From quasi-organism to protolife

Tansley's [Tansley, 1935. The use and abuse of vegetational concepts and terms. Ecology 16, 284–307] “quasi-organism” portrays the ecosystem as an aberration of nature, being neither fully organism nor fully abiotic. The term is untenable, as there can be no semi-metaphor. I approach the issue by examining whether ecosystems, nature, Gaia and communities are phenotypes, that is, as entities upon which natural selection operates and which are expressions of a genotype homologue. The complicated internal structure of atomic particles is suggested as homologues for the nucleotides of nature. It is further suggested that if the superpositions of quantum states of the molecular or cellular levels of a mutualism (community), or “q-gene,” such as a soil bacteria–vegetation complex, could remain coherent for biochemically relevant scales, then these could experience simultaneous adaptive mutations, providing an ensemble upon which natural selection could operate. In general, communities are not phenotypes because they lack a genome homologue. The earth (Gaia) and ecosystems cannot be phenotypes because the physical environment cannot experience adaptive mutation through quantum superposition, and even if they could, the superposition of quantum states of the environment with those of organisms is inconsistent with the treatment of the entanglement of the environment as constituting a measurement. A more tenable characterization of the ecosystem is as an example of a category of emergence that I refer to as protolife, comprising ecosystems, protocells and spiral galaxies. These entities demonstrate the same functions: capturing and transducing energy, sequestering organic matter and ions from the environment, catalyzing the synthesis of its components, protecting the accumulated organic matter from dilution, and self-replicating.