Mitochondria are matrilineal, passed in the cytoplasm of the egg, inherited only from our mother and her mother, etc. They are so ancient as to be presexual, and their genetic material is uninvolved in the fusion of nuclei between the egg and sperm, standing free from the 46 resulting chromosomes. Mitochondrial DNA is from the mother’s cell, changing much more slowly, and does not even divide on the same schedule as the chromosomes. Symbiogenesis as creation of new life forms early in evolution out of the collision or incomplete digestion or teaming up of life forms.
This is how mitochondria ended up in ‘our’ cells. Cooperation more than competition, joining more than diverging, creativity more than random. Biological life is not ruthless so much as it is mutually supportive: why? Biologist Lewis Thomas mentioned in his immensely popular Lives of a Cell the cross cultural persistence of merged or hybrid creatures in mythology. Perhaps this is a reflection of the early events of symbiogenesis, when creatures actually did merge to form cells with nuclei and mitochondria and chloroplasts.
Bacteria have the ability to trade useful bits of DNA quickly (called recombination), and do it separately from reproduction, so adaptive changes spread rapidly. As Fritjof Capra mentions in The Web of Life, “Thus microbiology teaches us the sobering lesson that technologies like genetic engineering and a global communication network, which we consider to be advanced achievements of our modern civilization, have been used by the planetary web of bacteria for billions of years to regulate life on Earth.”
Species coevolve, shaping each other by our interaction. “The environment” is not a static and dead unchanging thing, but also coevolves with the life on it. Life adapts itself, but it also adapts the globe for itself, and without governmental or economic coercion, without organizations. For example, our atmosphere is wildly chemically unstable; it is the continual action of living creatures upon it that keeps it at its current gas composition, precisely right to maintain life. The recent CO2 rise causing global warming could have devastating consequences for the current balance, but Gaia has handled more severe atmospheric changes before, from the early hydrogen shortage that triggered the use of water in photosynthesis to the oxygen poisoning that triggered the first animal respiration (in bacteria, of course).
The coevolved context is holy while decontexted opportunism is hubris. Outside the body, the loci of Fire or energy or South are all the energy we ever use for heating, cooling, cooking, transportation, lighting, communication, the Arts, maintenance, entertainment, etc. Did your mother teach you that it is rude to reject gifts? Every day our Mother showers us with gifts of sunshine, wind, flowing water, and hot magma. There are gifts of renewable energy in all these beribboned packages. All we need to do is open them; She renews them every day. Not for us the ungrateful squandering of pollutive energy stored in fossil fuels and the atom, we choose to accept Her fresh gifts.
Life is renewable energy. In a beautiful web of interconnected eating, we life forms take energy from one another and give energy to one another. Energy cycles around the physical globe and is renewed. Our spirit energy is renewed and recycled in reincarnation. This is deep teaching, not in some tome but embodied in the very flesh of the world, divine law expressed as the laws of physics and biology and ecology. We can take this teaching as our template for our energy use, and shift to renewable energy. We call it renewable because the sun shines again and again, the tides and waves flow in and out, the wind blows again and again, the rainfall renews the streams that spin our tiny turbines.
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