for self-preservation.
In real life, though, it doesn't seem to work this way. The self-
marking of invertebrate animals in the sea, who must have perfected the
business long before evolution got around to us, was set up in order to
permit creatures of one kind to locate others, not for predation but to
set up symbiotic households. The anemones who live on the shells of
crabs are precisely finicky; so are the crabs. Only a single species
of anemone will find its way to only a single species of crab. They
sense each other exquisitely, and live together as though made for
each other.
Sometimes there is such a mix-up about selfness that two
creatures, each attracted by the molecular configuration of the other,
incorporate the two selves to make a single organism. The best story
I've ever heard about this is the tale told of the nudibranch and
medusa living in the Bay of Naples. When first observed, the nudibranch,
a common sea slug, was found to have a tiny vestigial parasite, in the
form of a jellyfish, permanently affixed to the ventral surface near
the mouth. In curiosity to learn how the medusa got there, some marine
biologists began searching the local waters for earlier developmental
forms, and discovered something amazing. The attached parasite, although
apparently so specialized as to have given up living for itself, can
still produce offspring, for they are found in abundance at certain
seasons of the year. They drift through the upper waters, grow up
nicely and astonishingly, and finally become full-grown, handsome,
normal jellyfish. Meanwhile, the snail produces snail larvae, and these
too begin to grow normally, but not for long. While still extremely
small, they become entrapped in the tentacles of the medusa and then
engulfed within the umbrella-shaped body. At first glance, you'd believe
the medusae are now the predators, paying back for earlier humiliations,
and the snails the prey. But no. Soon the snails, undigested and
insatiable, begin to eat, browsing away first at the radial canals, then
the borders of the rim, finally the tentacles, until the jellyfish
becomes reduced in substance by being eaten while the snail grows
correspondingly in size. At the end, the arrangement is back to the
first scene, with a full-grown nudibranch basking, and nothing left
of the jellyfish except the round, successfully edited parasite,
safely affixed to the skin near the mouth.
It is a confusing tale to sort out, and even more confusing
to think about. Both creatures are designed for this encounter, marked
as selves so that they can find each other in the waters of the Bay of
Naples. The collaboration, if you want to call it that, is entirely
specific; it is only this species of medusa and only this kind of
nudibranch that can come together and live this way. And, more surprising,
they cannot live in any other way; they depend for their survival on
each other. They are not really selves, they are specific others.
The thought of these creatures gives me an odd feeling.
They do not remind me of anything, really. I've never heard of such a
cycle before. They are bizarre, that's it, unique. And at the same time,
like a vaguely remembered dream, they remind me of the whole earth at
once. I cannot get my mind to stay still and think it through.
- The Medusa and the Snail: More notes of a Biology Watcher
by Lewis Thomas

The starting point of this excursion into system-theory was the quest
for ultimate Unity, shared by physicist, the mystic and the
parapsychologist; a kind of unity which can only be obtained by a
detour through diversity, on a higher turn of the spiral. Among
biologists, too, there is a revival of interest in the potential of
living matter to build up forms of greater complexity which display
unity-in-variety on a higher level - in other words, in the integrative
powers of life, as distinct from the conception of evolution-through-
chance-mutations.
These powers are perhaps most strikingly demonstrated at
the very bottom of the evolutionary ladder. A classic example is the
behaviour of the slime mould, of which John Bleibtreu has recently
given a graphic description (The Parable of the Beast 1968). The
slime mould is an amoeba which lives on bacteria found among the
decaying leaves in forests. It mutiplies by simple cell division every
few hours. This leads to recurrent population explosions accompanied
by shortage of food. When threatened by famine, the amoeba "commence
the enactment of an incredible series of activities. These activities
are a literal metaphor for the organization of cells in a multi-celled
individual, or the organisation of individuals into a social unit."
The amoeba stop behaving as individuals and aggregate into
groups, which form clumps, discernible to the naked eye. These clumps
then "form straggling streamers of living matter, which ... orient
themselves towards central collection points.... At the hub of each
central aggregation point, a mound begins to form as groups of amoeba
mount themselves atop other groups.... This hub gradually rises first
into the shapeof a blunt peg, and then into a distinctly phallic
erection. When all the incoming streams of amoeba are almost completely
incorporated into this erected cartridge-like form, it topples over
onto its side, now looking like a slimy sausage. This slug begins
now to migrate across the forest floor to a point where, hopefully,
more favourable ecological conditions will prevail. Estimations about
the size of the population ... vary, but generally it is thought that
perhaps some half a million amoeba are involved.... After migrating
for a varible period of time (which can be two minutes or two weeks)
in the direction of light and warmth, this slug gradually erects
itself once again into its phallic shape until it is standing on its
tail.... This oval shape gradually assumes the form of a candle flame,
bellied at the bottom and coming to a point at the top.... The end
result is a delicate tapering shaft capped by a spherical mass of
spores. When the spores are dispersed ... each can split open to
liberate a tiny new amoeba."
Are the amoeba, so long as they hunt alone, whole individuals
- which then become transformed into parts of the slug? Are the polyps
which specialise as tentacles, floats or genitals of the Portugese Man
of War, individuals or organs? Are bees and termites, whose existence
is completely controlled by the interests of the group, possessed of
a group mind?
Sponges and hydras - fresh-water polyps - are primitive
forms of animal life. If a living sponge, or hydra, is crushed to
pulp, passed through a fine filter, then poured into water, the pulp
soon aggregates into flat sheets, then curls into balls which end up
as adult individuals, equipped with normal mouth, tentacles and so
forth.
The integrative powers of living matter seem like magic. A
flatworm can be cut into virtually as many segments as you like, and
each segment will regenerate a complete individual. similar regenerative
powers are found in the embryonic tissues of higher animals. If in a frog
embryo the eye-cup, destined to grow into the future eye, is cut into
fragments, each fragment will form a smaller, complete eye. If the eye-
cup is transplanted to the belly of the frog-embryo, the skin over it
will obligingly differentiate into a lens. If tissue from a chick
embryo in its early stages is submitted to the same mincing and
filtering treatment as the sponge and transplanted to the membrane of
another chick embryo, the scrambled liver cells will start forming a
liver, the kidney cells a kidney, the skin cells feathers.
These and other laboratory experiments show in miniature,
as it were, the manifestations of the Integrative Tendency in embryonic
development, regeneration and social co-operation - from the slime
mould to the bee. In each case ther are causal factors at work - but
they obey laws specific to living substance, which are not found in
the realms of inanimate matter. The gospel of classical physics was the
so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics - according to which the universe
is running down like a clock because all its energy is being steadily
dissipated into the random motion of molecules in a gas - so that the
end would be as the beginning was according to Genesis "without form
and void". Only in recent years did biologists realise that this law
applies only in the theoretical case of a "closed system", completely
isolated from its environment. Instead of running down like a
clockwork which dissipates energy through friction, a living organism
is all the time building up more complex chemicals from chemicals it
feeds on, more complex forms of energy from the energy it absorbs, and
more complex patterns of "information" - perceptions, memories, ideas -
from the input of its receptors. It is active instead of being just
reactive; it adapts the environment to its needs, instead of passiviely
adapting to it; it learns from experience and constructs systems of
knowledge out of chaos of sensations impinging on it; it sucks
information from the environment as it feeds on its substance and
synthesises its energies.
The same integrative "building-up" tendency is manifested in the
evolution of species towards more complex forms of physique and behavior,
more efficient ways of communication, with greater independence from and
mastery of the environment. To quote von Bertalanffy, one of the pioneers
of the new outlook in the biological sciences: "According to the Second
Law of Thermo-Dynamics, the general direction of physical events is
towards decrease of order and organization. In contrast to this, a
direction towards increasing order seems to be present in evolution."
This tendency towards "increasing order" - a higher form of unity
in a more complex variety - I have called the "Integrative Tendency". In
the present theory it is regarded as an "ultimate and irreducible"
principle in nature, complementary to the equally basic Self-Asserting
Tendency of its individual holons. I hope to have shown, at the risk
of boring the reader, that the concept is firmly anchored in the
biological sciences, and more than an ad hoc hypothesis.
- The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler

Our Mission:
The biology of slimemolds is a very interesting study.
Slimemolds are created by the process of cells
coming together in mutual cooperation without
sacrifice of individuality. It is apparent from the
behavior of some groups that certain folks believe
sameness and uniformity give strength to a
community of cells. Not so. It is the coordinated
expression of each cell's unique character in
cooperation with the whole that brings the
slimemold form into being.
Working in this way a slimemold is able to
accomplish things that no individual or group of
individuals could do in isolation. The internet is a
wonderful opportunity for us to make
experiments along this same line.
Each of the websites hosted by Slimeworld has a
very unique character -- a flavor all their own.
Browsing this domain the wide variety of view
points represented by the assembled websites is
quite apparent.
What may not be so apparent is the open
exchange of technical and artistic skills by the
assembled webnauts. It is this willing fusion of
talents that gives Slimeworld its special nature.
We take pleasure in helping each other maintain
our individual websites. As time moves along
inevitably the artists are learning the technical
aspects of web-design and the programmers are
expanding their creative talents into something
other than html markup.
Enjoy the fruits of our collective labors. We've
enjoyed the work.
- http://www.slimeworld.org/

See also Cards on Table IV: Bio-metaphor I

Participant Comments follow below

hi, I'm brasilian and i've read V for Vendetta, a comic book by Alan Moore, and the "hero", a man called V, was reading The Roots of Coincidence. I want to know how to get the whole book, if you can help me, I will be very pleased, that's it, thank you. João Vicente jvtb@bol.com.br 04/21/02 20:40:11 GMT