A failure or success?

Charles Darwin has often been misunderstood. He never stated that the fittest will survive, but rather those who benefit from the circumstances. One way to benefit is to cooperate – symbiosis. What Darwin did not realize was that cooperation can make the elements come together into a single organism. It is called endosymbiosis and is the prerequisite for all higher life on earth.

Endosymbiosis is a biological concept that means that one cell is living inside another. American biologist James A. Lake recently discovered that an endosymbiosis caused the Earth’s oxygen atmosphere 2.5 million years ago. Two bacterias went together and got the emergent property to produce oxygen. Unless these two bacterias had joined forces, higher life probably never have evolved on Earth.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection requires an inherited rivalry between individuals without close relationships. Yet we cooperate – it is beneficial and even essential in nature. Endosymbiosis can explain this apparent contradiction with Darwin’s theories. Life is not a game where the fittest survive. The great leap in evolution is because endosymbiosis develops between organisms.

Endosymbiotic theory supplements Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Humans and other living organisms have arisen through cooperation. Organisms work together inside us. They are now included in our system where they take advantage of each other. Each cell comprises organisms that have fused together and given rise to new emergent properties. Even the consciousness might be a product of endosymbiosis.

My feeling is that when endosymbiosis occurs, the joint system gets at least one emergent property. I would say emergent properties are the rewards in the evolution of cooperation. This is also apparent in the world of memes or ideas. All big inventions in the history of mankind are in fact products of merged ideas.

What happens if systems with direct and representative democracy merge into endosymbiosis? What new emergent feature will then occur?

This entry was posted on September 9, 2010 at 12:08 am and is filed under Think-tank. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.