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

1 - Cosmic Law And Order

Chaos is coming. It is written in the laws of thermodynamics. Left to itself, everything tends to become more and more disorderly until the final and natural state of things is a completely random distribution of matter. Any kind of order, even that as simple as the arrangement of atoms in a molecule, is unnatural and happens only by chance encounters that reverse the general trend. These events are statistically unlikely, and the further combination of molecules into anything as highly organised as a living organism is wildly improbable. Life is a rare and unreasonable thing.

The continuance of life depends on the maintenance of an unstable situation: It is like a vehicle that can be kept on the road only by continual running repairs and by access to an endless supply of spare parts. Life draws its components from the environment. From the vast mass of chaotic probability flowing by, it extracts only the distinctive improbabilities, the little bits of order among the general confusion. Some of these it uses as a source of energy, which it obtains by the destructive process of digestion; from others, it gets the information it needs to ensure continued survival. This is the hardest part, extracting order from disorder, distinguishing those aspects of the environment that carry useful information from those which simply contribute to the over-all process of decay. Life manages to do this by a splendid sense of the incongruous.

The cosmos is a bedlam of noisy confusion. Everything in it is subjected to a constant bombardment by millions of conflicting electromagnetic and sound waves. Life protects itself from this turmoil by using sense organs, which are like narrow slits, letting in only a very limited range of frequencies. But sometimes even these are too much, so there is the additional barrier of a nervous system, which filters the input and sorts it out into 'useful information' and 'irrelevant noise'. For instance, if a cat is exposed to a continuous electronic click, it hears and responds to the stimulus at first but is soon habituated to it and in the end effectively ignores the sound altogether. (87)

An electrode implanted in the auditory nerve, leading from the inner ear to the brain, shows that, after a while, the nerve no longer even sends information about the clicks on to the brain; the regular stimulus has been classified as irrelevant background noise and discarded as a source of information. But as soon as it stops, the cat pricks up its ears and takes notice of this novel and therefore incongruous phenomenon. Sailors respond in the same way by waking suddenly from even the deepest sleep when the sound of their ship's engine changes pitch or ceases altogether.

We all have this ability to focus on certain stimuli and to ignore others. A good example is 'cocktail party concentration', which enables us to tune in to the sound of just one person's voice among so many all saying similar things. (235) Even in our sleep, recordings of our brain waves show that we produce stronger reactions to the sound of our own names being spoken than we do to any other names. These are responses that we learn, but all life automatically sorts out environmental chaos in the same way and concentrates only on the improbable orderly events hidden in the prevailing disorder.

Living organisms select information from their surroundings, process it according to a program (in this case one that will ensure the best possible chance of survival), and supply an output of order (which is in turn a source of raw materials and information for other life). This is an accurate description of how a computer operates, so it is not surprising that a greater understanding of life should have come hand in hand with the recent development of computer systems. Computers operate on the basis of programmed information, which is supplied in accordance with a theory that describes information as a function of improbability, saying 'the more improbable an event, the more information it conveys.' (41) Returning to the metaphor of life as a vehicle, this means that we are bound to hear the improbable rattle in a new motorcar but hardly notice the much more probable rattle in an old one. The sound may be identical, but heard from the driver's seat of the old car, it is part of the environment that carries very little useful information. In a system in which everything tends toward decay, another symptom of disorder is not at all improbable and in no way distinctive.

A single bright light on a moonless night in the desert is very conspicuous and obviously worth investigating, but even when surrounded by other lights, one will stand out if it flashes on and off or changes color. Hurtling through space on our planet, we are continually exposed to the forces of the cosmos. Most of these are fairly constant and make little conscious impression on us; we are no more aware of them than we are of the force of gravity that keeps us attached to our vehicle. It is only when the cosmic forces change or fluctuate like flashing lamps that they become conspicuous and acquire information and signal value. Many of these changes are cyclic, occurring again and again at more or less regular intervals, which gives life time to develop a specific sensitivity to the changes and a response to the information they convey.

I have said that life occurs by chance and that the probability of its occurring, and continuing, is infinitesimal. It is even more unlikely that this life could, in the comparatively short time it has existing on this planet, develop into more than a million distinct living forms - and these are only the tip of an enormous pyramid of past successes and failures. To believe that this took place only by chance, places a great strain on the credulity of even the most mechanistic biologists. The geneticist Waddington compares it to 'throwing bricks together in heaps' in the hope that they would 'arrange themselves into an inhabitable house'. (334) I believe that chance did in fact play a large part in the process, but that its action was mediated by a pattern of information that lies half hidden in the cosmic chaos.

The cosmos itself is patternless, being a jumble of random and disordered events. Grey Walter, the discoverer of several basic rhythmic patterns in the brain, puts it perfectly: He says that the most significant thing about a pattern is that 'you can remember it and compare it with another pattern. This is what distinguishes it from random events or chaos. For the notion of randomness ... implies that disorder is beyond comparison; you cannot remember chaos or compare one chaos with another; there is no plural of the word.' (335) Life makes patterns out of patternless disorder, but I suggest that life was itself made by a pattern and that this design is inherent in cosmic forces to which life was, and still is, exposed. These environmental influences are behind most of Supernature.

The Earth

Cosmic forces recur in cyclical patterns, to which life learns to respond. The strongest responses are naturally linked to the shortest cycles, those which produce the greatest number of changes in a given period of time. The most fundamental and familiar of all the changes to which life is subject are those produced by the movement of our earth about its axis.

We live on a distorted sphere that is not only slightly flattened at the poles but also a little pear-shaped, with a bulge in the Southern Hemisphere. The sphere spins from west to east at about a thousand miles an hour and travels around the sun at more than sixty times this speed, but both movements are influenced by its irregular shape. The time taken for the earth to complete one full revolution about its own axis is not only variable but also depends on which object in space is used as a reference point to decide when the turn is complete. If we choose the sun as our fixed point, one revolution, or one solar day, lasts 24.0 hours. The lunar day is 24.8 hours, and, measuring our rotation relative to one of the distant fixed stars, we get a sidereal day 23.9 hours long. For convenience, we base our calendars on the mean solar day - the average length of all solar days throughout the year, but this is an arbitrary selection and it seems that life itself is sensitive to all three cycles.

We say that there are only twenty-four hours in 'the day', and yet we also divide the same period up into 'the day' and 'the night'. The confusion of words leads to real confusion about the roles of day and night in biology, but the fact is that all life on earth is ultimately dependent on the sun, and so the problem boils down to the presence or absence of sunlight. One of the most traumatic changes that life can experience is the sudden and unexpected disappearance of the sun. On the rare occasions of total eclipse, living things are thrown into complete confusion. I have seen an eagle drop straight out of the sky to take refuge in the crown of a tree, and a foraging troop of baboons rush into the defensive formation they usually assume in response to a predator, neither species knowing quite which way to turn to meet this new and unexpected threat. Only man knows when to expect the next eclipse of the sun by our moon, but all life is tuned to the daily obliteration of sunlight by the movement of our own planet.

Light and dark alternate in a regular pattern that provides life with basic information. This pattern has been called the diurnal rhythm, but the length of the cycle, the relative amounts of light and dark, and an organism's response to light or the absence of light, all vary. So a new and less confusing name was coined in 1960 by Franz Halberg, a medical physiologist at the University of Minnesota. He combined two Latin roots to produce the word 'Circadian', meaning that which lasts about one day. (132) Circadian rhythms produced by the earth's movement can be seen in action in life at every level of complexity.

At the lowest level are a group of organisms to which both botanists and zoologists lay claim. These are tiny pieces of undivided protoplasm that have chlorophyll and use it like plants to make food from the sun, but also have a long, whip-shaped flagellum, which undulates underwater and moves them like animals in pursuit of the sun. If kept in the dark, they abandon botanical methods of food production and pick up particles of ready-made food, in the best zoological tradition. Typical of the group is a little green teardrop called Euglena gracilis, which lives in shallow freshwater pools. At one end of its thin elastic body, near the whip-shaped propeller, is a minute 'eyespot' of dark pigment that is not itself responsive to light, but masks the real photosensitive granule lying at the base of the whip. When the eyespot covers the 'eye', nothing happens, but when light falls on the granule, it starts the whip waving at about twelve beats each second and sends the organism spiraling out into the light. Euglena comes to rest in the sunlight by positioning itself so that the granule is covered by the rakish eye patch. As the sun moves, so does Euglena, but gradually it begins to lose its sensitivity, and toward the end of the day it is a lot less active. If it remained mobile all day, chasing after every stray sunbeam, the organism would use energy as fast as it could produce it and have none left over for other processes or for sustaining itself during the night. So Euglena has not only developed a vital response to change in the environment but has also acted on the information provided by the regularity of these environmental changes. It has produced a mechanism for regulating its movement so that it operates at an optimal level, working quickly when movement is most necessary and phasing out as it becomes less important.

The fact that this regulation is 'built in' has been shown by its persistence in a population of Euglena that were kept in continuous darkness. Despite the total lack of light, all individuals became active and sensitive to light at the same time each day, a time when the sun they could not see was coming up, and they became insensitive when the light outside the laboratory began to fade. (250) Unable to make food from the sun, they took to feeding on particles in their environment, but they did this only during normal daylight hours, despite the fact that this food was available all the time. Even Euglena, with its solitary cell, follows an accurate circadian rhythm.

Our knowledge of the development of multi-cellular organisms from the first single cells is very limited, because they seldom left a fossil record, but it seems likely that all plant and animal life was derived from something rather like Euglena. In the course of evolution, cells destined to serve more specialised functions in complex organisms were modified a great deal, but most retained something of their early independence. Even man has single cells that can still leave his body altogether and live and move entirely on their own - on their way to fertilise an egg. If one cell is taken from the root of a plant such as the carrot, it can be kept alive in a nutrient solution and give rise to a whole new carrot plant. (310) We see living organisms as entities and tend to forget that they are intricate societies of single cells and that each of the components has a great deal in common with all the other cells, not only in that individual but in every other organism that ever lived. Alexander Pope recognised that 'all are but parts of one stupendous whole, whose body nature is ...' (251)

Circadian rhythms exist in simple unicellular organisms without hormones or specialised nervous systems. In more complex, multi-cellular forms that do have these advantages, they occur in more intricate patterns and respond to more subtle environmental stimuli.

Of all the species drafted into service in our laboratories, few have contributed as much to our knowledge of life as a fruit fly called Drosophila. There are over a thousand species belonging to the genus, but the most popular conscript has been Drosophila melanogaster. This little fly with its wings spread is just the size of a letter V in this print, but in 1909 Morgan discovered that it had enormous chromosomes in the cells of its salivary glands, and the fly was soon surrounded by murmurous haunts of geneticists. Today almost every university in the world supports a culture of fruit flies, so it is not surprising that when biologists turned their attention to the study of natural rhythms, Drosophila was again called in to assist the scientists with their inquiries. The results were fascinating.

Small animals have a very large surface area in proportion to their mass. If, like the fruit fly, they live on land, they are faced with the problem of losing water from all parts of their surface, and have to find some way of conserving body fluids. Most insects solve the problem by growing a tough, waxy cuticle that resists desiccation. Adult Drosophila are protected in this way, but when the flies first emerge from their puparia, the bodies are still soft and their wings are folded into a delicate tangle of lace that can expand and stiffen only if moisture is available. So the flies all emerge at dawn, when the air is cool and humidity is high. Under natural conditions the pupa is probably aware of light and temperature and can time its emergence properly, but it does not need all these clues.

Colin Pittendrigh of Princeton University devised a set of elegant experiments that show how well Drosophila responds to even the smallest scraps of information. (248) He kept fruit-fly eggs in complete darkness under conditions of constant temperature and humidity. The eggs hatched, and the larvae grew, and pupated. Development took place as if normal inside the puparium, and the adult flies eventually emerged, but they broke out at random, following no arcadian pattern at all. Pittendrigh then repeated the whole experiment with a second batch of eggs, but this time he allowed the larvae to see light for just one thousandth of a second, by firing an electronic flash at them once. At no other time in their lives were they ever exposed to light, and yet all the flies emerged from their puparia simultaneously.

The internal rhythms of the developing insects were synchronised by an incredibly subtle signal and continued to keep time for several days following the stimulus. Pittendrigh went on to show that the rhythm was circadian by giving the larvae a slightly longer exposure to light. Flies from these emerged together at a time that would have been sunrise if the time when the light went out was considered as sunset on some earlier evening. In other words, the flies started counting when darkness fell. It seems from these experiments that the rhythm is inherent in Drosophila and that the fly has only to be prodded very gently to get the cycle going and to keep it going. I am particularly impressed by the fact that emerging from a puparium is something that a fly does but once in its life; it has no chance to learn and practice this activity, and yet it operates on a 24-hour schedule. This natural rhythm must be instinctive, built into the memory of the insect's cells and waiting only to be tuned by the environment in order to produce a series of perfectly timed behavior patterns.

The cells themselves may house this clock, but Janet Harker at Cambridge University has shown that coordination between cells is achieved by chemical messengers that carry time signals. (135) Cockroaches generally suffer from a bad press, but they are excellent experimental animals. The common species Periplaneta americana becomes active soon after dark each day and scavenges continually for five or six hours, but if one has its head cut off, it no longer shows this circadian rhythm of activity. Not surprising, perhaps; but in fact if the head is removed surgically and precautions are taken to keep the insect from bleeding to death, it survives for several weeks. A headless cockroach eventually starves to death, but while it lives, it continues to move in a random and desultory fashion.

Janet Harker found that she could give a cockroach back its sense of direction by a process of transfusion. All insects have very rudimentary circulatory systems, in which blood just washes around in the body cavity bathing the internal organs. One individual can be made to share its blood with another by simply cutting a hole in the body wall of each and connecting them together with a short glass tube. Harker solved the problem of differences of opinion by an ingenious if somewhat gruesome compromise. She strapped the blood donor upside down on the back of the headless cockroach and cut off the upper one's legs to prevent it kicking and upsetting the weird combination. Paired like this in parabiosis (which means living side by side) the double-bodied cockroach with one head and one set of legs functioned almost normally. It once again showed the typical circadian rhythm with activity confined to the period immediately after dark. (137) Something in the blood of the donor passed through the glass tube and communicated rhythm to the legs of the disorganised, headless cockroach.

The substance responsible seems to be a hormone produced in the insect's head. Harker made a series of surgical transplants, each involving one of the organs in the head, and found that the subesophageal ganglion (a tangle of nerves just below the mouth) was the source of the message. She discovered that if this ganglion was transferred to a headless cockroach, the insect developed a rhythm identical to that of the donor.

So, in the cockroach, the center that responds to natural cycles of light and dark has been located and can even be translocated. This is vital information, but Harker went on to turn up something even more interesting. (136) She kept one group of cockroaches on a normal schedule and put a second group on a reverse timetable, with lights burning all night and darkness during the day. The second lot soon adapted to this situation and became active during the artificial night, so their rhythms were always out of phase with the control group. A subesophageal ganglion could easily be transplanted from a member of one group to a headless individual in the other, and it would impose its own rhythm on the recipient; but if the second cockroach kept its own pacemaker as well, there was immediate trouble. The extra ganglion turned out to be a lethal weapon.

Having two time-keepers sending out two completely different signals, the poor insect was thrown into turmoil. Its behavior became completely disorganised, and it soon developed acute stress symptoms, such as malignant tumors in the gut, and died.

This is a perfect demonstration of the importance of natural cycles of life; confusion of the cockroach rhythm kills the insect. Life keeps time, and it seems that the beat is an old one, determined mainly by the rotation of our own planet, which turns the sun on and off like some giant cosmic strobe light.

Life arose in the primordial broth by the action of sunlight on simple molecules. It is just possible, by stretching our knowledge of biochemistry, to envisage a situation in which life could arise in the absence of light, but it is difficult to see how it could continue to survive once it had consumed all the available food. Light waves carry both energy and information. It is no accident that the amount of energy contained in visible light is perfectly matched to the energy needed to carry out most chemical reactions. Electromagnetic radiation covers a vast range of possible frequencies, but both sunlight and life are confined to the same minute section of this spectrum, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that one is directly dependent on the other.

As various forms of life evolved on earth, the advantage went to those that were able to sense their environment and act on the information received. Because light covers considerable distances, it is probably the best source of information available, and of all cosmic forces, the best suited to sensing. The daily alternation between light and dark provides information on the earth's movement about its axis. And the fluctuation in the relative amounts of light and dark in each day tells of the earth's progress in its movement about the sun.

The axis of the spinning earth is tilted from the vertical, so as the planet travels on its orbital circuit, it presents each day a slightly different face to the sun. Twice in every year, the sun's rays fall vertically on the equator and days and nights everywhere are exactly twelve hours long. At all other times either the North or the South Pole is angled toward our star and there is an imbalance between the amounts of light and dark that fall on places at various latitudes. The regular shift in this relationship provides organisms with information that helps them adjust to a yearly cycle of changes in the circadian rhythm. This sensitivity is called the circannual rhythm - that which lasts about one year.

It was discovered almost by accident by Kenneth Fisher in his work at the University of Toronto, on the golden-mantled ground squirrel Citellus lateralis. (244) Fisher kept these tiny high-altitude rodents in a windowless room at a constant temperature of 0° C and twelve hours of light each day. He found that they were active and healthy, with a body temperature of 37° C, until October; then their temperatures fell to 1°C and the squirrels went into their usual winter hibernation. And then, despite the lack of any changes in light or heat, they all woke up in April, were active all the summer, and went back into stupor the following autumn. In a second experiment, Fisher changed the temperature to a constant 35° C and found that this was warm enough to prevent the squirrels from becoming dormant, but they still gained weight in autumn and lost it slowly through the winter, just as though they were actually hibernating.

Sensitivity to an annual cycle has obvious advantages: It helps an organism to predict seasonal changes in its environment and to make the necessary allowances for them. A bird that spends its winters in the constant conditions of the tropics could use this sense to tell it when the time had come to return north for nesting. A mammal that stays behind through the northern winter profits from a sensitivity to annual changes by knowing when to lay in a store of food. Both animals are co-ordinated by photoperiodism - a sensitivity to the relative amounts of light and dark in every day.

The tiny pale-green plant lice, or aphids, that spend their summers busily plunging their mouth parts into plants and sucking out the juices, reproduce during the long days by a process of virgin birth in which no males are involved. (191) But when there are less than fourteen hours of daylight, as autumn approaches, they start reproducing sexually and lay eggs that last through the winter. Many other animals change their appearance, rather than their habits, and adopt a winter plumage. Dull-brown summer weasels turn into resplendent white winter ones that can find concealment in the snow. If a weasel is kept under extra artificial light in the autumn to extend its days, it never produces its camouflage coat, so, like the aphid, it depends entirely on the day length to tell it when winter approaches.

Most cold-blooded animals are completely at the mercy of temperature fluctuations, which set the pace of their lives, but in mammals and birds it is often the activity that determines body temperature. Mice reach a temperature peak when their activity is greatest, around midnight, and are coolest in the heat of midday because that is the middle of their rest period. (18) So their temperatures follow a 24-hour cycle even though this is not imposed by the temperature of their surroundings. Some parasites take advantage of this phenomenon and set their clocks by the cycles of their hosts.

Malarial parasites invade red blood corpuscles, where they multiply until the cell can no longer withstand the pressure and bursts, releasing the offspring to seek out other corpuscles, where the same thing takes place again. If the parasites did this one at a time, they would have little effect on their host, but what happens is that all the malaria cells present in the body multiply at exactly the same time, and this simultaneous onslaught produces the classic symptoms of fever. Soon after noon the host begins to feel cold and starts shivering despite the fact that his skin feels hot to the touch; headache, backache, and vomiting follow and intensify throughout the afternoon until, at sunset, the body temperature shoots up as high as 42° C and he sweats profusely. It is biologically inefficient for a parasite to kill its host, but the Plasmodium that produces malaria fever takes this risk, because it is vital for its own survival that it should also come into contact with another kind of host.

Man is home for the non-sexual stage of the parasite, but the sexual stages require the unique environment of the stomach of a female of a certain species of mosquito. To get there, they have to be sucked up by the insect as it bites the man, which is a complex situation requiring perfect timing, but it all works out splendidly via the fever. The parasites become active and reach sexual maturity in man's blood stream, producing a fever, which raises the host's temperature, produces sweating, and attracts the mosquito just after dark, when these nocturnal insects are most active.

Little or no light penetrates to the blood vessels, where the parasites live. Their environment has no marked photoperiod, but they are able to bring their cycle to a peak at dusk by following the pattern of their host's temperature rhythm. Man is active during the daylight hours; his temperature follows the pattern of activity, and the parasites follow the temperature. Night workers reverse their activity patterns and therefore have their fevers in the morning, confusing the parasites hopelessly and putting them completely out of step with their alternative hosts, the mosquitoes. (141)

In the same way that parasites set their clocks by the body temperature of their host, so all life can measure time by responding to temperature changes of the body of our host, this planet.

Extensions of the photoperiodic research on fruit flies and cockroaches show quite clearly that both these species also respond to what could be called thermoperiodism. In constant darkness flies emerge from their puparia shortly after the temperature cycle reaches its lowest point, which in nature would be just before the dawn. Temperature can act as a time signal, in fact it may do even more than that: It may be absolutely essential for survival. An American botanist has found that the leaves of tomato plants are damaged and die if kept under conditions of constant light and heat, but remain perfectly healthy if given a 24-hour cycle of temperature change. (150) In practice it does not matter whether the temperature goes up or down; any regular fluctuation between the limits of 10 and 30° C was found to be equally effective.

Piece by piece we are beginning to build up a picture of the way in which physiological rhythms respond to environmental cues. Life is adapted to the earth's movement by a circadian rhythm and to the earth's position in space by a circannual rhythm. Sometimes these daily and yearly cycles intertwine to produce patterns of exquisite sensitivity that make an organism responsive to every nuance in its environment. This is as it should be. As parasites on the skin of our planet, we can be truly successful only when we become aware of its pulse and learn to pace our lives to the rhythm of its deep, untroubled breathing.

Our host, however, is not alone. Earth in its turn is ruffled by the galactic winds of change and subject to forces brought to bear on it by an even wider environment. Inevitably these forces filter through to us, and life on earth learns to dance to the rhythm of other bodies. The most insistent beat comes, naturally, from our nearest neighbors.

The Moon

When Isaac Newton was twenty-three years old and a student at Cambridge, he was forced to leave his college by the wave of bubonic plague that brought black death to most of England in 1665. While on this enforced holiday in the country, he saw an orblike apple fall to the earth and, in his own words, 'began to think of gravitation as extending to the orb of the moon'. These thoughts led to his universal theory of gravity, which says that every particle in the universe attracts every other particle with a force that depends on their masses and the distance between them. The earth attracts the moon strongly enough to hold it in orbit, and the moon is large enough and close enough to tug insistently at earth's mantle. The water on earth's surface behaves like a loose garment that can be pulled out from the body to fall back as earth turns away again. The moon circles the earth once every 27.3 days, rotating brazenly as she does so, to keep the same face turned always to us, but earth shows all its sides to the satellite once every 24.8 hours. This means that the waters of earth flow out toward the moon, and therefore bring high tide to any land that lies in that direction, forty-eight minutes later each day.

Every drop of water in the ocean responds to this force, and every living marine animal and plant is made aware of the rhythm. The lives of those that inhabit the margins of the sea depend entirely on this awareness. One very small flatworm, for instance, has entered into partnership with a green alga, and whenever the tide goes out, it must come up from the sand to expose its greenery to the sun. Rachel Carson took some of these animals into the laboratory and there described their conditioning to the tidal rhythm in her usual effortless and poetic way: 'Twice each day Convolute rises out of the sand in the bottom of the aquarium, into the light of the sun. And twice each day it sinks again into the soil. Without a brain, or what we would call a memory, or even any very clear perception, Convoluta continues to live out its life in this alien place, remembering, in every fibre of its small green body, the tidal rhythm of the distant sea.' (66)

This is true of any tidal animal taken to a laboratory near the sea. For convenience' sake, most marine research units are established on the coast, but fortunately for science one indefatigable researcher into natural rhythms lives and works a thousand miles from the sea, in Evanston, Illinois. Frank Brown started worked with oysters in 1954. He found that they had a marked tidal rhythm, opening their shells to feed at high tide and closing them to prevent damage and drying out during the ebb. In laboratory tanks they kept this strict rhythm going, so Brown decided to take some specimens home with him to Illinois to examine more closely. Evanston is a suburb of Chicago on the shore of Lake Michigan, but even here the oysters continued to remember the tidal rhythm of their home, on Long Island Sound, in Connecticut.

Everything went well for two weeks, but on the fifteenth day Brown noticed that a slippage in the rhythm had occurred. The oysters were not longer opening and closing in harmony with the tide that washed their distant home and it seemed as though the experiment had gone wrong, but the fascinating thing was that the behavior of all the mollusks had altered in the same way and they were still keeping time with each other. Brown calculated the difference between the old rhythm and the new one and discovered that the oysters now opened up at the time the tide would have flooded Evanston - had the town been on the shore and not perched on the bank of a Great Lake 580 feet above sea level. (42)

Somehow the oysters realised that they had been moved one thousand miles to the west and were able to calculate, and apply a correction to, their tidal timetable. Brown at first suspected that the later times of sunrise and sunset might have given them the clues they needed, but he found that keeping oysters in dark containers from the moment they were collected in the sea made no difference at all. It is true that there is no ocean tide near Chicago, but something we tend to forget is that the same gravitational force of the moon that acts on the ocean can also act on very much smaller bodies of water. The Hughes Aircraft Laboratory in California has developed a 'tilt meter' so sensitive that it has been able to record lunar tides in a cup of tea. (165)

The moon also draws away the envelope of air that surrounds the earth and produces regular daily atmospheric tides. Brown compared his oysters' new rhythm with the movements of the moon and found that most of them were opening when the moon was directly overhead in Evanston. This was the first piece of scientific evidence to show that even an organism living away from the ocean tides could be influenced by the passage of the moon.

These lunar rhythms are close enough to the solar day length to be included in the circadian classification of 'about one day', but the moon also produces another rhythm, with a period of about one month. We see the moon because it reflects light from the sun, and the amount of moon we see depends on its position relative to the sun and ourselves. The traditional phases of the moon follow a cycle slightly longer than the lunar orbit - it is 29.5 days from one full moon to the next. Twice during this cycle, the sun and the moon are directly in line with the earth and the pull of their bodies is added together to produce higher tides than usual. These spring tides occur when the moon is full and again when we see the first thin sliver of the new moon setting. And twice each month, at the quarters of the moon, when the pull of the two heavenly bodies is opposed, we have much more moderate movements of water called the neap tides.

Marine organisms are greatly affected by this cycle. A small silver fish, the grunion Leuresthes tenuis, has made such a precise adjustment to the moon that its very survival depends on the precision of this response. I cannot improve on Rachel Carson's description: 'Shortly after the full moon of the months from March to August, the grunion appear in the surf on the beaches of California. The tide reaches flood stage, slackens, hesitates, and begins to ebb. Now on these waves of the ebbing tide the fish begin to come in. Their bodies shimmer in the light of the moon as they are borne up the beach on the crest of a wave, they lie glittering on the wet sand for a perceptible moment of time, then fling themselves into the wash of the next wave and are carried back to sea.' (66)

During that brief moment in the air, the grunion leave their eggs buried on the wet sand, where they will be undisturbed for two weeks because the waves will not come that high again until the next spring tide. When the sea does return, the development of the larvae is complete, and they wait only for the cool touch of the water to break out of the eggs and swim away through the surf.

Another marine form that responds to the lunar rhythm is the palolo Eunice viridis, a flat, hairy version of the earthworm that spends most of its time hunting for food among the crevices of coral reefs in the South Pacific. (74) It feeds itself but it mates by proxy, concentrating eggs or sperm into the hind part of its body, which it equips with an eyespot, breaks off, and sends up to the surface of the sea to conjugate with the similar portions of other anonymous parents. Although the worms never actually meet, the rendezvous of their private parts is perfectly arranged by the moon. At dawn on the day the moon reaches its last quarter in November each year, all the worms cast off their hindquarters, and the sea around the reefs of Samoa and Fiji run red with the masses of eggs. The local people respond to the same time signal and gather over the coral in fleets of canoes to celebrate the 'great rising' and feast on its bounty.

The most dramatic examples of lunar periodicity come from animals that live in the sea, where the passage of the moon is accentuated by huge movements of water, but there is some evidence to show that it is not the tide so much as moonlight itself that acts as a signal. The light of the moon is three hundred thousand times less bright than that of the sun, and yet life is able to respond to this minute cosmic stimulus even through several fathoms of sea water. At the University of Freiburg they were working on the polychaete worm Platynereis dumerilii, which swarms to the surface of the sea around the last quarter of the moon. (140)

This worm loses its rhythm, swarming at all phases of the moon, if kept under constant light in the laboratory. But if the usual bright light is supplemented on just two nights of the month with another light, brighter than the moon but still six thousand times less bright than the sun, the worms are aware of this addition, interpret it as the time of the full moon, and swarm exactly one week later. Or, if they are not physiologically prepared for breeding at that time, they wait for thirty-five days to bring them to the same phase of the moon in the following month. This means that, in nature, the moon could be concealed by cloud for all but two nights and the worms would still be able to set their clocks by it. And even if the moon were to be covered completely during every single night in the month of swarming, they could still remember what happened the previous month and use this as the signal for timing their reproductive rendezvous on the surface.

Land animals are also influenced by the moon. Adult May flies live for only a few hours, during which time they have to find another fly, mate, and lay their eggs in winter. In temperate climates these insects respond to clues of changing light and temperature, and all emerge together in enormous numbers that hang in gossamer ballets over quiet country pools on a few warm evenings in May. But in the tropics the climate is so constant that these cues are missing and the May flies have to find another timekeeper and even another month. Lake Victoria straddles the equator in Africa, and yet it has a very successful species of May fly, Povilla adusta, which solves its timing problem by emerging only at the full moon. (138)

The Luo people, who live along the lake, say that it is going to rain when they see the May flies swarming, and they could be right, because we are just beginning to discover that superstitions like these often conceal truths or half-truths based on old and sometimes sound observations.

We know, for instance, that the moon pulls on the earth's atmosphere as it passes, drawing it away and allowing it to flow back again like an oceanic tide. Receding tides of air never leave a continent gasping in the same way that a beach is exposed altogether on the ebb, but the depth of air above us changes constantly, alternately decreasing and increasing our barometric pressure. As with tides of water, not all parts of the planet are equally affected; there are locations, which have now been pinpointed, where unusually high and low air pressures prevail. These are factories that churn out cyclones and anti-cyclones, loaded with good or bad weather. Since the invention of the weather satellite, we have been able to produce accurate maps of these disturbances, and by studying the movement of warm and cold fronts, predict changes several days in advance. But even armed with this information, it was not until recently that our attention was drawn to the role played by the moon in producing these weather patterns.

The news broke in Science magazine in the form of two short Papers published on facing pages of the same issue in 1962. The authors of the papers had been working completely independently, in the United States and Australia, both coming to the same conclusions but reluctant to publish their findings for fear of ridicule. Only when each discovered the existence of the other and learned that their findings had been confirmed, did they go to press - together, for mutual support, in the same magazine.

The American team collected data from 1,544 weather stations in North America that had been in continuous operation over the fifty years from 1900 through 1949. From this they extracted all rainfall figures and plotted the times of widespread rain against the lunar cycle. They got a strange pattern, which led them to this conclusion: "There is a marked tendency for extreme precipitation in North America to be recorded near the middle of the first and third weeks of the synodical month." Which means that heavy rain occurs more often on days after the full and the new moon. (36)

In Australia the meteorologists collected rainfall data from fifty weather stations for the period from 1901 to 1925 and found that the same patterns were true of the Southern Hemisphere. (1) Both sets of statistics seem sound and point to the conclusion that the moon does affect weather. We know that rain falls when enough dust, salt, or ice particles are present in a cloud for water vapor to condense around them and fall to the ground. This principle is used when 'seeding' likely clouds with chemicals from rockets or airplane to produce rain exactly where it is needed. A natural source of suitable particles is meteor dust, which falls at the rate of about a thousand tons each day on earth. (34) This could be the link between the moon and the weather, because two other independent teams have just come up with the discovery that the rate of meteor arrival at the edge of earth's atmosphere is greater at the times of full and new moon. (40)

Frank Brown, of oyster fame, has been working for twenty-five years on ways in which life can be influenced by remote environmental factors. Instead of testing these one at a time, he has tried to eliminate them altogether, and most of the time he has failed, but his failures succeed in giving us an astonishing picture of the sensitivity of life to the most subtle stimuli. One of his early experiments involved seaweed, carrots, potatoes, earthworms, and salamanders. He was interested in their cycles of activity and used as his measurement the amount of oxygen each consumed throughout the day. All his subjects produced splendid rhythms even when kept, like the oysters, in the dark at a constant temperature. Brown then tried to eliminate the influence of changing barometric pressure by designing an apparatus that equalised changes in barometric air pressure. His instruments told him that the pressure in the test chamber was constant, but his plants and animals continued to produce rhythms that told him they were still aware of changes going on outside. (43)

Brown now has a vast mass of data to show this phenomenon beyond reasonable doubt. His study on potatoes alone has gone on continuously for nine years and provides full metabolic data for more than a million hours of potato time. (47) The tubers 'know' whether the moon has just appeared over the horizon, whether it is at its zenith, or whether it is setting. Brown says that 'the similarity of changes such as these in metabolic rate with the time of lunar day can be plausibly explained only by saying that all are responding to a common physical fluctuation having a lunar period'. This heretical notion, that the 'constant conditions' (Brown always puts the words in quotes) referred to in thousands of pains taking laboratory studies might not be so uniform after all, has drawn a storm of criticism from biologists fighting a rearguard action for the old idea that nothing could touch animals kept under constant light, temperature, humidity, and pressure. But Brown continues to gather evidence to show that there are other, even more subtle factors that need to be taken into account.

One possible candidate is magnetism. We know that the earth's magnetic field changes slightly according to the positions of both the moon and the sun. Readings taken at Greenwich from 1916 to 1957 show that the geometric field alters hourly in direct accordance with the solar day, the lunar day, and the lunar month. (190) So, if living things were sensitive to magnetism, they could follow the movements of both the moon and the sun even while confined in the 'constant conditions' of laboratory dungeons. It seems that life does have this sensitivity.

If you look carefully into the surface layers of a freshwater pool, you are almost certain to see, rolling smoothly along through the water, a determined little green ball as big as this 'O'. This is Volvox, probably the most simple of all living organisms composed of a number of cells that show a common purpose, and almost certainly a direct and little-changed descendant of the first experimental union of the early single cells. For these reasons J.D. Palmer, an associate of Frank Brown at Evanston, chose Volvox aureus as his subject for an experiment with magnetic fields. (239)

Volvox, whose name comes from the Latin for 'rolling', is a photosynthetic plant, but one that moves rapidly and well by the coordinated beating of whip cells that stick out from the surface of the ball. Palmer confined his colony in a small glass corral with a long thin neck that pointed toward magnetic south; then, as the green balls came tumbling out, he noted the directions in which they travelled. He recorded the emergence of 6,916 Volvox, one third under natural conditions, one third with a bar magnet placed at the entrance so that it augmented the earth's field, and the final third with the magnet pointing east-west, at right angles to the field. The magnet provided a field thirty times stronger than the natural one - and the results were quite unequivocal.

With the magnet in line with the earth field, 43 per cent more Volvox than normal turned to the west. With the magnet lying across the field, there was an additional bias of 75 per cent. This shows that these organisms not only can detect a magnetic field but are aware of the direction of lines of force in that field. And the fact that Volvox is an archaic form shows that life's awareness of magnetism goes back a long way and is probably very deep-seated.

Brown pursued this study further with Nassarius obsoleta, a mud snail that slithers in rapidly moving herds over the mud flats on New England shores. He also confined them to a corral whose south-facing exit was wide enough to allow only one to emerge at a time - and recorded the movement of thirty-four thousand snails in this way. Some turned left, some right, and some continued straight ahead, depending on the time of day. In the morning, the tendency was to turn left, toward the east, and in the afternoon toward the west. Brown introduced a magnet with a strength only nine times that of the earth's field and found that, when this was in the same direction as the natural field, it made no difference - the snails continued to follow the sun. But when the magnet was at right angles to the natural field, they began to follow a lunar pattern. (46)

As the earth's cycle and its field are influenced both by sun and moon, it is not surprising to find that both also affect an animal's response to magnetism. Nassarius is adapted more to the solar rhythm, but in a later experiment with a more nocturnal species, Brown found that he could get clear-cut responses to the phases of the moon. He chose the planarian Dugesia dorotocephala, a very popular little freshwater flatworm about an inch long with an arrow-shaped head and an endearing squint. In the same test apparatus, the worm turned left, that is to the east, at new moon, and to the right when the moon was full. (45)

Since this work was done, there have been similar experiments with rats and mice that show some evidence of response to magnetic fields, and an old suggestion, that migrating birds may navigate along lines of the earth's field, has been revived and is being re-examined. The work on snails and worms shows that life has a clock-regulated capacity to orient itself in a weak magnetic field. This possession of both a living clock and a living compass fulfill the two essential prerequisites of any system of navigation.

The Sun

Beyond earth's atmosphere, beyond even the orbit of the moon, lies space. By definition this is supposed to be empty, an interval separating things from each other, but instruments sent out to probe this space reveal that it is far from empty. The vacuum is filled with a variety of forces, many of which reach the earth and some of which affect life here. The most powerful of these forces come from the star we call our sun.

The sun is a dense mass of glowing matter a million times the volume of the earth and in a permanent state of effervescence. Every second, four million tons of hydrogen are destroyed in incredible explosions that start somewhere near the core, where the temperature is 13 million degrees C, and send fountains of flame shooting thousands of miles out into space. In this continuous and unimaginable holocaust, atoms are split into streams of fast-moving electrons and protons that rush out into space as a solar wind that buffets all the planets in our system. Earth falls well inside the sun's 'atmosphere' and is constantly exposed to the changes in its weather. Scattered over the face of the sun like acne are spots of even more violent activity that flare up from time to time. These are usually about the size of earth, and sometimes the rash spreads quickly and the sun erupts in a bout of bad weather that produces magnetic storms in our atmosphere as well.

We first notice these storms when they disrupt radio and television reception and produce the fantastic draperies of the aurora borealis, but we continue to feel their effects in changes they produce in our own weather. At times of sunspot activity there is a tendency for cyclones to form over the ocean and for anti-cyclones to develop over the land masses, producing bad weather at sea and fine conditions ashore. One of the ways in which the moon may influence weather is by deflecting the solar wind so that it hits the earth at a different angle or misses it altogether. The IMP-1 satellite of 1964 recorded fluctuations in magnetic field produced in this way. (225)

It would be possible to use sunspot activity as an aid to weather forecasting were it not for the fact that it seems to vary from day to day in a completely random fashion, but there are regular cycles of activity covering much longer periods of time. In 1801 Sir John Herschel discovered an 11-year sunspot cycle, which has since been confirmed many times and found to correlate with the thickness of annual rings in trees, the level of Lake Victoria, the number of icebergs, the occurrence of drought and famine in India, and the great vintage years for Burgundy wines. All these variables are dependent on the weather, and it seems certain that this regular pattern of change is produced by cycles in the sun. An even more sensitive measure has recently been made available by the study of thin layers of fossil mud deposited on the bottoms of old lakes. These layers are called varves, and their thickness depends on the annual rate at which glaciers melt and therefore provides an indication of climate conditions. Microscopic measurement of varves going back as much as five hundred million years shows that, even in Pre-Cambrian times, there were cycles about eleven years long. (347)

Computer analysis of varves in New Mexico has turned up another, longer sun cycle as well. (7) The 11-year peaks grow higher and higher for about forty years and then fade away to complete an 80- or 90-year cycle. This rhythm has been delicately confirmed by the German botanist Schnelle, who collected dates for the first annual appearance of snowdrops in the Frankfurt region from 1870 to 1950, and found that they formed a smoothly curved pattern. (297) For the first forty years the flowers always appeared before the average date of February 23, but after 1910 they blossomed later and later until, in 1925, they were almost two months behind. Then the snowdrops began to reverse the trend, and in 1950 they were a full two months ahead of schedule again. There is a perfect statistical correlation between the snowdrop and sunspot cycles. (214) In years of great sunspot activity the flowers bloomed later, and in years of the quiet sun they appeared ahead of time. The numbers of earthquakes in Chile over the past century seem to have followed the same cycle. It seems that, overlying the short-term variations in climate, there is a world-wide uniformity of change and that this is very largely determined by regular magnetic storms in the sun.

These and other studies provide ample evidence of the electromagnetic influence of the sun and the way in which it is mediated by the moon and affects our weather. Life in turn is influenced by the weather, and so storms in the sun touch us indirectly, but there is at least one way in which all living things can be directly controlled by cosmic activity. The answer lies in some peculiar properties of water and is quite incredible, so I shall start with basic principles and approach it cautiously.

Every high school student knows that water is H20, a chemical compound of two simple elements. And yet scientific journals are full of articles arguing the merits of various theories on the structure of water - and we still do not understand exactly how it works. There are so many anomalies: water is one of the very few substances that are more dense in the liquid than the solid state, so ice floats; water is unique in that it is most dense a few degrees above its melting point, so that heating it up to 4° C from its melting point of 0° C causes it to contract even further; and water can act both as an acid and as a base, so that it actually reacts chemically with itself under certain conditions.

The clue to some of water's strange behavior lies with the hydrogen atom, which has only one electron to share with any other atom with which it combines. When it joins with oxygen to form molecules of water, each hydrogen atom is balanced between two oxygen atoms in what is called the 'hydrogen bond'; but having only one electron to offer, the hydrogen atom can be attached firmly on only one side, so the bond is a weak one. Its strength is 10 per cent of that of most ordinary chemical bonds, so for water to exist at all, there have to be lots of bonds to hold it together. Liquid water is so intricately laced that it is almost a continuous structure, and one worker has gone so far as to describe a glass of water as a single molecule. (252) Ice is even more regular, and forms the most perfectly bonded hydrogen structure known. Its crystalline pattern is so very precise that it seems to persist into the liquid state, and though it looks clear, water contains short-lived regions of ice crystals that form and melt many millions of times every second. It is as though liquid water remembers the form of the ice from which it came by repeating the formula over and over again to itself, ready to change back again at a moment's notice. If one could take a photograph with a short enough exposure, it would probably show icelike areas even in a glass of hot water.

So water is tremendously flexible. The tenuous links between its atoms make it very fragile, and little external pressure is necessary to break the bonds and destroy or change its pattern. Biological reactions must occur quickly and take place with very little expenditure of energy, so a trigger substance such as water is the ideal go-between. In fact all living processes take place in an aqueous medium, and most of the body weight of every living organism (in man the figure is 65 per cent) is made up of water.

No scientist now doubts that water behaves like this inside a plant or an animal. As I intend to show that external, even cosmic, influences can change the form of water inside an organism, the next step in the argument is to demonstrate that water outside the body can be influenced in this way.

At the same time that Frank Brown was busy demonstrating the unconstancy of 'constant condition' in biological experiments, an Italian chemist was busy upsetting his contemporaries by showing that chemical properties were equally inconsistent and changed from one hour to the next. Giorgio Piccardi, Director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Florence, has always been intrigued by the way in which chemical reactions occasionally prove idiosyncratic and go off in the wrong direction or refuse to take place at all. He began his research with an experimental method of removing incrustations from industrial boilers. (246) Sometimes it worked well and sometimes it did not. He suspected that outside influences might be affecting the reaction, and so he tried enclosing the whole experiment in a thin copper sheet and found that, with this in place, it always worked well.

Piccardi was interested in the forces that could influence a reaction like this, and to find out more about them, he designed an experiment that would yield a large number of observations over a long period of time. He chose a simple reaction, the speed with which bismuth oxychloride (a colloid) forms a cloudy precipitate when poured into distilled water. Three times a day, every day, he and his assistants carried out this simple test until they had more than two hundred thousand separate results. These have now been analysed, together with results of a parallel series of tests made at Brussels University. (63)

There were several kinds of change in the speed of precipitation over the ten-year period of the experiment. Short-term, sudden changes, often lasting only a day or two, were frequent, and all were connected with the sun. The reaction always took place more quickly when there was a solar eruption and changes in the earth's magnetic field could be measured. There were also long-term changes, and when these were plotted on a graph, they formed a curve exactly parallel to that for sunspot frequency in the 11-year cycle. As a control, Piccardi did simultaneous experiments with the same solutions under the protection of a copper screen - and found that precipitation always took place at the normal speed when shielded from outside influence in this way.

So a chemical reaction taking place in water is influenced by cosmic activity, which means that either the chemical or the water is susceptible to electromagnetic radiation. All available evidence points to the water. Two other Italian chemists have found that they could alter the electrical conductivity of water simply by exposing it to a very small magnet. (32) And at the Atmospheric Research Center in Colorado a series of experiments is in progress that shows that water is very sensitive to electromagnetic fields. (102)

Piccardi takes the argument the last step along the way. In 1962 he said, 'Water is sensitive to extremely delicate influences and is capable of adapting itself to the most varying circumstances to a degree attained by no other liquid. Perhaps it is even by means of water and the aqueous system that the external forces are able to react on living organisms.' (247) This suggestion is nicely complemented by a recent demonstration which shows that water is particularly unstable, and therefore most valuable to life, between 35 and 40° C - the body temperature of most active animals. (205)

Which leaves us, I think, with the conclusion that there certainly are ways in which the sun, and other cosmic forces, can influence life.

Other Factors

Traveling with us in the solar system are eight other planets, all of which revolve the same way around the sun, in orbits that lie, with the exception of Pluto and Mercury, in the same plane as ours. We know that the planets influence each other, because Lowell in 1914 used previously unexplained aberrations in the movements of the inner eight to predict the existence of another planet. It was only in 1940 that Pluto was actually discovered.

In 1951 John Nelson was engaged by RCA in the United States to study factors that affect radio reception. By this time it was well known that sunspots are the major cause of interference, but RCA wanted to be able to predict disturbances in the atmosphere more accurately. Nelson studied records for poor reception dating back to 1932 and found, as expected, that they were closely linked to the occurrence of sunspots, but he also discovered something else: Sunspots, and therefore radio disturbances, both occurred when two or more planets were in line, at right angles, or arranged at 180° to the sun. (228) He worked first with Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn and found that, by computing their positions, he could predict the time of future large sunspot actions with 80 per cent accuracy. (229)

In a later study he refined his method to include data from all the planets and improved his accuracy of prediction to an impressive 93 per cent. RCA was delighted, and so, of course, were the astrologists, because this was the first piece of hard scientific fact to show that we could be influenced in any way by the planets. What happens, it seems, is that the position of the planets influences, or is at least an indication of, the sun's magnetic field and that certain configurations coincide with strong sunspot activity - and we know that this in turn touches life here.

If the planets can affect the sun, then it seems reasonable to assume that they also affect the earth, which, with the exception of Mercury, is much closer to them. One night in 1955 an astronomer using a radio telescope in Maryland found a foreign body in his pictures of the Crab nebula. (106) On the following nights it was still there, but it had moved, which made him think immediately of a planet, so he pointed his antenna at Jupiter and found that it was sending out strong radio signals, both short and long wave, with the power of a billion watts. It has now been shown that Venus and Saturn are also powerful sources of radio waves. (278) At least part of the planetary effect may be due to the fact that each body leaves behind it in space a magnetospheric tail of disturbance like a long wake of disturbed water that takes time to settle. The tail that earth drags behind it may be more than five million miles long. (35) So, far from being insignificant specks in space, it seems that the planets are more like territorial animals that leave behind them powerful marks whose influence lingers on long after they themselves have passed by.

The universe does not end with the solar system. On a clear night we can see about three thousand other individual stars, many of them larger than our sun, and all of them part of a hundred billion that go to make up our disk-shaped Milky Way galaxy. Beyond this, scattered more or less uniformly through space, lie perhaps ten billion other galaxies of similar size. From all these sources come radiations of varying strength.

We know that certain stars emit radio waves all the time, while others send out powerful flares of radiation when they undergo violent changes. Some large young stars explode and, in the process of becoming supernovae, produce enormous quantities of cosmic energy. (319) The normal amount falling each year on the atmosphere of earth is about 0.03 roentgen, but during the time that life has been on earth it has been exposed at least once to a short, sharp dose of 2,000 roentgen, about four times to doses of over 1,000 roentgen, and perhaps ten times to 500 roentgen. The lethal dose for most laboratory animals is between 200 and 700 roentgen, but female mice can be completely sterilised by only 80 roentgen. So the explosion of supernovae has subjected the earth at least fifteen times to showers of radiation strong enough to kill most forms. Plant seeds are radiation resistant, and marine life would be protected to some extent by water as the land is by the blanket of air, but these bouts of high radiation could well have been a significant factor in the evolution of life. Even at lower levels, radiation from other suns than ours could have a strong influence on life here.

James Clerk Maxwell revolutionised physics in the middle of the nineteenth century with a set of laws describing all electric and magnetic phenomena. In one of these he proved that disturbances in conditions at one place could be carried across space to another place. He called his carrier electromagnetic waves and found that, no matter what the disturbance, all news of it travelled at the same speed - the speed of light. The electromagnetic spectrum includes X rays, light rays, and radio and television waves, and covers an enormous range, from waves longer than the diameter of the earth to waves so short that a billion strung together would barely cover a fingernail. All these are broadcast by the cosmos all the time. We are most responsive to light waves, which lie somewhere near the middle of the spectrum, but life seems also to be aware of radiation from the electromagnetic extremes.

Radioactive substances occur in nature, and in all of them nuclear changes take place that result in three kinds of radiation: Alpha rays can be stopped by a sheet of paper, beta rays can just about get through aluminium foil, but gamma rays travel across space with so much energy that they can penetrate even lead. Their wavelength is so short that they pass through matter like X rays that have been supercharged, so that even animals in the deepest caves or at the bottom of the ocean feel their effects. Frank Brown has tested his planarian worms for response to a very weak gamma radiation emitted by a sample of cesium 137. (44) He found that worms were aware of the radiation and turned away from it, but only when they were moving north or south. They ignored the radiation, no matter where it came from, if they were swimming in any other direction. This shows that gamma rays can be a vector force that somehow indicates direction as well as intensity. The earth rotates from east to west, so any organism that behaves like these worms and responds to the field in only one direction, has a mechanism that can be used for navigation and for the recognition of all the important geophysical cycles.

At the other end of the usual electromagnetic spectrum are enormously long waves, recently detected by equipment designed to monitor variations in the magnetic field. Most waves are measured in cycles per second, but these are so huge that they take more than a second to pass by - which makes them more than 186,000 miles long, or more than twenty times the diameter of the earth. Some waves eight seconds long occur at night, particularly during displays of the aurora, and there are indications of a few as much as forty seconds, that is seven million miles, in length. (146) At the moment, we cannot even begin to guess at the possible significance of these signals; all we can do is record that such waves exist, that they traverse whole galaxies with little effort, and that, despite their very low field strength, life might be sensitive to them.

The entire universe hangs together, or comes apart, depending on your theoretical bias, by the most basic cosmic force of all, the force of gravity. Electromagnetic waves react only with electrical charges and currents, but gravity waves interact with all forms of matter. The amount of gravitational energy coming from the center of our galaxy is ten thousand times greater than the electromagnetic energy, but we still have trouble measuring it. (338) Gravitational waves from the cosmos have now been recorded, but nobody has yet been able to demonstrate that life is aware of them. The best evidence so far comes from a Swiss biologist working on little flying beetles with the interesting name of cockchafers. (296) He put swarms of the beetles into an opaque container and found that they responded to the invisible approach of a lump of lead outside.

When lead weighing more than eighty pounds was moved closer to their container, the beetles gathered on the side farthest from it. They could not see the lead, and the experiment seems to have been designed to eliminate all other clues, so we must assume that these insects at least are aware, by change in gravity, of the distribution of masses around them. It is possible that the stronger gravitational fields produced by the sun and the moon could have similar effects on behavior. So now we know this much:

Life arose by order out of chaos and maintains this order by collecting information from the cosmos. Cosmic forces bombard earth all the time, but the movement of celestial bodies and the movement of earth in relation to these bodies produces a pattern that provides useful information. Life is sensitive to this pattern because it contains water, which is unstable and easily influenced.

Which means that living things are involved in an open dialogue with the universe, a free exchange of information and influence that unites all life into one vast organism that is itself part of an even larger dynamic structure. There is no escaping the conclusion that the basic similarity in structure and function are ties that bind all life together and that man, for all his special features, is an integral part of this whole.

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