Literary Adventures

This page will take you into pieces of literature that are carefully selected for their great content at the literary, scientific, or philosophical level. A short selection will be presented in full. A long one will be divided into sections that will be refreshed regularly. Emphasis and highlights are mostly ours, not made by the original author.

Here is our current selection:

Supernature By Lyall Watson

Part One - Cosmos

'The most beautiful experience we can have, is the mysterious.'
Albert Einstein in Living Philosophies, 1931.

'I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.'
Albert Einstein, in the London Observer, 5 April 1964.

There is life on earth - one life, which embraces every animal and plant on the planet. Time has divided it up into several million parts, but each is an integral part of the whole. A rose is a rose, but it is also a robin and a rabbit. We are all of one flesh, drawn from the same crucible.

There are ninety-two chemical elements that occur in nature, but the same small selection of sixteen, forms the basis of all living matter. One of the sixteen, carbon, plays a central role because of its ability to form complex chains and rings that can be built into an immense number of compounds. And yet, from the thousands of possible combinations, just twenty amino acids are singled out as the units of construction for all proteins. Most significant of all, these proteins are produced in the right place at the right time by an ordered sequence of events governed by a code carried in just four molecules, called nucleotide bases. This is true whether the protein is destined to become a bacterium or a Bactrian camel. The instructions for all life are written in the same simple language.

The activities of life are governed by the second law of thermodynamics. This says that the natural state of matter is chaos and that all things tend to run down and become random and disordered. Living systems consist of highly organised matter; they create order out of disorder, but it is a constant battle against the process of disruption. Order is maintained by bringing in energy from outside to keep the system going. So biochemical systems exchange matter with their surroundings all the time, they are open, thermodynamic processes, as opposed to the closed, thermostatic structure of ordinary chemical reactions.

This is the secret of life. It means that there is a continuous communication not only between living things and their environment, but among all things living in that environment. An intricate web of interaction connects all life into one vast, self-maintaining system. Each part is related to every other part and we are all part of the whole, part of Supernature.

In this first section I want to look at some of the ways in which our life system is influenced by its environment.

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