Following Dr. Savin’s discussion on Mercury, biology teacher Howie Waldman brought Tehillah back to Earth with a discussion of the interconnections between plant and animal (human) life. Most of us were taught in school that nature was a harsh, “eat or be eaten” competition between species and genes. Newer research into plant and mushroom life, however, offers a more nuanced picture. Though death remains a part of life, of course, the interconnected life of forest stands and fungi seems to invite us in, and encourage us to ponder our own interconnections.
(This post is part of Sinai and Synapses’ project Scientists in Synagogues, a grass-roots program to offer Jews opportunities to explore the most interesting and pressing questions surrounding Judaism and science. Howie Waldman is a biology teacher at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and is informally known as “the green dean of Fieldston.” He is also a member of Tehillah in Bronx, NY.)
Howie Waldman: Howie Waldman, he/him/his. And I’m not an active practicing scientist right now, but I have done science, and I’m an active practicing science teacher, high school, and actually help kids do experiments sometimes. And many years ago, I went to college, and graduate school, and I studied evolution and ecology.
So the last time I spoke as part of this grant, as Rabbi indicated, I was talking about evolution and speciation and what species are and what they’re not. And I guess what I’ll say about that is: thinking about evolution focuses me on the forces that cause change over time. But we’re in sort of a critical time in the world right now, with lots and lots of change. So I’ve been also going back to my ecology roots. And when I say I’m really interested in ecology, I guess I’m thinking about the forces that hold things together. So we have the forces that cause change over the years, and also the forces in real time at any given moment that hold systems together – except for when they don’t. And sometimes that happens, and that’s quite complicated. And sometimes for the good, and sometimes maybe not, depending on your perspective.
But after that talk, we went to the Museum of Natural History and we saw this really cool exhibit called Invisible Worlds, which I recommend to everybody. It’s a neat immersive, interactive exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, and it’s really in large part about communication and interconnectedness, because at every level of cool thing it shows you in this exhibit, it’s basically showing you how cells or species are working together, and maybe on purpose or maybe not, but the result of it is they create networks of interconnectedness and connection, and I would say, at least temporary, stability.
So that’s kind of the theme I want to take you on. And also after that, the rabbi asked me to talk about the malkeinu verses in Rosh Hashanah, which is about sort of the greatness of God. And when I did speak about them in synagogue, I said, “I’m going to focus more about the spirit smallness of people, not so much the greatness of the deity, but about the smallness of people.” We are small, much as we like to think of ourselves as powerful and amazing and knowing all sorts of stuff. We found out some really cool stuff through the process of science. But we also sometimes forget that we’re really a small little bit player in a pretty complicated planet, and an even smaller bit player in the solar system and in the universe – to be almost inconsequential. But here on our turf, we do have an effect, and we are important.
Howie Waldman: So I guess I wanted to ask you if any of you have heard of mycorrhizae. Have you heard of mycorrhizae? Anybody? I thought in a group this big, one person would have heard. Mycorrhizae are fungi that stick their little stringy hyphae into and around the roots of trees and other plants. And this is really, really interesting and exciting and important. So, most of you have seen mushrooms before, and many of you probably know that that’s just the fruiting body of the fungus. It just is used to drop spores into the environment. But most of the action is inside the soil, or inside the wood, where these guys are putting these little stringy hyphae out all over the place – sometimes to break things down, sometimes to team up with something, sometimes, actually, to parasitize something – (if you’ve ever had athlete’s foot, that’s not a great feeling, and that’s from a fungus) – and also sometimes to even prey on things. Like some fungi create these little lariats and they trap tiny worms in the soil, nematode worms, and then they harpoon them. But the ones I want to talk about today do this incredible thing – these mycorrhizae – they essentially amplify the power of roots in a tree a gazillion-fold – technical term. And they then allow the plants to absorb much more water than they would otherwise. What do they get out of the deal? Any ideas?
Survival.
Howie Waldman: They do get survival. How they get survival is by getting payments in sugar from the plant. Because plants do this thing called photosynthesis, which is amazing. Plants grab solar energy and use it to make glucose. They grab solar energy and they use it to fuse carbon dioxide and water into glucose, which is simple sugar. And that way, the energy from the sun is trapped.
And then plants can use that for a lot of different things, like growth or building enzymes or whatever. But it’s so easy for plants to make sugar. They have excesses of it. They have so much. Can you imagine building your house out of food? Well, that’s what plants do. They just take a bunch of sugars, they link them together into cellulose, otherwise known as wood, and they build a house. It’s because they have so much of it, so they can afford to dump some of it off on a fungus who’s willing to give them water. And that was a really cool thing that people understood for a while, but then they started to understand something else, which is that in a forest, – Let me go to the next slide in the forest. we now know that trees are connected to other trees throughout the forest through a highway of fungal networks. And it’s really cool.
And this professor is really cool. Suzanne Simard, if you’ve never heard of her, one of my, I don’t know, the mind-blowers of my life is to read the work of Suzanne Simard. She’s at the University of British Columbia. She’s got some pretty famous TED talks. If you look at her on YouTube, you’ll find out about her. And what she noticed was that a tree, especially a big one, the older one in a forest stand – it might be called the “mother tree,” as she’s named them – will dispense extra glucose to other trees in the forest, often her close relatives. Through this fungal network, the fungus takes a cut. I’ll do that if you give me some sugar on the way. So they take a cut, and they pass the sugar on to other trees. But then it gets even better, because it turns out they don’t just feed their children, they feed other trees of the same species in the stand – and it gets even better. – they feed trees of other species in the stand. So now you’re getting me. Like, why would you do that? Are you just like, you know, a philanthropist? You know, are you just someone who’s just totally, totally nice? And the answer is still pending. There are some really interesting hypotheses about why trees would do this. But it turns out that when you look at a forest and you think, “Oh, here’s a cool black oak, here’s a cool red oak, there’s a cool gray birch,” it’s actually also something more than that. It’s an integrated structure with a cast of characters that sometimes blip in and blip out, but it’s a thing with emergent properties. It’s not just a bunch of trees. It’s a forest stand. It’s a forest stand, and it’s very, very cool.
Glucose: The Currency of Life
I have a question. Do the trees use glucose, the sugar, the same way we do, as energy, or is it in order to build what they do, or does it provide something else?
Howie Waldman: No, they use it in the same way, and also to build. So, in other words, plants do photosynthesis much faster than they do respiration. Respiration is the process by which we cut glucose up and release the energy that’s stored in it to do all sorts of stuff. And thank God plants do photosynthesis faster than respiration, because if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be oxygen for us to breathe. It’s just a by-product. It’s not like we don’t think that plants are trying to – well, I don’t know if they are working together in a forest stand. I don’t know of any brains in trees, but maybe they are thinking about us.
That’s going a little bit beyond scientific hypothesizing to speculation. So, interestingly, though, the first photosynthesizers weren’t trees – and I’ll get to that, but they were simple bacteria living in the ocean. And to this day, more oxygen is produced by bacteria and algae in the ocean than by trees on the planet. So acidifying and warming your ocean is probably not a good idea if you depend on oxygen for living.
How many of you have ever heard of the endosymbion hypothesis? That I didn’t expect. But it’s a good one. . Oh, let me me back-track. I forgot to just say humans are stuck in that story of plants and fungi. I apologize, I forgot this slide. You humans have biomass. They were eating plants, or they’re eating animals that eat plants. You can’t get away from plants. So it all depends on solar energy and solar wind. And if you look at all the living biomass on the planet, humans are in there with, I don’t know, 0.06 gigatons of carbon. That’s actually a lot, but it’s not that much compared to all the other living things on the planet. Just marine arthropods like shrimp, crabs, lobsters and krill – the things that big whales eat – they make up, like, a gigaton of carbon. So like something like 15, 16 billion times as much carbon as humans on the planet.
We think of there being a lot of humans, but if you just add up a bunch of different species – all those arthropods like crabs and stuff like that – it‘s much, much, much more. But we’re in there, we’re in the game, absorbing, eating, and as I say, breathing out, sweating, peeing and pooping. “Defecate” being the simple word, “pooping” the scientific word. And that all goes into the system. It’s all being processed, recycled. The energy that is not being recycled, it hits a plant. If a plant’s lucky enough to catch it and reformulate it, that energy will get passed along a chain or a complex set of chains called webs, and eventually go out into space.
But in the meantime, all of the molecules that are sitting around on the planet will get recycled, reused, recycled, reused, again and again and again. So we are part of that story.
The Endosymbion Story
And we’re also part of this story, the endosymbion story, which is also about interconnectedness and cooperation. Because – how many of you have heard of a mitochondria before? You may have learned about it in middle school as the powerhouse of the cell. It’s the thing that, after glucose is split in two, is taking two carbon fragments and using it to produce something called ATP. And ATP is like – if glucose are $20 bills, ATP are dollar bills. Nowadays, nobody takes a dollar. But imagine I was giving this talk 40 years ago, then $20 would be something, and dollar bills would be what people were using in the day-to-day, right?
And have you ever heard of a chloroplast? So chloroplasts help photosynthesis happen, and mitochondria help respiration happen. And the weird thing is when you look at them closely, you realize that they look very much like bacteria. You look at them really closely, you see that they both have some of their own genes, and that they replicate as if they were bacteria inside cells –like they have an independence to them.
And so some scientists, actually a bunch of Russian scientists, started, in the late 19th century saying, “Hey, maybe these used to be bacteria,” but nobody really believed them. And then a force of nature herself, Professor Lynn Margulis at the University of Massachusetts, put all of the interesting data together and eventually convinced everybody that, in fact, chloroplasts and mitochondria used to be bacteria.
What does that mean? That means that about two-and-a-half billion years ago, there were these big fat cells that kind of swallowed and ate things. And then some of them swallowed mitochondria, but they couldn’t actually eat them. And we know that when we look at mitochondria, they have a double envelope around them, which is – do you remember Pac-Man? Like, as if the cell ate this other cell, but didn’t actually digest it. So it’s covered with a cellular envelope, which is kind of an indication of, I don’t know, the big cell’s heartburn, or something didn’t eat it.
The bacteria inside the big cell probably get a payoff of protection, and water, and things like that. And it’s providing energy, in energy packets called ATP, to the bigger cell. And the result of all that is that eventually, they can’t exist without the other. And so if you pull a mitochondrion out of a cell now, it dies, and if you take the mitochondria out of a cell, the cell will die. And so they are now completely interconnected, interlaced and cooperating together. And the same is true for chloroplasts, which used to be like cyanobacteria, what we call blue-green algae, in the ocean. And these guys are now incorporated, locked in step, to the cells inside them, which we now call plant cells. How about that for cooperation and interconnection?
So, Lynn Margulis – I’m going to read you her quote here:
“The view of evolution is a crowded, bloody competition among individuals and species. A popular distortion of Darwin’s notion of survival of the fittest dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction and mutual dependence among lifeforms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking. Lifeforms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing.”
And she does say “not just,” because she does acknowledge there’s a lot of killing going on, if you read her whole work, but she says all the big innovations in evolution actually come from cooperation. All of them.
A few slides ago, I’m sorry, but the same organisms that emit the glucose, the energy for everything in the world, also contribute to the deconstruction. Like when you see trees decomposing, it’s the same. They do both. They build and they build and they break down.
Howie Waldman: They build and they break down. Because if they didn’t, well, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. I mean, it’s possible they could have developed that way, but we wouldn’t be having this discussion. It’s the continual recycling of matter as energy keeps pumping into the system that has led to the forces that change things, speciation, [and] has led to us.
But at every step of the way, it seems we keep moving back in on each other. These chloroplasts and mitochondria and red oaks and black oaks, which hybridize all the time, makes it very hard to identify them sometimes. And they keep interacting, cooperating and interconnecting to create emergent new things all the time. And Lynn Margulis – just because she said it, it wasn’t necessarily agreed with; a lot of people disagreed with her until she died.
The Gaia Hypothesis
And I just wanted to say, also, about Dr. Margulis, is that because she was so interested in interconnectedness, she teamed up with a guy named Dr. James Lovelock, who came up with an idea called the Gaia Hypothesis, which is the notion that pretty much all life on Earth interconnects at some level and creates a thing that, from a distance at least, could be looked at as a living thing, which is why he called it “Gaia,” or Mother Earth. And she provided him with the knowledge and understanding of microbial networks. So, our atmosphere is controlled primarily by bacteria, not by us. And really, we’re kind of a little blip, like I said. We don’t account for a lot of biomass. We don’t account for all that much going on.
Now I’m about to finish up. There’s that Gaia Hypothesis, where all the things on Earth are integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system. So as I said, I’ve become really, really interested, again, in the forces that connect things and establish emergent properties and stuff like that. And even if we have only a small place in it, it’s pretty exciting to watch it all, and to do our part to help maintain it when we can.
And it makes me come back to this slide, which I used in my first talk. And the rabbi also knows – this is the last line of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, who is not usually considered a fan or a proponent of religion, but he says, “there’s grandeur in this view of life” – Wow. “And that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
It’s pretty cool, right?
A New Kind of Awareness?
I say right off the bat that this could be like really naive of me, but I wonder, with all this connection going on, has anybody ever done a study of the possibility that there is a kind of awareness going on in other things that is totally different from the way we are aware?
It seems that just to say it’s, like, mechanical, doesn’t give it enough credit. It’s like, for things to thrive and and choose to do what they’re doing, it just seems to me that there’s got to be a way, something else – don’t know if it’s a cognizance, but some kind of an awareness, again, that is just so totally different from what we understand as awareness.
Howie Waldman: Yes. The short answer is yes. Not even just a philosopher and the people of great faith, but scientists have tried to look at this, and depending on who you talk to, some people will say “no,” they’ve never found evidence, and other people say they have. It depends a little bit on how you define “awareness.”
But Dr. Monica Gagliano wrote a book called Thus Spoke the Plant, and she is really interested in the notion that plants do have some kind of awareness. And other people have argued against it. Actually, her first papers on this were published in peer reviewed journals. But then I think the way she spoke about it maybe made people a little bit shyer about continuing to support her ideas. So yeah, there are people out there.
And is it mechanical? What’s awareness? We’re going to have to do that at another gathering. But it’s a really, really interesting question, I think. And just before I leave, because Farnoush asked me to, I’m going to read you a quote, and then I really will leave. Because I kind of talked to you about breath on a global scale, right? I talked about respiration and photosynthesis. There’s a quote I came across in a book today. And I sent it to our team and said, you’ve got to just read this. So here it is:
“An intake of breath is not just oxygen. A pulse is not just the rush of blood, but also taking in of divinity through an orifice. And as it moves through, it becomes a spark. To be inspired is to have accepted spirit in the lung and heart, to watch it circulate through miles of blood vessels and capillaries whose tiny fenestrations allow oxygen, nutrients and grace to leak into the tissues of muscle and consciousness, then be taken up again, re-oxygenated and returned.”
And that’s from Gretel Ehrlich’s book, A Match to the Heart.
0 Comments