Biogeochemistry and Open System Thinking

Written by Matthew Ehret on November 3, 2022. Posted in Current News

At a recent World Government forum in Dubai, WEF president and Dr Evil look-alike Klaus Schwab made a big deal about systemic changes that were currently underway across the globe and despite the dangers posed by the breakdown, Klaus believed that great opportunities were to be found for those hungry to shape a new system.

In his speech Klaus said:

“History is truly at a turning point. We do not yet know the full extent and the systemic and structural changes which will happen.

However, we do know that global energy systems, food systems, and supply chains will be deeply affected.”

Meanwhile in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a central bankers conference is underway where discussion of the systemic crisis and new system of central banking digital currencies and “green finance” will pave the way to a supposed Green New Deal economic recovery.

At the other side of the iron curtain, a recent forum took titled ‘Strong Ideas for a New Time‘, where President Putin also spoke of the new systemic changes that are shaping all facets of life contrasting the multipolar outlook with the obsession on an “international rules based order” animating the west.

In his speech Putin said:

“These enormous changes are irreversible, of course. National and global processes are underway to develop the fundamentals and principles of a harmonious, fairer and more community-focused and safe world order as an alternative to the existing world order, or the unipolar world order in which we lived, and which, because of its nature, is definitely becoming a brake on the development of our civilisation.”

No matter where one looks within those discussions occurring in the corridors of power in Eurasia or the western unipolar bloc, the idea that a new system will replace the current order is an unquestioned reality.

But as much as similar words may be found to overlap, the core concepts associated of the two systems (unipolar vs multipolar) are in fact diametrically opposed. Unless one takes a bit of time to appreciate not only the nature of closed system thinking animating western technocrats or the opposing healthier paradigm of open system thinking animating the grand strategic planning of the leaders of the Eurasian partnership, then it were impossible to properly navigate through our current storm.

While both paradigms feature concepts of a “natural order”, one assumes a system whose natural state is unipolar, demands vast population reduction, decarbonization, energy use contraction, and food production reduction. The other system, however is profoundly open, multipolar and premised on the idea of ongoing scientific and technological growth.

The Nature of Systems Analysis and You

The concept of “systems” is integral to all human mentation whether we know it or not, and has occupied the minds of great thinkers for thousands of years.

Although a mind absorbed by a naïve belief in sensory impressions will often assume the existence of self evident “things” in nature floating in empty space without due regard for contexts known and unknown shaping said object of sense impression, the reality is that no simple “thing” exists as an island unto itself.

No atom on Mendeleyev’s periodic table can be said to have any self-contained existence outside of the whole spectrum of elements and isotopes which shape its behavior, purpose and nature within a whole.

Similarly, no cell exists outside of the living system which shapes its behavior and whose behavior it in turn shapes.

No single plant or species of plant life exists outside of a biosphere which itself is shaped by long evolutionary forces with each plant playing a direct role in supporting and in turn being supported by, the entire bio-geochemical system in which it exists.

Just like an element, or cell, this biospheric activity is itself shaped by atomic, astrophysical and even galactic forces which carry both material and energetic properties stretching to the largest expanse of our galaxy’s field of influence and the broader cluster of galaxies which our modest Milky Way is but a part. Of these forces in the very large, and very small, our knowledge is scant, although increasing with small leaps of progress.

Each system one chooses to direct the mind’s attention to- from the lithosphere, biosphere, body of an organism, or even of a galaxy, certain fundamental invariant characteristics can be observed.

Four Properties of Open Systems

1) Each system can be understood as both a “One”, a “Many” and an “infinite”… simultaneously. In this way, the Aristotelian modes of logic which assert a priori that “something must be A or Not A, but never both A and Not A” break down. Instead, the preferable mode of reasoning demonstrated by Plato in the Philebus dialogue proves infinitely more useful at analysing the world as it actually is. (1)

2) A system is either understood as organized by reason or arbitrariness. If arbitrary, then we might as well stop trying to wrap the mind (reason) around the unreasonable, and give up immediately. Since we are continuing our journey, I am assuming that you agree with me that reason governs natural systems.

If this be so, then the parts of each system under analysis must be found to demonstrate both purpose and design within the whole of which they are parts. This takes us directly into an awareness of the coherence that must exist between the subjective properties of creative thought and the discoverable properties of the objective universe.

3) Any broader system shaping smaller systems cannot be bounded by the exact same properties and principles. In this sense, we find that the daily cycles of planetary rotation do not find 100% reconciliation in the higher geometries of annual revolutions of planets around the sun, nor do the sun’s revolution around the galactic center find an exact commensurability with the lower cycles of the solar system.

There will of course be common traits expressed throughout lower and higher cycles, but there will also be unique properties with each newly discovered cycle as well. Kurt Gödel’s 1931 refutation of the Russell-Whitehead Principia Mathematica provides one of many interesting proofs of this fact. Leibniz’s dispute with Locke, Descartes and Newton provide additional fuel to this line of Platonic reasoning.

4) Each system under investigation must be understood to be more than its sum of parts. The reductionist biologist attempting to isolate the life principle in a rabbit finds themselves confused by the fact that the dead rabbit is not quantifiably different from the living rabbit- being made up of the same molecules and gases.

Yet there is something beyond the simple “material expression” of living matter which said reductionist cannot fathom which again is where the Aristotelian logic of materialists will tend to break down.

The principal dispute which has shaped the entirety of world history is based on the two-fold issue of mind’s relationship to nature and its corollary: are systems fundamentally open or closed?

The Case of Vladimir Vernadsky’s Understanding of open systems

A great biogeochemist who shaped in many ways the flow of some of the most exciting leaps in creative scientific progress in the first half of the 20th century was named Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945). Throughout his career, Vernadsky served as a leading light in Russian science, acting both as founder and first President of the Ukrainian Academy of Science and leader of the Russian Academy of Science.

Vernadsky founded the Radium Institute of Russia after collaborating extensively with Madame Marie Curie in France, oversaw the development of nuclear science in Russia, was among the earliest proponents for nuclear power generation and as such, is considered the father of Russian nuclear science.

Throughout his years of productive scientific work, Vernadsky internalized the methods outlined by his mentor Dimitry Mendeleyev and applied his creative powers to finding unifying principles that shape the behavior of systems not only as they are “found” in space, but also in time.

While not ignoring the forests for the trees, Vernadsky demonstrated an extreme quality of rigor while mastering the mechanics of the fields of biology, geology and chemistry pushing himself to the limits of humanity’s knowledge of all three fields. Recognizing that needed discoveries in any one domain required moving out of narrow specializations into the other two domains of knowledge, Vernadsky pioneered a new field of research called “Biogeochemistry” by the early 1920s.

Throughout his work on Geochemistry (1924), The Biosphere (1926), On the Principles of Biogeochemistry (1938), and The States of Physical Space (1938), Vernadsky made a point to locate as many unifying principles of nature as possible insofar as they could be found by looking holistically upon the behavior of living matter as distinct from non-living matter.

Several of these principles which he dubbed “empirical generalizations” can be here listed:

1) The Huygen’s Principle. Although calcium, carbon, nitrogen etc are expressions of non-living matter, their behavior, purpose and form when animated by life are entirely different due to the incommensurable difference of life and non-living domains. Vernadksy wrote of this principle in 1943: “[Christian] Huygens established the scientific generalization that “life is a cosmic phenomenon, in some way sharply distinct from nonliving matter.” I recently named this generalization “the Huygens principle”.

2) The non-existence of abiogenesis. Just as existence cannot be said with good reason to arise from non-existence, the impossibility for life to arise from non-life was explored by Louis Pasteur in the 19th century and was embraced by Vernadsky as a foundational empirical generalization. Vernadsky writes:

“The connection between the living and the inert substance of the biosphere is indissoluble and material within the geological time… Abiogenesis is not known in any form of its manifestation.

Practically, the naturalist cannot overlook in his work this empirically precise deduction from a scientific observation of nature, even if he does not agree with it due to his religious or philosophically religious premises.”

3) The Golden Section. Five-fold symmetries and the golden section which are inherently united in the the construction of the pentagon, permeate living systems both in form as well as in population growth patterns in time. These attributes are nearly entirely absent from the non-living world of abiotic matter and was first explored Leonardo Da Vinci in the late 15th Century.

Comparing the configuration and behavior of atoms contained in non-living crystals compared to living organisms, Vernadsky writes:

“Living organisms exhibit five-fold or higher than sixfold axes of symmetry. This indicates that we are not dealing here with the symmetry, or the atomic structure, of a homogeneous solid. The homogeneity of internal structure, which is so characteristic of crystals, is absent here.

The inside of a living organism is distinctly heterogeneous, its atoms being in continuous motion, never returning to the same points where they were, unlike crystals, where the atoms do not shift for billions of years, unless external forces cause that to happen.”

4) Light Rotation. Life rotates planes of polarized light which does not occur when the same polarised light passes through liquid solutions devoid of any presence of organic material.

Vernadsky writes:

“All proteins exhibit a left rotation of the plane of light, both in animals and in plants. This means that, in the complex matter of living bodies, only left isomers in protein bodies—the principle component of protoplasm—are stable. Right isomers are absent”

5) Handedness/Chirality. This property, investigated deeply by the young Louis Pasteur in the 1850s, extends into isomers/chirality of molecular biology that was beginning to open up new doors of discovery in Vernadsky’s lifetime.

Just as living systems demonstrate “handedness” regarding harmonic disequilibrium preferring left handed spirals in sea shells over the inverse, so too do molecules with identical atoms and bonding properties demonstrate different qualitative properties when formed in the mirror image of themselves.

Here again the logic of an Aristotelian (or other syllogistic machine thinking) breaks down. Vernadsky wrote of this early discovery saying:

“The molecular dissymmetry, discovered by Pasteur, showed, that the presence of living matter is reflected in the chemical formula, including in solutions, and that right- and left-handed atomic structures are found to be non-equivalent in chemical reactions.

They are chemically distinct in living matter, but chemically identical in inert chemical media”

6) The Ubiquity of Life. In Vernadsky’s analysis, the tension found in the biosphere which is connected to the rise of new living properties among species is NOT located in scarcity or vacuum as British Darwinians had asserted for decades, but rather in a positive yearning of life to express its potential to the fullest possible measure, and in so doing, leap beyond the limits of nature through the advent of new biological “technologies”.

This yearning of each species towards expressing itself to the fullest was seen by Vernadsky as a colonization process, and the new “technologies” which nature generated (whether the chlorophyll molecule that allowed early life to begin using sunlight to increase its power to thrive and create) giving living matter the attribute of moving from lower to higher states of organization and complexity.

Vernadsky writes:

“The creation resulting from this evolution of new living forms, adapts itself to new forms of existence, augments the ubiquity of life, and enlarges its domain.

Life penetrates, thus, the regions of the biosphere where it had not earlier had access.”

7) Top Down Systemic Change as Primary. Vernadsky emphasizes that each upshift from one lower system to a higher system in evolutionary time, occurs as a change within the system as a whole and never within the bottom-up accumulation of units of particular species or individuals fighting for survival in a closed system of diminishing returns as we find in the Darwinist worldview.

8) Increasing Biogeochemical energy. From a material standpoint, each advanced new species and organism processes molecules and atoms from the ambient environment in a process akin to that of a whirlpool. Unlike the whirlpool however, each living organism does not merely move the elements through it unchanged, but rather change the molecular and even isotopic properties of elements via acts of respiration, nutrition, and reproduction.

From an energetic standpoint, organisms tended to advance in such a manner that the metabolic power (the ratio of matter converted into energy) in the form of nutrition increased as greater means of doing work was achieved.

The orientation of this entire process is not a mathematical homeostasis as a closed system interpretation of nature must presume, but rather an increase of free energy such that a system as a whole is “tuned” to generate not only enough energy to sustain itself, but increased free energy to feed back into the system that allows for the support of newer, more productive and diverse species.

Vernadsky writes in his Problems of Biogeochemistry II:

“The basic distinctive feature of biogeochemical energy is clearly and forcefully demonstrated in the increase of the free energy of the biosphere over the course of geological time”

This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here canadianpatriot.org

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