The development of all life, and its future

Science!
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The development of all life has been the development of a single organism. In the early earth, near hydrothermal vents, there was a pre-biotic metabolic network, running on iron sulfide. This was not what we consider an organism, it would’ve been divided into multiple ‘pots’ each producing intermediates in the cycles that eventually became our metabolic system. Life originated as an entire ecosystem-level metabolic network, where each part worked in tandem to create the complex chemicals needed to form the first proto-cell.

In the incredibly hot water of hydrothermal vents, these proto- cells needed a way to stop their genetic material from being damaged, or to replace it when it is damaged. This lead to the evolution of lateral gene transfer, a system where two microbes that are near each other will give each other some genetic material. This makes both organisms more likely to survive by replacing degraded genetic material, and introducing genetic diversity.

One effect of this is that archaea and bacteria will get close to each other, and form positive symbiotic relationships. You need to have contact to exchange genetic material, and archaea are larger than bacteria, which leads to archaea developing the ability to form ‘nubs’ (little extensions of their cellular membrane which hold the bacterium in place). After some time, the nubs of the archaea could grow large enough that they engulfed the bacterium, becoming the nucleus of the first eukaryotic cell, while the bacterium became mitochondria. Eukaryotic life has the unique ability to form membrane-bound organelles, which are far more efficient than the proteins haphazardly floating around in prokaryotes. This allows for eukaryotes to grow in complexity, and work with each other more closely than prokaryotes, which allowed for the development of multicellular life.

After the evolution of multicellularity, creatures have more ability to specialize certain cells into doing certain things, this gives an advantage over other cells. Eventually, creatures like siphonophores come into existence. Siphonophores are made out of many individual clones of one original multi-cellular organism, allowing the different parts of the siphonophore (colony?) to specialize into doing different things. It’s one organism made
out of many independent organisms, each with their own roles. This same transition from a multicellular organism to a colonial
superorganism happened in ants, termites, etc. And I would argue that humans are in the early stages of becoming one such superorganism.

In the future, I view it as inevitable that all life will amalgamate into a single superorganism, where each part is individual, and collective at the same time. Soon we will see the emergence of a global organic mind, which processes all information on the planet and co-ordinates global ecology.

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What about selfishness, narcissism, loneliness, other anti-social behaviors, tribalism/nationalism, racism, e.t.c., which go against becoming a fully collective whole, and instead cause people to break up into groups or even loners?

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But isn’t life more so just sort of a self-replicating pattern of “information”? And self-replicating information that works only towards being good enough at replicating, not being perfect at it? What mechanism brings convergence?

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An interesting example are parasites, organisms that specifically harm/cause death of another organism to survive. The craziest examples would be spreading Cancer cells within one own’s body, and of course, Viruses. These do not cause cohesion.

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I think it’s a bit of a situation where any organism that harvests energy from the environment thus has energy which can be harvested, and since the energy in the organism is harvestable a new niche opens up to harvest that energy through predation and parasitism, which of course are not cohesive relationships.

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Viruses are a selective pressure towards collectivism. Societies that care less about other people, wearing a mask if you are sick, or wearing protection if you have an STD can prevent other people from catching the disease, changing the evolutionary fitness of societies that don’t do that type of thing, especially when there’s a pandemic. They also incentivizes a collectivist outlook globally, for instance, if countries where people can easily afford to get vaccinated don’t help countries who cannot easily afford to get treated, viruses will soon evolve into a threat towards the people who can afford to be treated. Only by developing a global perspective can these issues be solved.

Yeah those behaviors, and societies that embrace them are selected against. If humanity cannot coordinate effectively and recognize that we are dependent on the environmental and ecological conditions that for human existence we will not live

Also incels don’t reproduce so that kind of thing is obviously selected against

PS. Thank you for your patience everyone I’ve havent been on forums much before and I was on my mobile phone

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You do realize you can edit your responses so you don’t need to triple post.

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The issue is that if these were intense enough selective pressures to warrant a shift, we likely would have seen that shift. Societies seem to settle somewhere between collectivism and individualism, at a limit which maintains the society for the interests of a present population, particularly the politically dominant population. I’m not denying there’s any sort of gravitation towards collectivism - many have theorized so, but I think the mechanisms you’re grasping at don’t allow for a clear pathway to collectivism. I think you need to look more towards how power is distributed within a society to understand what causes a society to shift in any direction. It’s also important to define our terms, I don’t know exactly what you mean by collectivism in this context.

Also, try to edit instead of double posting! If you highlight text from somebody’s message, you can quote them to effectively respond to multiple messages at once. Like this! I think that’s still a forum standard, probably.

image

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Are you sure you’re finding that everything appears to be going towards a sort of collectivisation across the entire biosphere since that is the best option to explain those phenomena, or is it because when you’ve started thinking about it, the mindset was already established and searched for what supports it, even if the mindset by itself wouldn’t be what you reach by first analyzing the data with a clear mind?

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I won’t deny that I’m influenced by confirmation bias, as everyone is. and this wasn’t really well developed theory, more of just a interesting thought I had

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Anyhow I feel like in the end it’s survival of the fittest which may not always favour working together as a biosphere

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There are actually a few places on earth where multiple species that can’t survive alone work together for the collective benefit, but that is exceptionally rare.

I may be biased, but from what I have learned/experienced, when it comes to humanity, the selfish tend to come out on top in the short run, at a long run cost that is worse for the collective. It is half the reason the US is on the verge of economic collapse and the environment is so bad. People do what is best for themself, and don’t care how it effects their neighbors or descendants. Like Eddie Lampert, who owned Sears, and INTENTIONALLY ran himself out of business for his own personal profit, without a care about how that effected all the people who had worked for him that lost their jobs due to his actions (he was his own landlord and increased his own rent to profit one company he owned at the cost of the other). Our society runs on money. Selfish people collect more money than collectivists do. Ergo, selfish people can make the rules that the collectivists then have to abide by.

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Maybe one day we will be able to cure out selfishness out of people

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With the right science/technology, it should be possible to greatly increase the availability of/reduce the need for certain resources, but the initial investments to do so have enormous costs, and most people with that kind of money are looking for profit. You know, Nicolas Tesla had the idea to use a wireless network to beam not only information, but electricity, into every household in America, more than 90 years before wireless internet was invented, and he designed a prototype (for the electricity part), but couldn’t get it funded, because the investors weren’t interested in his plan to give wireless electricity to the world for free, they wanted to charge people. So sad.

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Only with a collective movement we could topple the rule of the selfish and greedy… one day…

It’d put an end to a trend that’s been around since perhaps the life begun

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The system is objectively in favor of selfishness, so if we want to end greediness and selfishness, we need a change that will bring about a new system.

Like a socialist revolution! Viva la NDAF!

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Maybe let’s not bring the blue eye’s attention here…

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I’m not denying the natural tendency towards selfishness over community. I think you basically made my point for me with the thing about us being on the verge of economic and environmental collapse because of this. My argument wasn’t really that humanity will definitely do this, it’s more that if a great shock comes, we must do this if we are to continue to exist.

Also I feel like I kinda misrepresented myself by implying that what I’m talking about is the same type of thing as any normal political development (like helping ppl in the third world get vaccines or what have you), when my idea of how this comes about is not really through that. I agree that the way society is right now is deeply engrained in everyone. I don’t think the thing I’m imagining could come about from gradual societal shifts. It would either take a massive punctured equilibrium event on the scale of the black death or the world wars to bring about what I am imagining, or technological advances, like the advent of human parthenogenesis, allowing us to structure our societies more like the colonies of ants, or both of course.

Another thing is the language I used in the original post is not very precise. I don’t think it will be possible soon for all life on earth to be unified under a single mind in the sense that we will all converge and absolutely everything is going to work together and there’ll be no problems, because that would be improbable to happen soon. I think rather than something like that, humans will come to a point where the current system does not work, and the people who don’t recognize that and come together to solve those issues and maintain the ecological balance that allows for human society will just die off, leaving only the ones who do.

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Would that essentially be cloning?

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Basically yes, ants, bees, and wasps have the ability to fertilize their own egg cells to produce monoploid clones of themselves, which are male, and when fertilized will produce diploid offspring which are female. This is why they have independently evolved eusocial colonies so many times, which leads me to think that if people come up with a similar way to clone ourselves we could become eusocial much more easily

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