DNA MONTHLY
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August 2007 (Vol. 3, No. 7)
Breaking News: Scientists Convert the Sequences of Proteins into Music
"We converted the sequence of proteins into music and can get an auditory signal for every protein," said Jeffrey H. Miller, distinguished professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics, and a member of UCLA's Molecular Biology Institute. "Every protein will have its unique auditory signature because every protein has a unique sequence. You can hear the sequence of the protein."
"We assigned a chord to each amino acid," said Rie Takahashi, a UCLA research assistant and an award-winning, classically trained piano player. "We want to see if we can hear patterns within the music, as opposed to looking at the letters of an amino acid or protein sequence. We can listen to a protein, as opposed to just looking at it."
The building blocks of proteins are linear sequences of 20 different amino acids. Assigning one note for each amino acid therefore results in a 20-note scale.
On the biologists' website, you can listen to the compositions and even submit your own genetic sequence and have it translated into music. The browser allows anyone to send in a sequence coding for a protein, which will then be converted into music and returned as a MIDI audio file. The research is published in Genome Biology, a major journal in the field of genomics.
FEATURED IN THE AUGUST 2007 ISSUE OF DNA MONTHLY
1. "Embryonic Holography," by Richard Alan Miller & Burt Webb
Also, Also ... DNA-related Definition of the Month & Did You Know?
1. Embryonic Holography
Richard Alan Miller & Burt Webb
Holography is the process of recording and recreating complex three-dimensional wave fronts in space. The holography with which we are most familiar deals mostly with the visible spectrum, so we tend to think of holography in terms of three-dimensional photography.
However, holography can be conceived in different realms of the spectrum. The process of lasers and laser abilities to create images in space in visible light radiation is closely connected to microwave research and a device called a "maser" which broadcasts coherent radiation of microwave frequencies. It should be possible, in theory, with the proper kind of equipment, to capture and broadcast complex three-dimensional wave form structures in space across a broad band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can call this "broad band holography. Thus holography here refers to a whole range of processes for capturing wave forms at different frequencies.
Some of the interesting properties of holography have to do with its differences from photography. In photography, light from an object is reflected onto a flat surface where it essentially discolors that surface; or rather, the shadow that it casts discolors that surface. If you cut a photograph in half, you have half of the original picture. Holography is quite different. In a hologram, the pattern of light created by the object is recorded at each point of the film. Each grain contains the whole image. Each image is slightly different, however, and all of the images are very vague and fuzzy.
Detail in a photograph is not particularly connected to the size in the sense that a small piece of a photograph will have a lot of detail on a small area of the scene. A large photograph will have a lot of detail on all of the scene. In a hologram, each grain has some of the information about the whole scene. A large hologram has a lot of details about the whole scene. Something different happens when you cut a hologram in half: you get the original picture, but it is less clear because you have lost detail.
A lot of work has been done over the past several decades on the electromagnetic field phenomena associated with biological processes. The idea is nothing new, of course. Farraday did some experimentation with animal electricity, and Galvanni (with his Galvannic cells) did experiments with animals. It was quite understandable in the growth of science to accept life as being electronic.
However, within the last fifty years, our intense activity in the biological field and the breakthroughs in molecular biology (DNA research, etc.) have tended to obscure some deeper questions as to the nature of life. We are reaching the end of the paradigm in which we can afford to ignore the electromagnetic properties of the macro-system and deal with chemistry as if it were taking place in a neutral system. This new field can be termed "bio-electronic": a term based on biophysics.
Conventional biophysics seems to be centered around very minute detail of things, such as ion exchanges across cell membranes. Very little contact is made with the idea that electromagnetic systems may regulate the whole multi-cellular organism--and not merely function at the level of cells.
Regulation of the nervous system is thought to be primarily a biochemical phenomenon in the sense that it involves the exchange or profusion of calcium and potassium across a cell membrane. In such a system what you essentially have is a ripple effect that travels down the process of the cell, a chemical signal caused by an exchange of ions. Even though electromagnetics is appreciated in the nervous system, it is seen as an epi-phenomenon that is not integral to the regulation of the system. Such a theory does little justice to the complexity and subtlety of living processes.
Some of the specific electronic characteristics in the cell could pertain to the presence or absence of various chemicals that either accept or donate electrons. Electron donation or electron acceptance are connected to older ideas of acids and bases, of chemical processes called oxidation and reduction. From this perspective one is forced to approach a biological solution--say, interior body fluids--on the basis of the electrolytes in solution: the different ionized and charged particles. And this is only the beginning.
We must deal also with the fields that exist, the potentials and polarities. The charged particles in the fields begin to generate flows, forcing us to come to terms with a process called electrophoresis, which is the movement of small particles by an electrostatic field. Here we also recognize the possibility of electrodynamic fields moving particles in waves.
What we have, essentially, is a solution of charged particles under a very complex control via a complicated electromagnetic field system that moves solutions around. But in moving the solutions, the charged distributions inside the organism change and modify the fields. In other words, there is a highly complex feedback between flows of particles and electromagnetic fields.
We have an incredibly complex situation compared to a motor in which a simple electromagnetic field system is cut by a simple metallic conductor. We have an organic system in which there are literally billions of fields being generated by enormous numbers of particles--all being created, changed, switched around. There also possibly exists an interaction between the structure of a physical system and the fluid flows within that system, with the heart being one of the most profound examples of the latter. The heart could be seen as setting up a system of waves of movement that form the basis--the fundamental note--of the organic system.
There are many other interesting bioelectronic characteristics. One of the most fascinating is the fact that protein-formed structures in cellular space are based on the charged distribution across their surface, which is related to the sequence of amino acids in their particular side-chains, which determines their tendencies to act. Amino acids have been called semi-conductor in nature on the basis of one end being an electron acceptor and the other being an electron donor. These link up into chains, which have little side-spines with their own characteristics.
It is possible that charge movement takes place across the surface of a protein. A line of side-chains sticks out of the surface of a protein molecule, forming a charge distribution system that acts almost like an electrical conductor. Electrons could hop along the spines sticking out from the side of the protein molecule and actually flow across the surface as if traveling along a conductor.
We possess any number of interesting prostheses, or special radicals in the sense of molecular substructures, that have a whole host of purposes. For instance, the heme of hemoglobin is a very fascinating iron prosthesis. This conjunction of iron and other atoms arrayed in space is very small compared to the size of the globin molecule to which it is attached, but very effective for acting as a grappling hook for oxygen. Such processes are under electronic control. Charge flow and distribution in a protein molecule are critical to changes in its shape.
There is evidence of special tissue in the back of rats, in fatty pads, that can uncouple oxidation energy instead of converting it to ATP. Special enzymes convert oxidation energy directly into infrared radiation and radiate it out of their bodies. It is thus conceivable that infrared radiation takes place as a result of bioelectronic processes in proteins. In addition, recent research has detected microwaves in the brain and the heart of humans and rabbits.
Clearly, a living organic system is a very complex holographic entity interfacing with various forms of electromagnetic activity.
In the nucleus of each human cell, DNA carries the structure of our whole body. Not just our physical form, but also the processes that form undergoes in terms of survival. It is possible that DNA is a holographic projector, one that projects a field that is somehow experienced by other DNA in the body. Not only is DNA thus probably linked, DNA is also linked to its own cells that it regulates via mechanisms of RNA transfer and enzymatic action. It is further likely that DNA and RNA are in direct communication.
Recent research has shown the possibility that DNA activates the motion of an RNA sphincter or iris mechanism to permit or exclude ion entrance into the cell. If this is true, and if DNA controls the action of RNA that goes to the ribosomes and other sites to create specific enzymes in the cell that lead to further developments, it seems reasonable that cellular enzymes are also under DNA's control.
DNA appears to be the projector of a biohologram, both at cellular and organismic levels. This means that DNA is responsible for creating a complex pattern of three-dimensional electromagnetic standing and moving wave fronts in the space that the organism occupies. We believe that these wave fronts interact with, interpenetrate and interdetermine the physical substance that makes up the creature.
The biohologram has characteristic properties that include the ability to affect the DNA that occupies specific positions within the biohologram. In such a situation the nervous system constitutes, first and foremost, a coordination mechanism that integrates DNA projections across all of the cells in the biohologram--aligning these cellular holograms and linking the whole creature hologram.
DNA in a particular cell is not totally active. There may be as little as one percent of the DNA present in the nucleus of the cell acting as the determinant for the structure of that cell. The nervous system, interestingly enough, has the highest percentage of operating DNA of any cell system in the body--up to ten percent activation in brain cells where neuron nuclei are most active.
If the membrane structure of neuron nuclei are examined closely, it will be seen that the different cavity systems that enter the outer and also inner membranes are, topologically, a single membrane. Thus their nucleus is effectively lacking a membrane. In other words, neurons may not actually be brain cells as such. We believe that the brain is the cell, and neurons are like a distributed cellular nucleus, making glial cells, which are intimately involved in the biohologram's projections and coordination, organelles in the giant brain-cell.
The biohologram, projected by the brain, creates standing and moving electromagnetic wave patterns at different frequencies of the spectrum in order to effect different biochemical transformations. There may be specific electrostatic fields, or there may be electrodynamic fields with various frequencies from low radio waves all the way up the spectrum into visible light and beyond.
Another process important to our discussion of holography is called "acoustical holography." Acoustical holography employs sound waves to create a movement on a surface that is used as the basis for creation of an optical hologram. Essentially, acoustical holography converts between a pattern of sound waves reflected off an object in space into a pattern of light waves that can reconstruct the shape of the original object. Here we have a transformation between two levels of vibration, two media as it were, preserving a pattern in space.
This conversion process happens as a matter of course in the way DNA regulates our bodies. The special function of liver cells, for example, is created by the influence of the projection of the liver pattern on DNA in the cells where the liver is created. We are suggesting an important feedback mechanism between activation of DNA in a particular cellular tissue type that causes it to be that tissue type, and the biohologram being projected by the nervous system. This is the essence of bioholography.
Conception
Human sexuality is usually viewed as a physical-chemical complex. A more coherent viewpoint would see human sexuality in terms of electronics. We will not go into the detail of the electronic behaviour of the nervous system of the human being during intercourse, but we will begin the story with ovulation.
Researchers have found that at the moment of ovulation there is a definite shift in the electrical fields of a woman's body. The membrane in the follicle bursts and the egg passes down the fallopian tubes. The phases of the moon quite probably influence the permeability of the membrane in the follicle, making it more likely that the egg will pass down the fallopian tubes at certain periods of time. The sperm is negative with respect to the egg. When the sperm and the egg unite, the membrane around the egg becomes hyper-polarized. It is at this moment that the electromagnetic entity is formed.
The fertilized egg cell contains all the information necessary to create a complete operational human being. Furthermore, this biohologram begins to function at conception, and only ceases to function at death. Perhaps, then, conception is the proper place to mark the beginning of the individual.
The zygote begins to divide as it travels down the fallopian tube. It is quite possible that it navigates its passage partially by sensing the biohologram of the mother. And this may actually assist the zygote as it approaches and attaches to the wall of the uterus.
As soon as attachment to the wall of the uterus is complete, the zygote begins the process of establishing the linkage with the mother's circulatory system that will permit the passage of blood carrying important nutrients into the zygote. The womb is a special electronic environment in which an electrolytic solution provides an excellent framework for electromagnetic effects which are necessary in the development of the egg.
Development
The developing zygote is spherical in shape at first. Then it flattens to become the embryonic disk. The disk differentiates into three layers: the inner layer (the endoderm) will become the visceria--digestion, blood, etc; the middle layer (the mesoderm) will become the musculature; and the outer layer (the ectoderm), furthest away from the wall of the uterus, will become the nervous system and skin.
Very early in development, one of the first appearances of discrete structure has to do with the formation of the neural tube. From a point in the center of the embryonic disk, a radial line defines itself out to the edge of the disk. On both sides of this line, called the neural groove, the flesh puckers up and curves over to form a tube. This is called the neural tube. Both ends of the neural tube are originally open. It is possible that field lines could pass through the tube, that the tube is actually entrapping electromagnetic lines of force.
Eventually, the tube closes on both ends, trapping the amnionic fluid in the cerebrospinal space. The cerebrospinal fluid is an analog of the amnionic fluid that the embryo develops in. It is probable that the nervous system, especially the brain, retains some embryonic properties throughout the life of the organism. It is a safe assumption that the brain is, in a sense, the most infantile tissue in the body.
As mentioned before, the greatest percentage of the genome is active in the brain; this agrees well with the idea that the brain is neo-embryonic because originally all of the genome in the nucleus of embryonic cells is functional. It is only with development that most of the genome shuts down and specific cells begin to function, operating on only a fraction of their genetic potential.
During formation of the neural tube, one end (the end that is in the center of the embryonic disk) begins to expand, enfold, twist and develop itself into a system of complex tissues in complicated geometrical structures, which will become the brain. It appears that the brain and central nervous system are necessary for the development of the creature, as they predate generation of most of the structure of the body.
The study of cymatics has to do with the creation of structures from the resonance of wave patterns. As an example, if a drumhead is covered with fine sand and then caused to vibrate by drawing a violin bow across the edge of the diaphragm or drumhead, the sand will arrange itself in geometrical patterns. It will flow into lines that mark nodal lines of zero motion that separate zones of the drumhead that are moving in different directions. The simplest structure would be a single line that is the diameter of the drumhead, signifying that one half is pulsating differently from the other half. Yet the line between them is not moving--a phenomenon that is very important to an understanding of biological development.
The biohologram projected by way of DNA in the embryonic nervous system forms a three-dimensional pattern of resonant structures--including points, lines, and planes--that electromagnetically behave as the acoustic (material) waves of the drumhead. In other words, these electromagnetic points, lines and planes form locations of no movement. Essentially the matter (electrolytic solutions) that are flowing, having been drawn from the blood of the mother, are caused to move rhythmically through the developing embryo. At certain points, lines and planes their motion stops. This is where structures are laid down and built up--a key process of embryonic holography.
The zygote acts like a three-dimensional nozzle. Electrolytes from the mother's bloodstream flow through this nozzle into the cymatic structure of standing wave patterns distributed through space inside the embryo and become fixed, solidified structures. This accounts for different physiological zones and the separation of these zones into tissue groups.
The picture is completed by the effects of the biohologram on the DNA of the cells that have formed along with the migration of the substances. We have an actual migration of cells, as well as a migration of substances throughout the embryo that take up locations dependent on resonant structures of standing wave patterns. The cells, having arrived at their proper location and beginning to involve themselves with the materials and the fluids that are flowing in the three-dimensional nozzle, are then specified in their particular tissue nature by the biohologram being projected from the nervous system.
These tissue cells are refined and developed as their genome is shut down until only the DNA that operates in a particular type of tissue group cell is operative. Thus through a complex interaction, a kind of feedback loop, of three-dimensional electromagnetic fields rapidly dividing cells and directing the flow of electrolytes into those cells, a multi-cellular organism achieves the proper structure that will permit it to exist apart from the specialized environment of the womb.
This brings us to the close of embryological development. When the proper point is reached at which a potentially self-sustaining entity has been created, then the conditions begin to change, leading to the expulsion of the new self-sufficient entity from the mother's womb. We are now ready to enter a new developmental phase.
Postnatal Development
Birth occurs. The fetus is expelled from the electromagnetic environment of the womb, and enters a world of separate gases, liquids, and solids. The biohologram which led to the development and stabilization of the entity now takes on its important control behaviour that is necessary to keep the organism alive and well throughout its life. The biohologram changes its action with changes in media. Its responsibility is no longer the actual development of structures, but rather the regulation of processes within those structures.
Very little has been said about the potential interaction of the biohologram of the mother and the developing baby. We do not know very much about this subject, except that the possibility of interaction certainly exists. However, at the moment of birth such an intimate interlocking of holograms ceases as the entity enters the world alone, at least in the sense that it can interact bioholographically with other creatures only under certain conditions.
Evidence has been found that certain kinds of salamanders possess a complex system of electromagnetic sensing based on a string of spots along their side. As long as such a salamander is in salt water, which is an excellent electromagnetic conductor, this system of spots serves to detect three-dimensional electromagnetic field changes around the salamander--thereby alerting it to food, enemies, etc. But the salamander spends part of its time on dry land. When it comes on dry land, its holographic detection system withers and ceases to function because there is no longer a medium to sustain the necessary electromagnetic fields. However, when the salamander re-enters water, the holographic detection system comes back on.
One reasonable possibility is that humans and other multi-cellular land creatures have such an external holographic detection system in the womb. Just as with our salamander in the above example, this external system tends to atrophy in the atmosphere because it does not have sufficient media to sustain the necessary electromagnetic fields. That said, there is still a very slight leakage of the biohologram beyond the entity's skin. This slight leakage is the basis of a great deal of paranormal phenomena and is definitely the origin of the concept of the aura.
Under certain circumstances and in certain individuals in abnormal
states, the projected bio-field becomes faintly visible. It is
possible, as recent research has shown, that the human eye can detect
other frequencies than the strictly visual frequencies of light. Since
the leaking biohologram may actually be on a different frequency than
the visible spectrum, it appears that our eye transduces or
translates it into the visible spectrum. The aura is intimately
connected to the biohologram that causes the body to continue to
function properly.
Dowsing might possibly be related to an external functioning of the organism's bioholographic system. Experiments have shown that dowsers detect extremely minute changes in geo-magnetism, which are probably connected to the presence of water underground. We are mostly water, and the structuring of water in our systems is very closely connected to our bioelectronic behavior. It is conceivable that we have some sort of sympathetic resonance that can permit us to detect a very minute magnetic field change associated with underground water.
Ionization of the air also would potentially permit the expansion of the biohologram (aura) further beyond the skin. Areas of high ionization (such as mountaintops, coasts, waterfalls, etc.) have been known since time immemorial as holy or magical places. This might be connected to the fact that the increased ionization in the atmosphere permits the expansion of the aura or biohologram to the extent that the bioholograms of individuals can interact or to the extent that an individual can manipulate this biohologram to cause external effects that would be perceived by ancient superstitious people as magic.
As long as the biohologram functions properly, as long as the nervous system continues to coordinate and project the complex three-dimensional fields that support the oganism's biological processes, the entity survives. When the biohologram ceases to function properly, the organism suffers. And when the principle action of the biohologram stops, the organism dies.
If there is any scientific correlate to the concept of the Soul, it is most probably this bioholographic pattern system, which is composed of the ultimate stuff of the universe: electromagnetic field energy that does not die in the sense that creatures die, but is, like the Soul, immortal. The biohologram, however, does change with growth, learning, experience, and age--showing development of the Soul or electromagnetic field entity.
Although a great deal more research needs to be done, it is conceivable that the electromagnetic entity might be capable of an independent existence which would form the basis for the concept of life after death. However, a free electromagnetic entity without a biophysiological matrix might have a difficult time interacting with creatures, such as ourselves, still utilizing the biophysiological matrix.
Such a situation might be the origin of stories of ghosts and so forth, in which a disembodied biohologram attempting to communicate with a physical creature could only enter the nervous system of the creature and cause hallucinations of forms in space that on examination disappear or turn out to be merely hallucinations, having no scientifically verifiable existence.
Regeneration
In reptiles, tissue regeneration of a profound nature is possible. Entire limbs can be replaced. The process goes something like this. A leg is lost. The damaged cells on the stump revert to a neo-embryonic condition. They then undergo explosive growth. The growth slows as the crude size and shape of the leg reappears. Refinement continues. Details appear. Growth slows even further. Finally, a new leg exists.
Such regeneration is not possible in mammals. The greater detail and sophistication of the biological machinery in mammals is made possible by the greater sophistication of the bioholographic projection system, which we call the nervous system. In the case of a lost limb, nerve linkages that permit the very sophisticated mammalian fields (that define our appendages) to exist, is lacking. We can generate new tissue, but to regenerate nerve cells seems much more difficult. And without those nerve cells being present in the new limb, the final sophisticated stages of coordination are impossible.
Many theorists now tend toward the concept that cancerous tissue is tissue that has been damaged in some fashion and has reverted to a neo-embryonic condition. However, because the necessary coordination control is not possible for regeneration to proceed, the cancerous tissue is stuck in the earliest stages of regeneration and merely continues to divide and expand without any control whatsoever. This runaway behaviour, that is outside the control of the physical biohologram, may itself be electromagnetic in nature.
If it is indeed true that cancerous tissue is runaway neo-embryonic tissue caused by a partially functioning regeneration system, and if we come to understand this process better, not only could we control cancer--but even more important and profound, we might be able to unlock the key of complex mammalian regeneration processes so that someday it could be possible to regenerate an entire human limb.
Robert Becker, in a series of experiments, has shown that bone regeneration can be tripled in speed by the proper application of electromagnetic fields from the outside with no implants necessary. This proves that electromagnetic fields have a profound role in the generation and coordination of biological structures.
As mentioned, the biohologram appears closely connected to paranormal phenomena. It is quite possible that psychic healers who "lay on hands" are, in essence, exporting the power of their own bioholograms and asserting control of that biohologram over the sick, weak biohologram that has permitted the disease condition to occur in the patient. Just in the way that two oscillators that are connected will tend toward the frequency of the more powerful oscillator, if two biohologram systems are connected, the more powerful biohologram may entrain the weaker biohologram and restore it to its proper coordination function.
It is possible that psychic surgery occurs via a process of the location of the diseased tissue through electromagnetic sensing inasmuch as diseased tissue has different electromagnetic properties than healthy tissue. An invasion of the body of the patient by the hand of the psychic surgeon occurs through manipulation of electromagnetic fields that actually cause the skin to part and help to locate the diseased tissue and then cause the skin to reclose.
In closing, we call the reader's attention to the fact that the earth, sun and planets are all very complex electromagnetic entities. From the earliest existence of a bioholographic entity in the womb, the sun, earth, moon, other planets and even stars beyond the solar system influence and to some extent direct the development of the entity. This is a very concrete electromagnetic connection that could serve as a scientific basis for explaining astrology.
Not only do these conditions influence prenatal development, but they are also present postnatally and continue to influence the organism in a variety of interesting ways. Evidence has come to light that the brain can intercept various frequencies of radiation from astronomical and terrestrial phenomena. If this is so, then it provides a real scientific basis for the statements of mystics that we are all inextricably woven into the fabric of the universe. We are not separate, distinct physical entities, but rather partially interacting electromagnetic entities that partake of the rich electromagnetic life of the universe.Copyright (c) 2007 by Richard Alan Miller & Burt Webb. All Rights Reserved.
[Richard Alan Miller started his career as a physicist, biophysicist and instrumentation specialist. In 1972 he began his foray into paraphysics with experiments in Kirlian photography and developed a field theory to explain the phenomenon. He is an expert in growing and marketing botanicals, and set up his own company, Northwest Botanicals. Visit http://www.nwbotanicals.org for a listing of his writings on metaphysics, parapsychology, and alternative agriculture. His forthcoming book is entitled The Non-local Mind in a Holographic Universe. Richard is available for lectures and as an outside consultant.]
Quantum Potential: phrase coined by physicist David Bohm to refer to the aspect of nonlocality where space ceases to exist and two electrons, for example, can occupy the same coordinates.
2. Living Systems in Evolution
Elisabet Sahtouris
As an evolution biologist, my work and passion are looking at the evolving patterns of biological living systems over time in order to make sense of our present human affairs in a broad evolutionary context. One might say that I'm a "Pastist" looking for perspective that will help me be a good Futurist. But I have an even deeper passion, which is to understand myself, my world and the entire Cosmos in which we exist locally.
Within this broader mission I have long sought to undo the artificial barriers we have erected between Science and Spirit for historical reasons, to reveal a richer worldview or cosmovision. I especially like the latter term--cosmovision--for its breadth and depth to the furthest reaches of what we can know through experience. The word cosmos is Greek, and in Greek it means people, world or cosmos in the English sense, depending on context. So cosmovision is a very inclusive term.
Every culture present and past has, or has had, its worldview or cosmovision. Western science has evolved a cosmovision very different from all other human cultures, though it has become the one most influential in all the world now. Its most obvious divergences from other cosmovisions lie in its seeing life and consciousness only in Earth's biological creatures, and in its narrowing of "reality" to what can be tested and measured scientifically. This excludes from its reality gods, soul, spirit, dream experience, thoughts, feelings, values, passions, enlightenment experiences, and many other aspects of consciousness beyond their physiological correlates.
Given that no one, neither scientist nor anyone else, has ever had any experience outside consciousness, these omissions seem gravely limiting and unrealistic.
Nevertheless, Western science has defined the universe as an array of non-living matter and non-conscious energy--a universe in which changes over time are due to random or accidental processes that assemble material particles, atoms and molecules into patterns within the constraints of a few physical laws. Thus random events account for life, which is seen as arising from non-life on the surface of one non-living planet, and possibly on others yet undiscovered, evolving by Darwinian random mutations and "blind" natural selection. The origin of the universe is seen as a Big Bang and its end envisioned as the gradual wearing out of the Big Bang's spreading energy in "heat death"--the ultimate coldness in which no further change takes place.
One way to sum up the essential difference between this Western scientific cosmovision and all other human cultural cosmovisions is to see the former as portraying a universe in which things happen by accident rather than by intelligent design.
The cosmovision which is the framework in which we attempt to understand the patterns of biological evolution is enormously important. If evolution proceeds by accident, rather than by intelligent intent, the same evidence for evolution, the same observations of it, will be seen very differently. Context gives perspective, determining perception, meaning and interpretation. And cosmovision, or worldview, is context. Humans, for example, will be seen very differently in religious, economic, cultural and scientific perspectives.
While the Western scientific worldview as described gives a satisfying picture and interpretation of nature to many scientists and persuades many others, and while its adherents can feel awe at nature's complexity and beauty, ever larger numbers of people either cannot accept it or feel impelled to revise and expand it. These numbers include many scientists dissatisfied with its limitations. In fact, they are changing Western science very rapidly now toward an understanding of nature as alive, self-organizing, intelligent, conscious or sentient and participatory at all levels--from subatomic particles and molecules to entire living planets, galaxies and the whole Cosmos, from local human consciousness to Cosmic Consciousness.
The reductionist pursuit of matter to its tiniest particles helped us see all matter as disturbances of a great energy field, now called the Zero Point Energy (ZPE) field, in which everything is as dynamically interconnected as in Shiva's Dance or Indra's Net. Furthermore, physics is now demonstrating nonlocality in this ZPE, meaning that information from any spatial point in the universe is accessible at any other point, and that all events taking place in the universe at any time are accessible at any other time.
Nonlocality thus implies a non-physical, non-timespace ground of being--deeper and more essential than our mundane timespace reality--in which everything exists as potential to be played out in our physical world and whatever other worlds exist. I am reminded of the Kogi Indians of Colombia, saying of Aluna, their Creatrix, symbolized by water: "Through great mental anguish She lived all possible worlds before creating them; thus she is called Memory and Possibility." And I am reminded of the Mayoruna--the "Cat People" of the Amazon--thought to be extinct until well-known explorer and National Geographic photographer Loren MacIntyre stumbled on them while lost in the rainforest. Living with them, MacIntyre not only learned to communicate their way--by the telepathy he called "Amazon beaming"--but discovered that they easily handled two concepts of time: the eternal Now of non-timespace and linear time as we understand it. That Now is also the Dreamtime of the Australian aborigines and the Akashic records of the esoterics, and has been made accessible through ritual and meditation in many human cultures: indigenous, religious and other.
Most cultures understand the universe as conscious, and this Cosmic Consciousness, by various names, as the source of Creation. Now science itself is coming close to these views through quantum physicists' recognition that consciousness is essential to reality and somehow a deep feature of the ZPE field or an even deeper non-timespace. Thus, our scientific cosmovision is shifting 180 degrees from the view of consciousness as a late product of material and biological evolution to the view of consciousness as the very source of material and biological evolution.
In molecular genetic biology this shift is supported by fifty years of research evidence that DNA reorganizes itself intelligently when organisms are environmentally stressed, and that the required information transfer often seems to obey some form of nonlocality rather than slower chemical or electromagnetic transmission. Rather than being the sources of variation and evolution, errors known to occur in DNA during reproduction and by cosmic radiation or other accidents are recognized at the molecular level and fixed by repair genes. Thus we see intelligence at work not only in higher brains, but in the lowliest of bacteria and cellular components. Clearly, we are moving toward a post-Darwinian era in evolution biology.
The earliest creatures of Earth, Archean bacteria, invented complex and diverse lifestyles, rearranging the planet's crust to produce patches of oxides (rusted earth) and pure streams of metals we mine today, including copper and uranium. They created an entirely new atmosphere from their waste gases, especially oxygen, and forged huge continental shelf formations. By evolving ways to exchange DNA information among themselves around the world, we can rightly say they invented the first worldwide web of information exchange. The importance of this astoundingly flexible gene pool, which exists to this day, cannot be underestimated. It is still as active as in Archean times and is related, for example, to rapid bacterial resistance to our antibiotics.
Information exchange gave bacteria close relationships that facilitated both competition and cooperation in communal living. We have known of their communal lives for some time, but only now are we able to investigate their amazing urban complexes in real detail and understand how surprisingly like our own their history has been.
In what seems to us the almost unthinkably ancient past, the first half of Earth's four-and-a-half-billion-year life, when bacteria still had the world to themselves, they not only discovered the advantages of communal living but even evolved sophisticated cityscapes. We can see their huge urban complexes today as slimy films--in wetlands, in dank closets, in the stomachs of cows, in kitchen drains. Scientists call them biofilms or mucilages, as they look like slimy brown or greenish patches to the unaided eye. Only now can we discover their inner structure and functions with the newest microscopy techniques that magnify them sufficiently without destroying them.
Looking closely for the first time at intact bacterial microcities, scientists are amazed to see them packed as tightly as our own urban centers, but with a decidedly futuristic look. Towers of spheres and cone- or mushroom-shaped skyscrapers soar 100 to 200 micrometers upward from a base of dense sticky sugars, other big molecules and water, all collectively produced by the bacterial inhabitants. In these cities, different strains of bacteria with different enzymes help each other exploit food supplies that no one strain can break down alone, and all of them together build the city's infrastructure. The cities are laced with intricate channels connecting the buildings to circulate water, nutrients, enzymes, oxygen and recyclable wastes. Their diverse inhabitants live in different microneighborhoods and glide, motor or swim along roadways and canals. The more food is available, the denser the populations become.
Researcher Bill Keevil in England, making videos of these cityscapes, says of one, "It looks like Manhattan when you fly over it." Microbiologist Bill Costerton in Montana observes: "All of a sudden, instead of individual organisms, you have communication, cell cooperation, cell specialization, and a basic circulatory system, as in plants or animals ... It's a big intellectual break." Researchers are coming to see colonial bacteria or even all bacteria now as multicelled creatures despite their separate bodies.
In addition to rearranging Earth's crust, creating an atmosphere, devising urban lifestyles and initiating the first worldwide web, bacteria invented other amazing technologies. Some produced polyester, though biodegradable; others harnessed solar energy as photosynthesis, permitting the making of food when it became scarce; still others invented the electric motor for locomotion---a disk with flagellum attached, rotating in a magnetic field, complete with ball bearings, not to mention the atomic pile, probably to raise local temperatures. Seeing these startling parallels to human lifestyles and inventions makes us see evolution fractally. In fact, when I fly over human cities, making them appear small, I see them as cells spread over a substrate, or as bacterial colonies.
Some bacterial colonies, as we know, cause infections, diseases and deteriorate our teeth, buildings and bridges. But most bacterial cooperatives are harmless or indeed cooperative with other creatures, many living inside their guts, as in termites and cows, helping with digestion. They maintain our worldwide habitats by renewing and chemically balancing the atmosphere, seas and soils; they work for our health by the billions in our guts and have evolved into the organelles inside our cells.
We use bacteria in our original biotechnologies of making cheese, yogurt, beer, wine, bread, soy sauce and other foods. We harness them for newer biotechnologies to remove contaminants from water in sewage treatment plants, to clean up our oil spills and other pollution, to refine oil, to mine ores, and and even to make that biodegradable polyester they were making long before we were. All our genetic engineering efforts depend on them as they do much of the work of DNA recombination in our laboratories.
Most astonishing to investigators, communal bacteria turn on a different set of genes than their genetically identical relatives roaming independently outside of biofilms. This gives the urban dwellers a very different biochemical makeup. A special bacterial chemical, homoserine lactone, signals incoming bacteria to turn into city dwellers. All bacteria constantly discharge low levels of this chemical. Large concentrations of it in urban environments trigger the urbanizing genetic changes, no matter what strain the bacteria are.
These changes include those that make bacteria most resistant to antibiotics. Costerton estimates that more than ninety-nine percent of all bacteria live in biofilm communities and finds that such communities, pooling their resources, can be up to 1,500 times more resistant to antibiotics than a single colony. Under today's siege by antibiotics, bacteria respond with ever-new genetic immunity. Our fifth generation of antibiotics failed in 1996.
Researcher Eshel Ben-Jacob also finds bacteria trading genes and discovers complex interactions between individuals and their communities. The genomes of individuals--defined as their full set of structural and regulatory genes--can and do alter their patterns in the interests of the bacterial community as a whole. He observes that bacteria signal each other chemically, calculate their own numbers in relation to food supplies, make decisions on how to behave accordingly to maximize community wellbeing, and collectively change their environments to their communal benefit.
Bacterial communities thus create complex genetic and behavioral patterns specific to different environmental conditions. The genomes of individual bacteria alter their composition, arrangement and which genes are turned on in response to changes in the environment or communal circumstances. This important information is coming from various research laboratories. Both Ben-Jacob and Costerton see individual bacteria gaining the benefits of group living by putting group interests ahead of their own. Ben-Jacob concludes that colonies form a kind of supermind genomic web of intelligent individual genomes. Such webs are capable of creative responses to the environment that bring about "cooperative self-improvement or cooperative evolution."
Einstein's worldview was shaken when some quantum physicists suggested that electrons intentionally leap orbits. Microbiologists are beginning to see similar intentional activity at systemic, cellular and molecular DNA levels. These discoveries of genomic changes in response to an organism's environment, in the context of a holistic systems view of evolution, are changing our story of how evolution proceeds in very significant ways. We are discovering, in short, that the fundamental life forms from which all other organisms evolve are capable of both self-organization in community and self-improvement through environmental challenge.
Genomic changes in response to an organism's environment have actually been known since the 1950s, but they challenged the accepted theories of the time, so it has taken half a century to amass sufficient data to warrant changing our scientific picture of evolution accordingly.
Barbara McClintock, who did much of her work on corn plants, pioneered this research showing that DNA sequences move about to new locations and that this genetic activity increases when the plants are stressed. She also found closed-loop molecular bits of self-reproducing DNA called plasmids moving among the normal DNA and exchanged from cell to cell. Plasmids were invented by ancient bacteria and persist in multicelled creatures. They are used a great deal in genetic engineering as they can be inserted into new genomes.
McClintock's work on transposable genetic elements was verified and elaborated by many researchers until it became clear that DNA reorganizes itself and trades genes with other cells, even with other creatures. The trading process sometimes involves viruslike elements known as transposons. Some are retrotransposons and retroviruses that transcribe their RNA into DNA--opposite to the usual order and not thought possible before their discovery. Some theorists now believe that bacteria may have invented viruses as well as plasmids.
Nobel Laureate biologists Phillip Sharp and Richard Roberts discovered that RNA is arranged in modules that can be reshuffled by spliceosomes, referred to as a cell's "editors." Other researchers have shown that bacteria naturally retool themselves genetically and can correct defects created by human genetic engineers. Ancient bacteria had already evolved the ability to repair genes damaged by UV radiation.
Further research shows that bacteria not only alter genomes very specifically in response to environmental pressures, but also transfer the mutations to other bacteria. Many of these genetic transfers appear to be evolutionarily related to "free-living" viruses, according to Temin and Engels in England. Retroviruses are known to infect across species and enter the host's germline DNA.
We are still in early stages of understanding the extent to which DNA is freely traded in the world of microbes to benefit both individuals and their communities. And we are just beginning to see these processes of genetic alteration at cellular levels as intelligent responses to changing environmental conditions in multicelled creatures. We know viruses and plasmids carry bits of DNA from whales to seagulls, from monkeys to cats, and so on, but it remains to be understood whether all this transfer is random or meaningful.
Most research in this area is still confined to microbes in which these matters are easier to study. As yet we do not know to what extent DNA trading occurs in creatures larger than microbes, nor to what extent it facilitates specific responses to environmental conditions. For that matter, we still do not know what the vast proportion of multicellular creature DNA does at all. Depending on the particular plant or animal species, only between one and ten percent (in humans) codes for proteins. The remaining ninety-odd percent remains a mystery! So our stories are far from complete, but it seems reasonable to hazard the guess that nature would not have evolved an evolutionary strategy as sophisticated as gene trading to facilitate evolution billions of years ago only to abandon it in evolving larger creatures.
When we see that genomes respond to stress in many different species, from microbes to plants and animals, with the changes passed on to succeeding generations, as Jeffrey Pollard in England has reported, we are closer to the much discredited Lamarck than to Darwin. Pollard tells us we are seeing "dramatic alterations of developmental plans independent of natural selection," a situation that may itself may "play a minor role in evolutionary change, perhaps honing up the fit between the organism and its environment."
This growing body of evidence suggests that evolution may proceed much faster under stress than was thought possible. It also reveals how the worldwide web of DNA information exchange invented by ancient bacteria still functions today, not only among bacteria as always, but also within multicelled creatures and among species. As Lynn Margulis puts it: "Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth."
Margulis meant the multidimensional being of an interwoven biological network. But let's look at this concept of multidimensional being in an even broader sense. Physicists discovered an astounding interconnectivity and interdependence among all the particles of our material universe, with each particle actually created by the others, much in the same way as Buddhist monk Thich Nat Han tells us that a sheet of paper is everything that it is not, showing us how we can trace the paper to its source in factory and forest, the workers and woodcutters, their families and so on to all things interconnected.
Now biologists are showing us the same interconnectedness among bacteria and larger organisms, in ecosystems and in the Earth as a whole living entity. Earth continually recycles its matter into new organisms through the great recycling system of erupting magma cooling into rock, transforming into creatures, eventually into sediment and back into rock and molten magma as tectonic plates slide beneath each other and back into the Earth's fiery depths below the continents.
My co-author Willis Harman once said, "If consciousness is anywhere in the universe, it must be everywhere." The easiest way to understand this is to see that consciousness is a fundamental property of the source of all being, as more and more physicists believe it to be. This consciousness is a vital dimension of being, more fundamental than energy or matter.
I like to think of creaturehood as life music played on a keyboard, with consciousness or spirit represented by the high keys, electromagnetic energy as the mid-range and matter as the low keys. With this metaphor, we see that Einstein showed us how to transpose the music of the mid-range to the low range and back, with his simple equation E = MC2. Now we are seeking the key to transposing from the high keys into the world of matter via electromagnetic energy, through the ZPE field, called the Plenum by the Greeks, the ether by Europeans and the Implicate Order by physicist David Bohm. I participate in many different discussion groups on this subject, mostly with other scientists, all of us asking: "If consciousness is the source of creation, just how does it transmute into our measurable electromagnetic energy? What are the properties of electromagnetic energy that we do not yet understand? What keys lie in the ZPE range?"
I observed earlier that Western science is changing very rapidly now toward an understanding of nature as alive, self-organizing, intelligent, conscious or sentient and participatory at all levels. In this newer framework or cosmovision, biological evolution is holistic, intelligent and purposeful. Notions such as entropy in a non-living universe, running down to its death, no longer apply. Rather, we see a living universe with a metabolism like that in our bodies, with its continual creation from the ZPE as anabolism, while entropy can now be seen as catabolism--continual dissolution for purposes of recycling. In this version entropy does not lead to the death of the universe because the universe is capable of replenishing itself continuously.
Evolution from the perspective of linear time displays cycles that move ever upward, reflecting the complex spiraling paths of planets, stars and galaxies. Each cycle begins with some form of unity dividing into diversity, leading it to conflict, which then moves into negotiations and resolution in a higher lever of cooperative unity.
The ancient bacteria diversified from the unity of a new planet's crustal mixture of elements, moving them about as they invented new forms and lifestyles. They competed with each other for resources as they caused major planetwide problems such as starvation and global pollution. They invented new technologies to solve them, but also had to negotiate and learn to cooperate in communities, finally in the ultimate symbiotic bacterial community which became the first "multi-creatured cell"--the nucleated cell--a new unity at a higher level of complexity.
From this nucleated cell, new diversity emerged as many kinds of single cells competed, negotiated and finally cooperated as multicelled creatures. From this new level of unity, all other creatures diversified, competed and negotiated their way into harmonious ecosystems. The best life insurance for any species in an ecosystem is to contribute usefully to sustaining the lives of other species, a lesson we are only beginning to learn as humans.
Today we humans are repeating this process in amazing detail in what we have come to recognize as globalization. Human history repeats evolutionary history, with all its problems and technological solutions: diversification from the unity of the earliest human family, all the old patterns of competition and negotiation played out in wars, conquests and assimilations for the thousands of years in which we have built the empires of individual rulers, then of nations and now of corporations. Finally, we recognize that we need a cooperative world--unity at a higher level, a new multi-creatured cell the size of our entire planet. And gradually we see that just as our beautifully evolved body cannot be healthy if any of its organs is ill, so our global economy can thrive only if all local economies are healthy as well. Thus we become concerned with the ecosystems we have damaged and with the economic inequities we must solve.
How fascinating that just as we evolve this pattern of globalization in recognition of our need for harmony with each other and other species, we simultaneously awaken to our "full keyboard" selves, to our identity as spirit having a human experience, striving to understand the ultimate unity from which we sprang! What ancient mystics and religious prophets and saints taught is now becoming widespread. Thus, our new negotiations toward cooperation are not only reflected in economic globalization and our own worldwide web--the Internet--but in many efforts to globalize friendly conversation among the world's religions. In this process we move from religious conflicts to cooperation, in part by recognizing that ultimate unity, Cosmic Consciousness, is the source of all "God" concepts.
The barriers between science and spirit are dissolving as scientists find Cosmic Consciousness in a nonlocal, non-time energy field that transmutes itself into electromagnetic energy, and, in turn, matter, in the creation of universes such as ours. Presumably, it can also create itself (self-organize) into other pure energy patterns in myriad ways--including angelic realms, for example, and all the "worlds" we may exist in between lives, and eternally.
This Creative Source has been called "I Am" from the perspective of the local consciousness in beings such as you and me, when we practice meditation to expand our little consciousnesses into the Cosmic Consciousness of which they are part. In this state we not only perceive union with God, we may even transcend our local selves such that we recognize ourselves as God.
From a linear time perspective, our universe appears to be a learning universe. I like to say its basic principle is "Anything that can happen, will happen," and so it learns what works well and what doesn't. Evolution can thus be seen as an improvisational dance, keeping the steps that work and changing those that don't. God-as-Cosmic-Consciousness becomes Cosmic Consciousness transmuting into material universes. Perhaps we could say that in this process even God learns to know the nature of Self by exploring all possible forms and states of being and reflecting on those "selves," just as we, God's human reflections, learn to do.
Cosmic Consciousness, then, begins as Unity and divides into Complexity one stage at a time as it embodies itself in such vast varieties of energetic and material forms as we see in biological evolution, for example, from our human perspective of linear time. In its non-timespace Source, which some physicists now identify as the more fundamental nature of the universe, all these possibilities exist together in complexity inconceivable to us humans.
I believe each life comes with the freedom to choose a path through these endless possibilities at myriad choice points along its way, just as every particle weaves its trajectory through timespace. Every organism composed of and playing on its full keyboard from pure consciousness to matter can be theoretically led in its development by its ultimate goal. The acorn can know the oak tree it will become, as we can know the Higher Selves toward which we evolve.
All nature is thus conscious in my worldview or cosmovision, and all of it has access to non-timespace; all of it is an aspect of God. Only we humans of Western culture have played the game of cutting ourselves off from the Great Conversation that our very cells can still hear! I have come to believe, like many of my indigenous teachers, that soils, waters, organisms, ecosystems, Earth, even DNA itself, all know themselves in relation to the whole play of universal evolution as our cells know each other and our whole bodies in evolution, behaving intelligently to maintain themselves and that whole. Only this way can I understand how my own body, in its tremendous complexity, functions and preserves its health.
Perhaps God, through Western technological culture, is trying out the most dangerous game of all--the game of truly forgetting our nature. A great risk, but it had to be done to try all possibilities! It seems our human task now is to wake up and recognize ourselves as parts or aspects of God-as-Nature and behave accordingly. All are One, all harm harms each of us, all blessings bless each of us. What a guideline for choice!
Suppose we remind ourselves occasionally to see ourselves as the creative edge of God (a phrase I learned from a dear friend)--as God looking out through our eyes, acting through our hands, walking on our feet, in exploration of the new--and to observe how that changed things for us. This is the scientific worldview as I see it when the barriers are removed, expanding it to include the larger cosmovision traditionally relegated to religions. It is the view that makes sense to me at this point in my lifetime of exploration. We have only our stories to go by, and each must necessarily be at least somewhat, if not radically, different--for God/Cosmic Consciousness has become very complex, though always based on eternal Unity.
I pray that all religions will recognize the importance of the uniqueness in each story and the unity of All That Is. I pray that scientists, who have been given the role of "official" priesthood with the mandate to tell us "how things are," will soon officially recognize that there is one alive, intelligent universe in which spirit and matter are not separable and in which creation is continuous. I pray the indigenous people who never separated science and spirituality will be honored for that. It is time for the true communion which alone can save our species and all others, which alone can bring about the perfectly possible world we all dream of--a world expressing this understanding of ourselves as the creative edge of God!
Copyright (c) 2007 by Elisabet Sahtouris. All Rights Reserved.
[Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D., is an internationally known evolution biologist and futurist, author, speaker and consultant on Living Systems Design. She has taught at the University of Massachusetts and M.I.T., was a science writer for the Horizon/Nova TV series and a United Nations consultant on indigenous peoples. Her current focus is on evolution biology as a model for globalization and organizational change. Her recent books are EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution, A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us, and Biology Revisioned. The foregoing article was originally presented as part of At Home in the Universe: A Symposium on the Developing Dialogue between Science and Religion at the World Parliament of Religions in Capetown, South Africa in December, 1999. For more information visit http://www.sahtouris.com.]
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3. Resetting the Bioenergy Blueprint via DNA
Text copyright (c) 2007 by Sol Luckman. Image copyright (c) 2007 by Sol Luckman & Kara Brown. All Rights Reserved.
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