perception and community
i seem to be on a science kick. has anyone heard of dr. bruce lipton? in his article about Nature, Nurture and Human Development, he says:
Emerging at the cutting edge of cell science is the recognition that the environment, and more specifically, our perception of the environment, directly controls our behavior and gene activity (Thaler, 1994).
Positive perceptions produce a growth response, while negative perceptions activate the cell's protection response (Lipton, 1998b, 1999).
The expression of the cell is primarily molded by its perception of the environment and not by its genetic code, a fact that emphasizes the role of nurture in biological control.
While every cell is capable of behaving as a free-living entity, late in evolution cells began to assemble into interactive communities. Social organizations of cells resulted from an evolutionary drive to enhance survival. The more "awareness" an organism possesses, the more capable it is of surviving. Consider that a single cell has X amount of awareness. Then a colony of 25 cells would have a collective awareness of 25X. Since each cell in the community has an opportunity of sharing awareness with the rest of the group, then every single cell effectively possesses a collective awareness of 25X. Which is more capable of surviving, a cell with 1X awareness or one with 25X awareness? Nature favors the assembly of cells into communities as a means of expanding awareness.
The evolutionary transition from unicellular life forms to multicellular (communal) life forms represented an intellectually and technically profound high point in the creation of the biosphere. In the world of unicellular protozoa, each cell is an innately intelligent, independent being, adjusting its biology to its own perception of the environment. However, when cells join together to form multicellular "communities," it required that the cells establish a complex social intercourse. Within a community, individual cells can not behave independently, otherwise the community would cease to exist. By definition, the members of a community must follow a single "collective" voice. The "collective" voice controlling the community's expression represents the sum of all of the perceptions of every cell in the group.
Original cellular communities consisted of from tens to hundreds of cells. The evolutionary advantage to living in community soon led to organizations comprised of millions, billions or even trillions, of socially interactive single cells. In order to survive at such high densities, the amazing technologies evolved by the cells led to highly structured environments that would boggle the minds and imagination of human engineers. Within these environments, cell communities subdivide the workload among themselves, leading to the creation of hundreds of specialized cell types. The structural plans to create these interactive communities and differentiated cells are written into the genome of each cell within the community.
Though each individual cell is of microscopic dimensions, the size of multicellular communities may range from the barely visible to the monolithic in proportion . At our level of perspective, we do not observe individual cells but we do recognize the different structural forms cell communities acquire. We perceive these macroscopic structured communities as plants and animals, which includes ourselves among them. While you might consider yourself as a single entity, in truth your are the sum of a community of approximately 50 trillion single cells.
