Here’s the second installment
of my book-length “treati-festo,” wherein the title’s significance is
explained. This is a short section, setting the table for what’s to come, and
furthering the notion that we have every reason to believe our ideas about how
living things operate are flawed (seeing as how we don’t really even know what
it is that animates non-living matter). Again, I’ve taken on this project in the
first place because few people seem to appreciate the implications of this
crucial truth. My intellectual nemesis, Richard Dawkins, continually insists
that the only “purpose” of living things is to reproduce their DNA—his “selfish
gene” theory. But Dawkins (and, apparently almost everyone else) haven’t thought
to ask, “Why do all organisms “want” to be alive in the first place? What’s
behind the incredibly powerful drive that compels every living thing to try and
produce more of its kind?” Seriously: why have we not been asking these obvious
questions all along? Over the course of this work I’ll be pointing out a number
of things about nature that seem to be under the radar. At present, without
being aware of it, most of us have been conditioned (“educated”) to believe
that science has almost completely explained how our word works and the only
people who question its accepted findings are religious fanatics or crackpots.
One of my main goals is to sow in my readers’ minds a skeptic’s inclination to reexamine
things about nature that we’ve come to accept unquestioningly. For the last
three centuries, scientists have been taking things apart and examining the
pieces—what’s known as “reductionism.” This is how science functions. For the
most part, it’s a system that works beautifully. Presently, we’re moving toward
what’s called a “systems” approach to looking at the complex world of nature. A
shift that, in my estimation, is long overdue. Allow me to convince you....
I. I Step Out on a Limb…Again
What
I wish to make clear…is, in short, that from all we have learnt about the
structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner
that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics. And that not on the
ground that there is any ‘new force’ or what not, directing the behaviour of
the single atoms within a living organism, but because the construction is
different from anything we have yet tested in the physical laboratory.
Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?
My postulate of Natural Design is predicated on the idea that
each and every branch of the biological sciences are faced with major
conceptual shortcomings, from bottom to top, due to one crucial piece of
information: we don’t know what life
actually is. The almost universal belief among scientists that life can be explained solely in terms of
chemistry and physics will one day be considered a quaint anachronism. To those
who instinctively reject this assertion out of principle, reflect on the fact
that after attempts spanning centuries there is still no consensus on a
clear-cut, all-encompassing definition of what being alive entails. (No consensus—though some hundreds of
definitions have been proposed, each of which is true…aside from pesky
exceptions that continually crop up.) Insofar as we will ever truly fathom the
intricacies of life, it will be found
that the key lies in discovering how living things manipulate information. And the crux of the matter
will be finding how the ability to do so arose in the first place, with the
inception of the genetic code. Without such knowledge, the picture can never be
complete.
Before biology became a fully mature
science, this fundamental lack of understanding had yet to become an issue.
During its formative era (up until, say, the 1830s) the focus was mostly
comparative—directed toward learning about organisms and their various parts
and ways by observing, collecting, dissecting and classifying. Then came
ecology, which revealed new layers of complexity through its focus on
ecosystems and the tangled web of relationships between their inhabitants.
Questions of origins and meaning were for the most part left to philosophers.
Only after molecular biology and embryology
assumed their rightful foundational standings in the mid-20th
century did the most basic aspects of all life sciences finally seem to come within reach. In the
1940s, Erwin Schrödinger (co-discoverer of quantum mechanics and first to
propose the existence of some sort of “genetic code”) wrote an intentionally
thought-provoking little book entitled What
is life? It addressed head-on, from a physicist’s point of view, the
age-old debate that for the most part was being tacitly ignored by modern
biologists: How can physics and chemistry
account for living organisms? That question remains problematic. Still unanswered,
the whole vexing issue continues to be endlessly debated. But so far as modern
science is concerned, the subject is generally considered too ambiguous and
subjective, veering too close to philosophy for serious consideration.
There can be
little or no doubt that among the universe’s
billions—no, trillions— of planets, surely others are home to
living things. (For reasons taken up later, those harboring life forms higher
than microbial are far rarer than science fiction fans and Carl Sagan devotees
would like to believe.) Still, the vast majority of other worlds are lifeless,
always were, and have no difficulty whatsoever maintaining that status.
But here on this remarkable and munificent
little planet of ours, the living and non-living exist together, mingled
inextricably—animate or inanimate,
with nothing in between.[1]
Both are so omnipresent and entangled that, from day to day, we unavoidably
fail to note the truly vast gulf between the two; we lack any sort of
meaningful perspective. But it’s obvious!
One moves around and does things…the
other doesn’t. A point so obvious, it seems beyond question. This crucial
lack-of-perspective is a factor in virtually all my claims and of central
importance to my thesis; try to bear that in mind.
Another unconventional proposition: There
are no compelling reasons to presume that the inception of life was an event
intrinsically less remarkable than the origin of non-living matter, just
because its arrival here on Earth took place well after the uni-verse’s initial
expansion. For life to be realized,
the nascent universe itself had to evolve to meet the requisite conditions.
Following the Big Bang, matter in its atomic state didn’t take form until almost half a million years had passed[2]
and another 1.6 billion years elapsed before enough early generation stars had
exploded, creating the debris considered necessary for planetary formation.
Beyond that, multiple generations of specific types of stars (those capable of
forging the heavier elements necessary for life) had to explode in supernovae
and cast their seeds into space. In a cosmological sense, where the passage of
time has different meaning, the chronologic difference between matter’s origin
and life’s is not particularly consequential. My point being: there’s nothing
with which to compare those two historic origin-events—no causal framework in
which to place them that allows any rational conclusions as to their relative
significance. (My guess is that an omnipotent, omnipresent creator-deity might
consider life their better piece of
work.)
Cultural detachment from the natural world only magnifies our
inability to perceive life for what
it might represent in totality. Its significance is too profound for comprehension…perhaps
too overwhelming to face squarely without some coercion. But watching a single
episode of David Attenborough’s Nature series
should be more than enough to lastingly restore the most jaded person’s sense
of wonder. Or any open-eyed stroll through the woods, for that matter. Instead,
out of sheer familiarity, life’s
ubiquity and beyond-belief variety have a strange, numbing effect—our brains
resolutely clouding that unique human capacity to feel unbridled awe. We
continually take its innumerable wonders for granted and, by doing so, demean
it.
18 Jan 2016
[1] It is generally considered that the one candidate for
an exception would be viruses—crystal-like packets of lifeless genetic material
that require living hosts to provide their needs.
[2] At this point the universe had cooled sufficiently for
electrons to bond permanently with free hydrogen and helium nuclei.
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