Life, I’m sure, is made of poetry.
Jorge Luis Borges
From the lecture series This Craft of Verse, Harvard University, 1967
The power of poetic expression sometimes surprises us, and even shocks us, with unexpected originality. It happens that a poem reflects the essence of life in a new way not anticipated by the author. Jorge Luis Borges noticed this paradox when he confronted his poetry and concluded that he was powerless: poetry has a life of its own.
I discovered the depth of Borges’ thinking while reading the poem Brotherhood of faces in the universe by Augustin Tin Ujević (1891-1955) affectionately known as ‘Tin’ throughout former Yugoslavia. Born in a small town on Dalmatian coast, Tin encapsulated the fragile spirit of the Balkan brotherhood, squeezed between the courtyards of big powers fighting for the world dominance. He laughed at the authorities of all sorts and practiced the ancient poetic wisdom in bohemian quarters of Zagreb, Belgrade and Sarajevo. Tin’s poetry was free from prejudices of anthropocentrism.
Everything I wanted to say in my book Biocivilisations: A New Look at the Science of Life (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2023; White River Junction, Vermont USA & London UK) drawing on modern scientific evidence, from bacterial and insect cities, through the underground internet created by trees, to different forms of biogenic art and planetary microbial conversations that we cannot hear – achievements much older and more original than human ones – Tin sensed decades before modern science. We can discover his subtle poetic insight if we assume that Brotherhood is not only an homage to interconnected humanity unrestricted by time but also an homage to the connection of all biological species and the universe. In this way, Brotherhood becomes a powerful example of poetry woven into life’s fabric that unites us miraculously with our planetary brothers and sisters and searches for our relatives in the universe in a profoundly original way.
Biocivilisations
Do not be afraid! You are not alone. There are others than you
who unknown by you live within you.
And everything which you were, will be, and dream
Burns in them with the very same passion, beauty, and purity.
Where is everybody? asked physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 on behalf of scientifically-educated humanity. His ‘everybody’ referred to extraterrestrial civilisations; more precisely, copies of human civilisation in space. Scientific models show that the cosmos must contain human brothers in smartness, but they are mysteriously absent from the screens of our detection instruments.
But what if scientists are exaggerating? Could it be that they made a mistake in their models, and now we have an absurd astrobiological picture dominated by Homo sapiens and its questionable incarnations – Anthropocene, Homo Deus, Machinocene? Let’s insert the first stanza from Brotherhood into the astrobiological cacophony of modern science. How calming and sobering sound the words ‘Do not be afraid! You are not alone. There are others than you who unknown by you live within you.’ Modern biology, but not the mainstream one – the new science of life that I described in Biocivilisations – agrees with Tin’s vision. We are far from alone. ‘Others than you’ and ‘unknown by you live within you’ for an endlessly long time – more than 99.99% of the time before ‘you were, will be, and dream’. In Biocivilisations, I showed that languages, technologies, science, art, engineering, medicine, and other forms of intelligent behaviour that we modern humans attribute exclusively to ourselves, have existed for millions and billions of years in the biocivilisations of bacteria, protists, fungi, plants, and animals. These ancient biocivilisations ‘burn in them with the very same passion, beauty, and purity’, as ours burns in us.
Which of the ancient biocivilisations can reach into the cosmos? This is a question that modern science may ask one day when it corrects itself by admitting that humanity is not a chosen species, but only one, and equal to the others, in the web of life woven from millions of threads or species. But such a question would be wrong. Why? Well, because Brotherhood is a cosmic phenomenon – the brotherhood of bacteria, archaea, viruses, protists, fungi, plants, and animals with the cosmos. We are barely noticeable on this list, as an insignificant part of the animal kingdom, because we last a tiny fragment of cosmic time. Our cosmic home is also insignificant. The Earth is a barely visible ‘pale blue dot’ on the giant canvas of the cosmos. Given that there are countless Earth-like planets, and that microbial life forms, such as bacteria, can live in many locations in the cosmos, unlike us, we must confront our self-aggrandising logic: are we sure that our planet is a unique source from which life expands into the cosmos? Following Tin’s poetic insight, we must conclude that the cosmos is a much more likely source of life than Earth, and we, as a species, are only a fleeting thought in the all-encompassing cosmic mind (see Cosmic Mind).
New humanism
Be not proud. Your thoughts are not only yours. They live in others.
We have all crossed the same roads in darkness.
We were all wandering, searching under the sign, in the same manner
And all in the same manner are admired.
We should adopt ‘Be not proud!’, as the motto of true humanism, to tame the childish arrogance of Homo sapiens, a biological species that exists only for a tiny fragment of time, and yet considers itself the master of the planet and the universe. Our ‘humanism’ forgets that we are a true brotherhood of faces in the universe – our bodies and our minds are conglomerates of viruses, bacteria, archaea, and protists. Biological conglomerates in which ‘Your thoughts are not only yours. They live in others.’ In Biocivilisations, I illustrated this truth using well-established scientific facts. At least 8% of the human genome consists of DNA sequences that once belonged to viruses. Furthermore, the human genome is 38% bacterial, 28% protist, and 16% animal. Our genome reflects the true brotherhood of species. The latest scientific data unequivocally show that DNA sequences travel freely through space and bombard the Earth through comets, asteroids, and meteorites. Mathematician and astrobiologist, Chandra Wickramasinghe, together with the brilliant Fred Hoyle, developed the modern theory of panspermia – the cosmos is teeming with the seeds of life, that is bacteria and viruses.
Our evolutionary journey – ‘We have all crossed the same roads in darkness’ – lasted through the brothers and sisters who make us up, for billions of years. And our more recent brothers and sisters, plants and animals, ‘were all wandering, searching under the sign, in the same manner’ but significantly shorter than us. Our evolutionary darkness was the longest. We must suppress our false sense of biological superiority because misplaced pride is naïve. The biosphere, or the living system known as Gaia, sees all species as equal – ‘all in the same manner are admired.’ The woman who, along with James Lovelock, is responsible for the Gaia hypothesis, Lynn Margulis, was poetically inspired when she said ‘We can no more be cured of our viruses than we can be relieved of our brains’ frontal lobes: we are our viruses.’ Her favourite poet was Emily Dickinson.
Following the motto of the new humanism, ‘Don’t be proud’, mainstream biology, dominated by the neo-Darwinian principle known as ‘survival of the fittest’, must correct itself, by combining it with the Lamarckian principle of coexistence – or true brotherhood of species.
Symbiosis
You share something with everyone. More of you are the same.
And remember that this is so from ancient times.
And we are all repeating, even the great and the pure,
Like children who do not even know their names.
Symbiosis, one of the four biocivilising principles, is a synonym of brotherhood: ‘You share something with everyone. More of you are the same’. Lynn Margulis proved the theory of endosymbiosis disputed for more than a century before her. All organisms above bacteria and archaea are composite organisms, chimeras, or mosaics of unicellular ancestors that now ‘live in others’. In our cells live bacteria (mitochondria) that produce the energy necessary to move or breathe. In plant cells live photosynthetic bacteria that ‘eat the sun’ and produce oxygen. The development of our brain is not possible without bacteria from the human microbiome. We cannot think without bacteria.
‘And remember that this is so from ancient times.’ Margulis showed that the symbiotic sharing of resources lasts for at least two billion years, from the moment a bacterium and an archaeon integrated themselves into a true brotherhood – the new eukaryotic cell, from which plants and animals descended. Our bodies are complex brotherhoods of microbes. The Lamarckian idea of coexistence and coevolution of species is still foreign to mainstream biology, although the idea of endosymbiosis has made its way into textbooks.
Symbiosis is related to another biocivilising principle, the evolutionary river of life that flows in symbiotic cycles, so that ‘we are all repeating, even the great and the pure’. ‘The great and the pure’ refers to us. We are great (in a spatial sense) because we are made up of a large number of invisible biogenic forms: viruses, bacteria, archaea, and their fusions, which repeat themselves in different combinations for millions and billions of years. The human body is a conglomerate of 37 thousand billion eukaryotic cells and 400 thousand billion microbes that make up our microbiome. We are pure because we are evolutionary newborns in the truest sense ‘who do not even know their names.’ We live only a few moments of evolutionary time, and we play with our toys – Anthropocene, Homo Deus, and Machinocene. But the time of our coming of age in the drama of evolution is before us. The river of life, with us or without us, is uncertain. Awareness of uncertainty is by no means a handicap, nor should it be understood as fatalism. If we are brave enough, awareness of uncertainty becomes a challenge that we must accept to achieve our biological potential. Naive early games will, hopefully, one day be only memories of our immaturity.
Collective unconscious
Others share with us our power and our sins.
And our dreams are only from one common well.
And the food of our soul is from our common bowl.
And selfishness is the seal in the middle of the forehead.
We are not only a physical but also a psychological brotherhood of faces in the universe, because ‘Others share with us our power and our sins. And our dreams are only from one common well.’ Evidence for this claim is Jung’s well-known analysis of the human psyche. According to Carl Gustav Jung, the human psyche is the culmination of the diversity of psychological experiences that begins with the ‘central fire’. Psychological diversity, or Jung’s collective unconscious, is expressed through his 1925 ‘volcano diagram’ (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Jung’s volcano diagram. From lectures delivered in 1925. C. G. Jung, Analytical psychology. Princeton University Press (July 9, 1991).
The central fire in the diagram is life as an integral part of the cosmos (Figure 1. H). Other layers follow, starting with our animal ancestors (Figure 1. G), through our hominin ancestors (Figure 1. F), all the way to modern communities (Europe, nation, clan, family) (Figure 1. E, D, C, B). We as individuals (Figure 1. A) draw psychological experience from this volcano, because ‘the food of our souls is from our common bowl’.
It is worth recalling how Jung discovered the collective unconscious or the ‘common bowl’. A schizophrenic patient described an interesting vision to one of Jung’s assistants in 1906. The patient was convinced that the sun possesses a phallus that produces the wind. The patient’s vision would have been just another in a series of psychological distortions, had Jung not read the newly translated text of the magical papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt in 1910. Jung was struck by the similarity of the visions. The papyrus says that the origin of the wind is a tube hanging from the sun. Since the translation had just been published, Jung concluded that the patient could not possibly have come into contact with the text, but that the patient’s vision was the product of hallucinations coming from the ‘common bowl’ – a well of psychological experiences that repeat in us like cycles from Jung’s volcano.
In Biocivilisations, I developed the thesis that our psychological ancestors are not only animals. New studies show that the development of our brain depends on the human microbiome, the main constituent of which is bacteria. From this, it follows that Jung’s ‘central fire’ is the entire biosphere, given that bacteria are the ‘founders’ of the biosphere and are repeated in all layers of the biosphere – protists, fungi, plants, and animals. This observation opens an interesting question: how to connect the ‘central fire’ with the cosmos and finally with our brain? A new study gives us a potential clue. Two Italian researchers showed that the structure of the cosmic network of galaxies (cosmic web) is strikingly similar to the structure of the neural network of our brain (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Comparison of simulated web of galaxies (cosmic web) and microscopic samples of cerebellum and cortex. The comparison was performed by a network analysis procedure that tests similarity through clustering coefficients and the degree of centrality. F. Vazza and A. Feletti, The quantitative comparison between the neuronal network and the cosmic web. Frontiers in Physics, 2020. 8:525731. doi: 10.3389/fphy.2020.525731. Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
In the stratigraphy of Jung’s volcano diagram, we arrive at its top, the selfish ‘seal in the middle of the forehead’ or the conscious Self (Figure 1. A). We are psychological conglomerates tied to the cosmos by an umbilical cord of bacteria, yet we remain ourselves. Our biological potential lies in the possibility of a better understanding of the world – we have to overcome the initial stage of our development. Jung compared this maturation to mental alchemy.
Relativity
We stand man against man, in the knowledge
That we are all better, between ourselves. We together are dark.
And our blood, and the defeat of all of us in slaughtering,
Again is only a single history of the souls.
Protagoras is known for the maxim ‘man is the measure of all things’. In the light of Jung’s volcano diagram and Tin’s ‘common bowl’, Protagoras’ maxim becomes profoundly relativistic. We can be the measure of all things, but only in a limited sense, provided we understand our own physical and psychological origins and learn from them. We are children of the cosmos and the biosphere and we must grow up. Part of growing up is the realisation that we are not superior cosmic beings, and the acceptance of our fallibility: ‘We stand man against man, in the knowledge that we are all better, between ourselves. We together are dark.’
While immature eyes see only in front of them, from Jung’s top of the volcano (Figure 1 A), and from that perspective project a naive image of Homo Deus and the Anthropocene, the reality of the layers that define us (layers B – H; Figure 1) becomes clear only when we move into the next stage of development and discover a rear-view mirror that faithfully reflects our past as a determinant of the future. E. O. Wilson interpreted this rear-view mirror to mean that every human community is a struggle between altruism and selfishness: part saint, part sinner. Today we witness Wilson’s vision, combined with Jung’s, according to which the causes of global conflict – ‘And our blood [is] the defeat of all of us in the slaughtering’ – are conflicting fragments of our biological heritage that we persistently ignore, and because of that heritage ‘We together are dark’.
Accepting reality – ‘the defeat of all of us in slaughtering, again is only a single history of the souls’ – is an integral part of growing up. By getting to know ourselves, we also get to know our own origin, but also the world that determines such an origin, and our place in the world. In Biocivilisations I presented a simple truth: we are an ephemeral substance of the cosmos that has not passed the threshold of evolutionary longevity that typifies our older brothers: bacteria, archaea, protists, plants, insects, birds, fish… Unlike them, we are too young in the evolutionary sense. A simple calculation reveals that we are closer to an evolutionary error – ‘only a single history of the souls’ – than to the vision of the self-proclaimed master of the planet. We must learn from our collective errors, as ‘failure is, in a sense, the highway to success’ (John Keats).
Equality
Frightening it is to say in the ears of the arrogant,
But gleeful for very desperate happiness,
That we are all the same in evil and joy.
That we are burdened by the destiny resting on the back.
In the process of growing up, we must look up to our older and more experienced relatives, even though our naive humanism considers them to be inferior organisms. Mainstream biology, dominated by the principles of Neo-Darwinism considers bacteria stupid. Most botanists oppose the ideas of their minority colleagues that plants are intelligent. Biocivilisations are a challenge to the anthropocentric vision of the world. The central part of Biocivilisations is six chapters entitled, Communicators, Engineers, Scientists, Doctors, Artists, and Farmers – all achievements in a world without Homo sapiens. ‘Frightening it is to say in the ears of the arrogant’: our language, our engineering and scientific skills, our medicine, art, and agriculture, are nothing more than evolutionary discoveries of hot water.
But, on the other hand, the awareness that everything was discovered long before us, can be ‘gleeful for very desperate happiness’ if it helps us project a more credible vision of the future. And that future is clear: ‘we are all the same in evil and joy’. The birth and death of species are part of evolution. All species ‘are burdened by the destiny resting on the back’, with one exception. Species come and go, but bacteria are forever.
The equality of species in the face of evolutionary destiny cannot be outwitted by anthropocentrism. Things are diametrically opposite. Neither we nor other species can avoid the evolutionary burden. We can only temporarily relieve it. But this relief cannot happen without growing up through toning down anthropocentrism.
Living universe
I am there in another foreigner, and in the stars,
Far way, disentangled, and here in one thread,
In the flower no longer broken in the world passing by.
And when will ever I be there in my essence?
Arthur North Whitehead, a mathematician and philosopher, believed that the cosmos was alive. For him, even atoms were living beings. Partial confirmation of Whitehead’s thesis can be found in Figure 2. Both living and non-living matter share some traits of complexity. But the borderline between them remains. All hydrogen atoms are the same throughout the cosmos, but there are no two living beings in the world that are replicas of each other.
The true feature of the living – one of the four biocivilising principles – is agency. Every organism, from a bacterium to a human being, is an independent agent born in the process of autopoiesis – ‘I am there in another foreigner, and in the stars, far way, disentangled’. This foreigner, or rather foreigners, are the symbionts that make us up – bacteria, archaea, viruses, and their fusions in the form of eukaryotic cells. Symbionts, like us, come from the stars. Chemical elements are produced in the hot interior of stars, in the process of nuclear fusion, and scattered throughout the cosmos through stellar explosions. The cosmic ‘disentanglement’ is the birth of life and its constant complexification in a creative process that we will never be able to foretell. Just as artists do not know the next step in creative acts, so the biosphere cannot know its next product. In the all-encompassing mind of the biosphere, we and all other living beings, except perhaps bacteria (and viruses as helpers), are ephemeral thoughts ‘broken in the world passing by’.
Those ephemeral thoughts somehow reach maturity – independence in the process of discovering the world and learning about it – then turn into ‘one thread’ which flashes briefly, extinguishes ‘in the flower no longer’ and gets ‘broken [into star-dust] in the world passing by’. And we are all left searching for meaning in the ever-changing world striving for its next phase.
That’s why the question ‘when will ever I be there in my essence?’ is the question of all questions. No one knows a reliable answer. But if we rely on biocivilising principles, we can at least get some promising clues. In that fleeting flash of life, lost in the endless landscape of eternity, we have a chance to touch eternity. Some ephemeral thoughts – or individuals matured in the process of Jungian individuation – truly integrate into the river of life that began flowing four billion years ago and continue to flow with it into the future. This was masterfully explained by Borges through the concept of a book as a dead object, or a set of dead symbols. In the contact with the right reader, a dead book suddenly turns into life – the world of dead poets, such as Tin’s world, becomes alive. Let’s imagine the biological essence to be equivalent to Borges’ book. If we do so, this essence becomes a record of ‘one thread’. It is completely irrelevant whether that record is human, bacterial, insect, or plant. Each record remains permanently stored in the river of life – now carrying its own library, to borrow Borges’ concept of library elaborated in The Library of Babel (1941) as the record of the entire universe – and open for contact with new and old ‘readers’. Thus, life integrates Borges’ vision of poetry, now recognised as autopoiesis (self-making), as life’s timeless feature.
Mind
I am thus myself, stubborn, and even when I am gone
I am the stake from a hilltop sacrificed among the masses.
Oh universe! I live and die in everybody
I persevere in brotherhood without a name.
The last biocivilising principle, which unites the previous three, is the mind as a key property of the biosphere. The mind is that ‘central fire’ on Jung’s volcano diagram expressed through Gregory Bateson’s maxim: ‘Mind is the essence of being alive’. All organisms, from bacteria to humans, learn about the world in a mind-like way. This learning becomes visible in the changes in the biosphere. Our cities, or science, are reflections of our minds. In the same way, bacterial and insect cities, or amoeba’s hypothesis testing, represent a reflection of their minds. The biosphere is a network of biocivilisations – as the brain is a network of neurons.
Life takes on a new meaning with us: ‘I am still myself, stubborn, and even when I am gone’. The key word in this verse is ‘stubborn’ (the expression Tin used – ‘thinking stubbornly with my own head’ – is lost in translation). ‘Stubbornness’ means that collective thinking can never be as authentic as individual thinking. That is why the mind of the biosphere – the decentralised mind that unites the diversity of faces in the universe – is elusive to the collective effort of our hyper-mechanised science that insists on the exclusivity of anthropocentrism. Collective hyper-mechanised science stifles freedom of individual thought: ‘I am the stake from a hilltop sacrificed among the masses’.
Tin’s cry ‘Oh universe!’ is a rebellion against unfreedom. That rebellion is not a sign of arrogance but of true humanism: ‘I live and die in everybody’. We are an evolutionary kaleidoscope that concentrates four billion years of evolutionary history into a fleeting flash of life that illuminates the vast expanses of the cosmos. The idea of biocivilisations helps us understand our ephemeral status not as an absolute end, but only a physical end, through the crack of which there remains enough space for the endless autopoiesis: ‘I persevere in brotherhood without a name’.
Panta rhei
Timeless walking through the universe with the help of Tin’s poem and Borges’ vision of poetry, connects the world of biocivilisations with the concept of autopoesis of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. In Biocivilisations, I combined autopoiesis with concepts that mainstream biology ignores – Gregory Bateson’s idea of the mind of nature, Lynn Margulis’s symbiosis, the school of biosemiotics initiated by Charles Sanders Peers and Jakob Von Uxkull – to present an alternative picture of the science of life based on four principles:
- Pantha rhei (everything flows) – life is Heraclitean river, or permanent change, whose scientific term is ‘homeorhesis’ or steady flow.
- Agency – organisms are independent autopoietic agents that make up the river of life and move it by the constant projection of the future (limited teleology).
- Symbiosis – life is a community of autopoietic agents or the brotherhood of faces in the universe.
- Mind – Heraclitean river is a self-referential decentralised mind composed of streams of biocivilisations.
When the above principles are applied to all living beings, the anthropocentric image of the world projected by our modern civilisation becomes an obstacle that prevents us from reaching our evolutionary potential. The decentralised mind of nature promotes the equality of biological species through their differences. Thus Physis (nature) becomes poiesis (making) in which biology (autopoiesis) is part of the becoming of the universe.
