European Cultural Past and Possible Future!

 

The Apex of European Culture: 1648 to the Early 18th Century
(This is a Prompted Response from ChatGPT)

Introduction: In the wake of the Thirty Years’ War (ended 1648), Europe entered a period of extraordinary cultural flourishing. Roughly between the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the mid-18th century, the continent produced a spectrum of masterpieces across painting, architecture, music, literature, and philosophy. This era—broadly the Baroque period and its immediate aftermath—saw integrated high culture supported by strong communities (churches, courts, guilds) and a worldview that balanced reason with faith and emotion. By contrast, the subsequent Enlightenment and early Industrial age increasingly emphasized analytical reason, mechanization, and utilitarian values. In this answer, we defend the argument that Europe’s greatest cultural achievements occurred in that 1648–~1740 span, and we explore how Enlightenment rationalism and mechanistic thinking later altered the arts and the communities that nurtured them. Drawing on psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s insights about the “divided brain,” we will argue that the dominance of left-hemisphere, analytic thinking in modernity came at the expense of the right-hemisphere’s holistic vision, with far-reaching consequences for culture, meaning, and community​. andrewpgsweeny.medium.com​europeanconservative.com.

The High Baroque Era: Europe’s Cultural Zenith (1648–1750)

After 1648, a war-weary Europe experienced relative stability in many regions, enabling a remarkable flourishing of the arts. The Baroque style became the dominant mode of expression, “highly ornate and elaborate… flourished in Europe in the 17th and first half of the 18th century”​vam.ac.uk. Patrons such as the Church and absolutist monarchs (e.g. France’s Louis XIV) invested heavily in art to project power and inspire faith, while prosperous cities (like Amsterdam and London) became hotspots of creativity. Crucially, Baroque culture tended to integrate different art forms: as the Victoria and Albert Museum notes, “painting, sculpture and architecture were brought together into a complete whole, to convey a single message or meaning”​vam.ac.uk. The arts appealed to both the senses and the intellect, aiming to “persuade as well as impress” and to be “both rich and meaningful”​vam.ac.uk. In short, the period fostered a holistic artistic vision – grandeur with purpose – that many later critics would regard as a high-water mark of European culture.

Music: Baroque Composers and Sacred Harmony

In music, the late 17th to early 18th century stands as an unparalleled golden age. Baroque composers developed intricate forms like the fugue, concerto, and opera, blending technical mastery with emotional depth. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), for example, brought polyphonic music to its zenith – his works (from the Mass in B minor to the Brandenburg Concertos) exhibit mathematical complexity wedded to profound spiritual feeling. Bach and his contemporaries such as George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) and Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) were steeped in community traditions: Bach wrote primarily for church and civic occasions, Handel for public opera houses and royal ceremonies. Their music was not created in isolation but as part of living communities – church congregations, court audiences, city festivals – which gave it context and meaning. Sacred music in this era (Bach’s cantatas, Handel’s Messiah) fused faith with artistry, while secular music (the birth of the instrumental concerto, the French court ballet, etc.) still adhered to the ideal of music as a harmonizing force in society. In later periods, classical and Romantic composers would achieve fame, but the Baroque composers are often regarded as foundational geniuses, with Bach in particular frequently cited as one of the greatest composers of all time. Their work represents a pinnacle of musical architecture – a balance of order and emotion that mirrors the Baroque aesthetic in other arts.

Painting and Sculpture: Masters of the Baroque Canvas and Marble

Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” (1656) exemplifies the sophistication of Baroque art – a painting that is both a court portrait and a complex meditation on reality and representation. In the visual arts, the post-1648 period produced towering masters whose works rank among the most famous in Western history. “Peter Paul Rubens, Caravaggio, Diego Velázquez, Rembrandt van Rijn and Nicolas Poussin – they were the five greatest painters of the 17th century,” as one art historian notes​dailyartmagazine.com. Indeed, the Baroque era was “a period of excellence” that yielded countless masterpieces​dailyartmagazine.com. In the Spanish court, Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s gentle religious scenes set new standards for realism and subtlety. In the Dutch Republic, freed from war in 1648, the Dutch Golden Age blossomed: Rembrandt (1606–1669) painted introspective biblical scenes and portraits with unparalleled psychological depth, while Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) captured quiet domestic moments with luminous clarity (e.g. Girl with a Pearl Earring, c.1665). These artists combined technical virtuosity (mastery of light, color, perspective) with deep human feeling – a balance of right-brain empathy and left-brain skill, one might say.

Baroque sculpture and architecture were often allied with painting to create immersive environments. Preeminent sculptor-architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) in Rome designed grand churches and fountains and carved marble statues that seem to breathe with life and drama. His Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52) captures a mystical vision in tangible form, the angel’s spear and the saint’s swoon rendered with such dynamic realism that stone appears weightless and infused with divine light. This union of the earthly and the spiritual is a hallmark of Baroque art. As contemporaries recognized, Baroque artists aimed to evoke “a sense of awe” through “exuberant detail, deep color, grandeur, and surprise”​en.wikipedia.org. The result was art that moves its audience, appealing not just to reason but to the whole person. Later critics sometimes dismissed Baroque art as “overly decorative,” but its enduring popularity testifies to a powerful integration of skill and spirit that few other periods have matched.

Architecture and Design: Baroque Grandeur in Stone

The Palace of Versailles (built 1660s–1710) represents Baroque architecture at its most magnificent – a sprawling complex of gardens and halls intended to glorify Louis XIV and overawe the viewer. Baroque architecture transformed cityscapes with opulent palaces, stately avenues, and awe-inspiring churches. These structures were not only feats of engineering but also stage sets for cultural life – designed to host rituals, music, and public gatherings that bound communities together. In France, King Louis XIV’s Versailles (illustrated above) set the model: architects Louis Le Vau and Jules Hardouin-Mansart created a harmonized ensemble where painting, sculpture, and architecture merged (ceiling frescoes, mirrored halls, sculpted facades) to exalt the Sun King. Across Europe, great cathedrals and churches rose in this period or were lavishly refurbished: e.g. St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, rebuilt by Christopher Wren after 1666 with a majestic dome to crown the skyline; the Karlskirche in Vienna (1716–1737); and numerous stunning Baroque churches in Italy, Spain, and the German states. These buildings embodied the hierarchical but cohesive society of their time – they were collective achievements, often requiring collaboration of architects, artisans, painters, and local guilds.

A defining feature of Baroque design was its theatricality and unity. Interiors were filled with marble, gold, and dynamic forms (spiraling columns, curved walls, grand staircases) that lead the eye continuously, often toward a high altar or throne, focusing communal attention. In Baroque city planning, we see the creation of ordered yet dramatic public spaces (the colonnades of St. Peter’s Square in Rome, laid out by Bernini in the 1650s, embrace worshippers in an architectural “welcoming arms”). Such designs weren’t merely aesthetic indulgences; they aimed to inspire collective identity – be it religious fervor or civic pride. Architecture was a language of power and faith, and in the Baroque era this language reached an eloquence that subsequent utilitarian ages often struggled to speak. As Iain McGilchrist might observe, these environments “appealed to the emotions as well as the intellect”​vam.ac.uk, engaging the right hemisphere’s sense of lived, human context rather than reducing buildings to mere functional shelters.

Literature and Philosophy: Poetry, Passion, and the Quest for Meaning

The cultural vibrancy of 1648–1750 extended to literature and thought, which saw a flowering of poetic and philosophical works that still shape the Western canon. In literature, this era produced epics, dramas, and poems of immense influence: John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) stands as one of the greatest epic poems in English, blending classical form with Christian themes to “justify the ways of God to men.” In France, the age of Louis XIV brought the classical dramas of Jean Racine and Molière, whose tragedies and comedies (respectively) distilled human passions and follies with elegant verse. Across Europe, writers often enjoyed patronage (Milton, though independent, was Latin secretary to the Commonwealth; Racine and Molière were sponsored by the French court), allowing them the freedom to pursue grand themes. Their works are steeped in the mythology, religion, and history of Europe – a rich interwoven spectrum of references that gave them depth. Even as reason and science were advancing, these writers insisted on the value of imagination and moral insight. For example, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in New Spain (colonial Mexico) wrote brilliant poetry and plays in the late 17th century that fused Baroque wit with arguments for women’s intellectual rights, demonstrating the era’s global reach and intellectual boldness.

Philosophically, the late 17th century is known as the dawn of modern philosophy – yet many thinkers straddled old and new worldviews. René Descartes (d. 1650) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) pioneered analytic methods (Descartes’ rationalism, Leibniz’s calculus and Monadology), but they still believed in metaphysical truths (God, innate ideas) and sought to reconcile emerging science with spiritual meaning. Others like Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) critiqued pure reason, famously noting “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” Thinkers of this age often had one foot in the symbolic, religious worldview of the Renaissance and one foot in the coming Age of Reason. This tension yielded profound works: Pascal’s Pensées grapples with faith in an age of doubt; Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) argued in The New Science (1725) that human culture and history have cycles and meanings that mathematical rationality alone cannot capture. In short, the intellectual climate still allowed for holistic thinking – science and art and religion in dialogue, not strictly segregated. It is telling that Isaac Newton (1642–1727), the great scientist of this age, was also an alchemist and theologian. The unity of knowledge that had characterized the Renaissance continued into the 17th century: encyclopedic minds like G.W. Leibniz corresponded with poets and scholars across Europe (the Republic of Letters) in an effort to synthesize knowledge. This integrated intellectual community provided fertile soil for high culture.

Summing up the Baroque achievement: By the early 18th century, Europe boasted a spectrum of cultural brilliance seldom, if ever, equaled. The arts were vibrant at every level – from village folk art and liturgical music to the refined output of court composers and painters – all underpinned by communities and patronage systems that valued these creations. The Baroque era’s artworks were deeply rooted in communal life (church ceremonies, court pageantry, civic pride) and thus resonated with shared meaning. There was, of course, no utopia – the period had its share of social stratification and conflict. Yet, in terms of cultural output, one can argue that this era harnessed human creative potential in an especially balanced way: reason and passion, craftsmanship and inspiration, individual genius and communal tradition all worked in concert. It is this balance that later eras would find difficult to sustain.

Enlightenment and Industrialization: Changing Values and Lost Communities

Around the mid-18th century, the cultural landscape of Europe began to shift under the influence of Enlightenment philosophy and the early Industrial Revolution. The change was gradual and varied by region, but by the late 18th century the contrasts with the Baroque world became stark. Enlightenment thinkers championed reason, progress, and individual rights; these ideals brought many benefits, from scientific advances to political revolutions. However, when applied narrowly to art and society, Enlightenment rationalism and mechanistic thinking also had unintended side effects: a narrowing of artistic aims, the erosion of traditional community structures, and a new worldview that often treated humans and nature as machines rather than as repositories of intrinsic meaning. In this section, we compare the golden age of culture described above with the cultural climate of the later 18th and 19th centuries, showing how mechanistic views and industrial rationality altered the arts and the communities that create and sustain high culture.

Enlightenment Aesthetics: Reason over Imagination

By the mid-1700s, a reaction had set in against the Baroque style. The late Baroque had morphed into Rococo (especially in France – a lighter, decorative style in the early 18th century), which critics of the Enlightenment came to see as decadent and unserious. Leading intellectuals called for a return to Classical simplicity and moral purpose in art. As the Neoclassical art movement took hold (c. 1760 onwards), it explicitly “arose in opposition to the overly decorative and gaudy styles of Rococo and Baroque”, which Enlightenment elites dismissed as “vanity art” full of “personal conceits and whimsy.”​theartstory.org. The influential German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann urged artists to imitate ancient Greek sculpture and values, stating, “Art must have grandeur and moral purpose” and “the artist must be a philosopher and have no other guide except the torch of reason.”​theartstory.org. Likewise, the French painter Jacques-Louis David, a leading Neoclassicist, declared, “A painter should be a man of order,” reflecting the new ideal of disciplined, logical art​theartstory.org.

These Enlightenment-era values dramatically changed the tone and purpose of art. Where a Baroque painter like Rubens or Caravaggio might unabashedly depict visceral, chaotic scenes (violent martyrdoms, ecstatic revelries) to move the viewer’s soul, a Neoclassical painter like David or Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres chose impeccably composed Greco-Roman subjects intended to educate or edify the viewer. Art became more didactic and restrained: symmetry, clarity, and logic prevailed over the Baroque love of complexity and surprise. In literature, we see a parallel shift. Late 17th-century literature revelled in epic, metaphor, and theological nuance; by the mid-18th century, literature often took a more satirical or realistic turn. Voltaire’s Candide (1759) savagely critiqued the old philosophical optimism with cutting rational wit; the emerging novel form (e.g. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719, Richardson’s Pamela in 1740) favored everyday settings and empirical detail over the grand mythic sweep of earlier epics. Poetry, too, became more tightly structured and moralizing – Alexander Pope (1688–1744) wrote in heroic couplets that embodied order and clarity, famously stating “Order is Heaven’s first law.” In all these ways, Enlightenment thinking cleaned up and formalized the arts, aligning them with intellectual programs. This had some positive effects – precision and polish – but it often meant a loss of the Baroque era’s emotional breadth and spiritual resonance. The right-hemisphere qualities of ambiguity, depth, and implicit metaphor were downplayed in favor of left-hemisphere virtues like explicit logic and surface lucidity​shortform.com​shortform.com.

Music also changed: by the later 18th century, the complex counterpoint of Baroque music gave way to the Classical style (Haydn, Mozart), which emphasized balanced form and clear melody. While Mozart’s music is deeply expressive, it operates within more symmetrical structures than Bach’s. The age of Enlightenment rationalism in music prized elegance and clarity – the phrase structure, the sonata-allegro form – reflecting the broader Enlightenment preference for order. Notably, as the 18th century wore on, composers increasingly composed for public concerts or market publication rather than for church or exclusive court use. This shift presaged the artist as a more isolated individual genius (Mozart struggling for independent income, Beethoven in the early 19th century defiantly individual), as opposed to the Baroque model of a craftsman integrated into a stable institution (Bach as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, secure in his role). Thus, the communal and functional role of art started to diminish; art became more a vehicle of personal expression or public commentary, and less a built-in element of communal ritual.

It’s important not to oversimplify: the Enlightenment did produce great art and was not anti-art. But the philosophy driving the era was increasingly empirical and skeptical. Traditional sources of meaning – religion, myth, communal custom – came under rational scrutiny or even ridicule (Voltaire’s catchphrase écrasez l’infâme! targeted the Church; Diderot’s Encyclopédie systematically reordered knowledge in secular terms). As those shared frameworks of meaning weakened, the arts had to find new justifications. Often, art was justified in Enlightenment terms as providing moral instruction or refined entertainment, rather than tapping into mystery or transcendence. A telling example: in 1795 the German poet Schiller wrote On the Aesthetic Education of Man, arguing that art could reunify the fragmented modern self – implying that by the end of the Enlightenment, people already felt the loss of wholeness that earlier ages, for all their dogmas, had provided. The full onset of “Enlightenment rationalism” thus marked a turning point where the arts were both refined and constrained by reason.

Mechanization and the Destruction of Traditional Communities

Parallel to these intellectual shifts, the late 18th and 19th centuries witnessed the rise of industrial capitalism and mechanized production – a socioeconomic upheaval that profoundly affected communities and culture. In the Baroque period, artistic production and daily life were rooted in local communities: consider the guilds of artisans in a city, or the orchestra and choir of a prince’s court, or the fact that each town had its master builder, organist, or poet. These networks sustained high culture by providing training, patronage, and a ready audience grounded in common values. Industrialization disrupted and often dissolved these traditional networks. As one historian notes, “for generations, goods had been produced in cottage-style industries where apprentices learned from master craftsmen… each village supported its own potter, blacksmith, weaver, and woodworker.”​wcu.edu This reflects a broader truth: culture was local and passed down face-to-face. With the advent of the factory system in the late 1700s and early 1800s, that changed dramatically.

“As industrialization grew, the making of things became the province of… the factory – replacing the traditional workshop,” and “new factory methods broke work into small bits, resulting in long days that were monotonous and grueling.”​wcu.edu Instead of a skilled artisan taking pride in crafting a whole object, workers became cogs in a machine, each only doing one repetitive task. The division of labor, heralded by economists like Adam Smith, did increase productivity – but at the cost of the worker’s joy and holism in work: “The result was that the worker was robbed of any pleasure from work.”​wcu.edu Along with this came the breakup of communities: young people left villages for city factories, family enterprises died out, and the web of mutual obligations in villages (which often sponsored local festivals, arts, church feasts, etc.) was greatly weakened. By the mid-19th century, critics like John Ruskin in England observed that mass production and mechanization were degrading both the quality of goods and the quality of life. Traditional craftsmanship nearly disappeared in some domains; for instance, “within a few decades, the great tradition of European wrought iron declined, as casting replaced… skillful work made by hammering”​wcu.edu. This is just one example of a fine art (ornamental ironwork) essentially lost to industrial efficiency. Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts movement later lamented how industrial society produced “ugly” objects and “undermined long-held community values,” asking whether this material progress truly equated to cultural improvement​wcu.edu.

The systematic destruction of communities capable of producing high culture was not just an economic side-effect; it was arguably also driven by a new mindset that accompanied mechanization. As factories and urbanization spread, there was a tendency to see society itself as a kind of machine – a collection of interchangeable parts (workers, output, commodities) rather than a living organism bonded by shared customs. Traditional community events – holy days, harvest dances, guild pageants – which often engendered local arts, were frowned upon by rationalist reformers as “idle” or “superstitious” and were gradually phased out or commercialized. In France, the Revolution (a product of Enlightenment ideas) went so far as to abolish the old calendar of saints’ days and impose a rational calendar of 10-day weeks, explicitly attempting to break the hold of traditional community rhythms. Throughout the 19th century, we see centralizing states standardizing languages, education, and laws in the name of reason and progress, but inadvertently flattening regional folk cultures. Those folk cultures had been the soil from which many great artists sprang (think of how much Baroque sacred music drew on folk melodies and rhythms, or how painters learned in guild workshops that also produced vernacular art). As that soil thinned, art could become more uprooted – the province of bohemian geniuses in cosmopolitan cities rather than a pervasive communal endeavor.

The Mechanistic Worldview: Humans and Nature as Machines

Underpinning the above changes was what we might call the mechanistic worldview, which gained dominance during the Enlightenment. In the 17th century, pioneers of modern science like Descartes, Galileo, and Newton had introduced a powerful metaphor: the universe is a vast machine operating by mathematical laws. Descartes even described animals (and by implication the human body) as automata – complex machines made by God. By the mid-18th century, some thinkers took this further, discarding the role of God or spirit altogether. The French materialist philosopher La Mettrie wrote Man a Machine (L’Homme Machine) in 1747, explicitly arguing that human beings are essentially fleshy mechanisms, without immaterial souls. Such ideas were controversial but increasingly influential among intellectual elites. They encouraged an understanding of human behavior as unconscious, machine-like processes – an approach that would later underlie fields like economics (with the idea of the human as a rational utility-maximizer) and even early psychology.

The consequences for culture of this mechanistic turn were profound. If humans are viewed as machine-like and nature as inert matter, then the deeper sources of meaning that inspired Baroque art – the sacredness of the human spirit, the enchanted view of nature as full of God’s design, the value of imagination – begin to evaporate. As McGilchrist observes, “Beginning in the late medieval period, Western man began to reject the ancient philosophical idea that meaning inhered in nature… if all matter is ‘dead’… then we can do whatever we like with the natural world.”​europeanconservative.com In other words, when quantitative, left-brained thinking reduces the world to resource and number, qualities like beauty, soul, and community are either ignored or actively undermined. “The entire modern history of Western culture – through the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and all that has followed – is what you get from an intellect that values quantity over quality, that knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing,” writes McGilchrist, summing up this shift​europeanconservative.com. Enlightenment scientists indeed prized measurement; Enlightenment economists quantified productivity; and later, industrialists measured output and profit. But what about the “value” of a cohesive village life, or of a sublime cathedral? Those did not fit easily into the new calculus.

By the 19th century, the mechanical view had permeated social policy. For instance, in Britain, Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism explicitly proposed calculating morality based on units of pleasure and pain – a very machine-like approach to human life. Factories treated workers as replaceable parts (if one breaks or unions protest, get another). The design of industrial cities often neglected aesthetic and social needs, resulting in the grim slums and “satanic mills” decried by poet William Blake. The net effect was a cultural and spiritual flattening: communities that once patronized local arts were impoverished or scattered; education became more standardized and utilitarian, less rooted in classical or folk wisdom; and artists themselves increasingly either bent to market forces (producing art to suit bourgeois buyers’ tastes) or retreated into artistic countercultures in opposition to the philistine mainstream.

It’s worth noting that there were resistance movements. The Romantic movement (late 18th–early 19th century) was in part a rebellion against Enlightenment mechanistic rationality – Romantic poets and composers revered nature, emotion, and the medieval past (e.g. Gothic Revival architecture tried to recapture pre-industrial spirituality in the 19th century). Yet, even the Romantics were affected by the new paradigm: they often saw themselves as isolated geniuses at odds with society, which is a far cry from the integrated role of, say, a Bach working within a community church structure. By the late 19th century, cultural critics like Matthew Arnold were warning that industrial, secular societies faced an inner crisis – “anarchy” or loss of center – after the “withdrawal of faith and tradition.” Here we see the core of the argument: that the mechanistic, analytical mindset which brought material gains also hollowed out certain aspects of life that are essential for sustaining high culture and cohesive communities.

To crystallize the contrasts between the Baroque golden age and the post-Enlightenment world, consider the following comparison:

Aspect	Baroque Era (1648–1750)	Enlightenment & Industrial Era (1750– nineteenth c.)
Worldview	Organic, enchanted cosmos; a balance of reason and faith – nature and art seen as imbued with meaning and purpose.	Mechanical, disenchanted universe; reason and science as primary guides – nature and human life viewed in materialistic or utilitarian terms.
Art’s role	Express spiritual and communal values; evoke awe and emotional depth; integrated into rituals (church, court, civic).	Instruct or entertain with rational order; often art as commodity or propaganda; galleries and concert halls replace church patronage.
Style and aesthetics	Exuberant detail, drama, and grandeur (“to achieve a sense of awe”; rich symbolism appealing to emotion and intellect.	Clarity, symmetry, and simplicity; strict forms (Neoclassicism in art, Classical in music); emphasis on reason, moral lesson, or factual realism.
Community context	Strong local communities, guilds, and patronage systems support artists; art created with and for stable communities (towns, congregations, courts).	Decline of patronage/guilds; artists become freelancers or employees in a market; mass audiences form but local community art traditions weaken.
Human perspective	Humans as creative beings with souls; flaws and passions depicted compassionately (e.g. Shakespeare’s influence persisted); culture aimed to uplift to divine or heroic.	Humans as rational individuals or cogs in social machines; extremes of behavior pathologized or caricatured (satire); culture aimed to civilize or else used for social engineering.
Production	Hand-crafted, labor-intensive creation (one-of-a-kind artworks, bespoke architecture); slower production but high artisanal quality.	Mass production in factories (prints, cheap pianos, gaslit theatres, etc.); more art objects available but often lower craftsmanship; architecture adopts prefabrication.

This contrast is admittedly generalized – but it highlights how mechanistic rationalism systematically eroded the old cultural ecosystem. The Baroque achievements were not just a fluke of individual geniuses; they were the fruits of a whole mode of life and thought. Once that mode shifted toward what McGilchrist calls the “left-hemisphere” paradigm – fixating on parts rather than wholes, explicit design rather than implicit meaning – the wellspring of integrated high culture began to dry up.

McGilchrist’s Diagnosis: The Divided Brain and the Loss of Balance

Philosopher and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist provides a compelling framework to understand this historical shift. In his work The Master and His Emissary (2009) and The Matter with Things (2021), McGilchrist synthesizes neuroscience, psychology, and cultural history to argue that the West has fallen under the tyranny of the brain’s left hemisphere mode of attention, neglecting the more holistic wisdom of the right hemisphere. While he cautions against crude “left brain vs right brain” stereotypes, McGilchrist identifies the left hemisphere with analytic, abstract, compartmentalizing thinking, and the right hemisphere with integrative, contextual, meaning-oriented thinking​europeanconservative.com​europeanconservative.com. Both modes are essential, but problems arise when one dominates. According to McGilchrist, this is precisely what has happened in modern Western culture: “In modern times, Western man has become stuck in his left brain… convinced that this fragmented view is the real world”​europeanconservative.com. This neurological metaphor maps uncannily onto the contrast we have drawn between the Baroque era and the post-Enlightenment era.

We can interpret the 1648–1750 cultural peak as a time when the two hemispheres were in fruitful balance. Artistic and intellectual life combined rigorous technique and analysis (left-hemisphere skills) with imaginative depth and connection to lived human experience (right-hemisphere vision). Recall the Baroque penchant for uniting multiple arts to express a single meaning​vam.ac.uk – a very holistic endeavor. McGilchrist himself points to such epochs as examples of right-hemisphere leadership: he notes that “the Renaissance and Romanticism” were periods where the right’s influence was strong, fostering creativity and meaning, whereas “the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modernity” have been marked by left-hemisphere dominance​shortform.com​shortform.com. The Baroque falls between Renaissance and Enlightenment, and shares much with the former’s integrated outlook. Indeed, one could view the Baroque Catholic ethos (and even the communal Lutheran and Anglican arts) as a reaction against the Reformation’s more left-brained iconoclasm. McGilchrist notes that the Reformation’s rejection of images and metaphors in worship – the smashing of statues for being “idolatrous” – reflects an overly literal, left-hemisphere mindset unable to appreciate symbolic meaning​shortform.com​shortform.com. The Baroque, especially in Catholic Europe, restored the metaphoric, symbolic richness (saints’ images, elaborate allegories in painting, music as “the voice of God”) which speaks to the right hemisphere’s love of imagery and the sacred. It’s no coincidence that “when these two hemispheres are in proper relationship to each other, we have collective surges of high culture, like the Renaissance,” as one commentator summarizing McGilchrist puts it​andrewpgsweeny.medium.com. The Baroque can be seen as one such surge – a late renaissance of sorts – fueled by a dynamic interplay of analysis and intuition.

What happened next, according to McGilchrist’s schema, was the left hemisphere (analysis, quantification, control) increasingly usurping the master role. The Enlightenment’s very name suggests light and clarity, but it was a narrow beam of light in McGilchrist’s view – the spotlight of focused left-hemisphere attention, which misses the surrounding depth. Descartes’ philosophy epitomizes this shift. McGilchrist notes how Descartes “took a detached, ‘objective’ stance toward the world,” doubting even his own body’s reality in pursuit of certainty – a move that “shows a right-hemisphere deficit,” since the right hemisphere values embodied, relational knowing​shortform.com​shortform.com. The left hemisphere’s push for absolute certainty and explicit proof (Descartes’ method, or later the logical frameworks of Kant and the Encyclopedists) sidelined the more tacit, narrative, and experiential ways of knowing that had informed the arts and communal life. Over time, this led to what McGilchrist calls a cultural “left-brain runaway.” We started applying mechanistic, reductive thinking everywhere, even where it doesn’t belong: seeing nature as mere “resources,” treating communities as collections of economic units, and even viewing art as “nothing but” psychological or chemical processes. McGilchrist chillingly remarks, “Indeed, if you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula,” which “reject[s] all transcendent values” and insists our materialist, analytic way is the only truth​europeanconservative.com​europeanconservative.com. In neurological terms, the emissary (left hemisphere) has usurped the master (right hemisphere) – and “society becomes machine-like and pathological” in this state​andrewpgsweeny.medium.com.

Let’s connect this explicitly to culture and community. The right hemisphere, per McGilchrist, is more engaged when we encounter art, poetry, religion – anything that involves ambiguity, emotion, and context. It “sees the whole” and appreciates implicit meaning. The left hemisphere, by contrast, is adept at manipulating tools and symbols in isolation, but it “does not know what it does not know”​europeanconservative.com – it can become blind to the bigger picture. When Western culture increasingly trusted only the left hemisphere’s vision (the world as a set of objects to exploit or variables to calculate), it devalued the very things that make life meaningful: the qualitative aspects of existence. McGilchrist points out that the modern mind “knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing”​europeanconservative.com. This nicely encapsulates how a mechanistic society might create enormous wealth or dazzling technology, yet find itself culturally and spiritually impoverished. The Baroque culture we celebrate was rich in value: it valued beauty for beauty’s sake, worship, communal celebration – things that don’t reduce to a number. It’s not that Baroque people lacked reason (far from it – they built elaborate mathematical organs and composed intricate fugues), but reason was in service of higher values and human connections.

McGilchrist’s thesis suggests that to have a healthy culture, the right hemisphere’s holistic governance must be restored, with the left hemisphere as an important advisor. In historical terms, this would mean reclaiming some of the Baroque era’s mindset: re-infusing art with shared meaning, reviving the continuity between artist and community, and respecting the limits of linear reason. The Romantic era tried to do this, as have various cultural renaissances since. But many of those were partial or short-lived, often co-opted by the very forces they opposed (e.g. Romanticism yielding to the commodification of art in the later 19th century). McGilchrist warns that the trajectory of extreme left-brain dominance leads to cultural breakdown – he even correlates it with mental illness on a societal scale​europeanconservative.com​europeanconservative.com. When he writes that “the picture of reality taken as objectively true by the modern mind… is killing us”​europeanconservative.com, one can interpret “killing us” culturally and spiritually as well. The communities capable of producing high culture in the past are largely gone; rebuilding them would likely require a profound shift in how we think and relate – a shift back toward what the Baroque (and the right hemisphere) knew: that wholeness, meaning, and connection are real and indispensable.

Conclusion

The argument that Europe’s finest cultural fruits grew in the years 1648 to about 1750 is not a claim made lightly. We have seen how, in that era, great painters, composers, architects, writers, and philosophers created works of astonishing depth and brilliance – works that continue to define the pinnacle of European art. This flourishing was not an isolated miracle but the product of a particular cultural ecology: one in which communities were intact, patrons valued more than profit, and artists could balance innovation with tradition. It was a time when a cathedral or a concerto was understood as more than a personal project or a market commodity – it was a service to something larger, whether God, glory, or the public good. The subsequent Enlightenment and industrial age, for all their gains in knowledge and efficiency, gradually dismantled this old order. They traded the right-hemisphere richness of the Baroque (its spectrum of color, emotion, and meaning) for the left-hemisphere clarity of reason and calculation. In the process, Europe’s cultural output changed: some of the change was invigorating (new genres, more literacy, etc.), but much of it meant a loss of soul. The very phrase “high culture” began to sound old-fashioned in an age of mass production and secularization.

By invoking Iain McGilchrist’s ideas, we framed this as a story of imbalance. The best of European culture came from balance: intellect and intuition, part and whole, individual talent and communal support. The modern age tilted toward one side of these dualities – favoring analysis over synthesis, quantity over quality, explicit over implicit, mechanistic over organic. The result was a kind of cultural anemia, a weakening of the shared life-world that art needs. A Beethoven or a Picasso still could arise, but increasingly in spite of the cultural milieu rather than because of it. Communities that once might nurture a Bach or a Bernini had been refashioned into something less conducive to genius – or at least to integrative genius. As McGilchrist might say, modern society excelled at taking things apart but forgot how to put them back together into a meaningful whole​europeanconservative.com.

In defending the supremacy of that 1648–1750 era, we do not deny the genuine achievements of later periods; rather, we recognize that something intangible yet invaluable was present in the Baroque world that later developments eroded. It was a world still suffused with transcendent values – whether religious or humanistic – that gave art and life a higher purpose. When Voltaire and the philosophes sneered at the old “superstitions,” they failed to see that in scrubbing the altars clean, they might also be extinguishing the flame that lit those altars. To borrow McGilchrist’s metaphor: they used the magnifying glass of reason to inspect the stars, and then claimed the stars didn’t exist because the tool wasn’t suited to see them​europeanconservative.com. The Baroque era, with all its opulence and occasional excess, did see those stars – it acknowledged mystery, beauty, and communal joy as central to life, not mere ornament.

Ultimately, the “best of European culture” is not just a matter of artistic technique or output, but of the context and meaning behind it. The post-1648 Baroque era provided an extraordinarily fertile context: a Europe rebuilding from war, striving to unite heaven and earth through art, and doing so in a way that engaged entire communities. Later centuries, guided by a different spirit, often looked back to that era either in awe or with a kind of nostalgia (consider the 19th-century rediscovery of Bach, or the Neo-Baroque tendencies in some Romantic music, or the preservation of Baroque city centers as heritage). These were acknowledgments that something profoundly human and elevating was present in that culture.

In closing, defending the primacy of the 1648–1750 cultural spectrum is also a gentle critique of ourselves today. It invites us to ask: what have we lost in our pursuit of progress? And can we perhaps regain a balance – to cultivate communities and ways of thinking that once again allow for collective surges of high culture? The lesson of McGilchrist’s work and the historical evidence is that we must reintegrate the analytical and the holistic, the practical and the spiritual. The Baroque era shows it’s possible: Bach the scientist of music was also Bach the devotee. A society need not be a machine; it can be a living ecology of communities that sings, builds, and thinks in harmony. The incomparable cultural harvest of late 17th and early 18th-century Europe stands as a testament to that richer possibility – one that, if we heed the past, could inspire a future renaissance of meaning and community in our own time.

Sources:

• Victoria & Albert Museum, The Baroque Style: Baroque art flourished in 17th–early 18th c., integrating painting, sculpture, architecture into a meaningful whole​vam.ac.uk​vam.ac.uk.

• DailyArt Magazine, 5 Greatest Baroque Painters: Baroque era viewed as a period of excellence producing many of Western art’s most famous works​dailyartmagazine.com.

• Wikipedia, Baroque: Baroque art aimed to “achieve a sense of awe” through exuberant detail, grandeur, and surprise​en.wikipedia.org.

• Craft Revival (WCU) – Revival in Context: Industrialization replaced traditional workshops with factories, breaking labor into monotonous tasks and undermining community values and craftsmanship​wcu.edu​wcu.edu.

• TheArtStory, Neoclassicism: Enlightenment-era Neoclassicism arose as a reaction against the “gaudy” Baroque/Rococo, preferring moral clarity and reason​theartstory.org.

• Shortform summary of McGilchrist: McGilchrist sees Renaissance (right-hemisphere creativity) vs Enlightenment (left-hemisphere dominance, e.g. Descartes’ hyper-rationalism)​shortform.com​shortform.com.

• Andrew Sweeny (Medium) summarizing McGilchrist: When the left hemisphere “usurps”, society becomes “machine-like and pathological,” whereas a proper balance yields surges of high culture (e.g. the Renaissance)​andrewpgsweeny.medium.com.

• Rod Dreher, The European Conservative (2023) on McGilchrist: Modern Western culture (from Enlightenment & Industrial Revolution onward) is driven by an intellect that “values quantity over quality…knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.”​europeanconservative.com This left-brain mindset rejects transcendent values and “it would have been hard to improve on [it]” for destroying community happiness​europeanconservative.com.

Mechanistic Probability Spaces for Lifeforms are Limited to Nano-Scale Spaces!

Written by Müller Pretorius, 2024.

Email: mullerpr@gmail.com

(A new perspective on using science to expose the fundamental teleological underpinnings of our reality.  This article introduces a post-reductionist materialist outlook that was, among other things, inspired by Thomas Nagel’s "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False")

1.      Background and Introduction

The scientific method has long been recognised for its systematic ability to dissect and explain the natural world through a lens of mechanistic principles while using the best-known causal reasoning. However, there exists a pervasive logical error when only mechanistic interpretations are applied to the study of all forms of life, particularly multi-cellular organisms. Many assume that if an organism exists, its mere existence must be mechanistically more probable than other dynamic structures. This purely mechanistic assumption is entirely self-evident. Therefore, it mostly goes untested, particularly when it becomes intuitively clear that mechanistic probabilities might, or certainly will, expose this materialistic dogma to be flawed. The inherent properties of mechanistic structures and the probabilities arising from their dynamics can challenge this dogmatic perspective. The laws of nature define a specific set of mechanistic probabilities. In contrast, a different set of probabilities, which are only realised when the actions of a mindful agent become part of the system, forms a substantial part of our scientific experience.

In a modern scientific context, we can critically evaluate these 19th-century mechanistic perspectives mainly due to 20th-century findings in physics, mathematics, information science, and biology. Without going into the details of these scientific findings, this article will explore the validity of these 19th-century materialistic views in light of contemporary discoveries.

The still pervasive methodological naturalist dogma and, ultimately, the self-referential claim about the existence of certain life forms, including human life, is fundamentally flawed because it is evident that it ignores the inherent probabilistic mechanistic advantage of single-celled organisms in any possible environment.  Somehow, we still think that our existence as humans is mechanistically inevitable, and therefore, there is a mechanistic pathway to explain our existence. However, these single-celled organisms can be used as reference organisms.  This can be achieved when these reference organisms are used as an observable means to test our mechanistic assumption about our own existence and, in fact, all multi-cellular organisms’ existence.  The primary claim in this article is that from a purely mechanistic point of view, the known properties of single-celled organisms can be used as a reference point for all other living structures.  This article will then argue that given single-celled organisms are demonstrably more likely to survive and outcompete all redundant-dependencies (i.e. multi-cellular) kinds of organisms, based on mechanistic principles, the existence of complex multi-cellular organisms suggests the presence of additional causal factors beyond pure mechanistic probability events.

To understand the implications of random mutations and natural selection within Darwinian Evolution, including the neo-Darwinian synthesis, it is essential to recognise that these processes inherently suggest a mechanistic probability space. In this probability space, random mutations generate various structural changes, and those structures with a higher mechanistic probability—i.e., those that enhance survival and reproduction—are naturally selected. This selection process adheres strictly to mechanistic principles, where the likelihood of a mutation's persistence is determined by its contribution to an organism's mechanistic probability of survival. This methodological naturalist dogma, which posits that life forms, including human beings, arise purely from these mechanistic processes, fails to account for the inherent probabilistic advantage of single-celled organisms. Single-celled organisms, due to their parsimonious and robust structures, have a superior mechanistic probability to persist and outcompete other redundantly interdependent organisms in any environment compared to multi-cellular organisms.

After introducing these concepts, it becomes immediately necessary to address the concept of “niche environments within complex ecologies”, which are being used by most evolutionary biologists to arbitrarily demarcate a probability space, where specific organisms are thought to evolve traits suited to particular environmental pressures.  However, this concept implicitly introduces non-mechanistic teleology - the notion that niche environments, adequately defined, lead to life forms developing with “niche-defined” goals. This idea stands in stark contradiction to materialist Darwinian theory, which fundamentally disallows any teleological explanations, adhering strictly to random mutations and natural selection as undirected processes. The physical realities of any environment, combined with the observed ubiquity of single-celled organisms in virtually all conceivable environments, further challenge the purposeful abstractions made about the “niche environments”.

However, single-celled organisms thrive in a vast array of environments. Therefore, you have an actual physical structure or life form with which to compare any other organism’s probabilities. Their dominance across diverse conditions underscores a purely mechanistic probabilistic success model, which demonstrably invalidates the mechanistic probability spaces for niche-specific adaptations that multi-cellular organisms purportedly acquire mechanistically. The principle is that all organisms compete solely on their mechanistic, structural properties in a mechanistic probability space. Therefore, the reliance on niche environments to explain the existence of complex life forms inadvertently reintroduces the “disallowed teleological elements”, contradicting the core principles of Darwinian materialism and highlighting the need for additional causal explanations beyond mechanistic probability.  This teleological importation changes the entire neo-Darwinian conception of life!

The introduction of “niche environments” to explain the development of specific traits in organisms can be compared to the addition of epicycles in the Ptolemaic cosmology. In the Ptolemaic model, epicycles were introduced to account for the apparent retrograde motion of planets, creating increasingly complex and ad hoc modifications to fit observational data into the geocentric framework. Similarly, the concept of niche environments introduces additional layers of explanation to accommodate the observed diversity and complexity of life within a mechanistic framework. Both approaches serve to maintain existing theoretical structures by adding complexity, but in doing so, they reveal underlying inadequacies and the need for more fundamental revisions to the theoretical foundations. Just as the heliocentric model eventually replaced the Ptolemaic system by providing a more coherent and more straightforward explanation, a new understanding of life’s development may be required to move beyond the limitations imposed by niche-centric evolutionary explanations.

Therefore, this article proposes that the fundamental materialistic probability space must be the only explanatory focus to retain materialist claims. If it fails, it needs to be replaced, not with arbitrary additions to maintain the materialist dogma, but with actual observed causal realities.  This focus will challenge the emergence of unnecessary or novel dependencies within multi-cellular organisms. These dependencies introduce complexities and unnecessary potential points of failure from a purely mechanistic standpoint. Considering an obvious reference point, such multi-cellular intricacies can be identified for their highly improbable and counterintuitive survival probabilities, suggesting that additional non-mechanistic factors are at play. This compels us to reconsider and expand our understanding beyond the constraints of mechanistic probability alone. All scientists know that additional causal agents are acting in ways that account for what we observe.

To understand the persistence and diversity of life, we must suspend purely mechanistic claims about any life form less probable to survive than single-celled organisms and seek alternative causal explanations.  This explanatory approach must be applied throughout the entire evolutionary timescales we hypothesise and observe. This study argues that the scientific method must evolve beyond mechanistic dogmas to incorporate the study of agency and teleology when explaining the existence of complex organisms, as mechanistic interpretations fall short when they try to explain anything outside the realm of highly optimised single-celled life forms.

 

2.      Mechanistic Explanations and Their Limitations

The vast diversity of different kinds of Single-celled organisms, such as bacteria and archaea, can serve as the living and observable archetype of mechanistic efficiency and probabilistic outcomes in any possible environment. These life forms possess highly optimised structures and functions that enable them to survive, reproduce, compete, and adapt with remarkable success. The metabolic pathways of these organisms are highly efficient, allowing them to thrive and, in principle, outcompete any less ecologically probable life forms in environments where multi-cellular organisms exist. They can also survive in many extreme environments where multi-cellular structures cannot, such as the intense heat of hydrothermal vents, the acidic conditions of sulfuric springs, and even outer space. Their nano-structured efficiency represents an optimised level of complexity in function that is fine-tuned for mechanistic survival.  It might require us to shed our ideas about “bigger is better”, and the notion that consciousness somehow translates into improved survivability; both these myths are very dubious for any honest materialist or naturalist observer to acknowledge.

Moreover, no clear mechanistic advantages can be found in any biological structure that simply improves conscious experiences at the expense of survival success, as seen in more efficient organisms like bacteria. These single-celled organisms interact with energy and chemical signals far more mechanistically efficient. It is self-evidently clear that the primary benefits of complex sensory systems and heightened consciousness are related to the quality of conscious experience itself rather than survival efficiency. Such heightened consciousness necessitates many ad hoc strategies to ensure the survival of these inherently fragile properties, which do not contribute to the mechanistic efficiency observed in single-celled organisms. The existence of complex multi-cellular organisms with systems beneficial to conscious experiences does not inherently provide a survival benefit that outweighs the efficient, streamlined operations of bacteria. Conscious experiences, while rich and varied, do not equate to increased survival probabilities when compared to the parsimonious and highly effective survival strategies of bacteria. Thus, the survival and persistence of life forms do not align well with an examination purely through the lens of mechanistic efficiency. Instead, they are better understood as resulting from the interaction of natural processes and the subjective quality of conscious experiences. This perspective underscores the need to find non-mechanistic reasons or teleological principles to explain the existence and persistence of more complex life forms.

With this kind of unbiased frame of mind, we can look at some examples.  The rapid reproductive rates of bacteria, coupled with their ability to exchange genetic material through processes like ad hoc conjugation while retaining single-celled reproductive capabilities.  Then, there are ad hoc internal transformations on the scale of a single-celled organism, as well as the transduction of genetic and other structural optimisations.  All these and many more properties exclusively optimised within single-celled organisms exemplify the most natural kind of mechanistic optimisation for single-celled organisms within any ecosystem.  Keep in mind that all of these mechanistic dynamics were happening during earlier evolutionary epochs as well as in any modern ecosystem.

These processes allow single-celled organisms to adapt quickly to environmental changes. By purely mechanistic considerations, they are supposed to out-compete other forms of life that require unnecessary novel dependencies.  Our current ecosystems show this to be the case if you can agree on the self-evident fact that bacteria and viruses are the actual “apex predators” in all known ecosystems and all known environments; it is simply not the mythical T-Rex or the very real “evil rulers of mankind”.  The question now becomes pertinent; Why are we here? Why is life not following the mechanistic probability outcomes that are evident for any honest observer?

What is meant by “Mechanistically Optimal”?

To ensure a proper understanding of the mechanistic reference point we need to use to test the persisting 19^th-century dogmas, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by "Mechanistically optimal".  In principle, it refers to a value judgement made from a comparison of an observed living system and the proposed reference structures found somewhere within the known single-celled ecosystem that highlighted various universal advantages. The inherent advantages that single-celled organisms possess by virtue of their physical properties enable them to consistently outcompete organisms with a plethora of interdependent cells and vast but mechanistically redundant metabolic and reproductive interdependencies based solely on mechanistic principles. These advantages are all universally applicable as they are advantages over any kind of multi-cellular organisms.  These mechanistic and probabilistic advantages include:

  Metabolic Efficiency: Single-celled organisms such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast) and various bacteria exhibit highly efficient metabolic processes. Yeast undergoes glycolysis to produce energy in the form of ATP, which allows it to thrive in diverse environments, including those with high sugar and acidic conditions that inhibit bacterial growth. This efficiency enables it to quickly adapt and maximise energy extraction and utilisation under different conditions.

  Reproductive Speed: The rapid reproduction rate of single-celled organisms is a significant advantage. Yeast, for instance, can complete its cell cycle in about 90 minutes under optimal conditions, enabling substantial population growth in a short time. Similarly, bacteria such as E. coli can double their population every 20 minutes in ideal conditions, illustrating their ability to adapt and propagate​quickly.

  Independent Reproduction: Single-celled organisms reproduce independently through processes like binary fission in bacteria and mitosis in yeast. This independence from complex reproductive dependencies allows for swift and efficient propagation. The cell division process is tightly regulated to ensure survival and adaptation in various environments​​.

  Dormancy: Many single-celled organisms can enter a dormant state to survive unfavourable conditions. For example, Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker's yeast) can produce stress-resistant spores that remain dormant until conditions improve, allowing the cells to survive during periods of environmental stress. This dormancy involves a significant reduction in metabolic activity and the ability to germinate when favourable conditions return​.

  Adaptability: Single-celled organisms exhibit high genetic adaptability through mechanisms like horizontal gene transfer and mutations. This allows them to respond quickly to environmental changes and stresses. For instance, bacteria can acquire new genes from other bacteria, enhancing their ability to adapt to new environments and resist antibiotics​.

  Resilience: Single-celled organisms' structural simplicity and robustness make them highly resilient to physical and chemical disruptions. Their cellular structures are designed to withstand various environmental stresses, contributing to their survival and proliferation in diverse habitats​​.

  Low Mechanical Shear Exposure: Due to their tiny size and shape, single-celled organisms experience much smaller mechanical shear forces compared to larger organisms. This advantage extends to all their nano-sized mechanical and dynamic parts or building blocks that construct single-celled organisms. This property allows them to survive and thrive in environments with prevalent shear forces, such as aquatic habitats with strong currents. Their compact and robust structure minimises damage from such forces​.

  Resource Utilization: Single-celled organisms can utilise a wide range of substrates and resources for their metabolic needs. They often thrive in extreme environments where more complex organisms cannot survive, relying on minimal heat energy and inorganic food sources. Certain bacteria can metabolise various compounds, including minerals and gases, to sustain their growth in harsh conditions.

  Environmental Versatility: Single-celled organisms can occupy diverse environments, ranging from deep-sea vents to the human digestive tract. Their adaptability to various extreme conditions makes them capable of thriving in environments unsuitable for multicellular organisms. For instance, bacteria and archaea have been found in harsh environments such as acidic hot springs, alkaline lakes, and deep underground habitats​.

  Minimal Maintenance: Single-celled organisms require fewer resources and less energy to maintain cellular functions compared to multicellular organisms. Their more straightforward structure demands less energy for growth and maintenance, enabling them to survive and proliferate even in nutrient-poor environments. Prokaryotic cells efficiently store excess nutrients in inclusions, which helps them manage resources and survive in unstable conditions.

  Optimised Locomotion: Single-celled organisms, such as bacteria with flagella, utilise highly efficient means of locomotion that minimise energy expenditure. They exploit chemical and energy gradients to move towards optimal environments. Bacteria use chemotaxis to navigate towards higher concentrations of nutrients, optimising their energy use for survival and growth​​​.

 

  Optimised Thermodynamics: Single-celled organisms exploit energy changes in their environments optimally by preserving energy in low-energy settings and dissipating it in high-energy environments. This adaptive mechanism helps them survive and thrive under varying thermal conditions by minimising the number of potential failure events associated with energy fluctuations. They balance their metabolic activities to maintain efficiency in different thermal conditions​.

 

  Genetic Economy: Single-celled organisms often have smaller genomes with fewer non-essential genes. This genetic economy allows for faster replication and makes them less susceptible to genetic errors during reproduction. For instance, many bacteria and archaea have compact genomes that include only essential genes, streamlining their metabolic processes and enhancing their ability to adapt quickly to environmental changes​​.

 

  Rapid Adaptation: Single-celled organisms' high reproduction rate and short generation times accelerate evolutionary processes. These characteristics enable them to develop new traits and adapt swiftly to changing environments. Bacteria can rapidly evolve antibiotic resistance due to their fast replication cycles and the ability to exchange genetic material through horizontal gene transfer.

 

  Efficient Cellular Communication: Single-celled organisms rely on simple and effective signalling mechanisms for cellular communication. Bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate activities such as nutrient uptake and biofilm formation, while yeasts use signalling molecules like mating factors to communicate and coordinate their actions. These efficient communication strategies ensure swift responses to environmental changes and stressors​.

The concept of mechanistic optimality is an obvious value judgement, grounded in the idea that the most streamlined and efficient forms are naturally selected for survival simply by being the more probable organism to persist – it seems to be in line with any of the materialistic interpretations of Darwinian theories. This principle explains the dominance of single-celled organisms in all ecological niches. From a purely mechanistic point of view, single-celled organisms will consistently outperform multicellular organisms due to their inherent efficiency and overall survivability. Thus, the mechanistic superiority of single-celled organisms underscores their persistent dominance across all known habitats, demanding alternative explanations for our own existence, let alone all other mechanistically less probable organisms.

From the details about what would count as “mechanistically optimal”, it is now possible to discuss how the mechanistic dominance of single-celled organisms in the biological landscape can be attributed to the advantages their structures and dynamics exhibit. These nano-structured characteristics, when measured against purely mechanistic principles, grant them a significant survival advantage. Their complex cellular structures are highly optimised for mechanistic efficiency and require fewer resources and energy compared to the intricate systems of multi-cellular organisms, allowing them to thrive in a wide range of environments, from extreme heat to deep oceanic trenches and even outer space.

This mechanistic efficiency suggests that if survival were purely mechanistic, single-celled organisms would continuously outcompete most if not all multi-cellular organisms, starting with the most structurally compromised complex and large life forms, let alone the ones who cannot even perceive the single-celled competition their bodies have to endure.  This reality is due to a vast array of purely mechanistic advantages, as we discussed above. Therefore, single-celled organisms’ superior reproduction, competitive adaptability, and resource utilisation will always be the basis for materialistic claims about life forms.

Given their streamlined structures and processes, single-celled organisms exhibit a higher probability of survival and reproduction in varied and often harsh environments. In contrast, multi-cellular organisms face significant challenges due to their vast array of novel dependencies and physical interactions, which seem more adapted for consciousness than for survival; in comparison, these consciousness-seeking behaviours are demonstrably unnecessary from a mechanistic standpoint. These organisms require more resources to maintain their intricate structures and ensure the coordinated function of their numerous cells. This large set of critical dependencies often results in slower reproduction rates and a heightened vulnerability to environmental changes. The novelty of their behaviours becomes paramount, making their survival low-probability events that require explanation, including the mechanisms they employ to overcome these low probabilities. It is essential to distinguish between mechanistic probabilities and subjective, agent-created teleological rule-based probabilities.

Mechanistic probabilities, such as the 50% chance of a coin landing heads or the likelihood of a chemical reaction occurring based on reactant concentrations and temperature, are determined by natural laws and physical properties. In contrast, subjective, agent-created teleological probabilities are directly influenced by the intentions and actions of conscious agents. This can be best identified within the “teleologically defined so-called niche environments” of a group of animals that might enhance their survival probability by forming protective herds, thereby reducing individual predation risk. Alternatively, humans might increase their chances of overcoming environmental challenges by developing agricultural practices. These examples demonstrate how agents causally influence probability spaces through purposeful decision-making and strategic actions. Similarly, multi-cellular organisms, with their complex behaviours and dependencies, may employ conscious strategies to navigate and survive their environments, further distinguishing their survival probabilities from purely mechanistic origins.

The survival strategies of multi-cellular organisms, while sophisticated, involve intricate mechanisms that are ever more resource-intensive – effectively reducing their mechanistic probability to survive and persist. For example, the immune system of humans, which defends against pathogens, is exceptionally novel in its efficiency. Still, it also consumes substantial amounts of energy, which in turn leads to an increase in the probability of humans dying – let alone the vast array of novel experiences that flow from this state of heightened immune responses. In contrast, single-celled organisms employ more straightforward, more direct methods of defence and adaptation that are less resource-dependent, with a higher probability of being successful.

However, despite these apparent advantages, the observable diversity of life forms, including multi-cellular organisms, suggests the presence of alternative life-preserving factors able to overcome these mechanistic low probability spaces, which we can simply admit to be extreme frailties.  Pure scientific reasoning demands the falsifiability of mechanistic claims when the data do not support the hypothesis. This diversity challenges the notion that mechanistic efficiency alone dictates survival success – it essentially opens the door to all aspects of aesthetics, consciousness and morality. The persistence and thriving of multi-cellular organisms in various ecosystems indicate, by pure scientific analysis, that factors beyond mere mechanistic optimisation are at play.

 

3.      Limitations of mechanistic paradigms.

While mechanistic interpretations provide a robust framework for understanding single-celled life, they fall short when applied to multi-cellular organisms.  By conflating probabilities that do not apply to multi-cellular structures, a “sleight of hand” has been played by the Enlightenment humanists, and their legacy is still being enforced in most of science in general. The interdependent novelty and mechanistic frailty of multi-cellular life forms suggest the presence of additional causal properties or factors that influence their existence – but this is only obvious if you keep in mind the true nature of pure mechanistic probabilities as we learn from physics and the laws of nature. For instance, the intricate behaviours, developmental processes, and symbiotic relationships observed in multi-cellular organisms cannot overcome their less-probable outcomes demanded by purely mechanistic probability considerations. Therefore, they are never fully explained by mechanistic principles alone.

Multi-cellular organisms exhibit a range of characteristics that transcend low mechanistic probabilities.  We can discuss some examples:

• Complex Developmental Processes: The development of an organism from a single cell, which will only achieve reproductive viability when a complex multi-cellular entity develops intricate regulatory networks, many morphological structures and a fast array of epigenetic factors.  This reality is often oversimplified into mechanistic terms, thereby losing the ability to accurately describe what is observed. This simplification disregards the introduction of numerous low-probability events, all of which need teleological agent-based interventions to overcome the otherwise mechanistic low probabilities. In contrast, single-celled organisms with their higher-probability competitive interaction consistently manifest within the same system where developmental processes happen because single-celled organisms and their competing behaviours are virtually always present in any environment, ready to outperform these developmental processes (… let alone finding explanations for the plethora of interactions which are critically dependent on symbiotic relationships between single-celled organisms and multi-cellular systems.). Therefore, you will find these low-probability developmental processes are a mechanistic liability if survival is the only non-teleological process available.  Notwithstanding, these mechanistically low-probability developmental realities are crucial to sustain such novel structures and dynamics, representing a novel reality that mechanistic explanations in principle cannot account for, except if you want to ignore the entire single-celled ecosystem of organisms.
• Behavioural Novelty: Behaviours observed in animals, such as social interactions, learning, and problem-solving, imply the presence of agency and intentionality beyond mere mechanical responses. For instance, the novel social structures of ants, bees, or primates involve intricate communication systems, hierarchical organisation, and cooperative problem-solving strategies. These behaviours fall outside the sphere of higher mechanistic probabilities when compared to the structural dynamics of single-celled organisms in the same environments. Single-celled organisms exhibit behaviours that are governed mainly by straightforward biochemical pathways and environmental responses, which are significantly more probable in mechanistic terms. The intricate behaviours of multi-cellular organisms, however, involve a series of low-probability dependencies, such as the evolution of specialised neural circuits, hormonal regulation, and adaptive learning processes. These require an agent-based explanation to account for the observed novelty and redundant intentionality. Therefore, claiming environmental niches to explain multi-cellularity does not follow from mechanistic claims but becomes self-evident in a system with agency-induced probability spaces. The behavioural complexity of multi-cellular organisms demonstrates a novel reality that transcends mechanistic explanations, emphasising the need for teleological perspectives to understand the full scope of their actions and interactions.
• Symbiosis and Cooperation: Mutualistic relationships in multi-cellular organisms, such as the symbiosis between plants and mycorrhizal fungi or the cooperation between cleaner fish and their hosts, suggest a level of interdependence that cannot be easily explained by mechanistic probabilities alone. These relationships imply unnecessary dependencies when compared to the ad hoc cooperations of single-celled organisms, which lack reproductive dependencies and maintain higher mechanistic probabilities. Single-celled organisms often form transient and opportunistic associations driven by immediate survival benefits without long-term commitments. In contrast, multi-cellular interactions involve coordinated and sustained cooperation, such as the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in plant root nodules or the gut microbiota in animals. These interactions require precise genetic, biochemical, and environmental conditions to be advantageous, indicating numerous low-probability decisive dependencies. Most, if not all, multi-cellular interactions fall short of providing an advantage for successful mechanistic competition and survival when compared to the efficiency of single-celled ecosystems. The complex interdependencies observed in symbiosis and cooperation highlight the need for agent-based causation to fully understand these phenomena. They represent a departure from purely mechanistic explanations and underscore the importance of teleological perspectives in accounting for the novel and intricate relationships that sustain multi-cellular life.

The limitations of mechanistic interpretations become evident when attempting to explain the emergence and persistence of life forms in a competitive environment where these organisms and structures always have to compete against single-celled organisms.  This is even a reality of our own day, and we can always ask ourselves; If Darwin was correct, why do we observe any less probable living system compared to single-celled organisms?

These persistent questions flow from the explanatory limitations and highlight the need for a broader scientific paradigm that incorporates the study of agency and other non-mechanistic factors to fully understand the richness of life on Earth. This approach not only allows for this kind of study to be neutral towards any mechanistic outcome, but it ultimately allows for a clear assessment of when to suspend purely mechanistic explanations and when to assume agency.  It further provides for all knowledge and experience about what is capable of being achieved by agents like ourselves as well as any known or unknown agent whose artefacts we observe or experience through the entire complex of human consciousness.

 

4.      Case Studies and Examples where the “Science of Agency” is already the de facto methodology.

The "Science of Agency" offers an intuitive acknowledgement of an approach to understanding the full spectrum of behaviours observed in the natural world, moving beyond the limitations of purely mechanistic explanations. This section presents some compelling case studies and examples where this methodology seems to be applied already, illustrating its intuitive necessity in explaining observed agent causation or teleological phenomena. Through examining animal behaviours and ecosystem dynamics, we uncover how collective agency and strategic interactions present challenges to the traditional mechanistic paradigm. These examples highlight how various kinds of agency, rather than mere mechanistic survival, play a crucial role in the functioning and evolution of biological systems. By showcasing real-world instances where the "Science of Agency" provides a more comprehensive understanding, we aim to demonstrate its indispensability in advancing scientific knowledge.

Complex Behaviours in Animals

The complexity of behaviours observed in animals presents compelling evidence that mechanistic explanations alone are insufficient. For instance, the intricate social structures and communication systems of bees and ants extend beyond simple mechanistic survival strategies. These behaviours indicate a form of collective agency, where the colony operates as a single entity with a level of coordination and intentionality that cannot be solely attributed to individual mechanistic actions. This collective agency cannot be explained by a so-called “nested probability”, where the interdependencies are somehow considered to be purely mechanistic nested probabilities, as all the kinds of organisms work together with the bees’ and ants’ collective agency.  This again becomes clear if the mechanistic dependencies and the associated probabilities of these hive-based collective organisms are compared to the mechanistic probabilities of single-celled organisms.

Seeley's (2010) research on honeybee democracy illustrates how bees collectively make decisions about nesting sites, demonstrating a form of proto-consciousness and group-level agency within an ecological network of agents acting in harmony, not for mechanistic or single-species survival behaviours but for ecological purposes to preserve agency and consciousness.

Additionally, the novel “problem-solving” abilities of certain bird species, such as crows and parrots, further challenge the mechanistic paradigm (…take note the “novel problem-solving” is only problems for organisms with novel low probability structures and behaviours – it is not a challenge posed by their niche environments, it is a challenge posed by their less optimal novelties and deviations from more structurally sound organisms like bacteria). Notwithstanding, studies have shown that these birds can use tools, solve complex puzzles, and even exhibit behaviours that suggest an understanding of cause and effect (Emery & Clayton, 2004). These examples of animal cognition and behaviour suggest that a purely mechanistic view falls short, as it fails to account for the nuanced and mechanistically inefficient ways in which animals interact with their environment and each other. From a purely mechanistic perspective, these interactions reduce their probability of survival compared to the single-celled ecology they must compete with if one still dogmatically accepts a Darwinian outlook.

Ecosystem Dynamics

Ecosystem dynamics provide another arena where mechanistic explanations are inadequate. Ecosystems are characterised by a web of interactions that include competition, cooperation, and mutualism, often displaying emergent properties that cannot be predicted by analysing individual components in isolation. For instance, the relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and plant roots exemplifies mutualistic symbiosis, where both organisms benefit in ways that enhance their survival and growth. This interaction cannot be fully explained by mechanistic principles, as it involves a level of cooperation and resource exchange that suggests a form of agency in maintaining a mechanistically novel relationship (Smith & Read, 2008).

Moreover, predator-prey dynamics often exhibit behaviours that appear to involve strategic planning and anticipation, which are supra-mechanistic strategies necessary to overcome the mechanistic low probabilities their unnecessary high-energy body plans introduce when they go beyond more probable mechanistic responses. The observed hunting strategies of wolves, which include complex social cooperation and role differentiation, indicate a level of collective intentionality, […just to overcome their frail body plans and structural dynamics] (Mech, 1999).

These examples underscore the need to incorporate a broader understanding of fundamental agency and interaction within ecosystems, moving beyond the limitations of mechanistic interpretations.

 

5.      The Need to Make the New Scientific Paradigm Official.

Beyond Mechanistic Dogmas

The limitations of mechanistic explanations become evident when considering the extremely low mechanistic probability and novel diversity of life beyond single-celled organisms. To understand the full spectrum of biological existence, a paradigm shift in scientific inquiry is necessary. This new paradigm must move beyond strict mechanistic interpretations to incorporate the study of agency and other non-mechanistic factors.  Probabilities in nature can be the pointers to the nature of agency at work. When the mechanistic probability is accounted for, agent systems can be investigated for agent-based probability spaces.  This allows for a path to knowledge that provides for all rational interactions as well as aesthetic and irrational interactions and experiences to be identified according to the actual kinds of probabilities at play, both mechanistic and those caused by agents.

Mechanistic dogmas, while providing a robust framework for understanding mechanistically optimised/optimising life forms, need to explain the novel behaviours and survival strategies of multi-cellular / multi-organ organisms. The concept of agency—intentionality and decision-making capability—must be considered to be fundamental to fully grasp the dynamics of life. Agency, apart from being fundamental, also implies that organisms can engage in purposeful behaviour that is not reducible to mechanistic objectives (…or mechanistic probabilities for those who like to stick to non-teleological science).  This kind of novel behaviour from mechanistically low-probability organisms constitutes agency. Also, it influences the evolution and persistence of organisms in ways that mechanistic principles alone cannot explain.

Agency in Evolution

The role of agency in evolution introduces a dimension of intentionality in the development and persistence of most life forms. Agency suggests that any entity is not merely a passive entity driven by mechanistic processes but an active participant in the evolution of novel organisms. This perspective aligns with observations of lower mechanistic survival probability behaviours in organisms.

First, consider that all multi-cellular organisms' body plans exhibit a reduction in mechanistic survival probability due to their structural dependencies and the larger number of activities, all of which constitute additional failure points that need to be executed before reproduction is possible. Therefore, accepting their existence as proof of high mechanistic probabilities must be rejected if we rigorously test the probability of the entire Darwinian evolutionary process.  This process must not be extrapolated from current observations backwards. Still, it must be modelled from the beginning of the first life to the existence of observed organisms – while using known causal theories. 

This rational evaluation will reveal non-mechanistic agency by highlighting its mechanistic improbability. It will also demonstrate the original and persistent necessity for the kind of causal mechanisms, we experience as mindful agency, to overcome the reduction in survivability while still ensuring the successful persistence of a vast spectrum of novel multi-organ species and their novel ecosystems. 

Only then can you also consider the interacting causal behaviours of many multi-cellular organisms, such as cooperation, altruism, and even the use of tools. At the same time, it demonstrates a level of agency that goes beyond mechanistic explanations. These behaviours contribute to their survival and reproduction, not by virtue of a purely mechanistic increase in survival probability, but in ways that strictly mechanistic processes cannot account for. The intricate communication and organisation seen in honeybee colonies suggest a kind of agency that enhances resilience and adaptability. This agency is not merely for their own survival but also for the complex interactions necessary to overcome the low probabilities faced by organisms dependent on each other. These dependencies expose frailties when measured against the more probable nanostructures of single-celled organisms and their original single-celled ecosystems. This underscores the need for an agency to intervene in these low-probability scenarios, a necessity which is far more mechanistically evident in single-celled organisms. Any kind of randomly introduced new dependencies that are mechanistically more probable to survive simply do not allow for low probability dependencies without a pervasive influence of novel teleological objectives as well as the agency capable of giving causal effect to those novel outcomes throughout any deviation from the original single-celled ecosystems.

Incorporating agency into scientific research requires methodological changes and interdisciplinary collaboration. Fields such as biology, mathematics, physics, psychology, and philosophy must converge to develop a holistic understanding of life that embraces both mechanistic and non-mechanistic factors. This expanded perspective could lead to breakthroughs in understanding the complexities of life and the underlying principles that govern it.

While mechanistic interpretations provide valuable insights into the survival of single-celled organisms, they need to explain the low mechanistic survival probabilities and diversity of multi-cellular life. A new scientific paradigm that includes the study of agency and other non-mechanistic factors, capable of accounting for agent-based probability spaces, is essential for a comprehensive understanding of life. This shift will enable scientists to explore the true nature of aspects like consciousness and uncover the mechanisms that drive the evolution and the preservation of all life in general.

Methodological Changes

To address the limitations of mechanistic interpretations, scientific methodology must make another paradigm shift to include the study of agency and other non-mechanistic factors. This involves developing new frameworks and models that can account for the intentionality and complexity observed in living organisms and their interactions. One approach could be the integration of systems biology, which emphasises the holistic analysis of biological systems and their emergent properties (Kitano, 2002). By focusing on the interactions and interdependencies within systems, researchers can gain insights into the underlying principles that govern behaviours and dynamics with low mechanistic survival probability. This can be called the study of mechanisms that allow mechanistic frailty, particularly in relation to consciousness, to persist. Here, frailty is measured against the robust mechanistic properties of single-celled ecosystems and our dependence on these more probable single-celled structures.

Additionally, adopting more mechanistically neutral methodologies applied in fields such as more inclusive ethology and behavioural ecology can provide a more nuanced understanding of animal behaviour and ecosystem interactions. These disciplines emphasise the study of organisms in their natural and agency-based environments, considering the roles of learning, adaptation, and social interactions. Incorporating these approaches can help bridge the gap between mechanistic and agency-based explanations, offering a more comprehensive view of life.

Interdisciplinary Approaches

Collaboration between diverse fields such as biology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, psychology, and philosophy is essential for developing a holistic understanding of life that transcends mechanistic dogmas. Materialistically neutral biology provides the foundational knowledge of the physical and biochemical processes that sustain life. At the same time, physics and mathematics expose the mechanistic boundaries of material interactions, and psychology offers insights into behaviour, cognition, and the role of agency. Philosophy, on the other hand, contributes critical perspectives on the nature of consciousness, intentionality, and the ethical implications of scientific research.

Interdisciplinary research programs that combine these perspectives can foster innovative approaches and methodologies. An example of this kind of multidisciplinary cooperation can be seen in the emerging field of biosemiotics, which explores the role of signs and communication in biological systems, bridging the gap between biology and semiotics (Barbieri, 2008). Such interdisciplinary initiatives can lead to new theoretical frameworks and experimental techniques that capture the complexity of life in ways that mechanistic models alone cannot.

 

 

6.      Conclusion

This article has highlighted the inherent limitations of mechanistic explanations in accounting for the diversity and complexity of life, particularly multi-cellular organisms. While single-celled organisms exhibit optimal mechanistic efficiency and survival probability, the existence and persistence of more complex life forms point to factors beyond purely mechanistic principles. The frailty and novel dependencies of multi-cellular organisms introduce low-probability events that mechanistic paradigms cannot adequately explain.

To truly understand the rich spectrum of life and the wonderful spectrum of consciousness we do experience and observe, it is imperative to move beyond mechanistic dogmas and incorporate the study of agency, intentionality, and other non-mechanistic factors. This shift in scientific inquiry necessitates methodological changes and interdisciplinary collaboration, integrating insights from biology, mathematics, physics, psychology, and philosophy. By embracing a more holistic approach, we can uncover the underlying principles that govern the existence and persistence of life forms, leading to groundbreaking discoveries and a deeper appreciation of the natural world.

One of the unique, or rather forgotten, approaches discussed in this article is the use of mechanistic probabilities to successfully expose the influence of agency on any structure, including living systems. By rigorously testing mechanistic probabilities, as we propose, concerning single-celled organisms as a reference point, it becomes possible to reveal the role of agency in overcoming the inherent mechanistic low probabilities of multi-cellular organisms. This method depends on having a validated mechanistic reference point within the fundamental physical properties found in single-celled organisms. Furthermore, this method allows for a clear assessment of when to suspend purely mechanistic explanations and when to assume agency, ultimately promoting a balanced scientific perspective that respects both mechanistic and agent-based contributions to the evolution and persistence of life.  This study might even highlight a new approach to the study of the origin of life, even though it has been axiomatically accepted for this study.

Ultimately, recognising the limitations of mechanistic interpretations and the need for a broader scientific paradigm will allow us to explore the true nature of consciousness, agency, and the intricate web of interactions that sustain life. This article advocates for the “Science of Agency” as a neutral and essential sphere of inquiry, promoting a return to the dogmatic neutrality that characterised early scientific methods and fostering a more comprehensive understanding of the universe.

 

 

 

 

---

References

• Saccharomyces Cerevisiae - The Definitive Guide | Biology Dictionary. (n.d.). Retrieved from Biology Dictionary.
• 10.1A: The Role of the Cell Cycle - Biology LibreTexts. (n.d.). Retrieved from Biology LibreTexts.
• Metabolic reactions: Less is more in single-celled organisms. (2008, December 5). Retrieved from Phys.org.
• Reece, J. B., Urry, L. A., Cain, M. L., Wasserman, S. A., Minorsky, P. V., & Jackson, R. B. (2011). Bacteria and archaea. In Campbell Biology (10th ed., pp. 567-575). San Francisco, CA: Pearson.
• Todar, K. (2012). The growth of bacterial populations. In Todar’s Online Textbook of Bacteriology. Retrieved from Todar’s Online Textbook of Bacteriology.
• Vicente, M., Rico, A. I., Martínez-Arteaga, R., & Mingorance, J. (2006). Septum enlightenment: assembly of bacterial division proteins. Journal of Bacteriology, 188(1), 19-27. doi:10.1128/JB.188.1.19-27.2006.
• Laporte, D., O'Connell, K., Sagot, I., & Daignan-Fornier, B. (2015). A pH-driven transition of the cytoplasm from a fluid- to a solid-like state promotes entry into dormancy. eLife. Retrieved from eLife​ (eLife)​.
• Walker, L. (2020). Meet baker’s yeast, the budding, single-celled fungus that fluffs your bread. UBNow: News and views for UB faculty and staff. University at Buffalo. Retrieved from University at Buffalo​ (University at Buffalo)​.
• Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2024). Bacteria. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved from Encyclopaedia Britannica​ (Encyclopedia Britannica)​.
• An Introduction to Plankton. (n.d.). Retrieved from SpringerLink​ (SpringerLink)​.
• OpenStax Biology 2e. (n.d.). Signaling in Single-Celled Organisms. Retrieved from Lumen Learning​ (Lumen Learning)​.
• 46.2: Energy Flow through Ecosystems. (n.d.). Retrieved from Biology LibreTexts​(Biology LibreTexts)​.
• Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2024). Bacteria. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved from Encyclopaedia Britannica​ (Encyclopedia Britannica)​.
• Microbiology - Lumen Learning. (n.d.). Unique Characteristics of Prokaryotic Cells. Retrieved from Lumen Learning​ (Lumen Learning)​.
• Barbieri, M. (2008). Biosemiotics: A new understanding of life. Springer.
• Emery, N. J., & Clayton, N. S. (2004). The mentality of crows: Convergent evolution of intelligence in corvids and apes. Science, 306(5703), 1903-1907.
• Kitano, H. (2002). Systems biology: a brief overview. Science, 295(5560), 1662-1664.
• Mech, L. D. (1999). Alpha status, dominance, and division of labour in wolf packs. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 77(8), 1196-1203.
• Seeley, T. D. (2010). Honeybee Democracy. Princeton University Press.
• Smith, S. E., & Read, D. J. (2008). Mycorrhizal Symbiosis. Academic Press.