Desert oasis in Libya: an ecosystem with clear boundaries 

                                          (credit: Sfivat via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 1.  (continued) 

But Physics, by itself, is not enough to guide us in building a new moral code. Physics portrays the universe as destructive and unpredictable. By just the odds of Physics, we shouldn’t be here. The truths of Physics do not favor life.  

Thus, the Life Sciences enter our calculations at this point. Again, there are two basic concepts that we must understand, two key principles from Biology to add to our two key principles from Physics.

First, in Biology, it is important that we grasp the Theory of Evolution. In Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, how life began is not described. He takes the fact that life has existed for a long time on this planet as a given. Only then does he go on to explain his theory of how life developed into the variety of forms that it has taken since that original life-creating event.

Living things keep changing by reproducing themselves and, during the process of reproducing themselves, gradually changing their forms and functions. Offspring are always a bit different from their parents.

As time passes, living things makes more of themselves. There is a whole set of models to grasp if we wanted to go into how plants capture and store energy from the sun and how animals eat plants or other animals to steal that energy to feed their bodies and to reproduce. But we don’t need to explain respiration, photosynthesis, or reproduction in order to see how the Theory of Evolution affects Moral Philosophy.   

To understand evolution, we must see two things: one is that when living things reproduce, the offspring are never identical to their parents. They differ from their parents, usually in small ways. Darwin called this trait of life “variation”.

The second tenet of evolution we must see is that of the offspring produced by living things, some are always better suited to survive than others. Of the many varied forms that new members of a species may take, a few are better adapted to survive in their environment than their siblings are. Fitter individuals that are better adapted survive in greater numbers than the rest; they then go on to reproduce, creating more species members with the better-adapted traits. Over generations, species change their anatomies (how they are physically built) and their physiologies (how they perform the tasks of staying alive) and gradually become new species. Darwin called this process “natural selection”.

Evolution is the result of these two traits of life. Evolution is happening all the time for all living things. It is happening gradually for our species, now. So, to reiterate: there are two sub-concepts of evolution - variation and natural selection. These give us the model called the Theory of Evolution, the first basic tenet of the life sciences.

Observable, measurable changes in a species’ physiology and anatomy may take many generations to arrive, many thousands of years by human calendars. But evolution is always going on. No species that lives ever achieves its "final form".

We’ll keep evolution in mind as we set out to build a new moral code.  

The second big concept we get from the Life Sciences is the idea of an ecosystem.

As a result of millennia of changes, living things have evolved by trial and error into forms that live together in communities. They do so with members of their own species plus members of other species, all interacting, cooperating, and competing in a multitude of ways. In fact, over billions of years, communities of living things have established themselves in all the parts of this planet that are viable for life. From mountain tops to deserts, jungles, and ocean depths, interdependent communities of living things exist. Living communities look very different from environment to environment, but in all places, they settle into complex interdependent communities. To reiterate: living things always come together into communities of this type. A community of this type is called an “ecosystem”. A pond, a patch of forest on a mountain, a desert oasis – these are ecosystems.

In an ecosystem, there may be thousands of species and billions of individual living things, all interacting. Some species may kill and eat others, some may support the growth of others, and some may do both at different times. But all of the species interact in ways which mean that in the total picture, they depend on each other to stay vigorous, and thus, to survive over the long term.

To human eyes, lions ripping out the guts of a wildebeest look cruel. But the lions keep the wildebeest herds in their area strong because most of the time by far, they kill weak, sick, injured, and stupid wildebeest. Over time, the lions keep the whole wildebeest herd strong by culling out those individuals who are less fit to survive and reproduce.

How interdependent are the species in an ecosystem? A famous case study was seen in the ecosystem of Yellowstone National Park in the United States. The park had been severely overgrazed by elk for years. In its valleys especially, shrubs had been grazed down to stubs. As the elk overpopulated, other species dwindled. The ecosystem was out of balance because it lacked big predators.

Then, a pack of wolves was introduced into the park’s ecosystem. In a few years, the elk were avoiding the valleys. The wolves had a hunting advantage there. The numbers of elk shrank a bit, but overall, the valleys came back to full vigor. The beaver came back. Many species of plants and birds came back.

All kinds of species that had depended on valleys and the species that the valleys supported grew in numbers again. The wolves’ effect even indirectly caused the courses of some streams to change.

Ecosystem balances work down to the level of micro-organisms. Paramecia eat amoeba as surely as wolves eat elk. Spiders eat flies, owls eat mice, big fish eat little fish. Every ecosystem needs predators. Every ecosystem gets stronger, nimbler, and more flexible – and thus, more able to rebound from shocks and natural disasters – the more different kinds of living things and relationships between living things it contains. Or in scientific terms, the more biodiversity it contains.  

In our task of constructing a modern moral code, the concept of ecosystem, and its sub-concepts of balance and diversity are crucial. We will return to them over and over again.  

Two ideas from Physics: entropy and uncertainty. Two from Biology: evolution and ecosystem, with balance and biodiversity as sub-tenets of the ecosystem model. All these are present all over the Earth, all at once, all the time.

African lion in Namibia

                          (credit: Kevin Pluck, via Wikimedia Commons)