Episode Synopses
Life, as we know it.
By almost any measure, a newborn baby seems like a miraculous new addition to the universe. Tiny, vulnerable, adorable. But at only a few minutes old, she’s already a living, breathing testament to almost indescribable chemical and biological complexity, catastrophic terrestrial cataclysms, epic stellar dramas, and deep, deep cosmic timescales.
She will be made up of more atoms than there are stars in our galaxy. Most of these are hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, although there will be more than forty other types of atoms in her still young body. But for all her newness, nearly all of her hydrogen atoms will be over 13 billion years old, created shortly after the big bang. Each of the other atoms will also be immensely old, forged in the hearts of countless exploding stars over billions of years. Over the eons, these atoms combined with other atoms drifting through the cosmic nebulae to form simple molecules, which then combined to form ever more complex organic compounds. It is a process that seems to contradict the conventional wisdom of ever-increasing entropy throughout the universe, as embodied in the second law of thermodynamics. Dr Kauffman suggests that this hallowed law may need to be rewritten.
Some of these complex compounds possessed a remarkable ability – they were able to replicate themselves, an essential qualification for the emergence of life. Dr. Kauffman and his colleagues will describe the spectacular processes by which atoms, molecules, and compounds are made and will present the latest thinking from the frontiers of interstellar chemistry and autocatalytic (self-replicating) reactions that explain the emergence of life on early earth.
We will see how the slow adoption of ideas from Mendel’s genetics and Darwin’s observations on the origins of species transformed the biological sciences by shedding light on the many interdependent relationships that can be found in nature – from commensalism to symbiosis to parasitism. Today, it is generally understood that most creatures – including humans – incorporate a diverse community of microscopic organisms, each interacting with one another, with their host, and with the larger environment. It is in the Nature of Nature to operate this way.
We will also see how the revolutionary theory of The Adjacent Possible (TAP) explains how, in addition to occupying existing niches in an environmental ecology, nature can also create new and previously unpredictable niches, as a result of the new relationships between species and their changing environment. This is one of the central ideas of this documentary trilogy, and we will see that its implications extend from the lowliest biological organisms to the entirety of human civilization.
Each program in this series leads us toward a better understanding of what science is calling the Anthropocene – an era in which humanity’s activities on the planet are having a profound effect on each of its interlocking systems, an era where there is no longer a distinction between natural history and human history. In this program, we will see how each of those systems – the geosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the biosphere, and the human mind – has evolved over time to create the natural and cultural world that we swim in.
Terminally Unique?
Over billions of years on earth evolution conspired to create multicellular organisms that could respond to changes and fluctuations in their environment. Their evolving ability to distinguish between light and dark, up and down, nutrients and poisons all led to the emergence of what we now call “behavior.” Using engaging – and sometimes surprising – microphotography, this documentary will show how that wide range of sensory capabilities gradually developed.
In some creatures those capabilities reach further than the familiar limits of human sensation. Some birds can “see” the earth’s magnetic field. Some fish can sense the electric fields produced by other marine creatures. Some crustaceans signal their amorous intentions using polarized light. Many insects can see the shorter wavelengths of ultra-violet that identify certain pollen-bearing flowers, while some snakes can “see” the heat emanated by their nighttime supper. Some arctic predators can smell their lunch under meters of snow and ice. The natural world is replete with “super senses.”.
But sensation is not the same as perception. Perception attributes meaning to sensation. At its most basic, perception distinguishes self from not self. But beyond that simple distinction lies the realm of choice and action. Is this environment good for me or bad for me? Should I fight or should I flee? Should I eat what I’m sensing, or reproduce with it? In more complex organisms, such decisions also imply an understanding of consequence. And that involves imagination – an ability to construct alternate futures and select preferred outcomes. Such cognitive abilities lead behavioral scientists toward considerations of intelligence, self-awareness, and ultimately consciousness.
It has been relatively easy to ascribe intelligence, in the form of problem solving, to many inhabitants on the bewilderingly diversified tree of life. From crows to squirrels and from octopuses to spiders, nature abounds with amusing – and often astonishing – examples of animals that would qualify for the term intelligent, many of which will be featured in this program.
Some scientists now argue that it is what humankind did with its emerging intelligence that distinguishes us from every other species on the planet. We are, they maintain, qualitatively different from our terrestrial co-inhabitants. From written language to literature, and from axe-heads to atom splitting, we have manipulated nature and shaped our environment in ways that not even the most industrious beaver or persistent predator could imagine.
Indeed, imagination and creativity may turn out to be our most notable attributes. We have used them both to harness the power of nature, grow abundant food supplies, build towering edifices, and establish globe straddling empires. Our imprint on planet earth has been so profound that even the current geological era is named after us – the “Anthropocene”.
But now, we are confronted with an existential challenge and a disquieting question: Will the excesses of our “uniqueness” turn out to be a terminal condition?
Surviving the Anthropocene
From the snowy caps of the highest mountain peaks to the abyssal depths of the world’s oceans, we will see how, over the last 3.5 billion years, planet earth and all of the organisms living on it, have been engaged in an exquisitely intimate relationship with each other. The result has been a succession of worlds that were vastly different from the one we observe today – not all of them particularly hospitable. Indeed, it’s been estimated that since terrestrial life first began, 99% of all the species that ever evolved on earth, have gone extinct. Extinction, it would seem, is not an unusual phenomenon in nature. It is occurring all the time on every branch of the tree of life as species emerge and, in time, die out. Mass extinctions, however, are a different story altogether, and so far there have been five of them. The last one famously resulted in the demise of the dinosaurs, about 65 million years ago. But in nature, every cloud has a silver lining and – absent those dinosaurs – a few small, shrew-like proto-mammals were able to thrive. They were our ancestors.
Today we are living in an era called the Anthropocene – the period during which human activity is the dominant influence in our biosphere. What biological and cultural factors conspired to bring this about? How did slavery, steam power, capitalism, and warfare interact with science to bring about the movement of genes, peoples, crops, and capital across continents?
Historians still debate why it was that global economies took off toward the end of the 19th century, but it’s certain, as Dr. Kauffman will show, that the Theory of the Adjacent Possible – which we saw earlier at work in the natural world – has played a crucial role. Populations that had been predominantly rural began to flock to the cities, because that’s where the new factory jobs were. Urban communities grew, stimulating global consumer economies, and all the while technologies were providing for higher profits and, for some at least, higher standards of living. Fortunes were made.
Between 1850 and 1950 the world population doubled from 1.25 billion to 2.5 billion, by which time electrical power, the telephone, the automobile, air travel, radio, film, TV, and the atom bomb – magic to an average Victorian – had become everyday facts of life. New ways of thinking also took place in every scientific discipline as Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, Planck, and many others rewrote the textbooks and upended conventional wisdom, much of which was still predicated on an orderly, monotheistic point of view. It was also still a fundamentally anthropocentric point of view, in which humanity was thought to have been given dominion over the natural world. By 2000, there were 6 billion people, and the lifespan of a European worker had nearly doubled since the 1850s. We have fulfilled the Genesis command to multiply and subdue the world. What next?
Dr. Kauffman, along with numerous others, believes that the time has come for the Western world to relinquish the delusion that we are above or outside nature and to realize that we are of nature and must learn to live within it. To do so we must understand what the “Nature of Nature” truly is. The time has come, he and his colleagues will argue, for a reassessment of our role in the biosphere similar to the one that occurred centuries ago when pantheism gave way to monotheism and science emerged. Otherwise, we risk extinction.
As we will have seen, such extinctions are quite common, but our species would have the distinction of being its own executioner.