2019-10-01
Was listening to a wonderful Upstream podcast episode in which Lisi Krall was interviewed. She is just bursting with provocative ideas on ecologies, language, entymology, and the emergence of agriculture. But the ferocity on which she advocates for the importance of the last one really struck me.
It inspired me to get into my usual complexity science way of thinking: What might this event represent as a selected adaptation in the network at one level (human society), and how might it be generalized to events that have happened at other levels (biological)?
Perhaps you have heard of mitochondria. If you remember from high school, mitochondria are the “power plants of the cells”. They produce all the energy that runs the damn show. All complex multicellular organisms have mitochondria. It’s a way-old adaptation.
But there’s a funny thing about how mitochondria came to be hanging out in our cells, making us the energy we need as complex lifeforms. You see, they have their own DNA, separate from ours. And the reason they have that, is thought to be because they used to be a separate organism. But somewhere along the line, way back when, a mitochondria was enveloped by another, larger cell. And the mitochondria was like “hey, I like these new digs”, and the host cell either didn’t resist, or maybe it’s little parasite allowed it to do more than it could before, and fare better in the environment than non-parasitized cells without mitochondria.
But anyhow, these two primitive creatures stumbled into destinies that became intertwined. They learned to reproduce together, with the mitochondria never leaving the host.
In some sense, the host cell simply adopted another organism, and started nurturing it to produce energy for itself. Or maybe it was that the parasite found a host that would protect it and allow it to reproduce more than it ever could have on its own. Really both are true, depending on your frame.
But anyhow, maybe you see where this is going. Perhaps agriculture is to the human society’s evolution, what mitochondria are to the evolution from prokarytic to eukaryotic life. Each event was a symbiotic envelopment of life-forms into the domain and jurisdiction of another.
Each allowed the host to re-organize information storage/exchange systems it already had, and achieve new scales:
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the mitochondrial revolution allowed cells, which already used DNA, to use that DNA in new ways; to begin driving processes that were previously energetically infeasible.
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the agricultural revolution allowed humans, which already used language, to use that language in new ways; to begin driving processes that were previously energetically infeasible.
But this begs the question: Is the new order brought on by the revolution itself, or does that simply unlock latent capacity in the information system that was already there?