To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour…[William Blake, Auguries of Innocence]

Memory works similarly at the very largest and the very smallest scales of life. For both the microcosm and the macrocosm structure is memory.

Viruses are able to attach to and gain entry into living cells because they are encapsulated in a protein coat possessing a predetermined structure and shape which can latch onto particular proteins found on the outside of a cell much as a key fits into a lock. The virus’s genetic material can then be injected into the cell hijacking its replication process creating ever more of the virus.

In multi-cellular animals body cells are defended by an immune system which learns to recognize the outer protein structure of invasive viruses and other microorganisms. Once identified, its structure is physically recorded for future use as needed. Subsequently the immune system can produce endless attack cells which possess this pre-recorded structure in the form of an adaptive layered defense against the invading pathogen. This is how vaccinations create immunity to diseases for example.

The key insight is that pathogens learn how to gain entry into cells by “learning” the optimal protein structure to do so. Once this learning occurs it is passed down to all descendents—all possess the same successful structure.

An infected organism’s immune system subsequently “learns” to recognize these invasive pathogens by memorizing the shape of their outer protein coat. The organism then stores this learning in the form of template cells, which when needed can be replicated in vast numbers to overwhelm an invading pathogen. “Learning” in life’s microcosm involves developing and recognizing particular structural configurations.

For the largest structures created by human societies, nation-states and the overall international system, learning also involves structural adaptation. A society’s learning and memory are encoded, in part, for long-term storage and usage in the form of institutions and laws which encode the adaptive learned responses of individual level decision-makers into the structure of the political economic system.

For example, at the nation-state level, in the USA, adaptive learning deriving from the experience of the Great Depression was encoded into our political system in the form of newly created institutions such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which was created by Congress in 1934 to regulate the stock market and to prevent trading abuses. Regulatory laws such as the Glass-Stegall Act of 1933. This act regulated the permissible activities of savings and investment banks.

At the global level adaptive learning deriving from the experience of WWII was incorporated into the structure of the international political economy in the form of the creation of the United Nations. All members of this institution are required to sign its charter which then becomes legally binding upon the signatory nation.

This process allows for the transfer of hard learned knowledge from the minds of the learners into the very structure of society. As those who possessed this knowledge directly pass away, their learning remains viable, potentially forever to benefit futurity.

Thus at both life’s microcosm and at it macrocosm learning is encoded structurally. This is for identical reasons: initial learning occurs at the individual level. However, for learning to be passed down through successive generations it must be encoded in some manner. Encoding learning in structure is a robust technique for long-term informational storage. So both microbes and men (people) have learned to exploit this technique.

Storing information in this manner has both positive and negative implication for large-scale organized human complexities. A clear positive implication is that past learning can be maintained to the benefit of all long after the individual learners have passed from the scene. A negative implication is that the learning may decay over time.

Decay could occur in at least two ways:

1)      Forgetfulness. Over time structurally encoded past learning may simply be forgotten. This might happen because the circumstances which it is adaptive to seldom or never recur for a sufficiently long period of time. If eventually the circumstance did recur, the appropriate adaptive response would have been “forgotten” through prolonged disuse.

2)      Subversion. Unlike forgetfulness, this is intentional. Powerful societal actors which stand to benefit from removal of constraints on their freedom of action imposed by structural learning may gain sufficient control over societal decision-making as to eliminate or render ineffective the institutions and or laws which constrain them. Private gain seeking entities such as corporations, for example, may act to eliminate public good constraints to maximize short-term profit.

For example, with respect to #2 above, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 effectively repealed the Glass-Stegall Act of 1933. The result was predictable. In less than a decade the greed-driven mistakes which precipitated the Great Depression of the 1930’s caused the near collapse of not only the American economy, but indeed of the planetary economy. This collapse was facilitated by the functional neutering of the FEC under its W. Bush appointed Chair Chris Cox. Needless to say the large financial institutions, most particularly, Goldman Sachs, which willfully created this situation, made fortunes.

Also with respect to # 2 above, consider how the W. Bush administration, itself a tool of large global corporations, insidiously subverted the United Nation’s Charter in forcing that institution to acquiesce in its clearly illegal and unprovoked act of aggressive warfare against Iraq in 2003. Again, corporate fortunes were made consequential to this subversion.

This leads to my final comparison between microbes and men (humans). Human organized complexities such as nations and the world political economy, not to mention nature itself—our Earth’s biosphere, are complex systems which are basically “bodies”. Corporations are specialized, invasive pathogens which attack these bodies seeking, like all pathogens, to replicate themselves (“enrich” themselves) endlessly. In other words, both microbial and corporate pathogens seek to create private gain for themselves at the expense of the overall good of the invaded body. However, given that a body’s resources are finite, unless the infection is terminated, the body dies.

Where is our global immune system to fight off the invasion of this newly evolved class of inimically destructive pathogen? It’s time for rapid evolution—or death!