Overview:

What we believe our future holds depends on how we believe we change. Today, many of us think that we’re headed for better times—or for worse times, depending on your politics. But both predictions are based on a belief in the same thing: a ladder of progress. We’re either climbing up it or sliding down it. Today, many of us believe in that ladder because we think that we change linearly, or that changes come mainly through our will, or that change happens only after we first change inside. In the group physics view though our swarm behaves more like a giant ecogenetic network. No one’s in charge, yet it still has a direction, of a sort. But its direction isn’t linear, nor does it grow linearly. It’s also not random, nor does it grow randomly. Our swarm’s growth also needn’t depend on any earlier inner change in us—it’s more likely that we adapt to changing conditions as our swarm grows.

This chapter first outlines why so many of us believe in a cosmic ladder, and why that belief is probably wrong. In place of a ladder, it suggests that our apparent directionality as a species comes about because our swarm might be alive, in some sense. To do so, it then pulls together all the group physics ideas discussed so far to draw a new picture of what makes something alive. That picture includes one final group physics behavior—autopoiesis. If our swarm is itself a living thing, of a sort, then we aren’t headed for better times or worse times; we’re headed for fast times.

Welcome to the Monkey House

He looks human. It’s Saturday September 8th, 1906, and the Bronx Zoo has a new exhibit: a 23-year-old Congolese pygmy. He’s there because Belgian forces had recently shot his entire clan. They were after ivory and rubber, and because of that perhaps eight million Congolese had died. His world destroyed, he’d hitched a ride to New York with a missionary. Zoo keepers then induced him into the Monkey House with an orangutan. That first Saturday in the cage, when he bares his filed teeth the crowd goes wild. They look from him to the orangutan and back. They poke and tease and laugh. Above all, they stare. Over the coming weeks, thousands, then tens of thousands will come. The zoo will grow to be as popular as Coney Island.

Everyone wants to know what the zoo’s newest creature is. Is it an ape? But no, it seems to understand both them and its own state. It can also make things. And it can speak, albeit some savage tongue. What is it then? Could this 103 pounds of manlike flesh and crocodile teeth be a man? To scientists, pygmies are a missing link between ape and human. So to them he’s human, but only just—and not just because he’s black. To black pastors visiting the zoo, he’s human too. Unlike most whites though, they see brotherhood. But, like whites, they don’t see his kinship to our whole species either. They see kinship only to themselves alone. Whites had compared them to apes for centuries. This is just more of the same. So to them it’s shameful to see one of their own caged. Plus they don’t like that he’s being displayed as a missing link. They’re told that supports Darwinism, which they understand to mean that they’re divinely ordained to always be second class. And that they won’t have.

In our industrial world in 1906 that distorted form of Darwin’s idea was all the rage. But the impulse behind the uproar in the zoo didn’t come from Darwin’s work, 50 years before. It reached back at least as far as Aristotle’s ‘scale of nature,’ 2,300 years before. That belief had grown into medieval Europe’s ‘Great Chain of Being.’ It was a ladder that placed everything, and every human subtype, somewhere on a line from rocks to whites to God. Everything had a fixed place on that ladder, in increasing order of worth. So some of us were inherently better than others, with whites at the top end. Pygmies were black, short, filed their teeth, and didn’t farm. They didn’t wear much clothes, didn’t see the point of forks, and couldn’t read. They also had the wrong religion—if the mumbo jumbo they believed in were a religion at all, that is. And they had neither handkerchiefs nor guns. Obviously they were the lowest form of human life. They were just one rung up from apes on the cosmic ladder.

For most of us in the industrial world at the time that ladder gave our lives meaning. So rather than abandon it, we interpreted Darwin’s theory in terms of it. In the new version of reality, instead of a species being fixed in place it could now climb the ladder. And while some of us in the industrial world didn’t even accept that, we all used that slightly more Darwin-like ladder to justify our actions. In Europe, the United States, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Japan, we made it support Social Darwinism. We then made that justify empires and colonies. It’s much easier to kill others and steal their ivory and rubber if you can convince yourself that you’re doing them a favor. In Britain and the United States, we also made it support unchecked capitalism, robber baronism, and anti-unionism. Later, we made it support eugenics and immigration control. In Russia, we made it support Marxism. In Italy, we made it support fascism. In Germany, we made it support Nazism.

By 1941, one of those nations had forcibly sterilized tens of thousands of us. Anyone in (or catchable by) an asylum, jail, poorhouse, or hospital, was fair game. At risk were the poor, the blind, the deaf, the insane. Orphans, epileptics, cripples, and imbeciles also went into the bag. The net also caught blacks, homosexuals, hillbillies, immigrants, East European Jews, boys who masturbated a lot, whites with brown hair. Ahh, those goose-stepping Germans and their jackboot fetish. But that nation wasn’t Germany. It was the United States. It had allowed (illegal) forced sterilization since at least 1899. Indiana legalized it in 1907. Eleven other states followed. Not everyone thought it a great idea, but many did. That included many scientists, doctors, economists, the Supreme Court, Congress, and the president. Many officials, writers, speakers, philanthropists, and reformers endorsed it too. And the middle class stood solidly behind it. Obviously we had to improve the race, or what’s the point of having one? Germany watched, then drew its own conclusions. And so we went from a man in a zoo to gas chambers.

Today, a century after the man in the zoo, many of us still cling to the ladder idea. We still think of natural selection as a process that pushes species up a cosmic ladder, in search of perfection. But when some fish turned their fins into legs 360 million years ago they didn’t ‘progress.’ When penguins turned their wings into oars 62 million years ago they didn’t ‘regress.’ When hippo-like animals 50 million years ago turned their legs back into fins and became whales they didn’t become ‘better.’ When other hippo-like animals gave up their aquatic life to turn into elephants 37 million years ago they didn’t become ‘worse.’ Sharks are 30 million years older than goldfish, but a shark isn’t ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ than a goldfish—it’s merely bigger and can bite your leg off. Our species is no different. When we lost the ability to make our own vitamin C 20 million years ago we didn’t then ‘ascend’—nor did we ‘descend.’ We merely changed. We aren’t better or worse than other apes because we have lipgloss and pistols.

But regardless of what science might have to say about our place with respect to the rest of life on this planet, we’re always facing the same set of questions about purpose, meaning, and morals. We always have to decide what to do, and how to judge. So we always need some yardstick to guide our behavior, whether personal, corporate, or national. Whether our species is important in the cosmic sense or not, what we do matters, and how we judge each other’s actions matters. So we still keep to the ladder, even if only unconsciously.

So when reading almost any story of our past doings we’re often, if subconsciously, asking: ‘How could such meanness or stupidity have gone on for so long?’ It doesn’t matter whether it’s scurvy or cholera, Viking raids or the sacks of cities, forced famines or mass rapes. But from yesterday’s viewpoint, the question is: ‘Why did those normal, contained, and perfectly acceptable acts stop so quickly?’ Take cholera. Mostly only our poor died, and we’d already built up coping mechanisms to deal with their deaths. Miasma killed them. Sin killed them. They had no power anyway, so their deaths weren’t a serious problem—until they organized enough to threaten the rich. Today our purported reasons have changed but we’re still much the same. We today have vastly more knowledge and power, yet cholera and other diarrheal diseases still kill 1.8 million of us a year, mostly kids. Measles kills 0.6 million of our kids a year. Malaria kills 1.3 million of us, mostly children, every year. Tuberculosis takes another 1.6 million of us yearly. In all, at least six million of our kids die a year, every year.

Imagine a world where we had a war in which six million defenseless people were rounded up and butchered because the rest of us ignored their plight. In that world our shame would live on for centuries. Why then do we put up with that yearly holocaust today? Is it because solutions don’t exist? Nope. We could treat nearly all those diseases today. Is it because solutions are too costly? Nope again. We only need cheap vaccines, mosquito nets, disinfectants, sports drinks. Even a simple thing like sugar and salt dissolved in clean water would work as oral rehydration. It alone might save a third those lives. Just a few thousand cases of Clorox and Gatorade could save millions more lives than all the Mayo clinics in the world. But we’ll always spend more on Mayo clinics than airlifted Clorox and Gatorade.

We could save at least 2.3 million children a year with an outlay of just $4 billion U.S. But our problems are far more intricate than merely finding some money. Simply airlifting in cheap cures isn’t enough. They must also get into the hands of those of us who need them, which involves solving complex problems involving self-interest, corruption, and tribalism. Further, even when those of us who’re suffering have the cures in our hands, we need to understand how to use them—and why they work. A treated mosquito net works great to protect your baby from malaria. But it also works great as your new fishing net. All our groups live in a synergetic network of constraints and knowledge and that synergy is hard to change, even when it leads to so many deaths. So curing those diseases year by year is hard. Erasing them entirely is even harder. That would mean clean water, electricity, education, jobs, housing, machines, political change. That would take a lot of money and time, and perhaps even wars. Finally, those diseases are no longer new, nor virulent, nor contagious. They no longer scare the rich.

It would be different if those six million kids a year were Swedish. Or if they were dying on top of a billion barrels of oil. Or if they had Ebola and were a plane ride away from anywhere. Then, solving the problem would be of immediate concern to those who have the means to solve them. But as it is, those of us who could solve the problem don’t need to. All we need is to feel that we’ve done what we could. It’s then easy for many of us in the rich world to switch channels or turn the page. Often, we only need to mutter the magic word, ‘overpopulation,’ to ourselves. Today, 99 percent of all our newborn deaths—4 million babies—happen in our poor countries. Yet nearly all our efforts against neonatal deaths focuses on the one percent in our rich countries.

On the other hand, in the past 50 years the United States alone has put about half a trillion dollars into foreign aid. Some of that money has gone to its own consultants, construction companies, and military contractors, plus simple debt forgiveness. In the targeted countries, the effect of all that money has often been to either do nothing at all, or even to make matters worse. However, some of that aid has helped a lot of us around the world. Why, when we consider business investment, do we ignore its many failures and focus on its few successes, but when it comes to international aid, we ignore its few successes and focus on its many failures? Perhaps that’s because a lot of the motivation behind aid is grief and guilt. But it’s also political. Foreign aid tries to solve problems that are quite hard and therefore long-term. Were such problems solvable in, for example, five years, every politician in the world would campaign for an aid solution.

Putting political and emotional problems aside, both our scientific knowledge and our technological power are rising. One day our tools likely will once again change a lot. It’ll then be easy to save all our babies. But that won’t change our emotional responses. Our descendants will then think of themselves as higher up some ladder than we today are. Just as we today do, they’ll ask themselves the same questions we today ask about our past. They’ll wonder how we today could live with ourselves amid such avoidable mass death. They’ll congratulate themselves on their humanity—and damn those of us alive today for lacking it. They’ll call those of us alive today heartless and stupid and immoral. Which we aren’t. We’re selfish and ignorant and shortsighted. They will be too.

A century ago eight million Congolese died. They had lived in a land with rubber trees and elephants. Those elephants had ivory teeth, which could be carved to make billiard balls, piano keys, combs, hairpins. Those rubber trees could be bled to make boots, raincoats, false teeth (then later, condoms, tires, and napalm). The Congolese had thought that elephants were only a source of meat—and dangerous to hunt, too. They had also thought that rubber trees were just trees, like any other. Today, over five million Congolese have died just since 1998. A quarter million more have been raped. Some are as old as 71. Some are as young as one year old. They had lived in a land with diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, tin, and tantalum. Today we use tantalum to make electrolytic capacitors. They’re used in computers, pagers, digital cameras, music players, and mobile phones. The Congolese had thought that tantalum ore was just dirt, like any other. From 1990 to 2003 mobile phone usage and global network usage each rose over 100-fold. Today, 2.6 billion of us own mobile phones. By 2011, nearly half of all of us alive will have mobile phones. More Congolese will die.

On Tuesday July 25th, 1846, Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay his $1.50 poll tax. He saw taxes as paying for slavery and the latest war. Later, so the fable goes, Emerson asked him why he went to jail. Thoreau then asked how Emerson could not. The time has come to take the bull by the tail and face the situation. Things we don’t like have happened, and will continue to happen, and our actions cause them, whether we point the guns or not. None of our groups, no matter how defined, has ever held a monopoly on cruelty, incompetence, ignorance, or self-deception. We’re all in the Monkey House together. Those who jeered at a man in a zoo are us. But those who got him out again are us too. We believe in a ladder not because we have sure evidence of it but because it helps give our lives meaning. Belonging to something larger than ourselves would also give us some meaning, although perhaps not the meaning that many of us seek. Is our swarm random, or is it sensible to say that it’s a coherent thing? And if it is a coherent thing, does it have some sort of directionality? Is it going anywhere in particular? And if so, why?

Sparks of Life

Our swarm often does things that we don’t expect, don’t like, or don’t even understand until much later. It’s clear that we’re not in charge of it. More than that though, it acts as if it’s something entirely separate from us, even though we make it up and it can’t exist without us. Might it be a living thing? To answer that question we first need sharper mental tools; we need to understand what makes something alive in some detail.

In ancient times many of us thought that a living thing was something suffused with ‘life-force.’ The term relates to spiritus in Latin, qi in Mandarin, prana in Sanskrit, plus words in several other languages, all of which roughly translate as ‘breath.’ Things that were alive were things that breathed. But while that works well in Star Wars, where Obi-Wan can detect the destruction of Alderaan from light-years away through a disturbance in the force, it has no meaning in science. But when we turn to our biology texts, we read that living things are those things that breathe, eat, grow, reproduce, and so on. But that’s not an explanation of their structure either. It’s a statement about their behavior, just as ‘breath’ is. It’s a definition, not an explanation. Finally, in common use today, many of us think of living things as those things with DNA, which is just a simple replacement of the old secret sauce, ‘life-force,’ with the new secret sauce, ‘DNA.’ That definition works for life on earth as we commonly understand it today but doesn’t help us with more alien possibilities, including our swarm.

Today’s science though is moving toward a different kind of explanation of life. Instead of looking at living things from the outside to see how they behave, it looks at their insides to see how they work. It relates several group physics ideas: self-stimulation (autocatalysis), joint self-stimulation (synergy), self-construction (stigmergy), and joint self-construction (ecogenesis), plus reaction networks, non-linearity, closure, and phase change. However, it also relies on one new idea: self-maintenance (called ‘autopoiesis’). These ideas together suggest that our swarm is indeed alive, in some sense. The discussion starts with a simple-looking question. That question isn’t about our swarm, or even us, but about microbes.

Imagine that we’ve just put a microbe into a glass of water. The water has some nutrients and a dissolving sugar cube. The microbe moves until it reaches the highest sugar concentration it can survive in. Then it stops. It eats sugar and other nutrients, and makes more microbes. If there’s enough to eat, in seven hours a million microbes might swim in that water. What was once a sterile glass of sugary water is now full of life. (And ten hours later, as the food runs out and the wastes build up, nearly all will be dead.) Here’s the question: Why does the microbe do what it does?

Many of us might simply answer that microbes love sugar. In other words: they do what they do because of their desires. That’s our typical non-scientific style of answer to everything. It’s purpose-driven. It’s the kind of thing that Aristotle might’ve said, had he known about microbes. It’s also the kind of thing we tell kids when we want them to brush their teeth. It’s not, however, a ‘why.’ It’s a confession of ignorance about the ‘how.’

So we hire some molecular biologists to figure out how a microbe works. They tease it apart to see how it moves, eats, excretes, and such. They also discover its genes, which specify the 4,357 proteins that work together to let it do all that. After decades of work, they find that the microbe is nothing but a bag full of many copies of those 4,357 proteins, plus a description of those proteins. That’s all. There’s no ‘life force.’ There’s no ‘purpose.’ There’s no localized ‘desire’ for sugar. For microbes, Aristotle’s ‘final cause’ doesn’t exist.

A microbe is no more a microscopic, Aristotelian, purpose-filled thing than it is a long string of words—a sentence. When it copies itself, it’s writing a copy of itself in the water. So it’s fairly accurate to call it a self-writing sentence. It copies itself, just as it moves, eats, and so forth, via its network of proteins. Any human-like purpose that we think we see in its actions comes only when we try to imagine ourselves as microbes. Like Aristotle, we then imagine goals, agency, planning, and purpose behind its actions. That’s what we (think we) would do if we were it. But a microbe has no human-like purpose. It acts as it does because it’s a self-perpetuating network of thousands of interacting molecules. That’s all.

Our first explanation (‘microbes love sugar’) is simple, easy to remember, and easy to say to kids. It makes us feel like we know stuff, and it sounds like it explains why microbes do what they do. It would’ve been good enough for Aristotle. But it’s empty of meaning. However, our second, more detailed, explanation, the how of what it does, is full of meaning. We can use it to make new foods, cure illness, clean our world, make new fuels, and better understand both microbes and ourselves. That new data can change our lives. But it isn’t a ‘why.’ It doesn’t say why the microbe does what it does. It merely says how.

As soon as we answer that ‘how’ it leads us to other ‘why’s. Why, for instance, do microbes exist in the first place? Natural selection doesn’t explain that. It can explain how a microbe came to be shaped the way it is—why it has this set of proteins and not that. It can also explain how today’s microbes came to be made from yesterday’s microbes. But following the living chain back billions of years just leads to a super-simple but still complex first cell. No matter what else that first cell may or may not have had, it must have had a metabolism. If it couldn’t extract matter and energy from its surroundings, it couldn’t live. Plus, because it was the first, there was no earlier sentence for it to have been a copy of. Even microbes need parents. So where did it come from?

We now hire some biochemists and descend to the molecular level. After decades of work, they tell us that the key is catalysis. A catalyst raises or lowers a chemical reaction’s speed while itself remaining unchanged. All sorts of chemical reactions go on naturally all the time, but usually only slowly. Living systems use catalysts to speed up some of those reactions and slow down others. That lets them selectively respond to external changes. That selectivity gives them a way to detect changes and adapt to them. And that’s the key to everything.

Every living thing needs catalysts. Our body, for example, has perhaps 100 trillion of cells. Each one needs thousands of copies of thousands of proteins. A few thousand of those proteins are catalysts (called enzymes). Without even one of them, we die. Each one of them catalytically controls some reaction in our cells. Some of those reactions are autocatalytic. They catalyze themselves by making a molecule that speeds up their own reaction. But autocatalysis isn’t limited to molecules. Our farming phase change was also autocatalytic. Humans plus wheat equals more humans plus more wheat plus technology.

An autocatalytic reaction helps itself directly, but a reaction can also help itself indirectly—by helping others, which then help it. Here’s how: Suppose that some reactions are going on side by side. Some might make products that catalyze others. The set of reactions then forms a reaction network. Suppose now that such a network is so varied that every reaction’s catalysts are made by other reactions in the same network. The network is then catalytically closed. That is, it remakes all its own catalysts. So given the right conditions, it just keeps going, potentially forever. It’s a self-persistent machine. Such closed and self-helping reaction networks are synergetic.

Autocatalysis is thus just a special case of synergy where there’s only one reaction in the network. If given the right conditions, all synergetic reactions, which includes all autocatalytic ones, go on forever. Thus, over time, the only unplanned reaction networks that we see around us are synergetic ones. All others fall apart before we can notice them.

As with autocatalysis, synergy isn’t limited only to molecules. We can fall into such self-helping networks naturally too, just as molecules can, in a simple extension of the principle of division of labor. A synergetic network is like a village full of artisans who need each other. There might be carpenters who could make hammers, if they had hammerheads. Blacksmiths could make hammerheads, if they had forges. Ironmongers could make forges, if they had iron. Miners could smelt iron, if they had bellows. Cordwainers could make bellows, if they had hammers, which carpenters could make. Feed hammerheads (or forges, iron, bellows, or hammers) into that synergetic cycle and it thrums with activity until its ‘food’ runs out. Similarly, during the second stage of our industrial phase change, coal mines plus iron mines plus steam engines plus factories plus railroads equaled more mines, engines, factories, and railroads. That too was a synergetic network.

Now we’ve answered our last ‘why’—we now know why microbes come to exist. They’re synergetic. Again though we started with a ‘why’ and ended with a ‘how.’ And, again, that ‘how’ leads to more ‘why’s. For example, unplanned synergetic networks, although they can come about randomly, aren’t themselves random messes. They’re so highly structured that they appear designed. Why do they come to exist at all?

We now hire some mathematicians and computer scientists. They ignore test tubes and microscopes. Instead, they build models and head off into abstraction. They drink coffee, scribble theorems, run computer simulations, and bicker. Then—after the usual decades of work—they figure it out. They say that synergetic networks will come to exist even though designing one from scratch seems impossible. Some part of any complex enough reaction network is nearly certain to become synergetic, even though we can’t tell in advance which part that will be. All it needs is a constant flow of matter and energy, plus two simple properties: it must be both very diverse and very dense.

Here’s why: every molecule is in constant danger. Something is always trying to kill it. (‘Everything breaks down’ is perhaps the simplest way to state the second law of thermodynamics.) So its copies will die out unless some reaction makes fresh copies of it. Similarly, every reaction is also in constant danger. It will die out unless it’s always fed the molecules it needs to go on working. So molecules need reactions, and reactions need molecules. Thus, every reaction is like a factory. Given parts, it makes other parts. It gets the parts it needs from other factories that make those parts. Those factories need yet other factories that make their parts, and so on. Also, a part is only useful if it gets from where it’s made to where it’s needed before it is destroyed. So for the factories to be useful to each other, together they must make a wide variety of things, and the distances between them must be small. Their network must thus be both very diverse and very dense.

The way the math works out, once you start with enough different factories, and you stuff them into a small enough space, then some self-helping subset of them almost inevitably forms. It will be synergetic. All the rest must die since they’re not refreshed. Synergy is nearly inevitable in any diverse and dense world.

The importance of diversity and density extends far beyond molecules. For example, in Britain in the 1700s, James Watt and several dozen other innovators had different and complementary skills. (They were diverse.) But they worked as a unit strong enough to trigger the first stage of our industrial phase change only because they were also all squeezed into a small social space. (They were dense.) They all knew each other. They all had similar religions and inclinations. They were all literate and they could all communicate with each other fairly quickly. And the nation they lived in gave them no choice but to work with each other. So what Watt needed, others made. And what others needed, Watt made. (Not for free, though.) And the ‘distances’ (both communication and transport) between them were small enough that others could use Watt’s output, just as Watt could in turn use their output. In short, they could all mutually ‘trade’ their new devices fast enough for it to matter. Thus their work could build on each other’s. Take away either their diversity or their density, and the synergetic network that they welded themselves into may never have happened. The network is what’s important here, not its parts.

Now we understand when, and how, synergy can occur, but that’s still not enough to understand life. All cells are synergetic, but a cell is more than a synergetic network. It’s not merely self-stimulating, it’s also self-contained, and it maintains its own containment. To see how that can happen, imagine trying to build a simple cell. Start with a large-scale one to get an idea of how its parts work together. (Later we’ll shrink it down to normal cell size.) As noted, each reaction is like a factory and each molecule is like a factory part. But that factory part isn’t a simple doodad. Think of it as being about the size of a fingertip, made of metal, and of some convoluted shape. It has push-button switches and magnets studded all over its surface. Each switch controls some magnet somewhere on its surface. Now if you put a bunch of such parts in a box and shake the box for a while two such parts might bump into each other in such a way that they lock together. How many might do so depends on their shapes and where their switches and magnets are. As they bump around, some of their push-buttons might depress, which would activate various of their magnets, thus locking them together. (In reality, molecular reactions are more complex, but that’s the basic idea.)

Now to make a large-scale cell, stuff several thousand different such parts into a bag. (Just a few hundred won’t do. They wouldn’t be diverse enough.) The bag has small holes at its top and bottom. Plug its top into a faucet and let the water jet into the bag. The rush of water will make the parts tumble around. As they do, some might lock together. Then some of those might lock together, and so on. Once you start with enough different parts, a few such combined parts might grow quite complex. And once the water supplies enough energy, such complex parts might form fast enough to exist in many copies in the bag.

Biochemists call such large parts ‘macromolecules.’ All proteins are macromolecules. To a biochemist, your body is essentially a protein factory. It can make around a million proteins, depending on the circumstances that each of trillions of cells finds itself in. Among such proteins, two kinds in particular are special. They’re both catalysts (enzymes). One may be so shaped that it’ll lock on to two other parts, lock them together, then free itself. So from small parts it makes bigger parts. It’s a tailor. Another may lock on to a big part, break the locks between two of its parts, then free itself. So from bigger parts it makes smaller parts. It’s a surgeon. Such catalysts either break down or build up other parts in the cell while themselves remaining unchanged. For example, one catalyst (sucrase) breaks up sucrose into fructose and glucose, and another (sucrose synthase) joins them back up into sucrose. To function, a real cell needs at least a thousand different catalysts.

Now since all the parts are jammed together in a bag, they’ll keep jostling each other in the roiling water. All the parts that don’t mesh, or that do mesh but don’t stay meshed, will over time fall through the hole with the escaping water. So, after a while, each part that remains tumbling in the bag is there solely because other parts interact often enough to keep making new copies of it. Thus, if you start with a diverse enough set of parts, and if you keep them dense enough, some subset of them will become synergetic. All the rest will flush out. Thus, in the bag, the only thing that matters is the ongoing remaking of parts already in the bag. And the only parts that persist in the bag are the ones that take part in that endless cycle of self-remaking. Those parts have thus achieved catalytic closure. Their reactions make all their own catalysts. So the network of reactions they take part in is synergetic. Other reactions can happen, just by chance, but they’re too transient to last.

Further, the bag itself is made of parts. The reactions in the bag make parts, so they might even make bag parts. If some reactions do, and if other reactions glue those parts together to maintain the bag, then the whole cycle could achieve closure. The reactions would then be enclosed in a bag because they make the bag. The bag would keep together because the reactions inside it keep working. And they would keep working because they’re kept together by the bag, which they themselves maintain. Everything would now depend on everything else, the bag included. The whole thing would then become not merely a self-persistent machine, but a self-maintaining machine.

Consider what that means. A synergetic network is already self-stimulating (that’s what synergetic means). To get that way, it must first have been both diverse and dense. If it is, some part of it will likely become synergetic. And if it does, it’ll persist. But it can’t persist for long unless it remains both diverse and dense. Being contained ensures that, and the bag sees to that. Further, part of what this particular kind of closed synergetic network does is act to maintain its enclosing bag. So by its very nature it acts to maintain itself. It’s not merely self-stimulating. It’s also not merely closed. It’s self-maintaining.

Any synergetic network enclosed in a bag that it itself maintains can be self-maintaining. It’s then autopoietic (pronounced ‘awe-toe-poe-EE-ehh-tick’). Once given enough parts and energy, it preserves itself and its bag.

Now to make a real cell, pour more copies of the original small parts into the bag, and keep pouring for, oh, a few million years or so. Also, shrink the bag about a million-fold. It’s now about the size of a real cell. It’s parts are now about the size of molecules. At that size, they tumble about much much faster than before. They’re now bumping into each other at about a billion times a second and what you have in the bag is... life?

Suddenly, a mere jumble of non-living parts (or unplanning humans) becomes something that we can start thinking of as separate unto itself. Something new exists. The bag of reactions is now autonomous. It has phase changed. We might now see it as a teeming reaction network enclosed in a ‘skin’ (its bag). Its bag (or cell wall) gives it an inside and an outside. We might now call any of its parts that don’t catalyze reactions within the bag either ‘food’ or ‘waste.’ Either it needs them for catalysis but doesn’t make them (food), or it makes them but doesn’t need them for catalysis (waste). We might even start thinking of the bag of reactions as ‘eating’ and ‘excreting.’ And as long as it’d fed parts and energy, it’ll keep ‘eating’ and ‘excreting.’ The whole is no longer the sum of its parts. The first sentence exists.

Something similar happened when we stumbled upon mass production in the 1900s. A mass production system can make a lot of things, and the things it needs to make those things are themselves makeable inside the system. (If you like, it can ‘make its own bag.’) It can make its own machines, so it’s a ‘machine’ that can make itself. That’s a stronger idea than it merely being synergetic. A synergetic network will persist itself, once made, but an autopoietic network can make itself. It’s recursive.

All that doesn’t merely help us understand how our swarm changes, it also gives us a new definition of biology, if not of life itself: biology is the study of patterns that can maintain themselves. But our quest to explain life is still far from over. Even the simplest microbe is far more complex than even an autopoietic network. Here we stand on very shaky ground. We’ve no more experts to hire for no one is expert here yet. Every self-maintaining network must (by definition) use some of its byproducts to maintain its skin (that is, it’s autopoietic). If not, it couldn’t keep itself dense. And only with density (and diversity) can it persist. But a cell has more structure than just its skin. It would quickly fall apart if its reactions happened any old how. They must be kept apart so that they don’t interfer yet they still be close enough that they can work together. So a cell isn’t a formless blob. It’s more like a soggy, wadded up napkin. Most of its reactions happen on inner surfaces of that napkin. So for a self-maintaining network to become life as we know it, it must gain internal structural parts. Some of those parts might, for example, serve as conduits to move stuff around. There’s no point making stuff if it can’t get to the place it needs to be in time to help the right reaction.

But if a self-maintaining network could (somehow) gain such persistent structural parts, then it could become stigmergic (‘self-building’). That is, reactions between its (passive) structure and its (active) reactions could become possible. (That can indeed happen, at least with termite nests and with human infrastructure.) If so, its structures might then change over time. Its own reactions might stigmergically increase its internal structure. As new reactions enter the reaction network the reaction network might then change ecogenetically. Its structure could help constrain its reactions, and its reactions could help maintain its structure even as new reactions develop within it. (In our case, the more we learn, the more we have; the more we have, the more we learn.) Such new reactions might help their network ‘sense’ food, or help it ‘engulf’ food, or help it convert some food into more storable form (like fat). Yet others may help it void waste, or move around, or cooperate with other reaction networks. Or build a brain, invent malls, then shop in them.... Without such stigmergy and ecogenesis further changes seem unlikely. If an autopoietic network could somehow add structure to itself, and thus become stigmergic and then possibly ecogenetic, it seems hard to deny that it isn’t ‘almost as alive’ as at least a microbe.

But even if all that guesswork pans out, we still have so very much to figure out. Many cells can, at least partly, repair themselves when damaged. Most cells can also reproduce themselves. Thus, a cell is both ‘self-repairing’ and ‘self-writing.’ And to be self-repairing, it must first be ‘self-describing.’ It’s a sentence that contains a description of itself. It’s also a sentence that can write itself. (One of its stigmergic structures is a blueprint of itself. It can use that blueprint to repair itself. And it can write copies of that same blueprint into its copies.) But how could a sentence complexify itself enough to become self-describing? How could it compare that description with its current state so that it could repair itself? How could it write itself? How do all its transient reaction subnetworks stabilize so that the whole network perpetuates itself? We haven’t the smallest idea. We also don’t yet know if the phase changes from non-living to self-stimulating (autocatalytic) to jointly self-stimulating (synergetic) to self-maintaining (autopoietic) to self-building (stigmergic) to self-assembling (ecogenetic) to self-describing, self-repairing, and self-writing (living?) are inevitable.

‘In the beginning was the complex, self-writing sentence’ may not have quite the ring of our past great truths, but we do seem to be getting a little closer to understanding life. We now know that it’s a mobile stillness, an endlessly dying and reborning pattern. However, even with all our new insight about life, we still haven’t answered our first question, which is this: is our swarm alive? Nor have we even answered our second, apparently far simpler, question: Why does a microbe in a glass of sugary water do what it does? The point, remember, is to try to figure out why our species does what it does, and thus gain some idea of what it might do next. We’re still far away from an answer to that question. But by looking at molecules instead of ourselves, and by avoiding the ‘why,’ we now have a first guess about part of a possible ‘how.’ That guess might lead to all sorts of new tools to change our lives, and, perhaps as important, new ways of seeing our lives. Yet while we might one day be able to figure out how all the above might’ve happened, and perhaps even something of its technological effects on us, we can’t figure out why. Today’s science isn’t about the Aristotelian-why. It’s about the Newtonian-how. Don’t ask scientists why the sky is blue. They don’t know. However, they can tell you how the sky comes to appear blue. After enough ever more detailed ‘how’s, however, it becomes clear that ‘why’ is what most of us want, not ‘how.’ We don’t care about ‘how.’ But ‘why’ presupposes intent, and therefore agency. It’s often only a disguised plea for Aristotelian final cause, for some highly simplified, human-like purpose. It isn’t a request for knowledge at all. It’s a desperate cry for meaning.

Life is a Verb

We’re still a long way from understanding the machinery of life, but at least now we’re fairly sure that it is machinery. So far as we know today, life doesn’t need any special sauce. Its first deep principle is diverse density—or dense diversity. With that we can now begin to separate ‘living things’ from ‘non-living things’ in a completely new way. No longer must we restrict ourselves to gobs of goo. No longer need we speak airily of ‘life force.’ Like a tornado, a living thing is a vortex of constantly circling matter and energy. It’s a recursive pattern of information captured in its internal structure of handoffs from one entangled helping reaction to the next. That’s what lets it persist itself by tapping its surrounding flow of matter and energy. It’s matter informed so as to direct energy. It’s a self-persistent sentence written into the universe. Here then follows some general properties of living things.

An entity’s parts needn’t always be in physical contact for it to form a persistent whole. The whole needn’t be a single touchable thing, the way a kitten or mircobe is. It can be a process. As long as it can recreate its parts fast enough, it persists. An self-maintaining network, for example, isn’t its parts. It’s the ongoing reaction of those parts. The parts themselves don’t much matter. What matters is their relationships to its other parts. As with a termitary, ant colony, or beehive, such a network is different than the sum of its parts.

Such a network of parts can be ‘alive,’ in some sense, even if none of its parts are. It can also be ‘alive,’ in some sense, even if all of its parts are themselves alive. Those parts might be molecules, but they might also be termites, ants, bees. They might even be self-aware, tool-making, talking naked apes. Whether it’s molecules catalyzing each other in a cell, or humans plus their tools catalyzing each other on a planet may make little difference. The network’s dynamics seem roughly the same. What matters is the network’s ongoing self-remaking, its endless dance of self-helping parts.

That dance of parts must be catalytically closed, but it must also be environmentally open. That is, to persist it must make all its own catalysts—they’re too complex and delicate to exist in many copies unless the network always remakes them. But the network also needs a constant supply of ‘food’ and ‘energy’ to keep remaking its catalysts. If its supply is interrupted for too long it can’t restart, even if given a fresh supply. Without food, it ‘starves.’ Without energy, it ‘freezes.’ Without structure, it ‘rots.’ (Matter, energy, and information are all there is.) It exists from moment to moment solely because its structure keeps remaking itself. And it keeps remaking itself to keep extracting parts and energy from the matter/energy flux it exists within—to thus keep remaking itself. It’s stable, but not static. The only time it reaches equilibrium is when it’s ‘dead.’ It’s an engine that’s always running.

To work at all that network needs many parts, and many reactions between those parts. As far as we can tell today, it needs at least a few thousand different parts reacting together in at least a few thousand reactions. Below that point it often isn’t ‘rich’ enough to achieve ignition. Further, each such part needs to exist in many thousands of copies. Thus its parts must be both highly multiple and highly diverse. Yet they must also all be ‘near’ each other. If not, they couldn’t react together quickly enough before decaying. Their reactions couldn’t ‘trade.’ They wouldn’t be able to sustain themselves. So the reaction network must be both ‘rich’ and ‘near’—diverse and dense.

No part or reaction in such a network can exist alone. Each will die out unless it’s near some subset of the others. That subset acts as its factory. So the behavior of every reaction depends on the network that it’s only a small piece of. Every part, too, is vital—at least one reaction needs it or else its copies would wash out of the network in time. So if we take away all copies of any particular part, or any particular reaction, the whole network dies. Thus, we can’t separate the network into independent pieces. It’s non-linear.

All reactions in that non-linear network are synergetically linked. So whatever affects one, affects all. Any advantage that any one reaction gains must automatically aid all others. So if the number of copies of one particular catalyst rises, then all the reactions that it catalyzes will then speed up. That will then make more parts, which will catalyze yet other reactions. So they, in turn, will speed up, and so forth. The synergetic cycle then closes back on the first reaction. So each reaction in such a network persists only when it’s ‘cooperative.’

But ‘cooperative’ needn’t mean either ‘nice’ or ‘planful.’ It only means that the network’s parts work together. It needn’t mean moral judgment, or that anything in the network is forward-looking or consciously helpful—or even conscious. No part nor reaction need have any ‘desire’ to help others. It still will, because those that don’t will cease to exist—because the reactions they depend on but that they no longer help will cease to exist. Thus, all surviving reactions of every synergetic network are, and must be, ‘tit-for-tat.’

Thus, no such network can speed up beyond a limiting reaction rate. All reactions are linked. So the reaction that needs the scarcest ‘food’ fixes the maximum reaction rate of the whole network. During network speed up, all linked reactions will automatically adjust to that speed, although there will be lags as the change spreads from reaction to reaction. Once things settle down, the reactions can go no faster (and no slower) than that overall reaction rate. Such a network thus resists change. It persists only when it’s ‘conservative.’

However, while it must be ‘conservative’ its reactions can’t grow slowly or linearly. Their growth must be highly non-linear. A catalyzed reaction’s substrate—that is, the parts that the reaction’s catalyst acts on—get changed into products as the reaction proceeds. But the catalyst itself remains. Thus each catalyzed reaction speeds up in proportion to the amount of both its substrates and its catalysts. However, thanks to reaction linkage, the amount of any particular reaction’s catalyst goes up as the reaction’s rate goes up. So that reaction’s growth rate can’t be linear. It can’t even be merely exponential. It’s hyperbolic. It grows as the square of the amount of catalyst available to it. Once beyond a certain threshold, the reaction network takes off, burning through its substrates. Thus, once started it can’t stop until it’s eaten all of its scarcest substrate. It’s ‘greedy.’ (‘Shortsighted’ works too.)

In sum, self-maintaining networks can be made of separable parts. Those parts can be living or non-living. To exist, the reactions they belong to need constant amounts of matter and energy. They ‘eat’ and ‘excrete.’ They have a ‘skin.’ They can ‘die.’ They’re dense and diverse. They’re always running. They’re non-linear. They’re cooperative yet their parts don’t necessarily intend that—and they may not be able to intend anything at all. They’re conservative but they’re also ‘greedy.’ They can be unplanned. Sound familiar? We saw similar network behavior during our phase change to industry, particularly after the railroad and steamship and telegraph linked us synergetically. Perhaps similar things happened back during our farming phase change too. Although back then transport and communication was limited to foot traffic, so presumably our reaction rates were far lower and our reaction’s propagation delays were far higher.

If life is indeed more to do with the dynamics of co-catalyzing parts rather than the parts themselves, then we might one day build our own lifeforms from scratch. We’d become creators in a way we’ve never been before. Today we talk of ‘creating life’ when we have babies, but really we’re not creating life. We’re just passing it on. In 2007 came our first patent for a synthetic lifeform. Not only is frankenfood in our past, frankenlife is in our future. Further, the network view of life also implies that something might be alive even if it’s planetary in size. A lifeform may turn out to be something that can be much larger and stranger than a single animal or plant or microbe or even termite nest. Our swarm itself may be alive. If so, we may be sharing this planet with something so vast that we’ve mostly never recognized it as a separate thing.

There’s one more conclusion to come: You aren’t your genes. You’re not your brain, your gonads, your limbs, nor any other of your physical parts. You’re a set of constantly changing relationships between your parts. You’re a dynamic network of around 100 trillion human cells mixed in with maybe 1,000 trillion microbial cells, each of which has perhaps 50 million proteins, each hitting others at roughly a billion times a second to maintain its links. You’re as much a set of cells or molecules or atoms as a rainbow is the same as the set of water droplets that refract its colors. You’re a resonance, a time-traveling network effect. You’re a recursive pattern scrawled into the universe for a time. So is a rose bush, a poodle, a stick insect, a yeast. So is a termite—and a termite colony. Similarly, you aren’t definable alone, anymore than your cells or molecules or atoms are definable alone. You’re part of something larger. Our swarm isn’t its currently living individuals and their tools. Nor is it even only the set of all individuals who’ve ever lived and their tools. It’s the set of relationships between its individuals, living and dead, and their tools. That’s what persists. Life isn’t a noun. It’s a verb.

Summing Up

Complex network dynamics might be okay for molecules, microbes, termites, ecosystems, our stock markets, our entire toolbase, our own bodies, maybe even the origin of life itself, but we’re special though, aren’t we? ‘Large group physics’ seems to require that we be treatable like particles in a huge swarm. But we’re not all the same, nor do any of us have well-defined properties. We’re not wooden chesspieces being moved around by blind network effects. We’re intentional actors. We’re aware of our existence. We have a moral sense. We can sometimes suppress our instincts. We can care for each other. We’re goal-directed. We plan for the future, then work to make it so. All that’s true for us individually, but is it true for our swarm?

You’re driving on a highway and suddenly the cars around you slow down. After a while, they speed up again. Why? An accident on a highway full of fast-moving cars makes a clot of slow-moving cars. So cars entering the clot slow down. Cars exiting the clot speed up. Thus the clot’s front decays while its rear grows, so it slides backward down the road. That clot isn’t like the kinds of things we normally think about. It’s not a car or a horse or a microwave dinner. All of us help it persist, yet none of us decide to do so. And despite all our bobbing and weaving, we all help it continue, unperturbed, backward down the highway. It has no ‘leader’ car. It’s not even made of a fixed set of cars moving in tandem. It’ll also happen whether its made of cars or ox-carts. It’s not enforced by any policy or police. It emerges from our reactions with each other. It’s a network effect. To a physicist, it’s a shock wave. To a neuroscientist, it’s a memory. To a poet, it’s an accident’s ghost. To a biologist, it’s like a simple cell that lives on highways. It engulfs fast-moving cars at its rear and poops slow-moving cars out its front. It has no ‘intention.’ Like a rainbow, it’s not even a touchable thing; it’s a point of view.

Now think of a microbe in a glass of sugary water. Why does it do what it does? If we look at it as we look at cars or horses or microwave dinners, but not rainbows or tornados or traffic jams, we imagine that it has purpose. As Aristotle might have had it, looking at it only from the outside, its actions appear purposeful. It may even look as if a mind designed it. On the inside, however, it’s decidedly non-Aristotelian. There’s no purpose there. There’s no ‘why.’ There’s only ‘how.’ (Or, at least, ‘how’ is all we can speak about with any certainty.) Its actions are the results of densely packed and densely linked, and thus highly coordinated, molecular reactions. Its structure, plus its surroundings, drives it to do what it does. No one needs to have planned it. Even so, like the traffic clot, its actions aren’t random. Nor is its internal structure a random mess. Its parts aren’t individually purposeful, yet as a whole it still behaves purposefully. It’s thus somewhat predictable, even if, like the traffic clot, no one may have designed it. It’s purpose that need not have a purpose-maker.

Individually, we each think we know what we’re doing. Perhaps we do. But what are we as a species doing? As we speed up our reactions and more densely link ourselves and our constructs, especially our computers, we’re unconsciously shrinking the space between ourselves. For example, in the London of Dickens or the Mississippi of Twain, 30 miles was a long way away. That’s because 14 miles per hour was a very high speed. Eight miles an hour was a more normal top speed, and that was only on a stagecoach. By coach, the 60 miles from London to Oxford might’ve taken you two days—if you could afford the trip—and if an axle or wheel didn’t break on the rutted Oxford road—and if you weren’t held up by highwaymen. In general, it took two days to go from anywhere to anywhere just within England’s home counties. London to Manchester—180 miles—took over three days. London to Scotland took a week. From Ipswich—a river port on England’s east coast—Holland was closer by ship than London was by horse. From Dorset—a port on England’s south coast—Scotland might as well have been Africa—they were equally far since the fastest way to get to either place was by ship, and the distances were the same. Today, much of our planet, from doorstep to doorstep, is just 48 hours wide. And the price of that transport, measured relative to middle-class income, is about the same today as horse transport was before the railroad and steamship. Roughly speaking, since 1830 our planet has shrunk to at most a thousandth of its previous size.

Add telecommunications to that, starting with the telegraph by about 1850, and you see how much more our world has shrunk. That means something, and it’s not merely cheaper calls or faster vacations. The more separated we are, the greater the number of things that can go on independently. Hooking stuff up makes us more non-linear. It shrinks our degrees of freedom, but it also increases our idea diversity, because as we hook up more stuff, more ideas occur to us, more of us spread them, and more of us make more inventions. So as we hook up more and more stuff, we’re unwittingly concentrating all our reactions. Our idea density is rising. But our idea diversity is also rising.

Heat a liquid enough and its molecules start moving so fast they form a gas. Molecules in a gas bop around at about a thousand miles an hour. They hit each other about seven billion times a second. Cool a liquid enough and its molecules slow down so much they form a solid. Those are the three phases of matter on earth that most of us know about. Normally we think that atoms either experience a few high-energy hits or many low-energy hits. However, there’s a fourth phase of matter—a plasma. It can happen when you keep heating a gas while also keeping it contained. Its interactions are both many and high-energy. It can be hot but also dense. It’s what happens to air during a lightning strike—or what happens inside the sun. As our density rises and our diversity also rises we’re not behaving like a solid, liquid, or gas, but more like a hot and dense plasma. We interact more than before, and when we do, we interact more strongly than before. Fewer and fewer of our reactions are now independent of another reaction. We’re growing more and more non-linear as our propagation delays decline. A frost in Brazil and the price of coffee in Iceland spikes. A recession in Japan and the British economy slumps. A mortgage crisis in the United States and the world’s economy staggers. By cramming more and yet more interactions into a steadily shrinking space, every event we experience, life we birth, thought we think, tool we make, more swiftly catalyzes everything else already in our network. If we manage to maintain wide diversity of ideas and tools yet keep cramming ourselves into an ever smaller space, links between us will grow denser, stronger, and faster. If so, like an ever more diverse collection of molecules in an ever shrinking bag, our species network might well one day become self-maintaining. And if so, everything would then begin feeding on everything else in real-time, far beyond our ability to control. Lightning would strike.

The Invisible Nest

Human history is often the result of human action, but only rarely of human intent. It’s mostly oops-history. Like any ecogenetic network, our swarm isn’t climbing up (or falling down) some cosmic ladder. But it isn’t randomly flailing about either. It seems to be heading somewhere. But where it’s going may not be anywhere we plan to be, or perhaps can even imagine we could be. As Adam Smith noted in his 1776 Wealth of Nations, our world has a hidden order, but it’s not one that we designed.

Imagine ourselves as well as all the things we make—all our artifacts, ideas, laws, beliefs, entertainments—as molecules. Two or more of those ‘molecules’ can ‘react’ to make new ‘molecules.’ Those then react with yet other molecules already present, and so on. We, and all our products, would then be reacting in a planet-sized bag we call the earth. Today we think of our swarm as something we made to serve us. But there’s another way to think of it too. It extracts raw materials and energy from the earth and filters them through itself—for the sole purpose of keeping itself going. That network viewpoint contrasts sharply with the way we normally view our past. Typically, we say that we have the world we have today because of X. Depending on the writer, X could be: ‘Great men (and, oh yeah, maybe a few women),’ or it might be ‘Class warfare,’ or ‘Geography.’ X can also be: ‘Moral strivings.’ Or it can be: ‘The machine (or war, religion, democracy, capitalism, and so on).’ It can even be ‘No reason at all.’ (Or to speak more accurately: ‘Everything is contingent, so nothing is predictable.’) Each of those theories seems oversimple in a networked world. They’re all about the same as explaining microbial sugar-seeking by saying that ‘microbes love sugar.’

The swarm metaphor gives us a new tack on our actions down the millennia. All this time we’ve been looking at our individual selves as if we were the chief deciders of what happens to us next. That’s of course true, in a sense, but just because we decide the pieces doesn’t mean that we also decide the network that they form once they exist. All this time we’ve missed one impossibly large actor—our network itself, our swarm. It was too big for us to see before we began to understand the first principles of group physics. Today though we can begin to turn our gaze away from the parts of a network and begin to look at the network itself, the ongoing recursive dance of those parts, the mobile stillness that is the set of relationships between those parts. Many of the historical behaviors that we normally take as either random or intentioned—whether hero-determined, or class-conflict generated, or whatever—may well be results of the generic behavior of any sufficiently complex, self-maintaining network.

But if that’s so, why isn’t it already obvious to us all? Maybe that’s not so surprising. Perhaps we have trouble thinking about how large groups work because we’re built to live in small groups. We’re best of all with one-on-one interactions, but we can manage anything up to around 20 or 30 or so in a band. That can stretch to at most a hundred or so in a hamlet, but any more than that is more than our intuition can handle.

Twenty-three centuries ago Aristotle thought that the order he saw all around him was the result of everything obeying ‘final causes.’ For him, each thing, whether living and non-living, had an in-built purpose. By 1776, Adam Smith, trying to understand our economics with the then-new Newtonian science, saw the economic part of that same order as resulting from a combination of our in-built interest in ourselves, in trade, and in dividing labor. He dubbed it the ‘invisible hand.’ Although he was writing over 2,000 years after Aristotle, and was avowedly Newtonian, he was also a child of his time, just as Newton was, and just as all us wolf-children are. Today we’re beginning to see that the order we see around us is the result of many group physics forces working together. Nor need they work together in any coherent way. It’s merely that wherever they don’t, order can’t arise—or if it does, it can’t persist. Thus, whenever we see order it’s because network forces happened to cohere there. Call the result our ‘invisible nest.’ We can now draw ten tentative conclusions about it.

First, the sparks of life have less to do with particular parts than with links between their parts. Our swarm seems at least vaguely similar to a living thing. For example, governments, armies, religions, and languages act like cell membranes. Roads, canals, carts, jets, phones, power grids, and computer networks act like cell transport conduits. Traders, armies, insurance companies, stock markets, grain silos, fridges, tin cans, and garbage disposal companies act like a cell’s food extractors, food storers, and waste disposers. That analogy doesn’t go very far with any of our groups since no group is self-sufficient. But our species as a whole is.

Second, our species forms a swarm because of our biological needs and abilities. We’re the only talking, tool-making animals on the planet. We don’t have to want to be bound to each other. We already are. We’ll remain so until we stop being human. Our structure, shaped by the grammar of the cosmos, drives us to be as we are, just as the molecules inside a microbe, also shaped by the grammar of the cosmos, drives it to be as it is. We don’t have to like it. We needn’t force it. It doesn’t matter if we even notice it. Still it will be so.

Third, our swarm is highly non-linear. No reaction in it (for example, the invention of the railroad after changes in steam engines and iron smelting) has effects that we can fully foresee. Often, subsets of them even form synergetic subnetworks that spin out of control. Even though we’re more self-aware and more planning than other creatures we still can’t see far into the future. None of us is in charge, although many try—and some even think they succeed.

Fourth, our swarm automatically self-adjusts. It acts to take advantage of any currently abundant resources. But as our idea pool grows, powered by consumption of those same resources, we gain more knowledge of other resources. Thus, over time, our growing swarm acts to insulate itself from complete dependence on any one resource. On the other hand, as we divide labor we often lose knowledge of, and thus access to, earlier resources.

Fifth, the more our tools, whether physical or non-physical, link us into our swarm, the less privacy and sovereignty we each have, but also the stronger we each become. As our swarm densifies, all its parts become important to its persistence. We all stand on each other’s shoulders and only hermits, infants, and sole superpowers do as they please. We use our heroes and leaders and superbrights and such to help define our lives, but without the networks that we naturally form they can’t do much. And our over-focus on just a few of them blurs the warmth, generosity, and sacrifice in our immensely gregarious species. Were those traits not widespread among us, no beggar could exist. No business could survive. No war could end. Barbed-wire, landmines, and machine gun emplacements would surround every home. We’re vicious, selfish, and shortsighted, yes, but we’re also all sentenced to love. We too often lose sight of the network in the glare of the individual.

Sixth, our communications, distribution, and transport networks act as conduits between us. And now they also act as conduits between our computational devices. They link us and our devices more widely and densely. The phone, the plane, the computer, all shrank the spaces between us. And that shrinkage changes our swarm because as our density goes up, so does our diversity. The chance of the right pair of ideas, products, or services hitting the right brain or hands at the right time rises. And that in turn triggers new non-linear, ripple-effect swarm reactions that lead to new ideas, products, or services. More and more, our new tools concentrate and link our reactions. And that makes many new reactions more possible more quickly than before.

Seventh, the products of each of our newer reactions stigmergically react with products of our older reactions in our swarm. That makes new things possible. That happens regardless of whether or not we planned them to do so, and regardless of whether or not we then like the new things. Thus, railroads helped perpetuate colonies because they made for cheap bulk transport overland. Colonies helped prolong slavery in the United States. That then helped trigger a civil war there. Which then helped speed up mass production. Which spread outside the country and inflated middle classes in all industrial nations. Which led to a rise in literacy and a rise in the cost of children. Which led to a drop in birthrate. At the same time, and for similar reasons, women also got the vote, then many more things happened. Those many tumbling reactions aren’t random. Nor are the linked reactions that led to them random. But we surely didn’t plan them. Nor foresee them. Nor, often, even want them.

Eighth, whether our new things are inventions or laws or institutions, they all catalyze each other in our swarm. We’re one vast, ecogenetic, synergetic, and stigmergic network. As new things enter our swarm, new catalytic links form. Some of our older reactions speed up because of the new things; others slow down. For example, someone invents a phone and, if we find it useful, over time we make a phone network. We then spread news through that network. Through that news, we act to increase the prevalence of things we want relative to things we don’t want—including loss of our new phone network. Adding a phone network thus changes the set of things that we value. A group plus a phone network is resistant to some things, like dictatorship, and welcoming of other things, like decentralization, that the pre-phone version of the same group might’ve reacted to differently. It’s just as if a cell had synergetically built up a new conduit, then stigmergically built up new ecogenetic reactions because of it.

Ninth, over our last half century we’ve invented computers, our synthetic information manipulators, and they’ve brought far faster change to our swarm. Together with our natural information manipulators, our brains, they can affect everything we do. It doesn’t matter whether we’re working on changing our food, labor, materials, energy, institutions, health, or anything else. Both brains and computers are our universal catalysts. So liquefying intelligence is the single most catalytic thing we’re doing right now. That’s also why computers are such an important invention. They’re brain-amplifiers. They thus affect everything. They act through our communication and transport conduits to speed up all our swarm reactions. That brings our swarm toward self-maintenance more quickly than before. Today, by ramping up our number of computers, by shrinking their size and slashing their cost and extending their reach, we’re unwittingly increasing the number and speed of all our tool changes. The computer is such a strong catalyst that it’s even autocatalytic. As we build better computers, we use them to build even better computers.

Tenth, and last, we’re deeply conservative. All synergetic networks must be. Those that don’t resist change, fall apart. Our swarm is no different. Every one of our inventions, from the toilet roll to the space shuttle, encourages any earlier reactions that it works well with and discourages any that it doesn’t work well with. That’s why we as a species so resist change. We can still force change, but unless the change involves killing everyone in a particular area, it rarely lasts. Over the long run, willed force is much like a sword slashing water. It moves the water as it passes, but when it’s gone little will have changed. Water pays more attention to gravity than swords. Of course, force can still kill millions but, in general, our swarm over the long run tends to reject non-catalytic byproducts and reward catalytic ones. It does that even without any explicit guidance from us—and often, even against some of our express wishes.

So where are we? What can we say in general about our swarm? The denser and more diverse it becomes, the more catalytically interlinked its parts are likely to become. The things that most link themselves catalytically with everything else are the ones most likely to persist. They’re the most reinforced. Thus, as our swarm densifies, the more constrained each new thing or thought must be to work with all the things and thoughts we already have. The dominoes fall and as time passes, barring catastrophe, we end up in a highly synergetic network, awaiting our next avalanche of change. That can happen whether or not we plan it, foresee it, like it, control it—or even notice it.

Could we really be sharing the planet with a recursive pattern so vast we’re only now beginning to see it, despite being intimate parts of it? Could a termite ever know that it’s part of a recursive pattern far vaster than itself? Could a neuron ever know that it’s part of a brain? Could a pattern of neural activations ever know that it’s part of a mind? Could such a thing ever be a ‘being’? Could it have agency? Could it have ‘wants’ or ‘tastes’ or ‘habits’ that we can reasonably say are separate from its parts? If so, could we build devices to somehow eavesdrop on its ‘thoughts’? Could it ever be said to be sentient? Is there Someone Else here?

But forget the philosophy mumbo-jumbo, what might all this mean for our future? If this view of ourselves is a little less wrong than our earlier ones, then the faster our future changes come, the less likely are we to be even remotely in control of them. Their persistence within our swarm would depend more and more on how much they help, or harm, our swarm’s growth. New reactions would then persist only if they catalyze other reactions already within our swarm. After some critical point, linkage between our interlinked subnetworks would avalanche faster and faster, until our network achieves self-maintenance (autopoiesis), if it hasn’t already. It would then act to perpetuate itself independent of any one of us. In sum, then, perhaps the non-linear network of reactions that our species has mindlessly built up over the past 50,000 years has now so diversified, ramified, and reinforced itself that it’s nearing a big phase change—into what we don’t know.

No doubt you’ve already spotted the problem with that maniac—possibly megalomaniac—mapping between molecular networks and human networks. It’s trying to use one thing we don’t understand—the origin of life—to explain another thing we don’t understand—human organization. So far it’s only an analogy; it’s not science. We surely aren’t just like molecules, neurons, or termites. For one thing, we can plan. But events needn’t follow our plans. When you pour water into a funnel it doesn’t form an orderly line and simply flow through the funnel. It piles up, swirls about, bubbles, gurgles. However, it still pours through the funnel. Similarly, what we plan may make little difference over the short run, but perhaps it does over the long run. Or perhaps not. We still know far too little about the balance between our wills and the network effects at work among us to answer such vague questions. However, we can now at least conclude that a large part of how we work as a species is due more to our swarm’s dynamics than anything we intend. But we still haven’t quantified how big that ‘large part’ might be. And without a quantitative and predictive, and thus testable, theory, we’re still lost. The swarm idea might be a little less wrong than some of our earlier ones, but today it’s still only just another story. One day we might be able to do some actual science on how exactly the swarm works. But until then we’re still just doing our usual—we’re still just making stuff up.