COVID-19, Globalization, De-globalization and the Slime Mold's Lessons For Us All.

The world is struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic on a backdrop of conflicting globalization and de-globalization forces. A study of biology reveals that nature has been contending with such general issues for billions of years and has come up with broad strategies for their resolution. Copy and paste!

The COVID‐19 pandemic is raging across the planet and humanity is having to contend, not just with its health consequences, but with the economic dislocation that has been swift to follow. Awkwardly, this health crisis is taking place at a time that the world is increasingly destabilized by growing nationalistic and isolationist tendencies, a trend well under way before COVID‐19 forged its way into our lives. The evidence is clear: Brexit, increasing tensions within the EU, fissures within NATO, a growing contraction in world trade, erection of border fences to stem illegal immigration, notably within Europe and along the US‐Mexico border. Increasingly nationalistic governments, in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa are obvious expressions of an increasingly polarized and fragmented world.

So how does COVID‐19 and its aftermath fit into this bigger picture?

For the past decade the world has been undergoing a period of what we might term de‐globalization or decentralization. Previously, globalization was the name of the game. The trend toward greater political and economic integration was initiated after World War 2, at first within the Western alliance. However, following the fall of the Iron Curtain, Russia and China were quick to join into the newly emerging world order. Globalization was the catch‐cry, as reflected in growing trade, rapid dissemination of technology and innovation, lower costs of production, extension of supply chains, and improved employment opportunities. The fruits of cooperation were plain to see. Globalization appeared to be win‐win.

Why, then, the abrupt turn around? Why did the win‐win of globalization begin to reverse? In fact, one might ask: what are the factors that would favor a more decentralized political and economic world order? Is globalization or decentralization the appropriate strategy for a world order?

Well, a study of chemistry and biology can offer valuable insights into these difficult questions. Nature has had lots of practice in dealing with such problems simply because it has been contending with them for billions of years, from the earliest days of life's appearance on earth. The evolutionary process, directed by the guiding hand of natural selection, has come up with exhilarating discoveries, both conceptual and technological. Think of photosynthesis, vision, consciousness, digital storage of information, as prime examples. Nature's profound technological abilities are no less than awesome, and, like good students, we humans have much to learn by mimicking nature's innovative capabilities. Copy and paste!

So, what does nature teach us about the globalization versus de‐globalization dilemma?

The emergence of life is now thought to have involved the evolution of a simple replicating chemical system of unknown origin into the complex and highly intricate network of chemical reactions that is the biological cell. That process was the chemical expression of globalization and without doubt constituted nature's most remarkable discovery – life. And some two billion years ago that globalization process took another major step forward with the evolution of multi‐cell creatures – you, me and most living forms around us. Each of us are aggregates of billions of cells networked to form a more complex centralized life system. For billions of years life has been successfully following that globalization track – from miniscule single‐cell bacteria all the way through to giant blue whales.

But there's a serious wrinkle in that globalization strategy. It violates the ‘don't put all your eggs into one basket’ principle. Individuality and diversification also play a crucial role in governing the ability of the life phenomenon to persist. A population of interacting individuals of various kinds is more likely to survive life's never‐ending challenges than a single giant entity, no matter how complex, ingenious and sophisticated. In fact, the slime mold, a seemingly unsophisticated, protoplasmic life form, has learnt to take advantage of both centralized and decentralized states. It spends most of its time as individual separate single cell forms, but when food resources run low, the individual cells centralize – they coalesce into a giant slug able to travel in search of new resources. Life's message as expressed through slime molds: hedge your bets. Both globalization and de‐globalization are utilized to advance life's global agenda. Finding the right balance is the trick. And that, of course, is far from trivial as the optimal balance is continually shifting.

Back to COVID‐19. The pandemic sweeping across our planet is a grim reminder that we humans are a collective, that, with all our differences, we are irrevocably connected to one another, that life is a global enterprise. One individual's health can impact, not just on his neighbor's health, but on the health of someone half a world away. Consequently, individuality taken to the extreme can be dangerous. Thus, a society's rejection of universal health care, as in the US, for example, may well have taken individuality – each man to himself, and for himself – too far. An inadequately protected segment of society endangers the society as a whole. That is true whether the threat arises from disease or extreme poverty, as evidenced by the mass migration from war‐torn regions to safe‐havens countries. It was globalization that effectively connected those troubled regions to the world's safe havens in the first place, and de‐globalization, through border closure, border fences and border patrols, can only partially mitigate that mass migration threat.

The message is clear: we humans, and life itself, is a collective, with the conflicting needs of the individual and the collective continually in need of monitoring and re‐adjustment. Lose balance and the consequences can be profound. For us humans, COVID‐19 reminds us that disease, war, revolution, are disturbingly closer than we think. Like the slime mold, human society will need to continually vacillate between globalization and de‐globalization, seeking that elusive balance, as we strive to live more securely both with nature and ourselves.