Being Alive

It's worthwhile to base our understanding of the human condition on the brute and obvious fact that we are living things.  "Being alive" involves participation in a vastly complex environment - sharing that environment with all living things. This is where to start - not the illusion of individuality.  In this way, we cannot escape the most fundamental form of assimilation: participation in the drama of all life.

Since Darwin, our idea about what it means to be alive has changed beyond recognition. It is fair to say that the old myths, based on simple stories about the human condition, have not kept up with what we now understand our situation to be. Especially in the West and the Abrahamic religions that are base on the fate of the individual "soul", the simple fact of our interdependence has been forgotten.

The discipline of mathematics and physics can be applied to the science of life (biology) but few biologists, let alone the lay public, have been exposed to more than High School math, which most of them have forgotten anyway.

As a result, we see biological theories based on radical over-simplification:

• The "individual", essential to the mythology of "survival of the fittest". The picture here conjures up a struggle between "individuals", with those possessing the most adaptive modifications passing on their genes to the next generation. In fact, identification of the "individual" is somewhat arbitrary and the idea that the species (collection of individuals) "evolves" while the "environment" remains static is even more arbitrary. In fact, the whole environment is constantly changing due to the stunningly complex interactions between its "components", which can be animals, species, genes and even the wobble of the earth's axis. Traditional views of evolution are serviceable enough within their scope but ignore important aspects of reality. In practice, the sciences of medicine and ecology are both sciences of systems. Any challenge to "Darwinian" evolution is considered heresy.
• The system of life on this Earth is dynamic, not static. It's striking how the political prejudice for "order" and "equilibrium" dominated 19th and 20th century thinking. Extending conservative politics to physics and biology, we saw the world as essentially unchanging except for the little corner where we spun our theories about small changes - such as the evolution of man. As humans, we have a hard time visualizing vast, complex change over long periods. We also tend to take credit for "surviving" when the lion's share of the credit belongs to an environment conducive to human existence (so far).

Especially since the 1960's applied mathematics has provided tools that help us understand dynamic systems. Sadly, mastering the math of dynamic systems (and the resulting intuitive "feel" for dynamic systems) is out of reach for anyone lacking a strong background in analytical math. 

Dynamic systems are characterize by a set of equations (often a very large number of them) that describe the rate of change of variables and/or the relationship between variables. Time is of the essence. It is not generally possible to "solve" the equations to predict the value of all the variables at any one time. Even so, you can predict the behaviour of the system as a whole in important ways. For example, you can answer such questions as:

• Are there stable "orbits"? Does he system settle down into a repeating sequence of configurations or just wander around aimlessly? 
• Is the system chaotic? Do small changes in the initial conditions result in arbitrarily large variations over time?
• Does he system "settle down". If you start with a given configuration, will the system tend to move into a predictable state? Even a "stable" state (fixed point) where all variables remain constant?

In the case of a biological system, we can visualize a vast number of dynamic equations, specifying rates of change. For example, the rate that a substance can be metabolized (used for life) depends on its availability and concentration, along with the availability of proteins (enzymes). Availability of proteins depends on the existence of certain genes and the expression of these genes. If we are picturing the tiny environment of the human body, we can ask which genes. It's not just the human genome that is active. Every human being is a composite of two genomes (at least): one from both her parents and the completely independent mitochondrial genome "infecting" the egg - responsible for creating ATP - the essential energy currency of the body. And then there is the "microbiome", the genes working in the bacteria we host, which play an essential role in digestion and he immune system. Availability of essential substances also depends on the active genes in the food we eat - for example the genome of wheat (the world's oldest GMO) and the genome of the bacteria that are responsible for 70% of the energy available to cattle. We could consider all these genes working together to be an "individual", but perhaps it's best to put aside the notion of an individual altogether.

We can then go back and ask the kind of questions we typically ask of a dynamic system. For example, we see the daily rhythms of life - meal times, sleep times - as "stable orbits". We see the death of the "individual" as a stable "solution" to the dynamic equations under a wide range of circumstances where the rate of change for all relevant variables goes to zero. Disease and injury can be seen as radical departures from "normal" which may or may not lead back to stability. This concept of disease can be applied to "individuals", environments such as a coral reef, entire ecosystems or even the entire planet.

Stepping back from the "individual", we can see how vast collections of factors (metabolism of quadrillions of living agents) together determine the state of the system in the next moment. Ththte entire system is constantly changing. Many factors, including evolution and climate change, ensure that the overall trend is for the system not to "orbit" around a stable set of conditions. Life has a way of being unrepeatable. Or, as they say, extinction is forever. 

A simple example may suffice. A simplified mathematical model can be created for the relationship between predator and prey. Under certain fairly narrow conditions, the numbers of predators and prey swings around an "orbit". However, under different assumptions, either the predator or the prey is driven to extinction. The fate of either species is determined not by "fitness" but by the parameters of the system as a whole. This can be seen intuitively if one imagines a predator that is "too efficient" and wipes out all the prey, starving itself out of existence. On the scale of human current events, we can see that humans may be so efficient at consuming all possible prey that they literally eat themselves out of home and go extinct. Seen from the traditional perspective of Darwinian evolution, he "fitness" of a species quite obviously depends on the environment the species is found in and that environment is never static.

In mathematical terms, there are only a certain configuration of variables that are possible. Others, while possible, are radically unstable, leading quickly to stable solutions with a lot of zeros. Zeros in this case mean no metabolism: no life.