Complex Numbers

Lichen Thropy

In an effort to tie today's random article into today's sacred observance of Star Wars Day, I'll just quote our first introduction to the Force:

"The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together." -Obi-Wan Kenobi

    Lichens and the Meaning of Life  

Yeah, I know, it's kind of a stretch. But it relates to the unity of life, at least on our planet.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” the great naturalist John Muir wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Like I said. The Force.

Because of this delicate interconnectedness of life across time, space, and being, any littlest fragment of the universe can become a lens on the miraculous whole. Sometimes, it is the humblest life-forms that best intimate the majesty of life itself.

Take, for instance, lichens.

Not midichlorians.

Lichens — which are not to be confused with mosses — are some of Earth’s oldest life-forms: emissaries of the ocean gone terrestrial. For epochs, their exact nature was a mystery — until an improbable revolutionary illuminated that they are, in fact, part algae.

Also not to be confused with liches, the powerful undead that make for difficult final bosses in a D&D campaign. Or lycanthropes, also common in role-playing games.

In the final stretch of the nineteenth century, Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter punctuated her writing and her painting with a series of experiments with spores, demonstrating that lichens — which Linnaeus considered the “poor peasants of the plant world” — are in fact not plants but a hybrid of fungi and algae: living reminders that the supreme vital force of life is not competition but interdependence, that we survive and thrive not through combat but through collaboration.

I will take this opportunity to emphasize that the person discovering this wasn't known as a biologist, but as a writer.

Okay, I'll stop with the pop culture references for now, and take this opportunity to talk about cooperation.

There's a popular interpretation of the theory of evolution that is often described as "survival of the fittest." This was not, as I think most people believe, a term coined by Charles Darwin, or even by a different biologist, but by an economist, Herbert Spencer.

The problem with this phrase is mostly that it's a vast oversimplification (though reportedly, Darwin didn't object to it) of an extraordinarily complicated topic. Now, I don't claim to be an expert on evolution or economics (and anyone claiming to be an expert on economics is automatically suspect to me), but stopping there, at that phrase, seems to lead to the conclusion that only the strong survive, and that evolution is all about competing for resources.

Certainly, there are elements of competition. But the primary driving force of evolution is, in my admittedly limited view, cooperation.

As an analogy, consider an American football game. Or, really, any team sport. You have two teams. They play a game and, usually, there's a winner and a loser. Sure, the teams are competing against each other—but within each team, it's only by cooperation that victory is even possible. Moreover, even the battling teams cooperate to an extent: they agree on a set of rules, and when a rule is broken, they agree on the penalties for doing so.

Without that cooperation, both within and between the teams, you don't have a football game. It is cooperation, not competition, that allows organisms to survive long enough to compete, and it obviously takes some cooperation for most organisms to reproduce.

Okay, enough of that. Back to lichens.

From the article, quoting biologist Lynn Margulis:

Like a farmer tending her apple trees and her field of corn, a lichen is a melding of lives. Once individuality dissolves, the scorecard of victors and victims makes little sense. Is corn oppressed? Does the farmer’s dependence on corn make her a victim? These questions are premised on a separation that does not exist. The heartbeat of humans and the flowering of domesticated plants are one life. “Alone” is not an option… Lichens add physical intimacy to this interdependence, fusing their bodies and intertwining the membranes of their cells, like cornstalks fused with the farmer, bound by evolution’s hand.

There is, of course, a lot more at the link. And it's not very technical; there's not even any math involved.

I'll just add one more thing, though: we all probably learned long ago that lichens are symbiotic organisms, usually consisting of an alga and a fungus. I remember that from high school biology. Most of this article takes this point of view, because that was the accepted science for most of the history of that field. I did see an article recently, though I'm having trouble finding it again, which stated that many lichens contain a third organism, a yeast. There's some discussion of the concept here.   So the yeast binds the other organisms together.

You know. Like the Force.