Time Lapse reveals a superorganism.
Time lapse photography reveals fascinating details of slow events that would not normally be visible. The time lapse photography of a growing bramble tendril shows it feeling its way like an octopus’s tentacle as it searches out the best route to the light. It looks more like an animal than a plant. Time lapse changes our understanding by putting slow events into the time frame of our normal perceptions.
So why stop at such a fast event as a bramble growing? Why insist on time going forwards? Why must we use a camera? We can use our imaginations. We are going to start with you and trace you back at enormous speed to the origin of life.
Frame one is an adult human. Then there is a younger adult and a teenager and a child and a toddler and a baby and then an embryo and then a sperm and an egg. We have reached a junction. Which way shall we go? Well it really doesn’t matter – let’s take the maternal line. Picture people getting younger until they become sperm and egg , generation after generation. After hundreds of thousands of years the people look less like people and more like apes (although not like any present day ape, of course). We have a long way to go. After millions of years apes transmute into shrew-like primates, then reptiles, then amphibia, then fish, then organisms with a nerve cord but no spine. In all this reverse time lapse film of the imagination there has been no break in life being handed on to life. Continuing the process takes us back to the single cell that gave rise to all living organisms. The critical evidence here is that all life uses DNA or the closely related RNA to encode its characteristics. If we started at that cell and time lapsed in the forward direction we would find evolutionary branches pushing forwards and mostly lasting a time and then dying out. The species that we have today are the few branches that have so far survived but only for the moment. Most will die but some will push on towards the demise of planet earth.
Do we need to stop at the first cell as we imagine backwards? Indeed not! Where did the first cell come from? It came from existing ‘non-living’ chemicals in a unbroken stream leading back to star genesis and the big bang where the trail goes cold. What came before the big bang? Your guess is probably as good as any scientist’s guess.
Large ant and termite colonies are often referred to as superorganisms (E.O. Wilson) because they work closely together. I would suggest that all life on earth is a superorganism. We are part of a single organism, the species of animals and plants on earth, from Holly Blue to Seaweed to human, are all one entity. That they are not, is an illusion created by our sensory limitations. Is this an original thought? No, I’m sure some other part of the earth-based superorganism has thought of it. Well, James Lovelock for one – the Gaia theory. However, the superorganism need not stop at planet earth. It can be the whole universe / universes. Nor does it need (as a whole) to be conscious and there is no need for it to be self regulating. At this point I don’t run out of ideas but I do run out of space.