What Science Teaches

Living systems create themselves. They (we) are all self-authoring. We always and only organize around an identity, a membrane or boundary that distinguishes us from everything else. Without identity, there would be no means to differentiate one thing from another. There would be no possibility to organize into greater complexity and order. Without identity, it would be a never-ending mess of primordial soup devoid of form and possibility.

There are alternate theories for how life began about four billion years ago, how the first chemical reactions occurred to create the first cells. Where did the energy for those first chemical reactions come from? Was it in the primordial soup of ocean struck by lightning, or in heat vents deep on the ocean floor, or on the new planet’s fiery surface? What we do know is that life began with membranes, with boundaries that created cells by separating them from everything else.

Inside that container, possibilities arise—complex interactions that create different and sophisticated functions.¹ The membrane is semipermeable, letting in energy and matter in continual exchanges with its environment. Without that permeability, nothing new could be created, and, like all closed systems, the young life form would quickly wear down and die.

Life cannot be sustained when the boundary becomes rigid. Nor can it generate new capacities and adapt to its environment if the boundary is too open. Too much permeability is as dangerous to the continuation of a living system as is too much rigidity. Maintaining the sensitive balance between open and closed is the ever-present challenge for a living system.

Whenever a living system changes, it is attempting to save itself, to preserve its identity. Every living being has the freedom to use cognition to notice changes in its environment, interpret them, and decide how to respond. Nothing is predetermined—if a change happens, it is the result of the organism’s decision to change based on a perceived threat to itself. This is the intriguing paradox of identity: it can be greatly changed as the means to protect its existing self.

Without identity there is no life, no creation, no responsiveness, no continuation, no possibility for evolutionary change. Yet every change is motivated by an attempt to preserve a self.

You can prove this to yourself. Whenever you detect a change in a person, community, organization, or nation, observe how their old identity is referred to, sometimes many times over, even though they now appear quite changed. (You can also try this at home.) You will always find identity as the reference for change. It cannot be otherwise.