Most cultures understand the universe as conscious, and this cosmic consciousness, by various names, as the source of Creation. Now science itself is coming close to these views, through the quantum physicists' recognition that consciousness is essential to reality and somehow a deep feature of the ZPE field or an even deeper non-timespace.
Thus, our scientific cosmovision is shifting 180 degrees from the view of consciousness as a late product of material and biological evolution to the view of consciousness as the very source of material and biological evolution.
In molecular genetic biology this shift is supported by fifty years of research evidence that DNA reorganizes itself intelligently when organisms are environmentally stressed, and that the required information transfer often seems to obey some form of non-locality rather than slower chemical or electromagnetic transmission. Rather than being the sources of variation and evolution, errors known to occur in DNA during reproduction and by cosmic radiation or other accidents, are recognized at the molecular level and fixed by repair genes. Thus we see intelligence at work not only in higher brains, but in the lowliest of bacteria and cellular components. We are thus moving toward a post-Darwinian era in evolution biology.
The earliest creatures of Earth, Archean bacteria, invented complex and diverse lifestyles, rearranged the planet's crust to produce patches of oxides (rusted earth) and pure streams of metals we mine today, including copper and uranium. They created an entirely new atmosphere from their waste gases, especially oxygen and created huge continental shelf formations. By evolving ways to exchange DNA information among themselves around the world, we can rightly say they invented the first worldwide web of information exchange. The importance this astoundingly flexible gene pool, which exists to this day, cannot be underestimated. It is still as active as in Archean times and is related, for example, to rapid bacterial resistance to our antibiotics.
Information exchange gave bacteria close relationships that facilitated both competition and cooperation in communal living. We have known of their communal lives for some time, but only now are we able to investigate their amazing urban complexes in real detail and understand how surprisingly like our own their history was.
In what seems to us the almost unthinkably ancient past, the first half of Earth's four and a half billion year life, when bacteria still had the world to themselves, they not only discovered the advantages of communal living but even evolved sophisticated cityscapes. We can see their huge urban complexes today as slimy films -- in wetlands, in dank closets, in the stomachs of cows, in kitchen drains. Scientists call them biofilms or mucilages, as they look like slimy brown or greenish patches to the unaided eye. Only now can we discover their inner structure and functions with the newest microscopy techniques that magnify them sufficiently without destroying them (for example, confocal scanning laser microscopy).
Looking closely for the first time at intact bacterial microcities, scientists are amazed to see them packed as tightly as our own urban centers, but with a decidedly futuristic look. Towers of spheres and cone- or mushroom-shaped skyscrapers soar 100 to 200 micrometers upward from a base of dense sticky sugars, other big molecules and water, all collectively produced by the bacterial inhabitants. In these cities, different strains of bacteria with different enzymes help each other exploit food supplies that no one strain can break down alone, and all of them together build the city's infrastructure. The cities are laced with intricate channels connecting the buildings to circulate water, nutrients, enzymes, oxygen and recyclable wastes. Their diverse inhabitants live in different microneighborhoods and glide, motor or swim along roadways and canals. The more food is available, the denser the populations become. Researcher Bill Keevil in England, making videos of these cityscapes, says of one, "It looks like Manhattan when you fly over it."
Microbiologist Bill Costerton in Montana observes: "All of a sudden, instead of individual organisms, you have communication, cell cooperation, cell specialization, and a basic circulatory system, as in plants or animals.... It's a big intellectual break." Researchers are coming to see colonial bacteria or even all bacteria now as multicelled creatures despite their separate bodies.
In addition to rearranging Earth's crust, creating an atmosphere, devising urban lifestyles and creating the first worldwide web, bacteria invented other amazing technologies. Some produced polyester, though biodegradable; others harnessed solar energy as photosynthesis, permitting the making of food when it became scarce; still others invented the electric motor for locomotion -- -a disk with flagellum attached, rotating in a magnetic field, complete with ball bearings, not to mention the atomic pile, probably to raise local temperatures. Seeing these startling parallels to human lifestyles and inventions makes us see evolution fractally. In fact, when I fly over human cities, making them appear small, I see them as cells spread over a substrate, or as bacterial colonies.
Some bacterial colonies, as we know, cause infections, diseases and deteriorate our teeth, our buildings and bridges. But most bacterial cooperatives are harmless or indeed cooperative with other creatures, many living inside their guts, as in termites and cows, helping with digestion. They maintain our worldwide habitats by renewing and chemically balancing atmosphere, seas and soils; they work for our health by the billions in our guts and have evolved into the organelles inside our cells.
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