Life isn't about adjusting to one's external environment
Like you, I have been trained to believe that adaptation to environment is life. Something about the word ‘adaptation’ gives us the sense that it is the smart thing for an organism to do. And who can have a quarrel with ‘the environment’, the lovely blue and green brine in which we pickle, which leaks into us now and then and alters us to be better? So, when I read a paragraph that rubbished this view in an off-hand way, I was startled in the way other people’s insight could affect me in my teens.
The paragraph is in A Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit, who uses it to explain why Israel resisted its Arab brine. He writes: “The mid-nineteenth-century French physiologist Claude Bernard was the first to overturn the conventional understanding that life is an adjustment to the environment. Adjustment to the surrounding environment is death, argued Bernard; the phenomenon of life is that of preserving an internal environment contrary to an outside environment." This is a persuasive interpretation of Bernard’s observation: “The constancy of the interior environment is the condition of free and independent life." This phenomenon later came to be called ‘homeostatis.’ His insight was that life is resistance to the external environment.
A minutely perfected internal clockwork protects the body from the environment, which is actually very harsh. If air on Earth, which is mostly nitrogen, breaks through the body’s protections, it will kill us. Pure oxygen, too, can kill us.
An ambient temperature of 22° Celsius is pleasant, but the same thing inside our body will be the end of us. Life emerged on Earth, or perhaps it was seeded from another world but it bloomed here. Nevertheless, Earth is a lethal
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