Why I think Earth’s biosphere is sentient —Evolution

Previously I wrote about why I think Earth’s biosphere is sentient, and has been since very soon after life itself became established around 4.1 billion years ago. The biggest single reason for thinking this is that this time we’re living in now isn’t just any random moment in Earth’s history. It’s more or less exactly the moment in geological history where the process that’s so far kept our climate stable, the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere to compensate for the ever increasing heat output of the sun, reaches its operational limits.

As is the case with all main sequence stars, our sun is gradually getting hotter and brighter all the time. Up until now the temperature increases have been compensated for by removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The problem is we’ve reached the point where there are now almost no greenhouse gases left to remove. If you look at the rate of greenhouse gas removal over the last few tens of millions of years, and the rate at which the ice ages (a sign of increasingly serious climate instability) are intensifying, there’s probably only about a million years left to go before a crunch point is reached.

A million years is a long time in human terms, but it’s a very short time compared with the age of the Earth, so it’s extraordinarily unlikely that we just happened to appear at this particular point in time by chance. Especially in light of the fact that the only long term fix for the problem would be to expand Earth’s orbit to move us further away from the sun, and here we are, the one species in the entire history of life to have developed the ability to travel into space, and to have harnessed an energy source powerful enough to move planets. This very strongly suggests that we’re not here by chance, but were deliberately created.

Rather than an “invisible sky fairy”, I think the culprit is Earth’s biosphere itself. I think it’s sentient, and has been for billions of years. Since before the oldest surviving fossils (3500 million years old) were even laid down.

I’d like to lay out another line of evidence in support of this theory. The discrepancies between what Darwin’s theory of evolution predicts, and what we actually see in the fossil record. In particular, there’s an enormous 3000 million period in Earth’s history during which the rate of evolution was essentially zero. The fossils laid down at the beginning of this period (of bacterial colonies called stromatolites) are near enough identical to those laid down near its end.

All the plants, animals and other forms of “eukaryotic” life we have around us today evolved within just the last 600 million years. Furthermore, most of the diversity of eukaryotic life arose in an incredibly compressed period of time, the Ediacaran (when there was evolutionary explosion of soft bodied animals) and the Cambrian, during which there was a similar explosion of hard bodied animals. After 3000 million years of stagnation, all the major forms of plant and animal life we currently have appeared in the space of only a few tens of millions of years. This is something for which there’s no explanation whatsoever under current evolutionary theory, and which usually just doesn’t get talked about.

At the time Darwin proposed his theory, this wasn’t a problem because they thought the Earth was only about 100 million years old, and that the Cambrian occurred soon after life first became established. It made sense that simple, rapidly evolving organisms like bacteria would produce a tremendous explosion of evolution. Then, as more complex, slower evolving plant and animal life with longer reproductive cycles came to dominate, the rate of evolution would slow down to the relatively constant rate we’ve had ever since. So it all looked good.

That’s not the case now. Dating based on radioactive decay has given us accurate dates for all these events. Earth itself is 4600 million years old, the oldest surviving fossils are 3500 million years old, and there’s isotopic evidence suggesting that life was already present by 4100 million years ago. The Cambrian explosion started just 538.8 million years ago (immediately preceded by an evolutionary explosion of soft bodied animals, the Ediacaran, that wasn’t known about in Darwin’s time). There’s no evidence of evolution prior to the Ediacaran, just an enormous period of 3000 million years during which life was present in abundance, but no evolution took place. There’s no explanation for this at all under current evolutionary theory, and it usually just doesn’t get talked about.

The mysterious absence of evolution until comparatively recently (500 million years is only about 12.5 percent the age of life on Earth) used to be blamed on a lack of oxygen in the atmosphere, but then it was discovered that oxygen actually first appeared in the atmosphere some 2.2 billion years ago. So nearly 1.7 billion years passed when there was oxygen in the atmosphere, but still no evolution taking place. While the levels in the atmosphere as a whole during that time were only about 1 percent as high as they are now, there would have been places (such as shallow sunlit estuaries) where photosynthesis was taking place at a rapid rate, and oxygen levels were much higher than the average. It’s also been pointed out that oxygen isn’t necessary for animal life to exist. Animals have a process called anaerobic respiration that allows them to continue to produce energy even if there is no oxygen present. There are plenty of animal species (for instance parasitic intestinal worms) that live their entire lives in an environment that’s completely free of oxygen.

So why is the mysterious absence of evolution for over 85 percent of the time life has been in existence, evidence for a sentient biosphere? Firstly, I don’t think evolution stopped during that time. Instead I think it ran through very quickly, so quickly that it had already run through to its ultimate conclusion of a single sentient entity occupying the entire planet before the oldest surviving fossils (c. 3500 million years old) were even laid down. Evolution in bacteria is a very rapid process. They have a life cycle which can be as short as 20 minutes, which allows for very rapid genetic reshuffling, and far faster rates of evolution than is possible for eukaryotes (plants, animals and other “higher” life forms), whose life cycles last days at least, and often, as in our case, much much longer.

As they evolved, the bacteria organised themselves into progressively larger and more complex cell networks. Having access to more resources, the larger cell networks could outcompete and annihilate the smaller ones. The ensuing battle for dominance inexorably led to a situation where there were ever fewer, ever larger cell networks, until finally there was just one, encompassing the entire planet. Its main body embedded in rocks going miles deep, the so-called “deep biosphere”. All this happened very quickly, and had already reached its conclusion before the oldest surviving fossils were laid down.

Just looking at the way our planet is organised into tectonic plates, it’s also possible the process became arrested in its final stages, and each tectonic plate is actually a separate organism, all having learned to live together in harmony and close cooperation with each other, and functioning much as if they are a single organism. A colony of lithophages, each one consuming the rock upwelling in its section of mid-ocean rift, processing that rock, storing the desirable components in its section of continental plate, and excreting the unwanted waste in its section of subduction zone. Maybe that’s why continental rock is greatly enriched in thorium and uranium (70-fold enrichment) compared with mantle rock. The radioactive decay of these two elements releases substantial amounts of energy, that could act as an energy source, and help recreate the highly radioactive environment that was present on Earth when life first became established (which is what bacterial life forms are used to). Another advantage of secreting more and more continental rock over time is to help insulate the mantle and keep it hot and fluid so the rock can continue to be mined. Without the insulation the continents provide, the mantle might already have cooled off enough so it no longer convects, as has happened on Mars.

Anyway. returning to the topic. There was no evolution after a stable situation had been reached (of either a single sentient planetwide organism or a colony of lithophages acting much like one), for the same reason we (hopefully) don’t have new species evolving in our bodies all the time. We have an immune system that prevents unwanted organisms from growing in our bodies, where they’d start consuming our tissues and cause disease. Presumably there’s a planetary equivalent, which snuffs out any new forms of life before they can become established. As a result, no further evolution could take place.

Then, 600 million years ago, there was an accident, which allowed eukaryotic life to become established. The entire planet was frozen solid at the time (the “Snowball Earth”) while the atmospheric composition was being changed to the oxygen rich atmosphere we have now. All the ice would have isolated parts of the surface from the main body of the biosphere, and probably that’s what gave eukaryotic life the opportunity to become established. After the breakout of eukaryotic life happened, it took a few tens of millions of years to get the situation back under control, during which evolution in eukaryotes was unconstrained and took place at the very rapid pace we see in the rocks of the Ediacaran and Cambrian. Then the situation was brought back under control, and evolution ever since then has been a controlled and regulated process, a way of producing what are in effect self replicating machines created to perform specific tasks. Homo sapiens being one of the latest examples. Probably it’s being done using selective breeding, the same process we’ve used to turn wolves into dogs, and grasses and other wild plants into all our main cultivated crops.

The pattern of evolution we see in the fossil record supports this. Instead of the process of gradual continuous change Darwin predicted, what we see is that evolution occurs in a series of discrete steps (“punctuated equilibrium”). Each species plods along seemingly unchanged for millions of years, then suddenly disappears, often to be replaced by another species performing a similar role. It’s highly reminiscent of what we see with manufactured goods, where manufacturers periodically release a completely new model of their product with lots of changes incorporated into it, rather than making continual small changes.