Biocivilizations
According to bioscientist Predrag Slijepcevic, when humans view themselves as the crown of creation, they overlook the essential point: Life has existed for about four billion years, whereas Homo sapiens has been around for only two to three hundred thousand years. In a conversation with Robert Cibis, Slijepcevic—author of the recently published book *Biocivilizations: A New Perspective on the Science of Life*—paints a picture of nature that turns the familiar hierarchy on its head. Language, engineering, science, art, medicine, and agriculture—all those achievements that humans claim as their own—already existed in the natural world millions, and in some cases billions, of years before our civilization.
Slijepcevic refers to the Gaia theory formulated in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, according to which the biosphere is a coherent, decentralized system with a mind of its own. Long dismissed as unscientific, this view is gaining ground today. Humans, the biologist argues, do not control nature; rather, the opposite is true. He considers the recently popular concept of the Anthropocene—which declares humans to be the rulers and owners of the Earth—to be misleading, because from an evolutionary perspective, we are beginners.
In plain numbers, this means: Of the total weight of the biosphere—around 550 gigatons of carbon—about 70 percent is accounted for by plants, 25 percent by bacteria, and only about two percent by the entire animal kingdom, including humans. Bacteria colonize not only the soil but also up to 70 kilometers high in the atmosphere and 20 to 30 kilometers deep in the Earth’s crust. According to Slijepcevic, they created the biosphere in the first place. Without them, life would be inconceivable; mathematical models show that if microbes were to disappear, all other organisms would die within two to three months. The human microbiome comprises around 400 trillion bacteria compared to just 37 trillion body cells, and the development of the human brain would also be impossible without bacterial influence.
Slijepcevic provides a particularly compelling description of the social structures of these insects. Ants, termites, and honeybees live in veritable cities, complete with transportation networks, defensive structures, and agriculture—where fungi are cultivated as crops—as well as undertakers who identify dead members of their colony by their characteristic scent. Researchers have also observed that ants carry injured comrades back to the nest from the battlefield, disinfect their wounds with antimicrobial secretions, and amputate legs if necessary. The following day, the treated ants often returned to battle. It is remarkable that ants possess barely any brains and yet are capable of such feats.
This is precisely where Slijepcevic challenges a central dogma of modern biology. The mechanistic worldview, which conceives of life as a machine that can be taken apart and put back together again and reduces everything to genes and information, has reached a dead end. Together with colleagues, he argues in the book *The Sentient Cell* that every single organism, from bacteria to humans, is sentient and endowed with a subjective sense of self. Even Descartes was mistaken when he denied that animals could feel pain. Even ants apparently possess something akin to a personality. Consciousness, the biologist emphasizes, is not the same as rationality; many of our decisions are emotional, shaped by experiences, stories, and metaphors.
Slijepcevic does not describe bacteria as single-celled organisms, as textbooks do, but as societies of trillions of individuals that communicate with one another through chemical messages and over greater distances via electrical impulses. As early as about three billion years ago, something akin to a bacterial internet emerged—a globally networked system that also explains why antibiotic resistance can spread so rapidly across continents, carried by planetary wind systems in which bacteria travel long distances as spores.
In the interview, Cibis refers to the German philosopher Jochen Kirchhoff, who interprets the cosmos itself as a living organism, and questions the plausibility of such an idea. Slijepcevic recalls Alfred North Whitehead, who already understood atoms and electrons as living beings; the biologist Jakob von Uexküll, born in what is now Estonia, as the founder of biosemiotics; and Martin Heidegger’s famous essay on technology, in which he warned as early as 1954 against reducing nature to a mere resource. Furthermore, a 2020 study by two Italian physicists revealed a striking structural similarity between the network of galaxies and the human brain. Roger Penrose, a recent Nobel laureate in physics, also considers consciousness to be something that cannot be explained by calculation, which in turn means that life is not a machine.
In response to Cibis’s question about the social consequences of this perspective, Slijepcevic answers cautiously. Conflicts will always exist; that is human nature. Ways out of this mechanistic worldview can only be forged through serious dialogue between donors, politicians, ordinary citizens, young people, and religious leaders—and not only in Western Europe, but also with the involvement of Africa and Asia. In this context, Cibis expresses his skepticism regarding the political instrumentalization of the climate issue in Germany and makes a clear distinction between climate change and the undeniable loss of biodiversity. Slijepcevic agrees that the two should not be lumped together, but emphasizes that the “biological destruction” of the past 100 to 150 years—a phenomenon scientists have termed the sixth mass extinction—is clearly attributable to human technologies.
In the end, Slijepcevic advocates for humility. Humans, he says, are the latest addition to the kaleidoscope of evolution and would do well to learn from those who have lived on this planet for billions of years. He quotes Lynn Margulis, noting that we are essentially nothing more than ecological communities of microbes. Cibis concludes by remarking that filmmaking, too, is something to which he contributes without fully controlling it himself—a decentralized knowledge that works through him.
