Buzz Baum, Cell Biologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, explains the beginnings of life on Earth.

Key Points

• Darwin hypothesised that all living organisms are branches on a tree and that there is one single trunk to life on Earth. • Two partners gave rise to all complex cells: bacteria and archaea. We are all composite organisms – a mixture of bacterial genes and archaea organisms. • Many aspects of archaeal biology are very similar to our biology. So, although we’re separated by billions of years, if you look closely, these tiny cells share a lot of biology with us.

The Tree of Life Like many people, I’ve always been interested in nature, in the beautiful creatures around us, when we go walking in a forest or when we see all these different creatures. For most of human history, people didn’t really ask whether there were common ancestors. The first person to wonder whether, despite all the diversity of life on Earth, there are any commonalities, some sort of common relationships, was Charles Darwin.

In his notebooks, he had a picture of a tree, and he used this metaphor that all living organisms are branches on the tree and they all join up and there’s one trunk. He imagined in his sketchbooks that there was this single trunk to life on Earth. And we now know that his intuition was correct. Once upon a time, there was one organism and that organism gave rise to everything on Earth. In a way, you could look at all life on Earth as one colony. So, just as each of us starts as a single cell and gives rise to a whole body, the whole of life on Earth began as one cell, and is descended from a single cell, and that cell grew and divided, and grew and divided, and gave rise to the whole of life on Earth.

Jim Secord, Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge, explains the traits Darwin thought to be fundamental to humans.

About Jim Secord "I’m the Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project in the University Library at Cambridge University.

My research is on public debates about science in the 18th and 19th centuries. I’ve written particularly about Victorian evolution and debates about the problem of species and where we come from. I’ve also written about the reception of evolutionary works before Darwin published his Origin of Species."

What it means to be human is a crucial question for Darwin. You get an interesting impression of this from his writings. If you read On the Origin of Species, for example, there’s hardly anything in it about human beings. There is one sentence where he says light will be thrown on the origin of man and its history. And there are a few other examples that involve people.

What needs to be emphasized is that the core idea of On the Origin of Species, evolution by natural selection, comes from thinking about humans and what it means to be human. It comes from the work of political economy by Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population. When Darwin was thinking about why some individuals survive in the struggle for existence and others don’t make it, he was thinking about people; he was thinking about you and me.

I think it’s really important to realise that throughout Darwin’s theoretical thought, this question about humanity and the idea of what it means to have a mind and be part of the natural world at the same time – this is the core of the question he’s trying to answer. We can see this in his later writings when he publishes The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relationship to Sex in 1871. This is a two-volume work, which argues in the first part that humans come from lower animals. In making this argument, Darwin shows how a whole range of different characteristics – our morals, our belief in God, our love of music – are in various ways present within lower animals.

Emanuele Coccia, Associate Professor of Historical Anthropology at EHESS, discusses metamorphosis.

About Emanuele Coccia "I am Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

I’m working on art, fashion and ecology. I published The Life of Plants four years ago, and this year I published a book called Metamorphoses."

Key Points

• Metamorphosis shows that life cannot be reduced to a single anatomical or moral identity. • Metamorphosis is the relationship between all individuals within a species as well as the relationship between species. • Living beings come from previously living beings; every life is more ancient than the body carrying it.

Metamorphosis is interesting because it tells us about what life is in general. For example, take the most evident phenomenon of metamorphosis: insect metamorphosis. In this case, metamorphosis shows that there is life between two bodies that have nothing in common from an anatomical, ecological or ethological viewpoint.

A caterpillar and a butterfly do not share the same body. They do not share the same face. They are totally different. Moreover, they do not share the same ethos or moral identity. On the one hand, you have a caterpillar, which is a life form occupied by the question of nutrition. For a caterpillar, the world is a huge McDonald’s where it can simply eat. On the other hand, you have the butterfly, which is a life form whose main concern is having sex.

Tim Lenton, Professor of Earth System Science at the University of Exeter, discusses how our remarkable planet came to be the way it is now.

About Tim Lenton "I’m Director of the Global Systems Institute and Professor of Earth System Science at the University of Exeter. My work focusses on the transformation of our planet.

Reading Jim Lovelock’s books on Gaia ignited my passion for studying the Earth as a whole system. I study how our remarkable planet came to be the way it is now. I study how humans are transforming the Earth’s system and how we might create a flourishing future within that system."

Key Points

• There are three remarkable revolutions that made the Earth in which we could evolve as humans. The first is the origin of life. The second is the creation of oxygen in our atmosphere. The third is the makings of complex life forms. • Humans are the first conscious animal species to have a truly global influence on the climate. • The remarkable thing about our planet and what we call the Earth system is how interconnected the living and the non-living things are at the surface of the planet: Life has transformed the environment, and the environment has shaped life. • We recognise that we’re a global force and we’ve created a new geological epoch, which scientists have dubbed “The Anthropocene” that is destined to end badly. But humans could also be the beginning of another revolutionary change of the Earth.

The Earth's first revolution

There are three remarkable revolutions that made the Earth in which we could evolve as humans. The first is the origin of life. The second is the creation of oxygen in our atmosphere. The third is the makings of complex life forms and a second rise in oxygen to levels that can support creatures like us that are intelligent enough to reflect on this remarkable history from which we’ve evolved.

Life got started on this planet over three and a half billion years ago and it was immediately faced with a profound problem of trying to get hold of enough of all the elements it needed to build its bodies, because the supply from inside the Earth – from volcanoes and the like – of the materials that organisms use was pretty meagre. So, the first revolution was really a revolution of recycling, where the young biosphere learned how to recycle all the elements it needed to flourish, and to be productive and global in extent and influence.

Now, after that revolution, at least a billion years passed before one little lineage of bacteria solved an incredible puzzle of how to pull apart water molecules, to get hold of electrons and stick those electrons on molecules of carbon dioxide to reduce the carbon down to sugars, in what we know as photosynthesis. And that process spits out oxygen as a waste product.

Nowadays, I would say almost every person I see in therapy talks about their troubled body en passant, as though it is not something to be dealt with because it is just something you have to live with.

About Susie Orbach "I am a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and writer, and the co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre in London and New York.

I look at how the issues of society are structured into the individual, and constitute how we become who we are, but holding on to the notion that we live in a society and that every relation that exists is imbued with the power relations, the unconscious desires, the longings, and the struggle for subjectivity that exists between people."

Key Points

• As a psychotherapist, I have noticed an increase in what I would call body distress, or troubled bodies. Nowadays, almost every person I see in therapy talks about their troubled body as though they have accepted it’s something they have to live with. • I would say the vast majority are people who have body distress in the form of thinking they’re much too big. The second issue is age: the young ones want to be older and the women in their 40s all want to be younger-looking. • Girls are producing a kind of sexuality that has to do with performance rather than the expression of their own sexual desire. The huge prevalence of pornography means that both girls and boys end up confused about what an erotic is and what sex is. • When we come to the issue of trans, the idea of being able to get out of your body and into another body, and reconstruct a body, has a certain attraction because you have a desire to end up in a different place than the distressed body you're in.

Accepting our body distress?

As a psychotherapist, I have noticed an increase in what I would call body distress, or troubled bodies. When I started to practise, people with body difficulties would say, I have an eating problem – I throw up all the time, or I can’t eat, or I’m eating too much. They might have said they were too fat no matter what their size. They were very interested in working on that as a problem, as a manifestation of having a troubled body. Nowadays, I would say almost every person I see in therapy talks about their troubled body en passant, as though it is not something to be dealt with because it is just something you have to live with.

There is a deep acceptance now of being perhaps frightened of food, preoccupied with how you look, worried about whether you’re physically active or not, preoccupied with whether you should have cosmetic surgery, or involved in behaviours such as cutting oneself. At first these seem inexplicable to the individual, but they come to understand that these behaviours are a means to try to deal with their pain. People can be very reluctant to think that anything can be done in the therapy because they’ve been trying to solve the body problem for themselves for a very long time and they’ve either given up or they’ve sought commercial solutions.

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Anger is a primordial emotion and appears across cultures as a formative force.

About Josh Cohen "I’m a psychoanalyst in private practice in London and Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London.

My research is at the borders of psychoanalysis, literature and cultural theory. I’ve written a number of books, including one on Sigmund Freud, on privacy, on our aversion to work and, most recently, on the relationship between literature and life."

Key Points

• Anger is a primordial emotion and appears across cultures as a formative force. • Freud and Breuer believed that the traumas that trouble our mental lives are caused by psychic injuries, which often lead to a lodged anger at the centre of the self. • Addressing such anger requires a thoughtful, just response; it cannot be dealt with through quick fixes like shouting or receiving an apology. A primordial emotion

Anger is a main colour on the spectrum of human feeling. It’s one of the most primordial emotions. It involves the presence of at least one other person: a sense of injury that someone else has done us which makes us feel like we want to retaliate, to avenge ourselves. It’s one of the most venerable of human emotions, and one that is attested to across different cultures very early on.

We see anger in all the mythological traditions, in various cosmogonies and theogonies. The Greek gods, the Indian gods, various systems of the divine show us that in the creation of the world, in the creation of the people who make up the world, anger is always a formative force.

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Helping and being helped informs almost all our forms of relating to other people.

About Adam Philips "I was trained as a child psychotherapist and I worked in the NHS for 17 years. I am currently a psychoanalyst and a writer. Since 2003 I have been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud.

I write one day a week and I tend to write about psychoanalytic topics. I don’t ever write about my patients, though, but mostly on topics like boredom, kissing, hatred, obstacles and a whole range of things that interest me on a personal level. These are essays in the literal sense, since they are experiments for pursuing certain kinds of ideas."

Key Points

• We’re always equally dependent throughout our lives, but in different ways. • Every time I ask somebody for something I’m acknowledging a lack of self-sufficiency, and that means having to face the fact that I need somebody who I can’t control. • Real help is based fundamentally on care for another person, a capacity to make realistic promises and an ability to bear somebody else’s suffering • One of the fundamental questions that helping and being helped raises is, what is power? And how is power going to be used? Describing a life in terms of dependence

When I worked as a child psychotherapist in the Department of Child Psychiatry at Charing Cross Hospital in London, we developed a new method for interviewing new patients. Normally, in a medical context, you take a medical history when you meet the patient for the first time. In addition to that, we asked people to tell us the story of their relationship to help. In a way, it seems like a simple thing. It’s clear that we’ve spent our whole lives being helped in different ways, and yet we often don’t think about our relationship to the wish to be helped, the need to be helped and our capacity to bear being helped.

One of the striking things is that in order to be helped, you have to acknowledge there’s something you can’t do for yourself and there’s something you need somebody else for. These are two powerful and fundamentally formative experiences, because one of the ways of describing a life right from the beginning is in terms of dependence – that a baby is absolutely dependent on their family. And so you can think of a life as one in which one grows from a state of absolute dependence to relative independence.

The story we’re told officially is that we begin by being absolutely dependent. Then we have a long period in which we become more and more independent and then, when we’re old, we become dependent again. I think it’s probably truer to say that we’re always equally dependent throughout our lives, but in different ways. What dependence means is being able to acknowledge that I need other people in order to grow and develop. I can only live my life in a state of need and want. And what that means is something to do with what we call as adults “being helped”.

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Lisa Appignanesi, Visiting Professor at King’s College London and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, explores “good” and “bad” emotions.

About Lisa Appignanesi "I’m a Visiting Professor in Medical Humanities at King’s College London. I’ve written books on anger, on love and trials of passions, and on women.

I’m fascinated by the subject of emotions: extreme emotions, madness, Freud, the therapeutic and psychiatric professions."

Key Points

• Emotions in themselves can be both good and bad at the same time; it’s when they take over and there is an imbalance that things begin to go astray. • Women become the bearers of many of the emotional extremes. They are considered to be far more emotional than men. • Freud allowed women to have and experience desire. Women’s desire was no longer aberrant. • There has been a great medicalisation of our emotions and our potential behaviours. And we have nowhere to go except to doctors.

Classification of emotions

The classification of emotions has been with us for a very long time. The seven deadly sins are a form of classifying the emotions, of charting what is good and what is bad and what is desirable and not desirable. Emotions are aspects of feeling which lead you towards action, towards behaviour. And they also are linked to our motives. Emotions in themselves can be both good and bad at the same time; it’s when they take over and there is an imbalance that things begin to go astray. Every epoch, every moment in history, has its very own ways of behaving or characterising or acting crazy. So, what topples you over into something which is diagnosable by doctors? What topples you over is often that you don’t behave like everybody else or your emotions, the ones that are visible, don’t seem to be like those of others. Sanity itself, as a definition, of course, also changes because it’s very much linked to what society expects.