Until today it is taken for granted that business enterprises created by man are something fundamentally different from animals and plants. To compare a shoe-maker`s workshop with a rosebush, or a millipede with an insurance company, seems to be totally absurd.
The Energon Theory claims that our reasoning is misleading us here. What seems to be absurd to us is in fact reality. We are just stuck in old, conventional thinking patterns. What our senses and our brain make us believe is in many respects an illusion.
In biology, as well as in economy, a very important connection between these two areas has been overlooked. All animals, all plants and all business enterprises have the same main orientation, the same vital backbone, so to speak. However different they may appear, they are all geared towards increasing their energy potential. Their existence depends entirely on this one specific activity. Only if they succeed in achieving an energy balance which on the average is positive, will they continue to exist. They must gain more usable energy from their environment than they spend on all their activities and efforts. If they have a negative balance, they may be able to maintain themselves by using up reserves or by consuming their own structure, but if their deficit persists they will perish. This is true for every worm as well as for an automobile factory, for every bacterium as well as for a dentist.
Without energy there is no movement, no process, not even for one-thousandth of a second. Without energy there is no development or maintenance of any structure, no growth and no propagation.
What energy actually is, no physicist has yet been able to specify. We haven´t even the slightest clue about the nature of this "something". According to modern nuclear physics everything ultimately leads to energy …. Energy is the root of all concretely observable phenomena.
However: the properties of this ultimate item are today well known and have been thoroughly studied. First of all: Energy is extremely changeable, flexible and transformable. It manifests itself as heat, kinetic energy, electricity and chemical energy. Further manifestations include light, magnetism, gravity, nuclear energy and energy of the stationary mass. Every single one of these forms of energy can be transformed into any of the others. And each is measurable. Units of such measurement are, among others, the joule, the calorie, the horse-power-hour, the electron volt and the watt second. Each one of these can be converted into any of the others. But the extremely flexible phenomenon being measured here continues to elude us.
The energy source of all plants (except some bacteria included in the class of plants) is the rays of sunlight, acquired by the photosynthetic process. The energy source of all animals is the cell tissues of plants or animals which are incorporated and digested, thus breaking down their molecules and setting free the chemical energy which binds them together. The human being, emerging from the variety of animals, also acquires the energy needed for the functions of its body by feeding. It further learned to acquire energy in an indirect way by double barter: In organized communities some individuals specialize in performing services for others or in producing products which are needed. As an equivalent for these efforts they receive an adequate amount of money and, for this, in a second barter procedure, they can "buy" food as well as the services and goods offered by others. Money thus represents a mediator by which, in exchange for ones own efforts, not only food but also labor invested by others can be obtained. Further energy sources which the human being learned to exploit were wood, coal and petrol, the kinetic energy of wind and flowing water, as well as the tremendous forces hidden in the nucleus of atoms.
As no common denomination for "energy-acquiring systems" existed, I named them "energons" in 1970. This term, as can be easily understood, is not defined by a special appearance, structure or behavior but by a special effect. Namely the capability of gaining more usable energy from the environment than is spent by overall activity.
The human being thus became the first organism capable of improving the faculties of its genetic body. With the aid of its specially developed mental faculties it produces additional "organs" from inorganic matter. We call these functional units tools, weapons, buildings, machines etc. They enlarge the capacities of the genetic body and have the further advantage of not being firmly linked to it. If they are not needed they can be put aside or be replaced by others. Thus we became "specialists in manifold specialization". If we take a knife in our hands we are specialized in cutting objects. If we add the artificial organ "boat" to our body and grip rudders, we are specialized in moving over the surface of water.
A further improvement prompted by our specially developed brain was the faculty of passing on information to others by speech and writing. Improvements gained by learning no longer had to be coded in our genetic archive, but could be directly passed on to others. Thus the propagation of our cell body remained within the competence of the genetic mechanism, while the software necessary to produce and to efficiently use "additional organs" shifted to the human brain. Improvements could consequently be obtained a million times faster.
The Energon Theory claims that the human being is not just a multicellular organisms among many others, but a creative center producing much larger and more efficient energy-acquiring systems. I named these larger and more powerful energons created by the human being "hypercell organisms". According to Energon Theory they represent a third era in the evolution of life. Just as in the first transition, where each multicellular organism starts from a single cell (the germ cell), each hypercell organism develops from a multicell human being. The various functions shift in the first transition from cell-organs ("organelles") to more capable multicell-organs (for instance from the "flagellum" as an organelle of locomotion to the multicell fins, legs and wings of the vertebrates). In the second transition the needed functions equally shift step by step to additional artificial organs (the function of locomotion from the multicell fins, legs and wings to the non-cellular ships, motor cars and airplanes).
If we look at the human being from this perspective it becomes quite clear what lies behind our superiority over all plants and animals. We are the first and only living beings able to extend and improve our genetic structure almost at will. By adding additional organs directly formed of inorganic material, we gain the faculty of specializing in the most different tasks. Homo sapiens should perhaps better be called Homo proteus. Not our intelligence as such is the essential element, but rather what it produces.
The human being can therefore not really be compared to any species of animal or plant. It is - as the germ cell - a creative center able to produce an almost unlimited number of new kinds of energons. These possess not only organs that stem from cell differentiation, but also further ones formed directly from inorganic material. The latter can be cast off and exchanged according to the tasks to be fulfilled.
One of the main issues of the Energon Theory is to discover what further common functions exist in the various species of energons. The central one in all of them is that they must possess units capable of acquiring usable energy from the surroundings. Are there further functional affinities? Energon research has led to the conclusion that energons, in spite of their great variety, are intimately related in their main functions. Moreover, their efficiency can even be measured by the same relevant factors.
The two following books lead from two very different starting points to the principally same conclusion: The human being is not the purpose or aim of the evolution of life but one of its most powerful tools. Today, the accelerating increase of power held by hypercell organisms leads, on a planet of limited size and resources, necessarily to the danger of self-destruction of the evolutionary process and of life itself. At the present point three main problems become acute: