Review by James A. Shapiro
Predrag Slijepčević’s Biocivilisations (Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont, USA; London, UK) is an unusually thought-provoking and ambitious book. It challenges the reader to abandon several centuries of assumptions about how to describe the living world in purely physical and mechanistic terms, a world governed by an evolutionary process that places human beings at the apex. Instead, the author sets out to “…explore the science of life in an entirely new way, through the concept of biology as a civilising force.” He proposes four uniquely “biocivilising” principles that extend beyond the realm of physical explanations: constant “flows (homeorhesis), agency, symbiosis and mind.” (i) Homeorhesis describes the flows of energy and matter through and between organisms necessary to sustain life. (ii) Agency is the purposive drive of organisms to create the conditions for homeorhesis and reproduction. (iii) Symbiosis is the propensity for organisms to interact, collaborate and increase their capacity for proliferation on scales that range from two cells exchanging nutrients to very large and diverse populations, ultimately encompassing the entire biosphere (“Gaia”), whose inhabitants cooperate to maintain planetary conditions suitable for life. (iv) And mind is the innate intelligence in all living beings that directs their activities and strives to optimize the other three principles.
Slijepčević applies these four principles to all life forms, from bacteria to plants and animals. In separate chapters, he highlights examples of multiple “biocivilisation” accomplishments which have anticipated the technological achievements of human civilizations by millions of years in fields like communication, medicine, architecture, art, and agriculture. In agriculture, for example, the pre-human examples include Dictyostelium discoideum slime molds nurturing and grazing on a specific group of bacteria (Burkholderia), ants defending and herding herbivorous aphids to harvest their milky honeydew sap, and leaf-cutter ants constructing sophisticated subterranean cities where they cultivate fungal crops nourished by the leaf fragments they forage from plants.
It is important to recognize that Biocivilisations is more than just a new technical manner of describing life activities. The book carries a moral alert that heightens its scientific descriptions. In explaining the remarkable accomplishments of organisms that humans have all too often disparaged as lacking intelligence and technical capabilities, the author points out that all of these “biocivilised” accomplishments have survived millions of years because their prehuman creators successfully integrated them into the ceaseless flow of the Gaian system. Modern human society, on the other hand, has produced many so-called “advanced” technological creations which are unsustainable and threaten the Gaian system. Slijepčević takes advantage of several opportunities to remind the reader that humankind is a very recent inhabitant of the biosphere and may not endure. The book evaluates as delusional arrogance statements that we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, where the future of the planet will be determined principally by human technologies. Such thinking well may limit our evolutionary potential. Anyone who cares about our future on earth, therefore, has good reason to read this fascinating and highly original book.
James A. Shapiro (photo by Hummingbird Film), Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, The University of Chicago; Founder of The Third Way of Evolution; author of Evolution: A View from the 21st Century.
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