“Have humans evolved beyond nature – and do we even need it?” asked a recent article on a popular portal. The real-life answer arrived few weeks later, in the form of the global Covid-19 pandemic. We have not evolved beyond nature and never will. In the immortal words of Lynn Margulis
Lynn Margulis was acutely aware of the fact that we are built from viruses. Around 45% of the human genome consists of sequences that belonged to retroviruses. Margulis promoted the idea of symbiogenesis. She thought that life is more a collaborative game between equal partners – viruses, bacteria, plants, and animals – and less the ruthless competition between cheating predators. And she was right in many respects. In the hierarchy of nature, a virus is no less important than a human being.
Viruses are the most frequent biogenic structures on Earth. They form a global super-biosystem that some biologists call the virosphere. Viruses are everywhere, high in the air, deep underground, scattered around forests, oceans, and mountains. They may be cosmic travellers as well, at least according to the pioneering astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe. And viruses have partners. The most common viruses on Earth are those that infect bacteria. Bacteria are the second most frequent biogenic structures on Earth. The bacteriosphere and virosphere are structurally coupled. They have been existing in partnership for the last 4 billion years here on Earth, and possibly much longer throughout the cosmos. The entire galaxy may be one connected biosphere according to Wickramasinghe.
But, there is a crucial difference between these two forms of microbes. Bacteria are alive, viruses are not. Biologists think that a living thing must synthesise proteins and replicate autonomously. Viruses do neither. They are classified as parasites that require bacteria, plants or animals to live. However, the term parasite betrays our anthropocentric bias. How can a creative system, such as nature, be dominated by parasites?
I see viruses as invisible fingers on the hand of nature, that has been sculpting organisms through scattering viral RNA and DNA, from the dawn of life. That’s why our genomes, and the genomes of all plants and animals, are full of viral sequences.
The idea of nature the sculptor, must not be seen as the evidence of intelligent design – the creator separate from its creation. On the contrary. Nature the sculptor, is the natural mind at work – the nature making itself. This idea was articulated and developed by the British cyberneticist and philosopher, Gregory Bateson. He called the democracy of the biosphere – where all organisms have equal rights – the ecology of mind. For Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, the ecology of mind was equivalent to the homeostasis of the Earth biosphere, or Gaia. But Gaia may only be a part of the enormous galactic biosphere. Was the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras right when he speculated about the cosmic mind or Nous, two and a half millennia ago?
Nature is more of an artist, than a scientist. Viruses present in us, and all other living beings, are traces of the nature’s artistic hand. As Martin Heidegger argued, the greatest sculpture ever is the nature itself: Physis is poiesis. In the epic act of self-sculpting, a process biologists call autopoiesis, nature cannot, in a truly artistic manner, predict its next state. We humans are just a temporary thought in the mind of nature.
Yet we are easily deceived by the idea of self-deification, which we see as our natural right. According to Michael E. Zimmerman, the idea of self-deification persists in the European civilisation from St Paul and Martin Luther to Hegel and the modern day trans-humanists. The real life burial of the self-deification idea are viruses and bacteria that have been infecting people every day since our emergence on this planet. The viral and bacterial infections are traces of the nature’s invisible hand.
