Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life Paperback – August 29, 2003

I have been reading Grossinger on and off, occasionally, and in an ever widening field of inquiry, for the past 30 years. And it has always been a deeply rewarding, informative and stimulating experience - brilliant and challenging; wordy, complex, dense, inclusive, discursive, tangential, inferential and intuitive. I am, here and now, a bit surprised no one has reviewed this 2003 book yet, because it seems so important and unique. So here goes with my first impressions, as I just open to read it, for I can tell it is very rich and will take me quite awhile to digest all that it contains.

This book represents a vast (perennial) undertaking; the search for the meaning of, and in, life (the non-duality of this), for the why and how-could-it (self organize and be conscious) behind the how-it-does. It is thus expressing the poetic union of creative thought and intuition, to delve into these fundamental questions, beyond the domains of mere science or religion, which as the back cover says, "pretend to answer while never even asking." It attempts to address the mystery of this morphogenesis we call Life, the unlikely, inexplicable balance of order and chaos, complexity and entropy.

So let me use Grossinger's own words from his introduction to give a taste of this approach - for although I've only just begun, I can guarantee that the learning (and delight) will not be in the conclusions, but in the process.

"We must be present with our lives, these things that we somehow have and thus hold dear, in fact dearest, and that scientists tell us don't exist, not really. We have to salvage it all: love, the taste of mango, the blueness of sky, sparkling crystals of winter, salmon swimming upstream, the hop in a reggae song, the wonder of intuition inside us, because we live in a civilization that would give it all away, that everyday trades our birthright for a bit more instrumentation and capital toward the sterile molecularization and commoditization of everything that is or could ever be. This relentless, nihilistic march now threatens to give back everything that nature gave us once by some unknown magic. And so to what end? To serve what better good?

"I am trying to imagine what ways there are to conceive of life without yielding to metaphysical and vitalistic considerations, yet without discarding them as wishful idealism either. I am looking for a path out of genetic determinism without foolishly dismissing genes as bogus...In fact, we have no other choice."

Very interesting book, but needed to re-read some of the pages to clearly understand what he was talking about.

Written in the verbose style of Dr. Bronner—(as exemplified by the above title, which was lifted from the label of his famous peppermint oil soap)—Grossinger’s book gives the impression of a rambling lunatic or the manic musings of cannabis consciousness. Marked by hyperbole, fetishized linguistic bling, flight of ideas, and idosyncracies, this pretentious prose—begging to be poetry—makes a grand entrance in almost every paragraph that leads to nowhere.
Speculating on life forms on the planet Jupiter, Grossinger muses: “Two-kilometer Jovian jellyfish trailing rows of tentacles hundreds of meters behind them, their regalia beating a minute and a half per undulatory cycle in stately unison, may spurn terrestrial modes of morphogenesis, but they will still be materialized by some form of radial cleavage, Boolean distribution, lamination, foliation, squamation, cavitation, incremental thickening and thinning, vacuolization, outpocketing, and neural filamentation. Their ontogeny will reenact and condense phases of their phylogeny. This is atomic, molecular certainty.” P. 85.
Throughout the book, biological euphemisms in large italic print are poised at the head of such drivel. For example, “The infinitude of the universe is captured in the nucleus of the cell…The process of microcellularization has used the breadth and girth of the universe to encapsulate its own nondeterministic domain—to scratch, scallop, laminate, and mold carbon-phosphate clay; to seal sequential eskers in recombinative meiotic bundles; to establish hierarchical organization and replicative machinery; in short to fashion its own nucleocosmos. Gossamer microbes, diatoms, and minds have been spun from intermediate patterns into the great hollow zone among stars such that the catacombs of space are now rendered hologrammatically inside boxes of trillions of soft rhomboids.” P. 86.
Gossinger describes the biological cell as “vortex, as transdimensional bubble in the extensibility and boundary condition of cosmic ash. For being small and primitive, cells and their organelles are neither slave particles nor mere building blocks, nor are they witless fractals of barely sensate tissue. They are transdimensional rents in the fabric of space-time, gap junctions in the cordage of matter. Metathings releasing meta-energies, they foreshadow and potentiate the full rainbow of species.” P. 92.
The book never settles down to say anything substantial. There’s nothing quotable without laughing hysterically. And it gets worse. On the “Inertial Structure of the World…Fractal striations, strange attractors, connectivity mutations, and percolation sets provide hints that tissue-like lattices arise unbidden in Mandelbrot and Julia series, BZ reactions, and the like—long prior to photosynthesis, genetic regulators, and chemically hierarchical signals. Segmentation and replication are matter-inherent properties. Packets of galactic soot, ahitch on asteroids, are crudely cell-like. Wormlike fossils imprint themselves on meteors; iterative incisions coagulate on small moons. Molecular laminations and badges on rocks floating in outer space foreshadow microbial inklings in the Earth’s primordial seas. Their prototypes later guide Golgi folds, vertebral segments, worm metameres, and quickening seams of larval tentacles. This is gravity as we know him, but it is also more than gravity, as Jack was surprised to find coming down from the beanstalk.” P. 121-122. (Grossinger apparently knows Jack).
Two principal themes in the assembly of life are “topokinesis” and “morphogenesis.” He borrows heavily from German anatomist Erich Blechschmidt who saw gravitational-thermodynamic forces as primary and preceding genetic control. Throughout evolution, Grossinger muses, “Phylogenetic events became ontogenetic templates. Ontogenetic motifs accrued in phylogenetic fields, rolling along the topokinetic highway, irreversibly following time’s arrow…Topokinesis is thus the cell-inertial, tissue-specific magistrate of thermodynamics and gravity.” P. 128-129. (Did you get that?) How about: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (as the uterus recapitulates the dawn-time ocean), and together they recapitulate cosmogony—the overall evolution and destiny of chaos systems in the universe.” P. 136. And: “the microcosm, helix by helix, is the macrocosm, galaxy by galaxy.” P. 138 (As below, so above). Every elaboration is an opportunity for more bling, as the next sentence shows: “Thermodynamically, ontogeny and phylogeny are the same distributed chaotic event: the relationship between a creature and its germinal cell is a form of a logarithm or square-root function between a morphogenetic sequence and a lineage of prior embryos potentiating it.” p. 138
But wait! It gets even worse: “The primeval regulators, the source codes, design specifiers, circuit triggers, and quantum switches—while traceless and inaccessible—are still present, just as crucial as ever to the assemblage and structures of organisms. They are the lattices, frames, and base symmetries upon which life cultivated its once and future designs. Their submechanisms run under the mechanical surface, camouflaged by their own legacies of condensation, sublimation, transitorization, abbreviation, concision, tabefaction, ellipsis, syncope, meta-coding, deeper condensation, further abbreviation—and by the sheer layers and deviations of molecular motion itself.” P. 157.
Grossinger has a lot to say about the limits of genetic determinism, and much of it is provocative and even correct, if you can decipher his cryptogrammic verse: “Once we accept that genes are not the patented guardians of organic form, the sole architects and repair agents of our stuff, we stand as little more (or less) than elaborate ripples—unified, fluid-tissue matrices resonating with the aperiodic nanocrystals in our helices, held together not by a formula (though we could not exist without DNA’s circuits to locate and cue us) but by gravitational-centripetal resonance through chakra-yarn in excited, evanescent field states.” P. 228. Sounds very stoned to me!
On page 262, Grossinger detours into a 14 page rant regarding the 9/11 terroist attack on the Twin Towers—“Jihad versus McWorld.” Very strange!
There are many more paragraphs I could quote, but that would belabor the point. How does he conclude 445 pages of indulgent verbosity? Grossinger writes: “It hardly matters if we are atoms and molecules and our lives are not really real. What is real will survive somehow, even through obliteration of whole universes. What is illusion will be discarded. We don’t have to worry about this one.” Sounds like a self-reflexive paradox to me. The recycle bin is too good for this illusion. Perhaps the hearth is more appropriate. At least it will warm my bones beside the fire. If my critique sounds equally pretentious, it is by design. To quote Grossinger (page 265), “Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of retribution.”

This book offers thought for the 21st century, the 22nd century and the mind beyond the infinite beyond . .

Anti-science with a new spin, don't waste your time reading this. The categorical mistake it makes is claiming science should give us reasons for why we live. Science only really tells us how things happen, not why. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive. For example, science tells us how the Sun radiates energy into our thermodynamically open ecosystem on Earth. New age spiritualists want you to believe their reasons for why the Sun shines on us. This book is trying to tell you that some other-worldly force is controlling human destiny- human beings control human destiny, not some new age deception that the author here is trying to sell you. One star for his anti-money, anti-capitalist politics, otherwise zero stars.