Change Everything No 4 - Life lesson: cooperation beats competition

Welcome to the fourth edition of my email newsletter that mixes science, history and politics.

Jan 21, 2024

Book news

Another first: I’ve signed up to speak at Milton Keynes Literary Festival in April about my forthcoming first book Change Everything. I hope I will be going to many similar events. If you happen to be running one - or run a bookshop that has events - please do get in touch; I’m keen to get around the country as much as possible, to smaller towns as well as big cities.

Picks of the week

Reading

I read The Wizard of the Kremlin yesterday in one sitting and highly recommend it. The novel serves as a comprehensive survey of modern Russian history (focused on a period I covered as a journalist, from the fall of Boris Yeltsin, to the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk and the rise of Yevgeny Prigozhin. His fall is not covered, but is foreshadowed.) But it is also a deep character study, of an individual and a nation, and a cracking read, bristling with fun historical and literary references that it wears lightly. The debut novel of Giuliano da Empoli, an Italian/French politics professor, written originally in the latter language, it covers a single evening, as Putin’s “Rasputin” (a fictionalised version of a real historical actor) tells the story of his life, including his rise with President Putin.

The political analysis is laser sharp. I was particularly taken with the understanding of the impact of Russian interference in Western politics through social media, with the aim of being found out: “The ultimate gesture that a great artist makes is to reveal contradiction." … The only thing they will understand is that we’ve gotten inside their heads and are playing with their neural networks as if they were slot machines.”

(Here’s the Guardian review.)

Listening

Another whole podcast series to recommend, It’s A Continent, about African history, presented by two young women who don’t pretend to be experts on their subject, but our finding out about it with their listeners. Particularly favourite episodes, those on Wangari Maathai in Season 1 and Chagos Islands in Season 3

Having been in contact with them on what was Twitter, I was delighted to invite the presenters, British-Nigerian Chinny Ukata and Astrid Madimba, who’s British and Congolese, to the House of Lords and we had a great discussion about how little teaching of African history there is in the UK education system. They also have a book out of the same title, if you’d prefer that format.

Thinking

Photo by Craig Manners on Unsplash

On K’gari (formerly known as Fraser Island), off the coast of the Australian state of Queensland, for the fourth time in six months a wongari (dingo - native canine) has been killed because it had attacked people. This is highly unusual behaviour, generally after the wongari have been encouraged to get close by some of the many tourists on the island. The indigenous Butchulla people - who regard them as part of their family - are horrified by these events. But there is now, the Guardian reports, serious consideration being given to capping the number of tourists, particularly in peak season, so that their behaviour can be better managed. About time the thinking changed, since it is people who are the cause of the problem, not the wongari.

Researching

There is something very strange about Chlamyphorus truncatus, a 15cm-long, underground-dwelling armadillo. And it is not that it is pink, or that it looks like the drawing of a child with a particularly vivid imagination. Scientists have found that - unlike any other known species - it has two layers of skin. Underneath the skin bearing the hard shield, made up of scales and bony plates, along its back is another skin layer covered in a rich layer of fine white fur. The whole species is a reminder there is so much we don’t know about the world: “Their habits are poorly understood, and most captive specimens have perished in a matter of days.” (The oversized claws are for burrowing.)

Photo: Cliff

Planetary innovation is founded on cooperation

Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.” Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution, p. 29

I had the great pleasure last week of presenting a seminar for students at the New School of the Anthropocene, which is seeking to develop a new model of higher education as a community of scholars working to develop a survival model of the future, rather than the commercial operations feeding the current economic system that our mainstream institutions have been pushed into becoming.

I doubt there are many other non-specialist audiences who asked if they knew of Lynn Margulis would respond so resoundingly in the positive. Yet she deserves to be as famous, her discoveries as prominent in the curriculum as Charles Darwin, so I thought I’d focus on her today, to help to spread the word.

For it was Margulis who led the way to the understanding that it is symbiogenesis – permanent partnerships between different species, rather than competition – that is at the core of the development of the astonishing genius of life, that paved the way for millions of types of organism on our planet, the rich verdancy of a tropic rainforest, the astonishing complexity of a teaspoon of healthy soil.

It is at the centre of every cell in your body, and at the heart of the photosynthesis that is responsible for turning sunlight into the sugars at the base of the world’s food chains. It was the genius of Margulis that recognised, and fought for acceptance, of the understanding that the mitochondria (in high school biology terms “the powerhouse of the cell”) and chloroplasts (responsible for photosynthesis in plants) were originally independent organisms. (“Difficult” women get predictable responses: One of her grant applications drew the response "Your research is crap. Don't ever bother to apply again." I’ll bet that academic made little original progress in his life.)

Subsequently, our ability to analyse the DNA of different cell components have proved her right. But as is usual in science, she had intellectual foreparents. Russian Konstantin Merezhkovsky – primarily a specialist in lichen (long known to be symbionts of algae and fungi, with bacteria now added into the mix - and so tough they survived on the outside of the International Space Station for 18 months) - first argued in 1909 that chloroplasts had been ingested and incorporated within plant cells, and that this was symptomatic of a major creative force in evolution. The Russian anatomist Andrey Famintsyn and US biologist, Ivan Wallin, working separately, came to the same conclusions in the early decades of the century, but were dismissed as cranks by their peers.

Such cooperative evolutionary events kept occurring at great turning points in our planet’s systems. In the Carboniferous period (360-300 million years ago) plants flourished, and even after they had died, there was little to eat the remains. Ninety percent of the coal on Earth was laid down in this time, while oxygen was about 32 percent of the atmosphere versus about 20 today, as the huge mass of chloroplasts worked at speed in their hosts, with little to trim them back. First the wood roaches, then other insects formed symbiotic relationships with cellulose- and lignin-digesting microbes, enabling them to live on woody plants, eating them both alive and dead. About the same time vertebrates picked up the trick of cooperating with foliage-digesting microbes, with pareisasaurs (large parareptiles) showing a barrel-chested big stomach in which the fermentation would have taken place, and many early Triassic droppings showing the eggs of a kind of parasitic worm known only from herbivorous guts. Biomass that had been being stored in rocks was suddenly available for cycling through the living world. It was one of the great transformations of our planet, and all down to symbiotic cooperation.

The world starts to look like a very different set of systems when you see cooperation as the foundation of biology, yet we’ve yet to see that understanding transfer into much popular science, or politics. (As I noted in my review of the BBC series The Green Planet.)

Okay, not a directly relevant picture, except very generally on the inter-relationships of nature, but pointing to an excellent exhibition on in Paris until May 26: Shamanic Visions: Ayahuasca arts in the Peruvian Amazon. A great excuse to visit Paris, should you need an excuse. The painting is by Harry Pinedo Valera/Inin Metsa, “Drawings of the Forest and the River”.

Almost the end

One of my political moments of note in the week was the Financial Times printing my letter setting out - briefly - the “postgrowth” thesis, that we can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, and that chasing GDP growth has given us the unequal, unhealthy, insecure societies and battered planet on which we are now struggling to survive.

Next week Change Everything No 5 will be exploring post-growth further. If you know someone who might enjoy that, or any element of this newsletter, perhaps you could forward it to them? And if you got it that way, an ideal way to ensure you see future editions is to subscribe. Easy, and free.

What did you think?

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