A Post from Strange Loop Nan

I knew that there were amazing examples of symbiosis in the biological world, such as the social insects (see "Thoughts on Anthill..." entry), and the mitochondria in our own cells. And I love the idea of slime molds being able to exist as single cells but communicating by cyclic AMP that it's time to congregate and make a fruiting stalk. But I was surprised to read this morning in Matt Ridley's book that the Portuguese man-o'-war is actually a colony, not a single organism. I looked it up on a great site called Animal Diversity Web. I never did take a zoology class, so I guess that's how I missed this until now.

This kind of stuff fascinates me, partly because I think it's more evidence that it's hard to draw a line between self and nonself. A while ago I read I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstader . I had to skip over the main part, the explanation of how Godel's theorem--which leads to Hofstader's conclusion that there is no "I"--because I just couldn't get it. (The best I could do was figure that the scientific community seems to find Hofstader plausible.) I really wanted to get to Hofstader's idea that we don't really exist as separate selves. I find that immensely comforting, and I began to think of myself as Strange Loop Nan (i.e., the strange loop that is called Nan). You can read a nice excerpt on why the "I" doesn't exist here.

Ridley writes about this in the context of increasing cooperation over time in the history of life.