I Can Bet You Have Never Thought This Dead-Simple Question Could be This Hard
So, what is an organism? It’s harder than you might think
Then again, maybe you have.
What is an organism?
As simple as the question is, the answer is not straightforward.
When I was in high school, my physics teacher, Mr. Jackson Owino would often tell us how hard it is to prove that 1 + 1 = 2. He insisted it would take pages to validate this simple statement.
If you take a simple idea, and take it seriously, it opens you up to a world unexplored
Take the example of an organism.
Mentally, you might have to test your answer several times before you settle on a satisfactory one. I could then poke holes at it and find there are weaknesses in the answer.
I learnt that from my professor and mentor.
Just like the easy and hard problems of consciousness, there is a difficulty in defining an organism.
Life is another black box on its own. I chose to leave it out of my book for a reason. I can never solve the problem of defining life. We already have philosophers, mystics, and poets working on it.
What I did was take a leaf from previous attempts at solving problems and then see if it worked.
How other theories solved unsolvable problems
Let’s take the example of Isaac Newton.
Before Newton’s laws, there were Kepler’s laws. Kepler developed three solid laws about planetary motion.
Since Newtown had developed calculus, his theories were more accurate than Kepler’s. People could make calculations about large moving bodies and find the accuracy predicted by Newton’s laws was extremely high.
But the spirit of science lives off defiance. Scientists had to stress-test this to see if it applies to different scenarios. This is the only way sure-proof knowledge progresses.
Develop a theory. Make predictions. Validate predictions with observations. You can then accept, adjust, or dismiss the theory altogether.
In testing Newton’s theory, one peculiar aspect was Mercury’s orbit. It did not match what Newton’s law predicted.
A small discrepancy is often what is needed to develop a new theory, but it is often dismissed. Bold scientists do not dismiss. They question. Questions hold this special role in science as in other fields.
Rather than adjust the theories of gravity, Einstein thought of a completely different theory. This theory explained the curve seen in Mercury’s orbit. It further explained Newton’s predictions with greater precision. Several orders of magnitude more precise than Newton’s.
I borrowed a leaf from this story and decided to look at organisms in a different light.
The point is rather than make small adjustments to ideas that don’t fit the data or observation, we can create a new one.
This is how science describes organisms
This is the definition I got from Biology Online:
An organism refers to a living thing that has an organized structure, can react to stimuli, reproduce, grow, adapt, and maintain homeostasis. An organism would, therefore, be any animal, plant, fungus, protist, bacterium, or archaeon on Earth.
Wikipedia has summarized it from three peer-reviewed scientific articles:
Three traits have been proposed to play the main role in qualification as an organism:
· noncompartmentability — structure that cannot be divided without its functionality loss,[2]
· individuality — the entity has simultaneous holding of genetic uniqueness, genetic homogeneity and autonomy,[3]
· distinctness — genetic information has to maintain open-system (a cell).[4]
Taking these two as examples, there can be issues to pick with each of them. In the first one, there is a requirement of more than three necessities. But the largest hole in this definition is ‘living thing’.
As for adaptation, it is difficult to know if a trait is adaptive or not. It is easier to conclude as much, but difficult to objectively say it is adaptive.
Feathers are used for flight. They were not developed for that reason. Much like hair projections from the skin, they served a role in warmth. But now they are used for flight.
Are they adapted for light? Or is it warmth?
The birds of paradise use their fancy plumage to attract mates. Some even have feathers which are a handicap to their movement.
In this case, are feathers still adapted for flight?
Adaptation is a tough metric to use to qualify an entity as an organism. Sometimes, things just are as they are.
I also take issue with reactions to stimuli. Organisms act. They don’t react. But let’s take it back to the issue we have at hand. Defining an organism.
The second definition from Wikipedia is one I like. It tries to capture a wholesome definition without getting lost in the details as the first one from biology online did.
It, however, also runs into problems.
First, there are several structures that can be divided without functionality loss. Long hair can be cut, skin can be shed and the brain can even be split into two without complete functionality loss.
Emphasis, can.
Individuality is a misconception. Scott Gilbert discusses this in his amazing article.
Genetic distinctness is a problem when you think of mosaicism. You can have different sets of genotypes in a single organism. One study identified the male-defining gene in close to 50% of females. Other organs also had different genes in them.
The point of all this is:
Defining an organism is difficult.
Now, let us throw the spanner into the works
Add life.
Now you have a life-long problem that I can guarantee you will never succeed in defining.
I used to think physics could help develop a more accurate idea of the same, but physics doesn’t like getting into murky grounds.
Sean Carroll often jokes about how he doesn’t like biology because it is too hard. In a sense, he talks of the numerous variables one has to include before getting a satisfactory answer.
Add life into the picture and you have a recipe for a philosophy, but not a solution to a simple answer.
Negative entropy, on inverse entropy, doesn’t quite cut it. There’s more to life than reverse disorder.
From my recent readings and thinking, it looks like the situation only gets worse. The definition of what we think is life is emergent, but at a precise level that we cannot pinpoint.
It means all the features described from the definition used in biology online are also emergent. It also means we do not know where this emergent threshold is crossed.
You see, I bet you never thought about organisms in this way.
Imagine I had to write a book about the first organism — I must have been bonkers.
Now picture this.
I had to have all I have just taken you through while thinking about what the first organism was like.
Writing a book about it didn’t help.
It is difficult to summarize billions of years into a book, let alone an article. We can only do it piecemeal.
For now, I’ll let you think about your definition of an organism. I then dare you to think if it will fit the same description as the very first organism that ever existed.
Warning — it is not easy.
Next stop, my definition
Subscribe to the lightest newsletter on the Internet for a one-four-all & all-four-one weekly feed, because all you need is one alternative view, only one, to edge you closer to extreme value creation, but I give you four.
