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

Conclusion

Life survives in the chaos of the cosmos by picking order out of the winds. Death is certain, but life becomes possible by following patterns that lead like paths of firmer ground through the swamps of time. Cycles of light and dark, of heat and cold, of magnetism, radioactivity, and gravity all provide vital guides, and life learns to respond to even their most subtle signs. The emergence of a fruit fly is tuned by a spark lasting one thousandth of a second; the breeding of a bristle worm is coordinated on the ocean floor by a glimmer of light reflected from the moon; the development of the eggs of a quail is synchronised by a soft conversation between the embryos; conception in a woman waits for that phase of the moon under which she was born. Nothing happens in isolation. We breathe and bleed, we laugh and cry, we crash and die in time with cosmic cues.

Inorganic matter got together in the right way to create a self-perpetuating organism that started a system of elaboration that has now produced a pattern with several million pieces. This is Supernature, and man sits at the center of its web, tugging at the strands that interest him, following some through to useful conclusions and snapping others in his impatience. Man is the spearhead of evolution, vital, creative, and immensely talented, but still young enough to wreak havoc in his first flush of enthusiasm. Hopefully this period of awkward adolescence is coming to an end as he begins to realise that he cannot possibly survive alone, that the web of Supernature is supported by the combined strength of a vast number of individually fragile fragments, that life on earth is united into what amounts to a single superorganism, and that this in turn is only part of the cosmic community.

A first sight, the process of evolution looks extremely wasteful with most developments running into the dead ends of extinction, but even in their failure these contribute something to the few species that do succeed. It is imperative that there should be a multitude of participants so that life can move on a broad front, testing all possibilities in a search for the right ones. Even those that die have not lived in vain, because news of their failure is broadcast and becomes part of the inheritance of Supernature. This communion is possible because life shares a mutual sensitivity to the cosmos, has a common origin, and speaks the same organic language.

The alphabet is written in chemical symbols shared by all protoplasm. The most common word is water, which has the property of instability that makes it a most sensitive, reliable receiver of subtle signals. Simple formulas in an aqueous solution make it possible for information to pass from cell to cell as long as there is direct contact between them. The same information can jump across space provided with an overlap of electrical fields or where two communicants are sufficiently alike to resonate in sympathy with each other. And at the highest levels, messages are carried across gaps in time.

In the vanguard of evolution comes a development that is confined to a few species and seems to play no part in making them better fitted for survival in this system. Biology is usually very parsimonious and entirely utilitarian, but men--and possibly chimpanzees and dolphins--have acquired a need for things that satisfy none of the normal, natural hungers. We have developed a taste for the mysterious. We have become aware of ourselves, of our life, and of the fact that we must die. We have opened a door on forethought and imagination and discovered anxiety as well. The fact that even a potted plant responds to the death of an animal nearby means that life has always been aware of the phenomenon of death, but with consciousness comes a more complete awareness of our relation to this state--of the fact that we can cause it, or prevent it, or in trying to prevent it even bring about our own death. And with this kind of consciousness comes guilt and conflict and the development of a mental barrier behind which we can hide things away from ourselves.

The origin of this new awareness in biological terms is still obscure, but we are beginning to get some idea of its implications. Cosmic evolution produced our solar system and this habitable planet; inorganic evolution put together the right ingredients to produce life; organic evolution shaped and molded that life into its kaleidoscope of forms; cultural evolution took just one group and pushed them rapidly through intelligence and awareness to a position where they could manipulate the rest of evolution for themselves. So we have arrived at the moment of control with a new and growing consciousness both of the enormity of the task and of the breadth of our own ability to cope with it. In this situation two things stand out above all others: One is that our greatest strength lies in unity with all of Supernature here on earth, and the other is that this unity could give us the impetus we need to transcend the system altogether.

Supernature could become something really supernatural.

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