Dorion Sagan is an excellent writer and scholar. His parents Carl Sagan and Lynn Margulis were as well but he has progressed beyond them by incorporating the things that came after them into his worldview. Worldviews are important to me as I have written here many times. I reviewed his last book in a series of four diaries a while back :My first Eco-diary: The earth is Alive? This was a review of the book :Notes from the Holocene: A Brief History of the Future published by Chelsea Green who also published this recent book. They asked me to review it because my own interests parallel Sagan's to a great extent. An earlier book Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life Goes back to the time when I worked with Sagan's co-author Eric Schneider. This first installment will give an overview of the new book. Read on for that.
Sex is so central to all we are and do that it is neglected as a topic of serious study. Sagan has tackled the subject in earlier works but this book is special. Writing here has opened my eyes in many ways. I was naive when I first wrote here years ago. I thought I was writing for a sophisticated audience that took time to look into the deeper aspects of what was writing. Over the years I am slowly and painfully learning that it is even more important here to not expect readers to look beyond what is written here and that one is lucky if at least a few a of the comments come from people who have at least skimmed the diary. What this says about our political effectiveness is a topic for another piece. I only mention this because if you do happen to be reading this, it will be a chore to try to step out of the box that society has built for all of us in order to keep the topic a mystery. Try to examine your own reaction with that idea in mind. The censors have already done a job on your mind no matter how free you think you are.
The first thing to realize is the link between sex and evolution as topics we treat with special handling in our society as well as others. Sagan weaves these together in a pattern that makes their connection inescapable from all points of view, especially the biological and sociological. He does not get into politics and this is probably wise even if disappointing. The Sarah Palin phenomenon has certainly brought an underlying current in our political drama closer to the surface. But that too is topic enough for another book at least.
Among the reasons for mentioning the other works in my introduction is that this book is a radical statement of how things "hang together". All that we are and do is embedded in a greater system, the earth system. Reductionism has convinced most of us to look at it all piecemeal. We see us and then we see an environment. We are all too slow to catch on to the fact that we are shaping our environment and that it is what makes us possible.
As an evolutionary biologist Sagan sees all this clearly. He also has picked up on the thermodynamics that we developed in this context. Here is a taste of that theme:
But even if sex is a primordial genetic mixing mechanism selected for in evolution, this answers a decidedly secondary question. From a cosmic perspective, the tendency of all systems, as described by the second law of thermodynamics, is towards randomness. Chaos not order,; disorganization not organization; dissolution not individuation. From a cosmic perspective, the question isn't why sexual organisms, but why organisms at all - organisms whose name shares roots with organization , a principle opposed to the way all material systems are supposed to work according to the second law...
We, and our organic brethren, sexual and non-, are organized. in fact, we can perhaps best be understood as natural tools, nature - made complex systems whose function is in service of the second law. Our organization, far from violating the second la, helps to illustrate how nature accomplishes its unconscious purpose, to come to equilibrium, spread energy, and promote atomic and molecular chaos - even if it means temporarily creating complex materially cycling, energy spreading structures to do so. The amazing thing about life isn't the differences it shows , which are exacerbated by mutations and sexual recombination, but its basic maintenance of its complex forms, implicit in the term reproduction but also notable in the maintenance of bodies known as metabolism, which maintains our and other creature's energy levels and organization.
To the traditional scientist, rapidly becoming a modern dinosaur, this is heresy. But science has to be seen in a context. That's what this book does for us. I will say more in the next installment.