Biologists and geologists are proposing that we live in a new geological epoch called Anthropocene (anthropos meaning “human” and cene “period”). This emphasizes the human impact on our ecosystems. Humanity is now being recognized as a geological force; human activity as able to build and destroy, birth and kill humans as well as all other species on the planet. With climate change and global warming threatening our survival we need a new attunement to our entanglement with each other and all our nonhuman companions. We need new ways of living on a damaged planet Earth and new forms of engaging with each other in shared cultural spaces and ecological landscapes.
Life on Earth is a solar energetic process; it feeds on sunlight and emits heat into space. Successful ecosystems have a way of recycling “their wastes and avoid producing too much heat near their sensitive surfaces.”[i] We need more global diversity awareness, light and insight into the complex intersectional dynamics of inter-human and human-nonhuman communication and behavior.
I propose that we come together to develop a new form of intelligence I call Communal Intelligence. This badly needed intelligence is grounded in a new Ecobiont[ii] and Process ontology or paradigm. Ecobiont and Process highlight process, reciprocal interactions, and co-evolution. This new paradigm is inclusive of all species and understands the need for an eco-friendly, waste recycling and harm reduction approach to emotions, interactions, and operations.
Darwin proposed a theory of monogenomic individual evolution. Individual organisms with a single set of genes transfer their DNA vertically to their offspring and compete for advantage and survival. This theory of evolution informed and influenced our thinking and behavior and our emphasis on individual competitive relationships. New research in evolutionary biology shows that most organisms are ecological units of two or more symbionts. We are partnered beings comprised of multiple diverse creatures living together and exchanging DNA horizontally. Life started when multicellular eukaryotic organisms evolved from the endosymbiotic cohabitation of an aerobic bacterium living in an archaeal host cell (another species of single celled organisms). Thus, life is based on cooperating relationships across diverse species. The individual organisms do not precede or prime the collaboration. The elemental unit is the relationship.
Lynn Margulis described the vital symbiotic association between individuals of different species that lasts for significant portions of their lives.[iii] For example, as humans we rely on bacteria for our own evolution and health. Our bacterial microbiome, which lives primarily in our guts, functions as an essential metabolic organ that helps us regulate amongst other things our cognition, emotions, sleep and immune system. This partnership expands our metabolic range and helps us adjust to fluctuating conditions.
Clearly, this new research in the vital role of symbiosis questions the beliefs in individualism that have dominated our thinking in biology as well as in economics, social sciences and politics. Instead, we are “becoming with the other” or co-evolving together as ecological units or Ecobionts. We are all swimming in a collective environment, which is embedded in a changing and threatened world.
This new relational paradigm requires us to create a new communal intelligence, a form of intelligence that includes all symbionts, human and non-human, living and thriving together.
[i] Dorion Sagan. Beautiful Monsters. Terra in the Cyanocene. In: Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt (editors). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
[ii] Oliver López-Corona, Elvia Ramírez-Carrillo, and Gustavo Magallanes-Guijón. The rise of the technobionts: toward a new ontology to understand current planetary crisis. Researchers.one. https://www.researchers.one/article/2019-01-1. Retrieved June 8, 2019.
[iii] Lynn Margulis and René Fester, editors. Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation Speciation and Morphogenesis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.