Saving Life

2021 M. Lynn Lamoreux, PhD. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  05/20/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-1377-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-1376-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021900830

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The purpose of this book

Is to share a sustainable world view

That is biologically more true to the nature of Life

Than the failed corposystem world view that we have been taught.

This book is about achieving a viable future within the Biological system

of the Living Earth for the generations of humans yet to come,

If that is what we decide to do.

___________________________________

Biosystem = the system of the entire LIFE of Earth

Corposystem = The modern human social system that includes nearly all the good guys and nearly all the bad guys; the corposystem is a subsystem of LIFE.

LIFE, written in all caps, refers to LIFE itself, the LIFE of Earth for example. The LIFE of your body.

LIFE is an emergent property of the Biosystem

It is true that human peace cannot be achieved without the dream of peace

And it is also true that human peace cannot be achieved without

A fact-based human acknowledgement of the

Biological foundations of peace that denies the fiction

of survival of the fittest as a core phenomenon,

And recognizes how nature really uses collaborative interactions to sustain LIFE.

Other approaches to making peace only end in new kinds of conflict.

This book is dedicated to:

Dr. Elizabeth (Tibby) Russell

And Dr. Mary Lyon

The PanAmerican,

Japanese, European and Asian

Pigment Cell Societies

His Holiness The Dalai Lama

and Geshe Thupten Jinpa

Father John Dear

and Pace e Bene

Beata Tsosie-Peña and

TEWA Women United

CONTENTS

Preface

Corposystem-based versus Biosystem-based World Views

We are All Subunits of The Corposystem -- And the Biosystem

What is a System? (See Chapters 04 and 05 and Appendix B)

Our World Views are Systems That Direct Our Behaviors

How does LIFE Sustain Itself?

Chapter 1 It IS What It IS

The Big Lie

What is LIFE?

Chapter 2 Take Charge

What Can We Do?

Collaboration, Communication, Community

The Facts are Not Different

Our Words May Differ, But Words do Not Change Facts

Discussion

So Again, What Can We Do?

Why Aren’t We Doing It?

Codes of LIFE

World Views

Systems

Chapter 3 Information

Stories, Metaphors and Memes

Words

Discussion

Proper Definitions

What is a system?

Beginning with proper definitions

Chapter 4 Naturally Evolved LIFE Systems

What is LIFE?

Emergent Properties

Systems (Again)

Functions of Naturally Evolved LIFE Systems

Emergent Properties (Again)

We Tend to Name Systems by Their Emergent Properties

Naturally Evolved LIFE Systems are Complex and Adaptive

Adaptation is Not Evolution

Adaptation - Implications

Solution

Chapter 5 I am a Naturally Evolved System

I Am a Naturally Evolved System

I Am a LIFE System

Chapter 6 Energy, Entropy and Complexity

The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics (Grossman, 2014):

Energy and Entropy

Background – Fourteen Big Ideas

Energy, Entropy, Complexity

Sweet Spot

      Energy

      Entropy

      Environment

Complexity

Information

Adaptation is NOT Evolution.

Balance

Chapter 7 The Spider Question

The Answer

SAVE THE SPIDERS!

The Complexity of the Biosystem

The Efficiency of the Biosystem

      Efficiency – Form/Function

      Efficiency - Multitasking

      Efficiency – Recycling

      Implications – Recycling – waste not/want not

Implications - Pollution Sickness (aka Environmental Illness)

Evolution Sustains the Balanced Efficiency of the Biosystem Or at least it tries.

Balanced Efficiency of the Biosystem

Chapter 8 What is Evolution?

The Trash Company

Winter Wonderland

What Has Changed?

What is an Evil System?

Chapter 9 Codes of LIFE

Naturally Evolving Systems May be Discrete and Enclosed Or Not

Information

Emergent Properties

What is a Code?

What is meant by appropriate response?

System Codes

THREE CODES OF LIFE

      A - The Genetic Code of LIFE

The Genetic Code - Implications

      B – The Human World View Code

Components of a Human World View

Ontogeny of a World View Begins Before Birth

World View Code – implications

The Logic of World Views

The Tower of Reality

LIFE Codes Work Together

      C – The Universal Electromagnetic (EM) Code

The Precautionary Principle

Implications

What is Pollution Illness?

Can we Cure Pollution Illness?

Categories of Pollution Illness

Chemical Sensitivity

Electromagnetic Sensitivity

Chapter 10 Fourteen Big Ideas

REVIEW

      Energy

      Entropy

      Information

      Complexity

      Self Assembly

EVOLUTION

      Genetics

      Variability (including Self-Assembly)

      Natural Selection

      Genetics

      Variability

      Natural Selection

Limiting Factors

Evolution

How Does Evolution Function?

Evolution - Implications

Fourteen Big Words – Implications

So if we don’t need all these big Words/Ideas, Why are we Using Them?

Why?

Chapter 11 LIFE

Selected References

The Teaching Company DVD courses that I studied for this book include:

College Freshman Biology Text Books

Other References

Web Links

APPENDIX A – Our Common Problem

APPENDIX B ‒ Definitions, Descriptions, Key Concepts

APPENDIX C ‒ Realities Of Life

Appendix D ‒ Fourteen Big Ideas

APPENDIX E ‒ In The Beginning

PREFACE

Really, the reason why we devote our lives and our money to . . . (basic scientific research) . . . is because we want to know the answer. . . We want to discover the way the world works. . . We want to know what this nature is that we live in, what are the rules, what are the ingredients.

(Carroll, 2015)

My post-WWII generation had its troubles, plenty of them, but we were working hard to bring together our various cultures, with our social sciences and politics, and with the good basic science that is necessary if we are to know the rules of nature that can grow a sustainable world view to carry humanity forward into:

A reasonably comfortable, sustainable future, hand in hand with a healthy and productive Biosystem.

Sustainability is the ability to continue – to cycle forward in time -- forever. Or, unto the 7th generation and beyond. (Lyons & Goodman; Lyons & Moyers)

I did my bit.

On January 1, 2000, I emerged from my career as a geneticist, with some good publications and a cherished award from my peers for contributions to our common field of research, and then followed up with a co-authored book (Lamoreux et al., 2010) on the subject of a lovely naturally evolved biological system.

It seemed like success, but outside of the field of basic scientific research, I felt like a foreigner in my own land.

What I found, as I shut down my laboratory and settled into my dream retirement on a small piece of land, with the horses and a dog and a couple of cats, was a country – my country -- actually the whole Biosystem (the whole system of the living Earth, see Appendix B for definitions and descriptions) as we humans need it for our survival-- in deep trouble. Trouble that seemed to me primarily the result of biological misinformation – that could be resolved, I assumed, by making available the real universal facts about how the naturally evolved system of the LIFE of Earth, nurturing us within itself, functions to sustain itself and us -- healthy, beautiful and bountiful.

Reality Number One - We cannot align our behaviors with the fact-based requirements for all of LIFE if we don’t know what LIFE requires for its own welfare – or if we believe an alternative, unnatural or homocentric, human centered, version of the story of LIFE (Preface) See Appendix C for a list of the Realities.

So, I sat down in my little travel trailer on my little ranch and read, researched and wrote about the universal Facts of Life.

Universal Facts apply to us and to every other part of The Creation. "Social facts" apply to human societies, not necessarily to the universe; and different societies may have different social facts. That’s a down-side of our human reality. We are not in charge of the Universal Facts of LIFE, or of the Creator, or of The Creation. Problems arise when our imprinted social beliefs are different from the universal realities that apply to the whole of The Creation, including us.

Universal facts are realities and processes that we cannot change because they operate throughout the entire universe, the whole of The Creation, or at least the whole of LIFE. For example, energy, entropy, information, self-assembly, natural selection, time, gravity, history as it really was.

Our human social facts (Gimbel, 2015) and beliefs, on the other hand, are not universal Facts. They are beliefs or situations or answers that have been imprinted on our common consciousness, during our communal development as a naturally evolving human society. Imprinting is one of the ways that our environment communicates with us during our development (Chapter 09, LIFE codes). It is perfectly normal (Eagleman, 2017), and probably necessary. But not always perfect.

"The rules by which we determine a social fact are internalized.

We never think of them . . .

sometimes the social facts are there for good reason,

but sometimes they’re not. . . . Not all social facts are desirable,

and unless we are forced to confront and justify them,

they will remain of their own inertia, and become worse if not challenged."

(Gimbel, 2015)

The up-side of being human is that -- while we cannot change the laws that organize the entire universe -- we can change our human belief systems.

But it took me hardly any time to realize that very few people seem to care about the universal facts of the naturally evolved Creation – or of the biological system -- the LIFE(1) of the whole Earth Biosystem, of which we are a part.

And then my struggle began, with which I will not bore you here, to explain that the human Fundamental Problem (see Chapter 02 and Appendix A), our biological Problem that is at the core of most of our intractable human social, political and economic distress, is a real universal fact of LIFE that is easy to understand and largely avoidable (Diamond, 2011). I did not say easy to avoid – but avoidable, by changing our human behaviors.

The reality of our Biosystem is much more elegant than anything humans can conceive, and even so our Problem is well demonstrated (Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 1996; Goldsmith, 1981; Ripple et al., 2017; Gorschkov et al., 2002; and many others quoted in this book and elsewhere). But the people would rather hear about a pretty human social truth that in fact cannot be squeezed into the fact-based foundations of LIFE and the naturally evolved systems of Earth. And so most people don’t want to think about the universal facts; mostly we just believe the social truths.

Why do we not want to hear about the universal facts? I asked myself. Apart from a few physicists, why do we prefer to believe in a story that cannot be? Or am I wrong about the science? I need to find the answers to those questions.

I studied many disciplines at the basic level: economics; sociology; philosophy and religion; mathematics; physics (classical, quantum, modern, chaos, information, complexity), and most important of all, Biology since I am a Biologist and the Problem is biological.

The Teaching Company (www.TheTeaching

Company), was an invaluable resource, publishing basic lectures given by experts, that we can watch as many times as it takes to get the concepts that are understood today, and go back to if we should forget.

My goal was to learn enough about multiple relevant disciplines, based in my own specialties of genetics, evolution and ecology, so that I could fit together their basic, well-studied principles to describe some of the emergent patterns of LIFE, and particularly to learn how our modern human social view of LIFE differs from the reality.

I learned a lot, and it was fun learning.

"How are the immense numbers of parts of LIFE integrated into its holistic, living, evolving, sustainable reality? Why do they stay together rather than fly apart because of entropy? What does the whole of LIFE require for its survival? How is that different from our modern human belief system?"

Those were my next questions.

The answers turned out to revolve around balance and communication; around maintaining the viable balance among the systems of the whole Biosystem as Lewin (1992) and Lloyd (2016); Heylighen et al., 2010) and others describe it:

Life is balanced on the edge of chaos.

And I learned how evolution does the balancing, by bringing together and integrating the laws of LIFE.

At the same time, I spent agonizing hours on Facebook responding to questions and/or statements and arguments from people who obviously were not well informed about the Living Earth environment, as well as challenges from paid hacks as one colleague refers to them, and presumably unpaid hacks who simply get their kicks out of creating uproar (Berne, 1964), rather than educating themselves and helping us all to face up to the Facts of Life and find our place within them. And other people who sharpened my understanding of one or another question.

Challenged by a waiter at a pub in downtown Bryan, I began a blog, Bare Bones Biology (http://FactFictionFancy.wordpress.com).

The up-side of the internet is there were occasional questions that I could not answer well enough to satisfy anyone. These helped to guide my study. Two in particular kept cropping up:

1. How can the Biosystem be sustainable in a universe that tends toward entropy? (see Chapter 06)

2. If, as you claim, everything in the Biosystem is connected, from the micro- organisms to the whole ecological system, how do they connect? I am not connected to a zebra in Africa. Maybe it is connected to the grass it eats, but I am not. (see Chapters 07, 08, 09,10)

I got some answers. More than I expected. This book is an effort to organize them and share them with you as they relate to our current fundamental human Problem; a Problem that I thought everyone already understood because it was well studied long before the green revolution worked so hard a to prevent it. That is, overpopulation. (Appendix A)

But I know most people do not want to hear about that again. Therefore many of you will be happy to know that this book is NOT primarily about overpopulation. Rather, it is mostly about why we must believe that the balance of The Creation – biological balance -- is critical to our survival, and how it works. This view is based on:

A – Rearranging the Facts of LIFE into a world view that is more logical than than the outdated misinterpretation of the corposystem world view;

B – Adding three new insights (at least new to me):

1. Explains how and why biological (organic) energy actually uses entropy to generate the multitasking complexity that makes LIFE possible, including why our technologies cannot replace the processes of LIFE or force LIFE into a sustainable balance of our choice (Chapter 06).

2. Explains more clearly how living systems communicate with each other and why they must (Chapters 07, 09),

3. Explains why pollution diseases are likely to become our next predicable big surprise, as climate change progresses, if we continue to focus on human wants to the exclusion of Biosystem needs (Chapter 09). Unless we tear ourselves apart first.

Whatever we believe, ignoring any reality does not solve our problems, as we learned well enough relative to the Covid-19 crisis. Neither does denial. We all know what became of cigarette-damage denial 40 or 50 years ago and then we know what became of climate-change denial that was hot and heavy on the web nearly twenty years ago when I began my blog. And now we know that pandemic-denial only makes the reality worse for the community as a whole system.

A few people get rich by telling the rest of us what we want to hear (nearly everyone likes to hear pretty propaganda) but real facts are much more important, because pretty propaganda fades into our memories of lost causes, while real facts eventually come around and bite the deniers (or most often their children) in the rear because, as we said above, humans cannot change the Facts of LIFE. FYI, I have made every effort to fact-check my newer world view. The corposystem has not.

Overpopulation, as critical as it is to climate change, pandemics and human survival, is just another well-established and well-studied fact, and this book will not ignore any relevant, well-understood biological fact. Or at least that is the plan.

Good books about overpopulation are readily available and extremely important (Catton, 1982; Diamond, 2011; Dowd, 2007; Gore, 2006, 20170; Gorschkov et al., 2002; Heinberg and Lerch, 2010; Hopfenberg, et al, 2001, 2003; Martensen, 2009; Salmoney, 2004; Tiroir A Films, 2011; Wilson, 2016).

This book will not exclude awareness of our overpopulation, nor the probability that we cannot survive if we ignore or deny it and are unwilling to talk about overpopulation and deal with it, because it is BALANCE of the whole that sustains LIFE. That’s why the subject of this book is fourteen big ideas (Chapter 10, Appendix C) that place overpopulation in the context of balanced evolution and guide us toward understanding how LIFE sustains its balance.

But, because this book takes a holistic view of LIFE, we cannot discuss any of the details at great length. The goal is to envision the over-all system of LIFE, why and how it changes in response to human pressures or any other kind of pressures. That is, how LIFE uses the Facts of LIFE to sustain itself. The answer is, it changes. It evolves.

This book is an effort to present a holistic insight that is different from what most of us have been told or taught, about how the whole cycle of LIFE sustains itself. Because:

Reality Number One - We cannot align our behaviors with the fact-based requirements for all of LIFE if we don’t know what LIFE requires – or if we choose to believe an alternative or homocentric version of the story of LIFE. (Preface)

Communally, we of the corposystem (the corposystem is our human naturally evolved corpo-political-economic-military-medical-educational-charitable social system) as a system, we are not trying to collaborate with the Facts of LIFE. Instead, we are trying to save ourselves from those universal facts of LIFE by looking harder and harder for ways to fight against them.

That will not work.

LIFE is bigger and more powerful than we are.

Corposystem-based versus Biosystem-based World Views –

What are the Most Significant Differences?

The corposystem apparently believes it is more powerful than The Creation or the Creator, that our technologies can change nature to what we wish it were. They cannot.

Systems thinking (Chapter 04, 05, 06) (Barabasi, 2003; Meadows, 2007) applies to the Biosystem, not as mathematics or economics or politics or numbers crunching, or technology -- but as biology, because LIFE is biological -- not primarily human.

The Biosystem absolutely requires organic energy rather than technological energy such as solar or wind or hydrolic or any of those – in order for LIFE to exist (Goldsmith, 1981; West, 2017; Gorschkov et al., 2002) for at least the following reasons:

1. Organic (biological, biochemical) energy recycles the matter of LIFE at the same time that it flows the biological (organic) energy through LIFE. Normal LIFE does not have trash heaps or pollution illnesses. It does not remove materials of LIFE from the cycles of LIFE.

2. Organic energy (carried by organic molecules) contains or includes the biological information that is needed to flow energy through the Biosystem. Our technologies cannot do that.

3. Every specific biological interaction requires a specific, complex combination of information with energy. Biological interactions are not all the same as each other, in fact they may be all different, each specifically designed for its minute or magnificent task, and we do not understand most of them.

Biological energy systems are primarily collaborative systems rather than dominational systems. Therefore the failed corposystem world view, that is based on survival of the fittest is primarily not a valid description of evolution, nor a valid guide to human survival (see evolution Appendix B and Chapters 08 and 09), and the reality is very much more complex than most or our human "big data.

The answer to the entropy question involves complexity, not a simple linear gradient (Chapter 06).

The necessity of communication among naturally evolved biological systems, and the probable means by which naturally evolved systems talk to each other are apparently not known to the corposystem (Chapters 06, 07, 09, 10).

And the saddest difference between corposystem thinking and Biosystem thinking is the split between the idealism of most basic scientists and activists, and the egoistic and greedy uses to which we all are now putting their great works. The denial of the human need for our idealism and recognition of the many ways in which we need our communities, particularly our ancient wisdom communities (religions), to help us find our way to the sustainable uses of the enormous power of our technologies.

Within the corposystem, we are smugly well educated, or proudly uneducated, but so afraid of being wrong that we would rather fight than ask questions, or even talk among ourselves about life-or-death issues. With the result that we don’t understand each other, and we tend to each jump on separate bandwagons, ignoring the issues that are common to nearly all the bandwagons, with the result that our efforts tend to cancel each other out or compete against each other, and so we work against each other rather than join hands and heads around our common desire to save humanity from itself.

What we of the corposystem say is not what we really believe (which also makes discussion difficult). If we can’t talk about what we want, in a realistic way, then we won’t get what we really want.

What we believe we are doing – growing something better -- does not align with its reality – its cause-and-effect result, in terms of its impact on the Biosystem (Chapters 04, 05, 06, 10), because the Biosystem is not human, and we do not make the effort to learn what it really is; that is, a multitasking collaboration of naturally evolving living systems -- and what it really needs to sustain ITSELF, so that it can support us; that is, an optimally efficient, viable balance among its parts that will require, minimally, a cessation of hostile human overgrowth.

We are All Subunits of The Corposystem -- And the Biosystem

Many of us claim that God created the world and put us in it (Old and New Testaments and many other origin stories, for examples see Campbell, 1999), and of course that may or may not be a real fact, depending somewhat on our concept of God and our insight into the lovely metaphorical poetry of the origin stories.

Either way, yes or no, it is very difficult to understand why we continue to destroy the works of our Creator and instead, in our efforts to save ourselves from the natural consequences of what we have done, we worship the golden calf of our technologies; for example, designating sacrifice zones; essentially trash dumps where we pour our waste products into the body of The Creation, the land, water and air, and from there into the bodies of the people who live in these areas, from which the toxins ultimate recycle into the entire Biosystem; and a similar example, trying to use technologies to cure the damage that technologies have caused to the Biosystem and the people in it.

Technologies cannot maintain the efficiency required for LIFE, and they absolutely cannot flow organic energy/information through the body of LIFE.

To judge by both our words and our behaviors, we of the corposystem world view believe that our power, individually and collectively, is greater than the incomprehensible energy of The Creation/Creator that created us; that our knowledge surpasses the wisdom of our own wisdom traditions – for a few examples of wisdom traditions see (Black Elk Speaks, 1932; Easwaran, 1991; Smith, 2001; The Dalai Lama, 2010; The New Testament; The Old Testament; The Koran; The Bhagavad Gita; the many works of Joseph Campbell; and others), and of the systems of LIFE itself.

Instead, we are fighting against facts that are NOT the cause of our Problem; we are the cause of our Problem, as we apply the facts to benefit ourselves, rather than to nurture the emergence of LIFE.

Reality Number Two – All of LIFE is an emergent property of the Biosystem, which is a naturally evolve system that is composed of other naturally evolved systems. We humans cannot change how they evolved or how they function to sustain LIFE. Just as the growth of the human embryo requires the womb, and the mother cow feeds the calf, so do all the mothers and all the species require the appropriate naturally evolved environment for their survival (Preface).

We already knew all that.

Well, we might not have been in a position to appreciate the way I said it, but really we have known, in more or less primitive and metaphorical ways, since our early origins, that we evolved in and of the Biosystem.

Evolution (Appendix A; Chapters 8 and 9), the creation of a complex universe, or a star, or LIFE, or a creature, or a social system, or a world view is mostly not about bashing heads or making new bits. It’s about how we use the old bits to interact communally by assembling them, or allowing them to come together in uniquely advantageous ways and then selecting those combinations that benefit the Biosystem. That is what evolution does, building on one combination after another, slowly, taking as much time as it takes to find the perfect combinations of characteristics that are able to balance LIFE against the chaotic nature of non-LIFE.

We knew that too. We already knew most of the facts that we need to save ourselves from extinction.

The solution to extinction – that is, the solution to climate change, including the pandemics, because there will be more -- is not in our technological power.

We can not overpower the Biosystem with our relatively primitive technologies.

The solution to our survival Problem would be, if we would do it, to find win-win behaviors and use them so that everything we do benefits both ourselves and our Biosystem – benefits ourselves BY benefiting our environment -- so that the Biosystem is able to balance itself without our pressure for more and more growth.

This is no more impossible than travel to the moon, and probably no more expensive; it is what makes LIFE different from non-LIFE.

The Problem (see Appendix A) is that we, the corposystem, is/are using universal facts to generate growth of what we want, rather than LIFE of the whole system that feeds us, and that is the immutable choice that we now face.

We are making an orgy of the concept that the whole should benefit us, and that is not how evolution works. It is our job to benefit our environment if we expect to get any perks, any perks of LIFE, back from our environments.

LIFE is, after all, not a separate thing. It arises – emerges -- from a unique organizational plan consisting of matter and energy and some other things that we do not understand very well and probably more that we don’t know about at all. LIFE is not a technology and LIFE cannot swallow technologies indefinitely without disorganizing the very arrangement that makes it alive, because our technologies cannot match the required efficiency of LIFE, because we cannot replicate the information that accompanies the energy of LIFE (Chapter 06) and directs the flow of energy throughout the system of LIFE.

Talking about that kind of important reality is one of our most ancient human forms of wisdom. Not talking about realities cannot save us from them. Modern wisdom cannot be wise if it declines rational discussion. Or biologically oriented community.

The purpose of this book is to start the conversation. We may be ready for it. Some people will want to skip the more complicated parts, and that is fine because the basic reality is easy to understand and simple (but not easy) to address.

Too many people, not enough resources; too many trash dumps, not enough recycling, and we cannot fix the Problem with our technologies. Technolical energy cannot replace organic energy because it cannot recycle the matter of which we are composed, and it does not and can not contain the information that automatically directs the biological uses of organic energy (Chapter 06).

That is why LIFE is alive and technologies are not.

The do-able world view is what I want to share -- how to think like the real, naturally evolved system that you are.

What is a System? (See Chapters 04 and 05 and Appendix B)

A system is a group of things, objects or characteristics that are organized so that they interact with each other (using energy, matter and information) to perform some common function. For example, I am a naturally evolved system composed of a group of organs, cells, and other structures that interact to keep me alive. My car is not a naturally evolved system, but it is a system composed of tires, engine, you know all that, which all work together to perform a common function of getting me from here to there (definition modified from Barabasi, 2003).

The subunits (parts, like the wheels, engine, etc. of a car) of naturally evolved systems fit together to generate the emergent properties of the system. The primary function of each naturally evolved system is to perpetuate its own emergent properties. An emergent property of the Biosystem is LIFE. An emergent property of the corposystem is growth. Growth for profit. (See Chapter 04 and Appendix B for a brief discussion of complex adaptive systems and their emergent properties). Every system is somewhat or a lot different from other systems, it talks to other systems using its emergent properties, and so it is useful to define and name the various systems using their emergent properties.

This is not a complicated idea. Well, maybe it is, but it is easier to think about interacting sets of systems that talk to each other – if our goal is to understand relationships and balance -- rather than make a list of all the details of every system – and their functions -- and try to understand how that all fits together. We really can not understand the emergent properties of a naturally evolved system by adding up the details of its structure, but we can describe and name the system according to its primary (emergent) function. As I have named the emergent property of the Biosystem – LIFE.

In this book, I will describe only a few functions – primarily fourteen interacting functions (our fourteen big ideas, see Chapter 10 and Appendix D). Only fourteen, but there are thousands or millions of ways that they interact to bring LIFE to the Biosystem. Fourteen is somewhat complicated, but is not as overwhelming as trying to figure out and understand millions of interactions. Fourteen is do-able.

Systems thinking is not a new and mysterious human discovery. It just takes looking at everything we already know from inside a different paradigm. Thinking about systems is similar to thinking about the filing system I kept track of when I was working as a secretary, many decades ago before I even knew about ecosystems. Humans have always operated within systems, and so does every other living thing and even more non-living things.

The biggest difference between the human organism and all or most of the other living systems is that humans have a uniquely analytical brain to understand with. We should use it for our benefit; and our primary benefit is LIFE (not money, not winning, and certainly not growth, which has become our biggest danger).

Each of us is a system composed of other systems (our subsystems, such as heart, lungs, feet) -- living inside an environmental system alongside many other systems (you know what your environment is – I am just putting different words to it). We are subsystems of our environmental system(s) in the same way that our organs, tissues and cells are subsystems of us. Every system of this enormous complex LIFE system is connected to the other systems by their emergent properties -- functions they perform that benefit the whole Biosystem, or at least their immediate environment.

Because of the intricately connected levels of efficiency that are required to sustain the Biosystem; and because the big fish does not normally rule in its pond, but primarily feeds off it; therefore, these relationships among the systems, subsystems and environmental systems, are more accurately viewed as collaborative, rather than dominational (Eisler, 1987; Lynn Margulis, quoted in Feldman, 2018; Janeway, 1980).

Reality Number Three –Naturally evolved LIFE systems are fundamentally collaborative, feeding information/energy back and forth and recycling matter. They are not primarily dominational. They mostly function to support themselves in ways that do not harm the whole system of LIFE, but instead support the whole (Preface).

Our World Views are Systems That Direct Our Behaviors

Our world views are also naturally evolved systems that try (just look around at the arguments on Facebook) they try very hard to sustain themselves even against all the self-evident logic we may throw against them. Thus terms good and bad in the diagrams on these pages relate to the sustainability of the cycle -- NOT to human Face Book declarations, or ethics or opinions; and not to whichever organism can eat the other organisms. Good means sustainable; bad means not sustainable, relative to its own environment.

The corposystem is a naturally evolved human social system that has been vigorously working to sustain its growth ethic, even though we know, and it is intuitively obvious, that the growth ethic is the root cause of climate change because it eats up the resources, not only for humans but for all sentient beings, and then throws the discards into the trash where they cannot be biologically recycled; or it would require prodigious amounts of energy to recycle.

We have known about the imbalance of food (Brown, 2004, 2008, 2014) that is caused by human overpopulation long before our science proved it, or at