How to Live a Life in Harmony With Our Essential Selves
One of the most exciting discoveries in science for me occurred in the spring of 2021 when articles began appearing about the Xenobot’s ability to reproduce itself.
To refresh your memories of what the Xenobot is, back in 2020, a group of scientists from UVM and Tufts worked together to create biological robots. The UVM team, using a supercomputer, ran computer models and designed a programmable organism. The team from Tufts took these designs, extracted skin and heart cells from the embryos of a frog (Xenopus Laevis), and arranged those cells in specific shapes based on the models provided by the UVM team.
The result is that the heart and skin cells work together to form a new type of organism with new functionality and drive. In 2021, the scientist ran an experiment in which other embryonic heart and skin cells were added to the petri dish. The Xenobots moved around the dish, gathering cells and pushing them together to form replicas of themselves. When they were provided with the material, the Xenobots became self-replicating.
Here are some discoveries from the Xenobot studies that made these experiments remarkable.
- The scientist didn’t do anything different to the Frog’s DNA. These are standard Xenopus Laevis cells. Simply by changing the arrangement of the cells, the cells took on a life of their own. This means that the cells within the Xenobot are somehow communicating together. Even though these cells were designed to grow into a frog, they take on a new form with new functionality without changing their DNA coding simply by arranging them differently.
- How does it know to make replicas of itself? If its DNA coding is designed to create a frog, how does this new arrangement of cells know to make replicates of itself?
- Equally remarkable, on a dry petri dish, the Xenobot moves by contracting its heart cells to push itself across the surface. However, when placed in water, it coordinates the movement of its cilia to row through the water. How does it know to coordinate its movements in such a way as to row itself effectively?
- If you cut the Xenobot in half, it can heal and repair itself. The Xenobots also orm. Two Xenobots may stick together for a bit, but they never merge into one. They also seem to have a purpose and coordinate their movements with other Xenobots. If all signals to others in its environment, which they all respond to.
What these discoveries point to is that survival is designed on a cellular level. The cells of these Xenobots seem to work together to react to their environment and even replicate. What is it about life that makes the drive for survival so paramount? Is survival the prime directive coded into all of life’s DNA? Or is survival coded somewhere else in an organism?
All of these discoveries illustrate how remarkable and surprising life truly is. But what can we take away from this discovery and apply it to our understanding of ourselves? Can there be a lesson that we can use in our daily lives?
Humans have often sought to understand the governing principles of nature to help guide us in living in harmony with nature. Taoism is just one philosophy that comes to mind, which seeks to understand nature or Tao as a way to live in harmony with it. Perhaps, by understanding the design of life on a fundamental cellular level, we can gain insight into how we should live our lives in harmony with our own design.
If survival is the prime directive coded into all living organisms down to a cellular level, then one could extrapolate that living the longest, healthiest life possible would be acting in accordance with that design. That doesn’t seem like much of a revelation. But how many of us actively live a life intended to maximize our existence? To live a life that maximizes our individual existence would mean living life intentionally with longevity as the goal.
Consider all the things we have discovered of late about what living a healthy, longevity-driven life looks like. How many of us actively work daily to live that lifestyle? I won’t get into all the steps a person can take to live healthily here. But some basic ones are avoiding alcohol and refined sugars, staying physically active, getting quality sleep, and eating more plant-based foods while avoiding processed foods. These are just a few behaviors that would lead to living a longer and healthier life. However, maintaining that lifestyle requires daily commitment and active work.
However, another principle to take away is that life’s design is not just about self-preservation. While self-preservation is designed on a cellular level, so is death. We’re designed to die within a set amount of time. Why? There must also be an evolutionary reason for this.
Generational refresh allows a species to adapt and evolve to its environment. Organisms with longer life spans and slower generational refresh evolve more slowly. Evolving slowly can be detrimental to a species’ survival because that species will not be able to adapt quickly enough to changes in its environment.
The second takeaway from the Xenobot is that life’s design is not solely about the survival of a single entity. It is equally, if not more so, about the species’ survival at large. It seems that life has evolved through time to strike a balance between the survival of the individual and the survival of the species. And the survival of the individual is in service of the survival of the species.
If you acknowledge that the ultimate design of life is to ensure that life continues to exist regardless of the individual, then it wouldn’t be enough to just live to one’s fullest potential. To live in harmony with life’s design, we should aspire to contribute that potential toward the survival of our species.
For humans, that doesn’t mean just childbirth. Ensuring the survival of our species includes leaving behind the best environment, world, society, and education possible for future generations. Our technology and sheer numbers allow us to manipulate and change our environment. So, we are fully responsible for the health and productivity of our planet. If we continue to pollute our world and release greenhouse gases, the Earth we leave behind to future generations will not be hospitable to life. So it is our responsibility to remove harmful substances from our environment like micro and nano plastics, PFAS, reducing greenhouse gases, and reintroducing areas for natural habitats so other life forms can survive and thrive.
Of course, these issues are too big and complex for any individual to tackle alone. The good news is we’re not alone. There are over 8 billion of us. If we all worked together, there would be nothing we couldn’t achieve. In an earlier post, I wrote about the mighty Cyanobacteria and how this single-celled organism shaped our planet.
So, it is up to each of us to take responsibility for our actions and choices in our daily lives. Individually, we could actively eliminate plastic use in our daily lives. Or we can try to reduce our individual use of fossil fuels. Any action you take will make a difference in the long run. If everyone took similar actions, companies would have to respond. The companies profiting from these harmful products will have no choice but to cater to the consumer’s will as demand for their products subside.
This seems like a lot to extract from the existence of these tiny biological robots. However, the Xenobot demonstrates that survival as a function is ingrained into the very being of cellular organisms. If you accept that survival is the primal code driving life, then living one’s healthiest life possible while ensuring we’re setting up future generations for success would be living in harmony with life’s design.