Towards a New Philosophy of Life. Part One- Understanding Humanity

Human philosophy is in a moment of crisis.
We know so much.
We know so much more about how we ended up here, the physical processes that dictate life, the biological processes which determine our actions, the ultimate purposes of these actions.
And we have no moral framework any longer within which to work.

We are in crisis. We are scared.
We are afraid of what we know.

God didn't create the world in seven days. There is no devil.
But we know that there is Good and Evil in spite of that.
How do we make sense of this? How do we determine what to do now that the powers we once ascribed to the almighty sit in the palms of our hands?

Because at present our attitude to knowledge is very negative. On the one hand, we see the rise of fundamentalism. Be they Creationist, Muslim fundamentalists, whoever, it is people wishing that the old beliefs were true, because they cannot face the power at our disposal. They wish to take that power away and return it to God.

On the other hand, we have the extremities of the green lobby. Now don't get me wrong, the green lobby are right in so many ways. They are wise to the dangers inherent in what we now know. But again, often their response is that of the Luddite. They want the knowledge to go away.

No one is facing up to the truth. And the truth is awesome. We need to reinvent morality. Not the old dead morality, relevant to a world where angels and devils battle for human souls, but a world in which we know what it is that we are, and we know what is Good and Evil, because we truly can work it out rationally.

It isn't about PLAYING God. This is the point. We aren't children any more. Playing is part of learning and development. We played, as we learned, as we discovered the laws of the universe, as human minds examined matter, examined forces.
The day we split the atom, the time for play had stopped. Yet we are still stuck in that mentality of the student, afraid to leave university and go to work.

It's not about playing God. It's about taking on his responsibilities. They're ours now.

I'd like to start by offering forward a view on what life is. At present our definition is still hazy. But there are several major theoretical questions I'd tentatively like to address here.
In all our studies of life, we only actually know of one Life process. The history of DNA. Our history. But also the history of all living things we can think of. Everything you eat is your cousin, if you go back far enough.
Did it happen elsewhere, is it happening now in the vast reaches of the universe?

Our attitude to this question, is actually quite significant. Potentially, it DOES affect how we see ourselves. The problem is, on this scale, we just don't have the data to make a valid assessment. But I do think we can make some logical inferences.

One of the problems with the process of evolution, is we are looking at it backwards. We see the results, but is only recently we have started to really understand which parts of the story hold most significance. And it's not the ones we first thought of. Sometimes, we haven't been able to see the wood for the trees.
In understanding phylogeny, we have slowly begun to grasp ourselves.

Let us first clarify some basic assumptions. Amongst all the things that have happened in the history of life, which ones could be classed as 'universal' and which as 'parochial'.
What do I mean by that?

OK. What I mean is this. If we take the existence of a Bilaterian for granted, somewhere in the Sombrero galaxy, what features can we be justified in assuming MUST be present somewhere in the diversity of life there, and which quite possibly do not exist there?

And in fact, the answer is not the one a Creationist would expect. A Creationist points to features such as eyes and wings as unlikely evolutionary events. In fact, the facts go against this. The history of Earth shows that if Bilaterians exist, eventually, so will eyes, so will wings. They are favoured developments.
The eye has evolved 41 separate times in Earth. But there are only nine ways it has evolved. Because it is laws of physics state what sort of eyes work, and which don't. So Bilaterians anywhere, would include eyed creatures amongst them. They would have two eyes, no more, no less, almost certainly matching one of the models so far seen on this planet.
Incidentally, it is believed that the most sophisticated eye ever, was that of the extinct Trilobites, an eye form similar to that of modern insects, but which evolved completely separately.

The same is true of flight. Wings may be amazing things, but life has a habit of overcoming the obstacles necessary towards their evolution. Insects have done it. Reptiles have done it twice (Pterosaurs, Birds), Mammals have done it (Bats).

Again, we point to events such as the extinction of the Dinosaurs as crucial events in Life's history. In fact, we can take these events as normal. Catastrophic astronomical events aren't unusual. Look at Halle-Bopp crashing into Jupiter. We simply happen to be lucky the physical layout of our solar system protects us. It seems likely, looking at history, that mass extinctions happen every 26 million years on Earth. One view- one I incline to- is that beyond the Oort cloud, orbiting the Sun at a distance of half a light year, is a Brown Dwarf called Nemesis, which shaves through the Oort cloud every 26 million years, sending comets off their orbital paths.

These events aren't unusual in the history of Earth. Nor will they be strange anywhere else.

However.
There are three events which stand out as being unique in the history of life on Earth. We know that each of them only happened once. And once they did, Life on Earth changed forever. We cannot, at this point, say how likely these events were. Put another way, we know this haystack had a needle in it. Do any of the others, anywhere?

The first goes right to the essence of what life is. Here we are on the boundary of life, an uncomfortable zone where even scientists refuse to state the bald facts, frightened to strip away the last vestiges of mysticism regarding the life process. Because life is sacred. To finally categorise it in a table of chemical processes, is something we still baulk at.

Pasteur proved that spontaneous generation doesn't happen. All life, comes from other life. It can never just spring into existence. Or put another way, it's never been seen to happen, and no one can see how it would.
And yet of course, here we are.
Creationists derive some comfort from this thought.

But only because of the artificial barrier we maintain...

Because we don't categorise Viruses as life. They are PRE life.
What a convenient semantic!

Now viruses CAN just come from nowhere. They don't always need a parent. You CAN create a virus in a laboratory.

And DNA, if you look at it, is just another virus. Just another chemical reaction, capable of self replication.
Some time back, I proposed as a definition of life 'Any series of chemical reactions capable, merely by virtue of existing of initiating from scratch, an identical series of reactions, to the degree that over time, the total amount of matter being used in such reactions increases exponentially'.

This definition of course, includes viruses.

I suspect, chemistry being what it is, and chain reactions being a favoured form of reaction within the universe, that viruses exist wherever hydrocarbons can form in water to any degree of abundance.

It is whether viruses have ever appeared with the potential of that one special virus we know on Earth, the DNA virus.
Because everything we now classify as life, is merely a strain of that virus.

It is the amazing degree of potential for self replication inherent in that sequence. And the answer, lies in construction. It has developed a method of assembling it's molecules at an atomic level, that gives it unique capabilities in terms of processing and transmitting data. Which is of course, what viruses do. Basically, it's molecular achitecture.

And more significantly, it has potential for mutution. Evolving evolvability, if you like. Since no one ever sat down and designed these viruses, since the initial assemblage of all viruses, is, we must assume, random chemical events driven by thermodynamic effectiveness, we cannot theorise on how likely it is that such an extraordinary virus would emerge anywhere. If most viruses are constructions cobbled together by cowboy builders, DNA is the Sydney Opera House.

So Life as we know it. It boils down to mathematics. How often does the best possible construction of virus turn up? One capable of making itself visible from another planet?

And now on to the second great frontier. The second strange event in the history of life. Again, an event that makes perfect sense if we understand it. Like the emergence of life, scientists don't really like to talk about it. It is discussed, and the implications understood, but to say it TOO publicly, threatens a major part of human life. Because it concerns sex. Which really, underlies almost everything.



The second great event in the development of life was when Male and Female bonded. The great symbiosis of all time.
The emergence of Eukaryote life.
Possibly three billion years ago.

Biologists often don't like saying this too publicly. It is implied of course, and they allow us to join the dots (Dawkins does this very well), but to categorically state that all Eukaryote life is based on the symbiotic relationship between X and Y, is stark. Because what it really means, is that Male and Female are two mutually co-operating identities that cannot exist without eachother, that it is, in fact, the biggest division in the world of multi-cellular life, that before the emergence of Eukaryote life, men and women descended from different strains of bacteria.

But it's true.

Life is currently divided into three domains- Bacteria, Archaea (a bit like Bacteria, but not) and Eukarya. Eukarya, which includes everything you can see, is different to all other bacteria, because it's cells have a nucleus.

What happened was, between two and three billion years ago a large bacterium was swimming around, when a smaller bacterium of a different strain invaded it and started living inside it. The two started having a symbiotic relationship. The one took over the replicating function of the other. The one ended up being perpetually reproduced INSIDE the other. It became the nucleus. The two between them, became the ancestor of ALL multicellular life.
They invented sex, basically.

And still today, multicellular life replicates that. The little invader, is my ancestor. The reluctant host, is ancestor to all you ladies out there. Well, actually that's not true. Both are ancestors to both of us. We are all made up of bodies that are essentially composed of female cells with male nuclei. But we start the whole process afresh when we repeat the circumstances of the initial invasion, when the little descendants of the invading bacterium swim up the vagina to impregnate the reluctant host once more.

All multicellular life has male and female. Even if the reproductive process SEEMS asexual, it still replicates using those principles. Fertilisation happens somehow, even if it is self-fertilisation. But the logic of the situation dictates that there is greater possibility for diversity, greater possibility for variety- and therefore the emergence of more successful strains- by repeating the original dynamic over and over again.
Sex is the second great invention of Life.
And it may be unique. Symbiotic relationships between bacteria (where bacteria appear, and as we established, that may be rare) could be universal, but self-replicating symbiotic relationships, if you think about it, the chances seem bizarrely unlikely. It's only happened once here.

It seems so simple we overlook it. And yet, in a very real sense the anatomy of a male monkey and a male human, is more similar are to eachother, than the female versions of their own species, and the same is true with a female monkey and a female human.

And now on to the last of the three possibly unique developments of organic reactions.

And just as the second took place billions of years after the first, we need to go forward billions of years again.
I'm going to overlook the emergence of predators, which most biologists agree was a major development in creating the diversity of life, which probably initiated the Cambrian explosion by bringing the Red Queen hypothesis into operation (bluntly stated predators have to keep getting better to catch the prey which keeps getting better at not getting caught, creating an evolutionary arms race).

I overlook it, because whilst it is everything it is said to be as a development, I see it as being inevitable. Like the eye, it is driven by simple laws of nature. It is a logical consequence of multicellular existence. If multicellular life exists anywhere, the Red Queen would have appeared at some point, and as soon as it does, eyes, wings, legs, they all start popping up with a frequency determined simply by time and probability.

No. The last of the three key events is in the process of happening. A new dynamic, improbable in its occurrence, that changes the life process forever.

We take it for granted. We think of it, as inevitable. If there is life, there must be intelligent life.
Why?
Look how long life has gone on. And it has been driven hard by the Red Queen. Predators have had to be the best to survive. But none of them needed to grasp trigonometry to do so. Reptiles ruled the Earth for millions of years without it.
This is the point. As with the invention of sex, the chances of intelligence emerging are slim. It doesn't fit in particularly with the general scheme of things. A certain brute cunning in deceiving your prey, or your rivals, yes. Even a certain collective thinking, insects prove that. But that strange combination of collective thinking with the needs of a primate fruit eater that turned predator and in a short of time, though lacking speed, claws, or shearing teeth, replaced the carnivorous beasts as the pinnacle of the food chain, the Lords of the Earth, this was something new.

And this is where neither philosophy works. The fundamentalists refuse to accept man as an animal. The green lobby see us as just that.
The truth is, we are a unique animal. Our existence changes nature. Just as the emergence of sex and the Eukaryote relegated all other life (poor outmoded bacteria), to live in its guts, just so the existence of man, relegates all other life to a lower level. Because we know how it works. We can control the processes. The universe has finally created something CAPABLE of playing God. That changes everything.

The world we live in, is a world of man. We have ACTUALLY CHANGED the planet. We have carried out, in the space of a few hundred years changes to it's face beyond the workings of glaciation and continental drift. We change even the composition of it's atmosphere.

We are starting something new. And it began in earnest in documented times. Some geologists- and I concur- end the Holocene period in 1800 and start the new era- the Anthropocene, the age of a man-controlled world- at this point. I think they are right. Man the truly rational being, man the master of nature itself, emerges at this point.
It is a new dynamic in life. A creature capable of organising itself, and it's environment to do what nature could not- feed six billion people on this rock.

And this how we need to see it. Because our morality shouldn't be about what God might have said to a mythical first couple in a mythical garden. But nor should it be driven by expecting human existence to be constrained by the parameters of life as it existed before we did. That's gone. The world has changed. All those other eras of geological time, all the time that existed before human hives emerged, agglomerations of glass, concrete and steel stretching for miles, all the eras before the sky was dominated by vast steel craft, that carried life faster and further than all the life that evolved body parts to do it.

Human Morality in the Anthropocene must be governed by the following considerations.



Strength is in numbers. The more of us live, the more potential we have. In a human population of two hundred the chances of any one of them being an Einstein, is slim. But more people, means more intelligence. It is no coincidence that human knowledge has accelerated faster, the more of us have been born.

The future of man will always be dependant on an ever expanding human population. This will always be a law of life.
So the species MUST seize what resources are open to it. We MUST find ways to feed and provide for more of us, to keep advancing further. In doing so, we fuel our own progress.

Human Morality must be geared to increasing our numbers, our habitats, our knowledge, our comfort, our happiness.

The future we aspire to must be that of a species aspiring to ever greater, who continually wins each life struggle, just to take on another.

Our take on the Universe?

There's probably nobody out there- but there will be.
We're coming.

And the moral decisions we face here, will come in another post.