life as other than cellular/organismic

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

Folks,

There was a recent news feature in Nature that described a
group of folks suggesting that beyond a certain point back
in time there is no identifiable genome of a last universal
common ancestor (LUCA) cell/organism. The story is
Nature 427, 674 - 676 (19 February 2004); doi:10.1038/427674a
Title is "Origins of life: Born in a watery commune" Lead-in
line is "If you go back far enough, humans, frogs, bacteria
and slime moulds share a common ancestor. But scientists
can't agree what it was like, or even whether it was a single
creature. John Whitfield reviews the evidence."

One other quote:

'"The naive picture that a group of organisms got all their
genes from a simple last common ancestor is breaking down,"
says microbiologist Gary Olsen of the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. In its place, the image of a sophisticated,
global community is emerging, he says. "In the past two years,
it feels like it's fallen together into a coherent picture." Rather
than a last common ancestor, LUCA may have been a last
common community.'

I have meant to send this to list for some time...finally getting
to it. I see this trend as continuing to the point where we'll
soon talk of life itself as more a network, systemic or
community process (distributed, non-local, unfractionable,
non-mechanistic, with causal looping internally, etc.) than a
membrane-bounded, spatially localized, mainly linear fluxes
into/out of a bounded cellular/organismal entity, process or
phenomenon. The network/system likely came first and then
generated cells/organisms later. This is the view of HT Odum
from 1971. The story provides a more seamless bridge between
non-life and life, too, in my opinion. It also helps unify
"hardware and software", metabolism and genetics, life and
environment, epistemology and ontology, etc. etc. It also
inverts the traditional view that life is cellular in general and
ecosystems are all different and as due to the specifics of local
environments. It may be that life is ecosystemic in general, and
cells/organisms are special case, constrained, non-autonomous
subsets of life.

Dan