Mother Nature has never been short of fantastic ideas
From the beginning of time, her most favoured pastime has been an endless game of metamorphosis.
And she entertained herself throughout the eons not by merely changing one thing into another, but by doing so in a spectacular way.
And so, for all of cosmic history, -this pastime-her hobby played itself out in cataclysmic eruptions and violent upheavals. She didn’t seem to tire of making things explode, and violently smashing one piece of creation into another. The bigger the fire, the greater the fun.
But then time came for the greatest transformation of all, and whether mystical or magical, a wondrous trick it was.
Nature created Life
But at that point it had become a different game. This once, there was no orgy of fire.
The event may well have slipped by in silence, in or below the waves of the water, seemingly insignificant, almost invisible to any interested observer — had anyone been there to look. Of course, there were no watchers, although even that is not certain.
If we can’t guess it for ourselves, no one can tell us what it was: The pinprick of an electric spark, or just a few molecules shifting?
But can we really say that it wasn’t something big? Life could have sprung from the debris of an volcano on the ocean floor, or clung to a meteor falling out of the sky. Still. the change that mattered, was the invention or rearrangement of building blocks inside microscopic structures.
I am convinced that Mother Nature likes the role of masterful magician, but is also adept in comedy.
She set up the mechanics of life as a riddle, something so simple a concept, and yet so intricate to analyze – and then she endowed living creatures with an irritating itch: The ability, or desire, to look at itself, and try to understand the web of contradiction of existence. It was done with the cleverest of devices, by handing to the creature the gift of recognizing its own reflection – consciousness.
And so, Mother Nature looks with bemusement at humanity. She set us up, in the image of stone age hunters who find a working television set in the wilderness, and who are watching the movie playing, and puzzle over how the tiny people on the screen managed to fit into that little box.
a history of things and life
The history of the cosmos is a history of things, filled with molten rock and molecules, with planets, star dust and hydrogen clouds.
Life is made of things, too, though not itself a thing but a result of things, and it is twisted together with untouchables like consciousness and intelligence.
By intuition humans understand life, because humans are life, and pieces of the cosmos. We observe the birth of children, or a baby bird picking its way out of of an eggshell.
We also know that a rock will stubbornly resist any attempts to break it in half, but once broken, the pieces will still be rocks and serve their purpose as before.
But as hard as it is to describe without contradiction, nonetheless life is a very simple thing. We can tell life from non-life by inspecting what it does and watching its primary activity.
The primary activity of life is hanging onto life.
Life is made of things, but is not a thing
Over at least the past 7000 years people have attempted to say, paint, or write what exactly it is that distinguishes living beings from a rock on the ground.
Life is made of things, but is not a thing, and twisted together with consciousness and intelligence.
By human intuition we understand life. Humans are life, and a piece of the cosmos. We observe the birth of children, or a baby bird picking its way out of an eggshell.
We also know that a rock will stubbornly resist any attempts to break it in half, but once broken, the pieces will still be rocks and serve their purpose as before.
But no description has come about this true, complete, and without contradiction. No one has succeeded in a description of life that is without contradictions and complete. But as hard as it is to describe without contradiction, nonetheless life is a very simple thing.
Early life, eons ago, consisted of single cells with the ability to divide into halves, and each half growing to divide again.
This mechanism is so familiar that we hardly ever think of the magnitude of simple innovation.
Imagine for a moment you had been asked to design the methods and tools to produce a very large number of copies of some object, say a 100 shirts, or a 1000 chairs, or ten thousand boxes. And then you are asked to make these copies only once, but every day, every hour.
First, you would need to find great quantities of raw materials.
You would design a method and devices to transport the materials to your place of manufacture which you also would have to build somewhere. You would need tools, and some kind of assembly line. Then you begin a improving the efficiency of your tools, so that a huge number of identical objects are made very quickly, and make that machine adaptable for making a dozen or a million.
This process is smart and self-evident. We can appreciate nature’s brilliant sleight of hand.
She did away with the need for machinery altogether.
The tools is its own maker, assembly line and product at once. It uses itself as raw material, and transports itself to wherever it needs to be to continue making more of itself. Input and output, original and copy, tool and tool maker in endless succession.
Life is the machine that makes itself.
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An organism that reproduces in this way is the ultimate in efficient production. One cell becomes two, which become four and then eight, and the size of their swarm increases with ever greater force.
There is no obvious need for intelligence or for existence of a consciousness, although doing anything requires the knowledge how to do it even if that knowhow seems to come out of nowhere.
When we look at it from a bird’s eyes view, the picture of early organisms is that of a solitary entity that would eat, grow and divide with wild abandon, in a simple-minded pursuit of staying alive long enough to divide again. A supply of energy and an environment that tolerates its existence is sufficient. A newly separated cell exists entirely for itself, with complete disregard for any other organism. It does not need to recognize its own kind and even if one cell were to cannibalize its sibling for food, in the next step they would again splitting in two. Cells drifting into hostile environments are sacrificed, the loss is compensated for by abundent reproduction elsewhere.
The method is simple but also vulnerable to self-destruction because there is no sense of limit, and survival by dumb luck.
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But then, Nature imposed a deeper wisdom.
Nature created a higher kind of being, the innovation once again ingenious in its simplicity: Each individual was given only one half of the key to life.
From then on, the male and female had to find each other to create an offspring.
Invention of sexual reproduction nature added a new element to life. In addition to manufacturing copies of itself, nature imposed an intellectual dimension – the mandate to cooperate, it introduced the notion of a common goal, a need to communicate, and most significantly, to share knowledge.
Any cell that lives on by nothing more than splitting into identical halves, can do so in isolation, completely self-centered. A being that can give life to a new generation only by seeking out its opposite number, will also pass on some small measure of nature’s wisdom.
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The genius lies not merely in the physical but in imposing a philosophical dimension: … The mandate to cooperate, and along with that – a need to communicate, and share knowledge. Any cell that lives on by nothing more than splitting into identical halves, can do so unfettered. A being that can give life to a new generation only by seeking out its opposite number, will also pass on some small measure of nature’s wisdom.
In addition, this also required passing on non-physical facets, namely intellectual qualities. The new method put a premium on willingness to share knowledge among each other, and operate to each other’s benefit.
Riotous Rhymes 