Re: Ecosystems and life

["John Kineman" <***>]

Hi Judith
as you know, I can't refrain from commenting when the subject is ecosystems.

I agree with this, as we discussed before, but also hold out the caveat
that nothing is entirely black and white. There is perhaps a certain
threshold where the organization of what we call organism becomes stable
enough to obntain its dynamic persistence through time, which we then
call species. Organisms, like ecosystems, also contain non-biotic
components and separate living organisms in an ecosystem-like
relationship (e.g., bacteria, mitochondria, ...). But ecosystems have
not corssed this threshold of organization where their overall
organization is passed on to the future - their organization seems to
exist primarily in the present (except for mutualisms, etc. and the
community arguments). Perhaps we are now facilitating the process of
closing ecosystems to a continuing presence by studying them through
science and then restoring them or replicating them. This is one way the
Earth could achieve the status of the super-organism that was popular to
talk about a few decades ago. So, I would say there are living aspects
to the whole ecosystem aside from just the living aspects of its
organismic components. Yet to make distinctions, what you say is
certainly the case, that ecosystems are not alive in the same sense as
organisms; i.e., they are not the same.

Another way to support this continuum view is in Rosen's largest system
ideas. The contingencies between larger and smaller systems are part of
complex systems generally, are they not? Thus "life" and ecosystems
would both have such semantic inputs from larger systems - i.e., would
have functions in larger systems. So both organisms and ecosystems have
aspects of their existence that are shared up and down this system
hierarchy, and organisms are not fully contained in the package of the
thing we call an organism. It thus makes sense that the situation is a
continuum, in which organism means passing a significant threshold of
organization (or closure).

Does that work?

John

Judith Rosen wrote:

>Tim made some very good points in his post. I have a couple to add.
>
>The discussion revolves around the fact that ecosystems are full of "life"
>but not alive themselves. The reason they are full of life is because they
>are systems that are composed of a diversity of living things. The life in
>ecosystems is an artifact of the living state of the components, not an
>emergent property that arises spontaneously out of the complexity of the
>organization of the ecosystem.
>
>The other issue is context-dependence. Our knowledge of life forms is
>limited to the ones on this planet; that's all we've ever had the
>opportunity to interact with. Therefore, every life form on Earth has
>evolved within a context that was the niche within its environment that it
>was "contextualized" by. In other words, environments imprint their essence
>in some sense to the organisms that evolve there; both in physical
>conditions (or parameters), and in time. Organisms in turn impute effects to
>environments they interact with. It is certainly an important relationship,
>one that exists within the organisms own structure in it's organization and
>in the "time scale" that is the inherent "anticipatory model" that my father
>wrote about. But the very fact that you can think about transplanting an
>organism from one environment to another, even an artificial one, proves
>that the context is mutable. The organisms "organization" (the complexity
>level that causes life) will be preserved by many substitute contexts, as
>long as certain boundary conditions are provided. Those boundary conditions
>are the aspects of the environment that were imprinted into the organisms
>organization when it evolved there.
>
>Judith
>
>