https://hummingbirdfilms.com/symbioticearth/ ## Abstract We understand and describe nature through the lens of our culture. Mechanistic reductionist science of the 16th and 17th centuries – which sees people as separate from nature and allows us to exploit the environment – is today being replaced with systems thinking which looks at the relationships, patterns, and connections in nature and builds a picture of the whole, including people. ## Synopsis Lynn Margulis was, like Darwin, a naturalist. She studied and observed the natural world in the field and in the laboratory and she encouraged her students to do the same. She was also a prolific reader. Indeed one of her close friends once said to her: “You know what sleeping is, don’t you? It’s lying in bed, not reading.” One of the books that she recommended to everyone was Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. In this book Fleck explores the idea that scientific facts are the product of “thought collectives” and can change as the culture changes. The idea of the “thought collective” fascinated Margulis because it reminded her that whenever we look at and study nature, we see through the lens of our culture. The problem with that is that you can get stuck in a thought collective and only see things the way you are taught to see them. Alfred Whitehead called the propensity to not see things, because you are taught not to see them, “trained incapacities.” Indeed Lynn Margulis had a magnet on her refrigerator that said, “If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” Next, Stephan Harding points out that one of the things that we tend not to see is that our culture is “at war with nature.” We are destroying our environment, because we see humans as separate from and superior to nature. This has allowed us to exploit the Earth’s natural resources. This idea of people being separate from nature came about during the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries and is based on the “natural philosophy” of Rene Descartes. Descartes proposed that the universe and all of nature, including the human body, is nothing more than a machine. This metaphor was the product of Descartes’ culture which had just entered the “machine-age.” The clock is the great example of the wonders of that industrial revolution. This is called “mechanistic science,” and remains the basis of 21st century science. Several ideas follow from mechanism: Scientists must remain detached from the objects of their studies and are not supposed to get involved emotionally with the world they are studying. Just as one might take a clock apart in order to understand how it works, a mechanistic worldview proposes that if you want to understand, for example, an organism, you need to break it down into its components parts. This is called “reductionism.” The problem with reductionism is that it is limited. It works and has given great insights and knowledge, but it ignores the big picture. In particular, it ignores how parts of organisms and parts of nature interact with one another to bring about new properties that couldn’t have been predicted from a knowledge of the parts in isolation. These are called “emergent properties.” This brings about a new way of thinking called “[[system]]s thinking.” Fritjof Capra points out that we need systems thinking because the problems of our time are interconnected. Indeed everything is interconnected and interdependent and if we are to understand the natural world and to solve any of our social, economic and environmental problems we need to think in terms of patterns, in terms of relationships, and in terms of how things interact. This change from a mechanistic view of life to a systemic view of life is indeed a revolution in the life sciences. As Lynn Margulis says, “There is no such thing as a fully independent organism, because every organism requires food to be delivered and waste to be removed, so that it’s a system on the surface of the Earth.”