In the Beginning: Ecology Point of View

“We’re on our first cup of coffee. We’re on our third cup of tea

And we can’t pretend to live on different planets, you and me.”

– Collision of Worlds. 2012. Robbie Williams and Brad Paisley

In a 1965 collection of essays, G. Evelyn Hutchinson likened evolution to a play unfolding in an ecological theatre [1]. The theatre is the setting, and the play is the story of innumerable species interacting with one another and with the physical environment. As in many good plays, circumstances change, winners become losers, and new actors dominate the stage. Nonetheless, the play goes on, generation after generation, with billions of actors making countless life-and-death decisions. You and I are, of course, participants in the play: we live our everyday lives, making our best efforts to survive and raise our families while occasionally glimpsing the stories of those around us.

Try as we may, none of us sees more than a tiny part of the play, and we all see it from a different angle. We make decisions based on what we believe to be. We laugh, cry, love, create and destroy; sometimes we cooperate and sometimes we fight, all based on our understanding of reality. But how do we know what is real and what is not? None of us knows the full meaning of the play, but we all tell our stories. In the end, all we know is what we are born knowing, what we have learned from experience, what others have told us, and what we have figured out or imagined to be.

People learn a lot by personal experience, but most of what we know has been learned from others. People make decisions. We decide what to believe and what not to believe and we don’t all come to the same conclusions. There are, for example, countless creation stories, some more believable and told more often than others. There are two that, at various stages of my life, have been personally compelling. One story[2] is ancient, poetic, and evocative and it was read to me by my mother:

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light... And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after its kind…And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over… every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

The other story is not so poetic, but it is just as evocative and even more humbling. As the story was told to me:

In the beginning there was a Big Bang and the universe expanded to fill a vast void. Ten billion years later, in a remote corner of a spiral galaxy, Life began in deep, scorching-hot, hydrothermal vents. For the next 3 billion years, Life on Earth was dominated by microscopic organisms, but when they began to join together, they sparked a great diversification. And toward the very end of the story, a group of warm-blooded, furry animals began to walk upright, to make tools and weapons, and to take dominion over all the earth.

Both stories attempt to explain some of life’s greatest mysteries, but they are both accepted more on faith than we want to believe. Although billions of people believe some version of one or the other, almost none of us has come to believe either story based on direct experience. We may have found a fossil or two or read an ancient holy book but, for the most part, we believe a story because of who told it to us and how consistent it is with our other beliefs.

In 1953, I was 8 years old and attended Warren Baptist Church. I was told by Pastor Simmons that the Earth was 6,066 years old. On Monday through Friday, I attended Perrin Elementary where my 3rd grade teacher told the class that the Earth is millions of years old. I could not believe that Miss Davis was so misinformed. Sixty-five years later, I learned that James Ussher, born in Dublin in 1581 and Primate of All Ireland from 1625 to 1656, was a serious student of the Bible and from studying Genesis 5 and 11 and various other dates given in the Old Testament, he determined that the Creation occurred on October 23, 4,004 B.C.[3]

As a child, I believed what I was taught at home and in Church. Later, as a college student, I had the usual biology, chemistry, physics, and math courses plus a spattering of history and philosophy of science. As an aspiring young scientist, I accepted the prevailing scientific opinion that the Universe is ~13.8 billion years old and the Earth was formed ~3.8 billion years ago. My mother believed that the Bible is the unchangeable Word of God and she had no doubt as to its Truth. My belief in the scientific creation story is deeply rooted in my studies, but it remains much more tentative than my mother’s convictions. So far, the Big Bang Theory[4] is the best explanation I have found of discoveries made by thousands of curious scientists over the past few centuries, but I fully expect the story to change as new discoveries are made.

My mother believed, and taught me, that she was a direct descendant of Adam and Eve, who were created by God and lived in a garden called Eden. With no disrespect for Mother, I now believe that it is not that simple. I am a direct descendant of north Georgia dirt farmers, of arboreal primates that lived in African jungles, of finned fish that lived in ancient seas, and of unicellular, collared flagellates that filtered particulate matter from shallow seas nearly a billion years ago. I am puzzled by the observation that so many thoughtful and intelligent people have come to such disparate views about the nature of the world and of our own nature as participants in it. We are, of course, exposed to vastly different worldly experiences; my life has been very different from that of Gilgamesh the Great or that of a beggar on the streets of Delhi. Even so, people living at the same time and place come to vastly different conclusions even when faced with the same evidence. Our personal realities are based on what we think, not just what we see, suggesting that we need to look right through the mirror and peer into our minds in order to understand what we are seeing.

The Website and The Book

My website, Ecology Point of View, is about how living organisms make decisions. It is the companion of a book in progress: The Promethean Hypothesis. The emphasis of both is on animals, but decision-making predates the evolution of animals. In exploring the topic of the evolution of decision making, I attempt to tell the stories, ever so briefly, of hundreds of species, ranging from bacteria, slime molds, and sponges, all with no nervous systems, to nematodes, water fleas and tardigrades that get by with simple nervous systems consisting of a few hundred neurons, and finally to honeybees, octopi, and great apes with brains containing millions to billions of neurons. For each species, I ask what information is available for decision-making and what an individual needs to know to survive and reproduce. I am especially interested in the question, Is information more valuable to some species than to others?

Many of the questions addressed on this website and in the book were first posed by ancient eastern and western philosophers, and most are still unresolved. In some cases, the ancient mysteries of the cosmos have reappeared as more tightly framed questions and hypotheses, many formulated in the 19th and 20th centuries and still being tested in 21st century laboratories. Modern day scientists peer into the minds of animals in ways not available to the ancients. First, quite literally, they peer with sensors that record brain activity, and secondly, they peer into the workings of the mind by carefully observing behavior and presenting organisms with choices that reveal their preferences. Throughout this website and in the book to come, we will peer together, not only into the minds of wild animals, but also into the minds of people trying to understand other animals and themselves.

The book will explore many recent developments in the behavioral sciences but is in no way meant to be a comprehensive review of the vast modern literature on decision making. Almost the opposite, the book will not be a celebration of the advances made in recent years. Instead it will be more like a requiem reflecting as much on ancient text as on modern and suggesting that, while the behavioral sciences continue to gain momentum, the train sometimes barrels at ever-greater speed down the wrong track. Some of the behavioral sciences got on the wrong track by focusing solely on observable behaviors, leaving out the things that matter the most — feelings, beliefs, emotions, and values– as concepts too poorly defined to be topics of serious scientific inquiry. Fortunately, that is no longer the case: scientists from many disciplines have found new ways to study decision making, and most now see emotions and feelings as integral to balanced decision making.

The curtain was drawn open billions of years ago and the evolutionary play now is well under way. Nobody knows where it will go from here, but I suspect it is far from over. So, I invite you not just to find a seat and watch the play, but also to relish the fact that you have been chosen to be a member of the cast and to participate in the play.

1 Hutchinson, G. E. 1965. The ecological theater and the evolutionary play. Yale University Press, London and New Haven. 172 pp.

2 Genesis Chapter 1, verses 1-2, 21-21 and 26-27. The Holy Bible. King James Version.

3 Ussher, James The Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB). Contributed by John McCafferty. A project of the Royal Irish Academy.

4 By most current accounts, the Earth is thought to be about 13.8 billion years old, but this estimate, like all scientific “facts” is up for revision and a new theory and data from James Webb Space Telescope suggests it may twice as old as thought. See R. Gupta. How old is the universe exactly? A new theory suggests that it’s been around for twice as long as believed. Phys.org. The Conversation, Aug 2023.