Heroes Not Zombies

When I noticed this stone on the beach I was entranced. It looks like a whole small world. Look at the layers of minerals, their colours, their extent and shape. Look at the top of the stone with several species of lichen and/or seaweeds living there.

It makes me think of illustrations I saw when I was a child. Colour drawings of the Earth with a segment removed to show you the multiple layers all the way down to the core.

It also makes me think of the concept of the ecosystem, or even a biosphere….a complex of elements, some living, some non-living (which reminds me….I came across a quotation yesterday which said the opposite of “life” is not “death”, it’s “non-living”……must look that up!)

The idea of networks of connections and relationships between minerals, uni-cellular and multi-cellular organisms, air, water and sunlight co-creating the reality we live in…..I just love that.

It makes me think of the idea of viewing whatever we are looking at from different scales, because everything which exists, exists in nested layers of everything else……remember the old funny story about the teaching that the world floats on the back of a turtle? How the enquirer asked “And what does the turtle sit on?” The answer “Another turtle”. To which the enquirer asks “What does THAT turtle sit on?” The answer “Another turtle”. After a few minutes of this exchange continuing along the exact same question and response, the teacher finally responds to one of the “What does THAT turtle sit on?” with “It’s turtles all the way down, son. It’s turtles all the way down.”

On a more serious note, I found Lynn Margulis’s theory of “endo-symbiosis” hugely convincing. Briefly, she claimed that all multi-cellular organisms (that includes you and me) are made up an incredibly complex co-operating network of single cells, and that inside each of our cells are individual elements, like mitochondria, for example, which, way back in history were single celled creatures in their own right. She hypothesised that the evolutionary path of development was driven by collaboration and co-operation, with single celled organisms combining to live together at new levels. In other words all the different elements of a single cell came from smaller single “celled” creatures merging. Maybe that idea was a bit too challenging for some people, but it’s pretty undeniable that multi-cellular organisms like humans can actually be understood as whole worlds of vastly networked individual cells. It’s reckoned that only a tenth of the cells of your body are genetically “you”, the other ninety percent being bacteria and other unicellular organisms. Pretty mind boggling isn’t it? But it seems to be true all the same.

This idea of scale…..a long time ago I created a “human spectrometer” to help me discuss a patient’s issues with them at different levels of scale. Here it is

I’d start in the middle with the “person” because that’s where we met, person to person. Then I could move left zooming in on smaller and smaller parts of the person to consider the problems and their effects….perhaps in the “nervous system”, or the “digestive system”, then further “in” to disturbances in particular organs, “the heart”, or the “liver”, then further in yet to consider the role of cells, like white blood cells, or the cells of a specific organ, or, at an even smaller level the circulating levels of individual molecules, like hormones, antibodies, chemical messengers and so on.

I’d then return to the “person” and start moving right to consider the person within their significant relationships, within their family, within society, considering cultural, economic and work issues, or, finally within the “world”, by which I meant the environment.

I didn’t usually work through this whole thing methodically, step by step, but used it as an illustration to consider everything from pathology, to pathogenesis, to the impacts from and on the vast networks of life in which an individual lived.

I created a post about it back in 2007, so patients could explore the idea a bit more in their own homes.

It’s only now, many years later, after reading Iain McGilchrist’s “The Master and His Emissary“, that the left hemisphere zooms in to consider the parts, while the right zooms out to consider the connections, the relationships, the whole! Funny, how the universe works!

This notion of nested scales was also explored by Arthur Koestler who coined the term “holon” to describe the idea of multi-level hierarchies. You can read a bit more about that here.