Biological Systems

This is the seventh Chapter from the online book: Living Ethics: The Way of Wholeness. See: 1) How Should We Live? 2) Ethics and Civilization 3) Worldview and Ethics 4) Self View and Ethics 5) World as System 6) The Material Cosmos


Donivan Bessinger, MD

There are from time to time mornings … when especially the world seems to begin anew … Mornings of creation, I call them. In the midst of these marks of a creative energy recently active, while the sun is rising with more than usual splendor, I look back … for the era of his creation, not into the night, but to a dawn for which no man ever rose early enough. A morning which carries us back beyond the Mosaic creation, where crystallizations are fresh and unmelted. It is the poet’s hour. Mornings when men are new-born, men who have the seeds of life in them. —Henry David Thoreau (1)

We have set as our goal the discovery of the crystallization, fresh and unmelted as it were, of a natural ethic. If such an ethic is to be true and natural, it must be reflective of the essence of existence. Though the ethic be grounded in thought, thought itself is grounded in awareness of life and is inseparable from life. Thus the universal worldview must be fundamentally shaped by an understanding of life systems. Especially pertinent are studies of the interactions among all life forms, of the genetic kinship of life forms, and of the harmonic balance within individual organisms and within the biosphere itself.

Particularly since the Earth Day celebration of 1970, ecology seems to have become a watchword. Indeed, as the word has come into popular usage it has often been misused and misunderstood as a synonym for environment; environment has often been misunderstood as a somewhat static geophysical concept, an entity set apart from mankind. Of course ecology does have something to do with environment, but the word environment misses the fundamental concept of ecology. The environment is not static, and is not an entity disconnected from mankind.

Ecology is the biological specialty that deals with the mutual relationships among living organisms themselves and their physical surroundings. It is concerned with the levels of interacting living systems above and including the individual organism. The key concept in ecology is interaction in large life systems.

As such, ecology is a very broad study, involving all other disciplines in biology, such as anatomy, physiology, behavioral biology, zoology, botany, etc. However, since the non-biological disciplines have particular relevance, ecology also gives rise to such hybrid specialties as biometeorology, biogeochemistry, and biological oceanography. (2)

In studying the evidence for the wholeness of the universe, some may find that the lessons from the new physics are hard to grasp. However, the lessons of ecology involve us immediately, and are potentially apprehendable directly in ordinary life experience. Nevertheless, consciousness so often remains focused narrowly by self-interest or other preoccupations that we miss the importance of life-relationships at levels immediately touching our own lives.

For many of us, supermarkets and asphalt machines have moved our supporting life-forms a level away from immediate experience and usually into unconsciousness. Too often animals are known to us primarily as meat in a freezer case, vegetables as something packaged on a counter or in a can, and trees as expendable decorations.

Appreciating our interactions with other life-forms now takes some reflection, some effort to extend our consciousness. Yet such efforts still reward us directly with a sense of inter-relatedness and oneness with the living systems of the universe. These chords of harmony with existence remain close to our direct experience in the immediate unconscious, and may still resonate with the inner sense of mystery reflected by Thoreau on a January morning.


There is such an overwhelming volume of both popular and scientific literature dealing with interrelatedness in life systems that it is difficult to know where to start. However, in World as System, we used examples from biology in illustrating the generic terms of systems theory. Perhaps our examination of ecology can best proceed by simply continuing to examine relationships in the light of those concepts, considering the biosphere itself as the organism.

For ourselves, and for all other animal life, system input is directly dependent on other life. “Big fish must eat little fish” in sequence throughout the life chain. Though plants and primitive life forms may subsist on inorganic (mineral) substances, those soil nutrients are replenished primarily by the decay of once-living materials. The decay process itself is a life-process, achieved through bacterial action. Whether animal or vegetable, life-system input for every organism is in some way dependent on other life.

Systems input also must provide respiratory gases in appropriate concentration, oxygen for animals and carbon dioxide for plants. This complimentary exchange of gases necessary for life depends in large measure on preservation of forests, particularly the world’s massive tropical rain forests. Further, the respiratory gas mixture must be free of toxins which would poison the organism. All of the world’s gaseous effluents have some implication for the atmosphere, which is the biosphere’s distribution or circulatory system for respiratory gases.

Organisms have a respiratory output as well: carbon dioxide for animals and oxygen for plants. Output systems also include moisture (e.g. sweat, urine, exhaled water vapor) and mineral and organic waste which is itself involved in the nutrient chain fertilizing the inputs of other organisms. Such wastes must be distributed appropriately, for example to avoid input of disease-causing organisms such as parasites and bacteria.

The biosphere’s circulatory system consists not only in the moving of respiratory gases by weather systems in the atmosphere. The atmosphere is a major distributor of water, just as are gravity-borne water channels. The pollution of air and water constitutes not merely an indirect threat to individual organisms, but a direct assault on the circulatory system of the organism that is the biosphere.

The lakes and oceans constitute the biosphere’s storage system for water. Its component organisms constitute a living storage system for organic materials, while the earth itself stores both organic materials (e.g. coal, oil) and inorganic (mineral) ones.

The biosphere’s component organisms are its major producer system, processing materials and energy for the maintenance of the whole. As mentioned above, its motor systems include wind which is propelled by heating and the turning of the earth itself, and gravity which circulates water, as rain and in earth-bound channels.

What of the concept of boundaries within the system of the biosphere? Sometimes in discussing ecology one refers to animal ecology, plant ecology, or human ecology. However, since each of these classes of organisms relates directly with each of the others, these terms are merely conceptual boundaries established only for the convenience of study.

So too is habitat a conceptual boundary. In their mutual relationships organisms typically cluster in characteristic groups within a particular type of environment such as seashore, woodland pond, hardwood forest, etc. Within these, a particular species finds a niche in which it serves a function within the balance of the whole group of inhabitants. However, many species are sufficiently adaptable to appear within various habitats, and as we shall see, the concept of species is itself subject to some conceptual fuzziness.

Thus in any sort of concrete terms, the boundary of the biosphere is the outer reaches of the atmosphere. The system is the whole planet, whose input is solar radiation, and whose principle outputs are reflected light and heat. But is that the only output? And what of emergents?

In Chapter Eleven we shall consider the thesis that the emergent product of the biosphere is consciousness and thought. Thought has even been exported into the solar system as radio signals. Most are scattered incidentally during our everyday earthbound communications and entertainment, but some signals have been sent as control signals for spacecraft. We have talked with men in space as far away as the moon. We have exported thought on planetary probes, represented in the recorded sounds and images attached to them, and in the structure of the craft themselves. So far there is no encounter, no dialogue. Nevertheless, thought has already qualified itself as an output of Earth’s biosphere. More importantly, thought has become the major determinant of the biosphere’s survival.

Even in this brief summary it becomes evident that the biosphere itself exhibits the characteristics of a system, in which all life interacts as a part of the functioning wholeness of life. The concept of Earth as a living system has been advanced by J.E. Lovelock in his Gaia hypothesis, (3) named for the Greek goddess of Earth. Fritjof Capra summarizes his theme:

The planet is not only teeming with life but seems to be a living being in its own right. All the living matter on earth, together with the atmosphere, oceans, and soil, forms a complex system that has all the characteristic patterns of self-organization. It persists in a remarkable state of chemical and thermodynamic nonequilibrium and is able, through a huge variety of processes, to regulate the planetary environment so that optimal conditions for the evolution of life are maintained. (4)

The kinship of all forms of life can be seen not only in its functional interactions, but also in its genetic composition. The characteristics of each form of life are “programmed” through the complex, yet surprisingly consistent (and in that sense simple) system of coded nucleic acid molecules which control inheritance. This system carries all of the information necessary for an entity to qualify as living. A living organism is an entity which can utilize chemicals and energy from the environment to reproduce itself. It can undergo a permanent change (a mutation) which is transmitted to succeeding generations. By accumulation of numbers of such mutations, it can evolve into a distinctly new living form (a new species). (5)

In these days of new Scopes trials, the concept of evolution is often misrepresented and misunderstood. However, regardless of its interpretations, the idea of evolution is at a minimum an affirmation of kinship in the family of life. Professor Dobzhansky of Columbia University, a leading evolutionary geneticist, wrote:

Perhaps the most impressive demonstration of the unity of life is that in all organisms the genetic information is coded in two related groups of substances–the deoxyribonucleic (DNA) and ribonucleic (RNA) acids. Yet this method of coding is so versatile that the number of possible genetic “messages” is virtually infinite. Here, then, is the basis of the diversity as well as the unity of life. (6)

Dr. Philip Leder, a medical geneticist of Harvard Medical School writes in the same vein:

The evolutionary continuity of all organisms, including man, is plainly read in the continuity of biochemical and molecular processes in all living things. The fundamental threads of organization and of structure are seen again and again. Fundamental processes in simple bacteria, yeasts, or algae are the same fundamental processes that occur in man. The genetic code is virtually unchanged from Escherichia coli [a common bacterium] to man. The DNA molecule that incorporates genetic information is the same molecule, based on the same biochemistry, in the simplest and in the most complex organisms. The differences that exist between the species are written in the sequences of nucleotides that encode their genes, but the language in which the sequences are written and the biochemical properties of their cells are very similar. The paths of evolution can be easily traced today in the DNA of living organisms. (7)

An influential philosopher of science, Dr. Karl Popper, (8) has emphasized that a scientific theory must be a theory that can be submitted to testing to determine whether it may be false. By that semantic criterion alone, Popper held that Darwinism, the theory of natural selection, could not be considered a scientific theory in that it may not be submitted to a satisfactory single test. (9)

As discussed in Worldview and Ethics, reason is also capable of admitting judgments into the body of knowledge. While the theory of evolution is too complex to be submitted to any one test for verification, the many evidences from many tests may be submitted to verification by “thought experiment” and reason. Indeed, the characteristic gene sequences alluded to by Leder, which may be traced intact through various species and which could not have occurred by chance alone, certainly do approach verification of evolution by “one test”, and give ample evidence of common heritage among species.

In Origin of Species(10) Darwin held that species change comes through natural selection. When spontaneous genetic changes occur, the offspring will adapt or not, survive or not, based on whether the offspring is “fit”, that is, whether the change works in the animal’s environment, and if it does survive, the changed characteristic is then inherited by the next generation. In general, Darwin held that these spontaneous changes occur by chance, are gradual, and tend to be small and imperceptible. Those have been the major tenets of dogma among Darwinists to this day. Nevertheless, Darwin himself allowed for other mechanisms:

I am convinced that natural selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive means of modification. (11)

Though these changes tend to be gradual, under certain conditions a species may persist for long periods without substantial change:

Nevertheless, low and simple forms will long endure if well fitted to their simple conditions of life. (12)

However, it must not be supposed that Darwin had the final word, and Darwinism must not be equated with “theory of evolution.” Darwin’s work was empirical, and initially lacked a scientific basis for the genetic concepts. However, Gregor Mendel’s work on genetics (published in 1865 but begun in a monastery garden before Darwin’s first edition of Origin) eventually permitted a “modern synthesis” of genetics with Darwin’s concepts of natural selection.

Evolutionary theory remains very much in flux. Even Lamarck’s previously discredited idea (that the environment itself can induce adaptive genetic changes) is being reexamined, especially in the light of experiments showing that viruses can import genetic information to a host cell. (13)

It is now more clear that species do not all change gradually. Eldredge and Gould (14) made big waves among evolutionary theorists by presenting evidence for very long term stability of species in the fossil record. They theorized that species achieve an equilibrium or balance with their environment that fosters stability. The stability is punctuated by changes occuring in “jumps” or “saltations” (from the Latin saltum, leap).

The punctuated equilibria theory of evolution calls for a new understanding of the interactions between individuals and species, among species themselves, and between species and environment. Eldredge writes:

It turns out, moreover, that the fossil record is the best place to see the larger biological entities—not just species, but entire natural groups of creatures, like mammals, and also large-scale ecological units. If we admit that such entities have had histories, plus mechanisms of birth and death, stasis and change, then evolution simply cannot be entirely a matter of shifting gene representations from one generation to the next. Gould and I discussed the possibility of nonrandom species representation through time within a lineage—the notion now known as species selection. An entirely new field of active inquiry into macroevolution has sprung up—if not entirely to be traced to the original exposition of punctuated equilibria, at least partly beholden to it for its genesis. (15)

The theory also forces a reexamination of the concept of species. In classic Darwinism, the constant gradual change causes the concept of species to be rather fuzzy. In the Eldredge-Gould theory, however, the species is a defined entity in which individuals live in balance with others of the species and with other species and the environment. The species is characterized by shared anatomy and behavior, and marked by stability. Even more significantly, the species is a continuing reproductive community, in which individuals are:

… involved in spreading genes around within their community—genes destined never to be further shared with any other species save some possible and as yet unborn descendant species. (16)

In 1964, Ehrlich and Raven of Stanford University indicated that the interactions of species in the environment contribute to evolution. In an ecological community, many species may be related in close mutual dependence, such as in the host-parasite, prey-predator, or plant-insect relationships. These related groups may undergo co-evolution, making their interactions mutually advantageous. (17)

It is evident that there is considerable ferment about “realities” in biology as well as in physics. The biosphere has proved much too complex to be reduced to neat and simple rules and theories. More and more, biologists are seeing the biosphere in its whole-system aspect, interacting at many levels. Stephen Jay Gould, one of the authors of the theory of punctuated equilibria, in discussing the competing theories of evolution, acknowledges the importance of the increased multi-level (“hierarchical”) complexity. Gould wrote that this complexity requires us to reinterpret many phenomena.

We live in a world of reductionist traditions, and do not react comfortably to notions of hierarchy. Hierarchical theories permit us to retain the value of traditional ideas, while adding substantially to them. … If we abandon the “either-or” mentality that has characterized arguments about units of selection, we would not only reduce fruitless and often acrimonious debate, but we would also gain a deeper understanding of nature’s complexity through the concept of hierarchy. (18)


If the interactions of an organism with its external environment are critical to survival, its interactions within its internal environment are even more so. It was the nineteenth century French physiologist Claude Bernard who gave physiology its concept of internal environment. (19) In medical practice, Bernard’s milieu interieur remains the fundamental concept which guides medical students and physicians in dealing with the body’s balance of fluids and electrolytes (sodium, potassium, chloride, etc.) Intravenous fluid therapy depends on an understanding of exchanges of water and electrolytes between the extracellular and intracellular fluid spaces of the body. That exchange is a critical aspect of maintaining the internal balance. The cells of the body still survive in a primal sea.

Walter Cannon in 1929 amplified Bernard’s concept of a constant and optimum internal environment, and called its complex internal regulatory function homeostasis. The word derives from Greek words meaning to stand or stay the same. The organism seeks always to maintain its internal balance within a rather narrowly ordered range, and any deviation from that range triggers a very complex feedback or regulatory system.

When the French surgeon Ambroise Pare (1510-1590) was congratulated on the successful outcome of a difficult case, he replied, “I dressed the wound, God healed him.” (20) In a certain sense, he was anticipating the modern physician’s understanding of homeostasis. The body is too complex for a physician to control. The successful treatment can only serve to move certain functions back toward the normal range. It is homeostasis which does the fine tuning to restore the balance. It is homeostasis which does the healing.

In mammals, internal regulation is largely mediated through the autonomic nervous system. That is the system of involuntary unconscious automatic control signals carried back and forth to all systems of the body, adjusting blood flow (especially through small vessels), heart and respiratory rates, blood pressure, body temperature, intestinal muscle tone, hormone release, etc., all in response to internal and external changes.

Even a muscle at rest maintains a certain tension, or tone. The resting tone is intermediate between its tension during flexion and during relaxation, when its opposition muscles are flexing. So too does the autonomic nervous system maintain a resting signal state, which is then adjusted by opposing signals in either the sympathetic or parasympathetic nerve fibers.

Hormones are chemical messengers which also operate in feedback loops. For example, the pituitary gland’s thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH ) stimulates the production of thyroid hormones, which feed back to control production of TSH. If the thyroid cannot produce a normal amount of hormone, the pituitary continues to produce TSH, which leads to a type of goiter (enlarged thyroid). There are similar feedback loops between stimulating hormones of the pituitary and control of ovulation, lactation, and adrenal hormone production. The pituitary also receives information from the autonomic functions of the brain stem.

In stress, the whole homeostatic system is thrown into strain. The sympathetic nervous system is activated by the mere thought of a “fight or flight.” (21) The signals for the sympathetic system stimulate the adrenal medulla (its central portion) which produces norepinephrine and epinephrine (Adrenalin). Heart and respiratory rates which have been raised directly by sympathetic signals are further increased. Glucose is released from its liver and muscle stores, more blood flows to muscles and less to abdominal organs, sweating increases (removing excess heat), the pupils dilate, the eyelids widen, and in many animals the hair of the back and the tail bristles.

That all of the above changes can occur at a mere thought strongly indicates that there is no real boundary between the mental and physical. An imagined situation can be as real as any other. The term psychosomatic can be helpful if it reminds us of the inseparability of psyche and soma. However, sometimes it is used to emphasize that the separate concepts are tenuously related in special circumstances, and that is a considerable misunderstanding.

Through its many intimate loops, homeostasis illustrates that the individual functions as one unit. In fact, the word individual means an undivided whole. Thus the lessons of biology also illustrate a strange non-local reality. The whole biosphere shares a genetic and functional kinship, interacting homeostatically in all of its components.

In 1960, zoologist Marston Bates reflected on the implications of these lessons for ethics. Thirty years have passed, but his analysis is no less true today:

The ethical question is difficult. We have drifted in the modern world into a position of ethical relativism which leaves us with no absolutes of good and bad, right and wrong. Things are good or right according to the context, depending on the values of the society or culture. Yet one feels that there must be some basis of right conduct, applicable to all men and all places and not depending on any particular dogma or any specific revelation. Science has undermined the dogmas and the revelations; and it provides for many working scientists, a sort of faith, a sort of humanism, that can replace the need for an articulated code of conduct. But our scientists and philosophers so far failed to explain this in a way that reaches a very large number of people. This, it seems to me, is one of the great tasks of modern philosophy, which the philosophers, dallying in their academic groves, have shunned.

When some thinker does come forth to provide us with a rationale for conduct, he will have to consider not only the problems of man’s conduct with his fellow men, but also of man’s conduct toward nature. Life is a unity; the biosphere is a complex network of interrelations among all the host of living things. Man, in gaining the godlike quality of awareness, has also acquired a godlike responsibility. The questions of the nature of his relationships with the birds and the beasts, with the trees of the forests and the fish of the seas, become ethical questions: questions of what is good and right not only for man himself, but for the living world as a whole. (22)

Copyright 2000 by Donivan Bessinger. All rights reserved.


Related exhibits from Bessinger’s Religion Confronting Science: [ Creation history ] , [ Evolution’s design ] , [ Anthropic principle ]


Next Chapter: Human Systems

More by Donivan Bessinger, MD


References:

(1) “THERE ARE FROM TIME TO TIME”—Henry David Thoreau. Journal, January 26, 1853.

(2) SUCH HYBRID SPECIALTIES AS—Biology and the Future of Man. Philip Handler, editor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. page 431-2.

(3) GAIA HYPOTHESIS—J. E. Lovelock. Gaia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

(4) “THE PLANET IS NOT ONLY TEEMING”—Fritjof Capra, 1983 op.cit. (World as System) p 285.

(5) A LIVING ORGANISM IS AN ENTITY—P. Handler, editor. op. cit. p 7.

(6) “PERHAPS THE MOST IMPRESSIVE DEMONSTRATION”—Theodosius Dobzhansky. Genetics of the Evolutionary Process. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. p 8.

(7) “THE EVOLUTIONARY CONTINUITY OF ALL ORGANISMS”—Philip Leder. “Mechanisms of Gene Evolution”. Journal of the American Medical Association 1982 (Oct 1); 248: 1582.

(8) AN INFLUENTIAL PHILOSOPHER OF SCIENCE—K.R.Popper. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934). New York: Harper and Row, 1959.

(9) POPPER HELD THAT DARWINISM—Gordon Rattray Taylor. The Great Evolution Mystery. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. p 33.

(10) DARWIN HELD THAT SPECIES CHANGE—Charles Robert Darwin. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. 1859.

(11) “I AM CONVINCED THAT NATURAL SELECTION”—ibid, Introduction, First Edition.

(12) “NEVERTHELESS, LOW AND SIMPLE FORMS”—ibid, Chapter Four.

(13) VIRUSES CAN IMPORT—Taylor. op. cit. pp 51, 234.

(14) LONG TERM STABILITY OF SPECIES—Niles Eldredge and Stephen J. Gould. “Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism” in Models in Paleobiology. T.J.M.Schopf (editor). San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Co., 1972. (Available in Eldredge, reference below)

(15) “IT TURNS OUT, MOREOVER, THAT THE FOSSIL”—Niles Eldredge. Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. p 190.

(16) “INVOLVED IN SPREADING GENES AROUND”—Eldredge (1985). op. cit. p 99.

(17) CO-EVOLUTION—Dobzhansky. op. cit. p 215-216.

(18) “WE LIVE IN A WORLD”—Stephen Jay Gould. “Darwinism and the expansion of evolutionary theory.” Science (Apr 23) 1982. 216: 385-6.

(19) CONCEPT OF INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT—Carl F. Rothe. “Regulation of Visceral Function” in Physiology (Third Edition), E. E. Selkurt, Editor. Boston: Little Brown and Co, 1971. p 189.

(20) “I DRESSED THE WOUND”—”Je le pansay, Dieu le guarit“, the inscription on Pare’s statue. Encyclopedia Britannica 1965. 17: 283.

(21) FIGHT OR FLIGHT – – Rothe. op. cit. p 178. Also see any standard textbook of physiology or general surgery.

(22) “THE ETHICAL QUESTION IS DIFFICULT”—Marston Bates. The Forest and the Sea. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1960. p 257.