Genomes range from a few thousand base pairs for the simplest self-replicating element to a few billion for humans. Genotype spread, less extreme than phenotype ratios, is more dramatic. The length of the program does not express the ripple effect of increasing complexity. The entire genome of a bacteriophage — so simple it only just slips into the most liberal definition of life— could be printed in a book the size of a grocery-store romance. Yesterday, I thought it would be only a matter of time before we mapped out the entire program of such a creature. Today, I discover the feat is already years old: Sanger etal., 1977: the complete 5,375-nucleotide text for the X174 virus deciphered. The simplest-known, perhaps the simplest-possible living program, but a universe beyond the most complex inanimate matter. Nine proteins long, the viral bible is written with an ingenuity beyond the most sophisticated human hackers. The sequence coding for one protein hides the sequence for another, the way the phrase "a lisp in a chromosome" embeds the name of a leafy green.
How much more complicated can the card deck get? My molecular research only begins to hint. Bacteria trap energy, metabolize and manufacture compounds, sense their environment, go dormant indefinitely, synthesize their own enzymes, Xerox themselves. Their leap beyond viruses is larger than viruses' from inanimate compounds. Larger than the leap from my amateur's notes to Ressler's knowledge.
I read how cells develop distinct nuclei and organelles, acquire the trick of mashing other cells and recycling their parts. I struggle with an unthinkable threshold: the formation of limited partnerships, shared responsibilities. You float, you sting, you prop, you flex, you digest: we feed. Geometric increases in complexity: anagenesis exists. Something rises, flies in the face of entropy. Not better or wider or finer fits; bacteria can already live locked in ice, hot springs, even stratosphere. The code simply learns to do more with the place.
The arrangement of cells into bureaucractic corporations takes me two tiers above X174, itself nine proteins beyond my comprehension. I move into a mystery uninterpretable even in outline. Form — the ravelins of a starfish, the rococo redundancy of crabs— reveals itself as mere vessel for behavior, infinitely more varied. Evade this stimulus. Fly in this formation. Migrate at this moment. Build this burrow. Train your young.
The message, which at the low end of taxonomy began as a simple impulse toward excess, learns to communicate, first to constituent parts, then to coordinated cells within an organism. Up a second slope — classes, orders, families of behavior — the text learns to pass itself between organisms. One more minor magnification lights upon language — a newcomer in the garden dashing off transcripts, elaborate travelogues to no one.
Maybe I'm not congenitally adrift after all. I watch a videotape of the famous gorilla Koko reading a children's book, signing learned hand-words into the empty air. Signing the way I scribble here, for an audience long gone. These notes, my evolving, catch-all phylum, live and die, propagate their own excess. I arrange them, perpetually revising, inventing writing as I go, assembling a classification system large enough to name what Ressler already knew.
How high is the biosphere? How wide? I list degrees and kilometers. I'd do better to steal from Wallace Stevens; classification, after all, is just a record of neighboring plagiarisms. "Life consists of propositions about life." Shape and behavior are guesses at the place where they've been set down. Eons-long accumulation, the organism itself is only a theory of what it might still be. My hyperactive classroom screams out its answers, constantly recanting, amending, reaffirming, anything but silent and archived, fired by the same single fact that keeps me revising. However many un-classifiable ways there are of being alive, there are infinitely more ways of being dead.
B. Ecology
Death too, at the heart of variety. Every message I turn up whispers it in code. There's only so much to go around. The splintering catalog rushes after the same circuit of available energy. Not all miracles make it. Each excess program copy is shaped by limit. Checked by scarcity, populations are pruned in constant edit. And pruning makes the garden proliferate. Death is the mother of experiment.
The earth is a differential engine — gradients of heat, cold, dry, wet, fat, lean. Some terrains snicker at all hope for a meal; others rain continuous free lunch. Even this asymmetry shifts. Currents churn up cold; mountains buckle, wear down in an era or two. Seas recede; poles reverse. The pool is played on a table so warped that players can either shoot or wait for a change in the rules.
The game, I figure out, is to figure out the game. My runaway catalog's every proposition is about the prepositional calculus. Two strange succulents, one African, the other Arizonan, converge by distant routes. Each is a lab transcript, a probe of local conditions. Living diversity maps the diversity of available space. The race for the curve of best fit fractures at every rapid into an alluvial fan.
I pose the naif's Q: Which of these million unclassifiable experiments is the most successful? A first, satellite glance gives the hat tip to my own chromosome set. Five billion, from Sahara nomads to Antarctic scientists. Flexible, omnivorous environment shaper, top of the food chain. But almost upon arrival, it crests in oversuccess, chokes on its own effluent.
My second candidate is grass. As widespread as man, greater in biomass. And it rarely annihilates its own niche. A good enough solution to have diversified into five hundred genera, five thousand species: corn, wheat, rice, bamboo, sorghum, reed, oats, timothy, fescue, Kentucky blue. It encourages others to cultivate it, the sweet, sugarcane smell of global success. But even grass is colossally one-upped by Insecta. I trace a range greater than grass and man combined. Undivertable clouds, a single species can outnumber all humans a hundredfold. And Insecta contains as many different species as there are humans in Lower Manhattan.
Then I discover bacteria. They coat every cubic meter of the planet. A gram of soil can contain 100 million. Every cycle required for life involves them integrally. They have remained essentially unchanged since emergence, three billion or more years ago. They make their way inside every large organism. The successes of the pyramid's cap depend inextricably on success at the base. Their success is the success of the animate code, the living engine's linchpin. Supremacy of the sheet of cells spread passively over earth's surface is measured in tens of thousands of duplicating tons per second.
"Success" mutated from Ur-roots sub and cedere, to follow after. Its hold on my English mind is a loaded model where B competes with, bests, and replaces A. The word warps my research. Scarcity undeniably demands competition, but living success does not mean beating out all comers. Cooperation of ever tighter skeins ties the web together, interanimates the nets of success. Emerson came remarkably close for an American: "All are needed by each one; /Nothing is fair or good alone." That one I learned as a schoolgirl. Successful hunters are not too good at killing, and successful prey must be pared and pruned.