spread throughout the entire world, eventually coming together as one tremendous superorganism. As researchers Sonnea and Mathieu put it, bacteria came to “form one global, exceedingly diversified, yet functionally unified peculiar being.”7 Once that self-organized system emerged, it began to modulate the environment at a global scale in order to keep its self-organized state intact. It began to function at a level of complexity impossible for the linear mind to grasp.
