From bacteria to Saint Francis to Gaia in the symbiotic view of evolution

Chimeras and Consciousness is a collection of essays coming mainly from an international conference held in 2004 in Bellagio, Italy, hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation. In the section ‘What’s in Chimeras and Conscious- ness’ we summarize the content of the 23 essays appearing in the book organized in five parts: ‘Selves’, ‘Groups’, ‘Earth’, ‘Chimeras’, and ‘Consciousness’. We also make a few comments on such a structure, prob- ing both the boundaries and internal coherence of these topics. The main goal of the book seems a kind of innovative unification of entities and processes like consciousness, micro-organisms, evolution, and the chemico-physical processes involving the Earth as a whole. The editors and authors want to break up with a tradition that, in their view, keeps all these topics separated and marginalize some of them, thus hindering understanding. Then we assess this unifiying endeavor, analyzing it in terms of an all-encompassing glance, of the discovery of sameness, and/or of an explanatory history or theory. The conclusion summarizes and makes an over- all evaluation of the book as more an inspirational than a scientific work, related to some ancient philosophical themes.