Loops of Life

An ecosystem is loops layered upon loops, and the cycling of matter and energy is the essence of life. This is synonymous with entropy decreasing naturally, and to sever these cycles is to destroy life. Humankind’s anti-natural actions sever, one after another, the circular loops that nature creates, and in doing so increase the entropy of the universe.

The Role of Intelligent Life Is to Lower the Entropy of the Universe

Lowering the entropy of the universe is precisely the role of humankind as intelligent life. By rights, we should be fulfilling that role step by step: lowering the entropy of the Earth, then venturing out into the Solar System and lowering its entropy, then venturing out into the Milky Way and lowering its entropy, then venturing out into the supercluster and lowering its entropy, and so on. To neglect the mission given to us by heaven and live single-mindedly for ourselves is nothing but exercising pathogenicity¹ toward the universe. As Earth’s microorganisms, we must exercise not pathogenicity but healing power toward the Earth, the planet we currently inhabit.

Judging from the design of the universe, there are probably intelligent life forms elsewhere in the universe, too, doing the work of lowering entropy. Whether they have the same form as humans we cannot know, and that is not what matters. What counts is not appearance but substance: only the role one plays in the universe matters. They may turn out to be surprisingly similar to us, as when unknown groups of humans met for the first time on Earth, or they may be utterly unlike us, as when humans encountered unknown animals, but the important thing is what work they are doing. As long as we and they both exist in the universe, each of us has been given some role to play in it. Physically speaking, it is the role of lowering entropy, and we can call one another companions striving to bring about peace.

The work of lowering entropy is altruistic work, and it is precisely such work that brings about evolution. Living beings evolve into forms that are efficient for that work. The consciousness that directs those living beings co-evolves as well.

The Selfish Gene Is a Cosmically Impossible Concept

The universe is designed so that the selfish die out and cannot evolve². That the “selfish gene” is an impossible concept becomes clear at once if you simulate it as a thought experiment. If this world contained only selfish life forms, the diversity of species would inevitably decrease over time. One species after another would go extinct, until finally the environment could no longer support even the “strongest,” the “fittest,” the most selfish species in that world. If you are selfish, you drive others to extinction, and eventually everything goes extinct: that is an inescapable fate.

Imagine a world full of every kind of plant, in which the only animals are rabbits. The rabbits can live by eating whatever plants they like. Before long, the rabbits breed at a furious pace, devour most of the plant species and drive them to extinction. Only one species of plant is left. The rabbits have no choice but to live on it, so they eat it all and drive it to extinction too. With nothing left to eat, the rabbits starve and go extinct. What could the rabbits have done to avoid extinction?

What would have happened if there had been foxes in that world? The rabbits would be eaten by the foxes, and the diversity of plants would be protected. But if the foxes ate all the rabbits and drove them to extinction, the foxes would be forced to choose between becoming herbivores and going extinct. Either way, even if they became herbivores, they would meet the same end as in the world with rabbits as the only animals, so extinction would be unavoidable.

The plant kingdom is the same. If one selfish species monopolizes the energy, many species will go extinct. If many species go extinct, the flow of the cycle is severed, and in the end that species, too, will perish.

Seen on Nature’s Timescale, the Cause of Environmental Problems Is Clear

If you try to make a forest by planting nothing but fast-growing conifers such as Japanese cedar and Japanese cypress, the guardian deities of the future forest, which feed on the nuts of broadleaf trees such as beech, konara oak and sawtooth oak, will be forced to come down from the mountains. The effects of the 1957 plan to increase the productivity of Japan’s national forests have clearly appeared in 2024. That bears now come down from the mountains is the consequence of the short-sighted, anti-natural actions of people in the past. It is simply that the effects of anti-natural policies supported by the people of that time are appearing, non-simultaneously, in the present, half a century later. There is nothing difficult about this at all. Even small children can understand it.

Humans are poor at grasping geometric patterns that contain time. The faculty that deals with forms changing over time belongs not to the intellect but to the heart, so unless we cultivate the heart, we will never notice. Let us look at the forests, the mountains and the seas with the same heart that delights in cherry trees in full bloom. How does it feel on a scale not of one year but of ten years? What about a hundred years, or a thousand? We are endowed, in the form of the heart, with the ability to grasp patterns on scales of ten thousand, a million, a hundred million years. We who have hearts are able to cherish flowers, birds, wind and moon (kachō fūgetsu), and to sing of snow, moon and flowers (setsugekka).

The Loops of Life Go On Forever

Every anti-natural act committed against nature in the past is fed back into the present through the loops of the cycle. All the light emitted from the past arrives in the present as non-simultaneous waves. There are no straight lines in the universe. Nor is anything simultaneous. Just as the delegations to a world leaders’ summit or the Olympic Games never all arrive at the venue at the same moment, phenomena arrive one after another along curved trajectories, passing through something along the way.

There is a prevailing tendency these days to blame every nature-related trouble on global climate change, without reflecting on our own past behavior, carried out non-simultaneously in various parts of the globe. The media direct our attention only to phenomena, never to the great cycling loops.

As the German climatologist Köppen realized, climate and the distribution of vegetation are inseparable. Vegetation affects climate just as much as climate affects vegetation. The climate change that troubles us today can be seen as the result of past changes in vegetation. Those changes were a large-scale disturbance to Earth’s ecosystems. If what we do now will be fed back into the future, how should we behave for the sake of future generations? Everything connects to everything else³. The loops of life go on and on, forever.

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Footnotes

1. “Pathogenicity/healing power toward the universe” is a concept original to Polymath Research. We define pathogenicity as selfishness and healing power as altruism. Pathogenicity and healing within the bodies of living things probably correspond to selfish and altruistic functions as well ↩

2. The errors in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution were already pointed out in the Polymath Blog post of June 26, 2024, “The Mission of Species.” ↩

3. Words of Leonardo da Vinci. ↩