by Guy Murchie
Somehow I find this a comforting thought, not only because it finesses the problem of death, but because it seems so beautifully in tune with transcendence. And so also is the record I found of the last words of a Blackfoot Indian chief named Isapwo Muksika Crowfoot, who held his warriors in check for several years before he died about 1890, when he murmured to Father Doucet from his deathbed, "A little while and I will be gone from you - whither I cannot tell ... From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."
Chapter 21
Evolution of Earth
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IF ONE WERE LOOKING for a symbol to represent the Earth, it would be hard to find one more appropriate than the doorknob. For our planet actually has a slight doorknob shape, being measurably flattened at the poles. More important, she is offering man his first handle for opening the door to creation and acquainting him with the Universe. By which I mean that man's contemplation of Earth as a sample world gives him helpful clues to worlds in general and to how they evolve - including, I suppose, more than a hint of why they exist.
Beyond being a sample, however, Earth is a seed world, a world exuberant with untamed mind and spirit that have been long and patiently brewing life out of seeming lifelessness and are now clearly sprouting into germination, as we will see next chapter. Lifelessness, we learned in Chapter 14 on omnipresence, is probably illusory in the sense that stones, crystals and "inorganic" substances are at least potentially alive, with no provable line demarking them from organic stuff. But what factor on Earth do you suppose actually turned inorganic lava into organic soup and persuaded the planet she was a viable organism? How did the spunk ignite and the spirit find feather to take wing and fly? What made life live?
When Earth was young - say a baby of less than a billion years - the presumption of classical science is that she was sterile and completely innocent of anything a biologist could call life. Her rocks were hot and bare except where covered with steamy, unsalted pools, progressively growing into seas under an atmosphere thought to have been mostly ammonia fumes laced with methane, water vapor and wild gassy compounds of bromine, chlorine, fluorine or sulfur. If anyone had been there to look at the volcanic rockscape with its hissing fumaroles and thunderous black clouds pouring acid rain into fishless seas and could have been told that this noxious brew, left to itself long enough, would simmer and ferment into such fantastic improbabilities as the Taj Mahal and the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, the works of Shakespeare and Beethoven, electronic computers, television networks and moon rockets, he could not have been blamed for rejecting the idea as preposterous.
EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION
Moreover, behind the puzzle of how life arose and evolved looms the derivative question of how did the puzzle itself arise and evolve? When did philosophers or scientists first conceive of evolution and how did they set about measuring its structure?
Before the nineteenth century few of them seem to have had any inkling that nature might be going through any fundamental change with the passing eons, for almost no one had ever heard of the perspicacious handful of ancient observers who had somehow managed to surmise a progressive creation. One of these was Anaximander of Miletos who said in the sixth century B.C. that man "descended from a fish in the beginning of the world." A century later came Empedokles who mystically announced: "I have been ere now a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird and a dumb fish in the sea." Another certainly was Lucretius who wrote in Rome that "the new-born Earth first flung up herbs and shrubs. Next in order it engendered the various breeds of mortal creatures, manifold in mode of origin as in form ... more and bigger ones took shape and developed... first... birds... then... mammals..."
His rare pre-Christian sagacity even told him that there must be some sort of a natural law selecting the kinds of creatures that were to succeed or fail in the obvious struggle of life, for he explained that "monstrous and misshapen animals were born, but to no avail because nature ruthlessly eliminated them ... and many species must have died out permanently through failure to reproduce their kind while every breed of animal we now see alive has been preserved from the beginning of the world either by courage, cunning or speed."
Dozens of later philosophers and scientists also touched on this umbrageous idea of competition for survival, including Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. In the modern age Kant speculated that apes might well in time turn into men, Goethe wrote about "the metamorphosis of plants," and both Erasmus Darwin (Charles's grandfather) and Jean Baptiste de Lamarck propounded the theory (with little supporting evidence) that all species must have evolved from simpler and more primitive forms by "inheritance of the effects of use and disuse." Even the new science called geology prepared the way for the evolutionists by demonstrating in the nineteenth century for the first time, particularly through the research of Charles Lyell and the new study of fossils, that the earth is immensely older than anyone had dared imagine. In fact Lyell described our planet as steadily and irresistibly changing, not only through the slow wrinkling of its skin in the process of pushing up mountains but almost equally by the mountains' wearing down again under the relentless grinding action of rain and wind and ice and rushing streams. And a Swiss named Louis Agassiz made a dramatic contribution to geology when he suddenly realized that the earth is now in the very act of thawing itself out of an ice age which has been going on for tens of thousands of years and which, as new evidence turned up, was quickly revealed to be only the latest in a complex sequence of hot and cold ages going back for untold millions of years.
By the mid-nineteenth century, in consequence, the seed of evolution had unmistakably germinated in human thought, and it sprouted irrepressibly into the forefront of science news when Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published their papers on "evolution through natural selection" in 1858, bursting into full flower the following year as Darwin's closely reasoned Origin of Species hit the bookstores, and its meaning sundered the complacency of a world brought up on a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis and Bishop Usher's calculation of the date of creation as 4004 B.C. This is not to say that the theory of evolution denied God's creation of the world, for anyone who understood the symbolic meaning of the Scriptures could accept evolution as a logical elucidation of just how the Creator may have carried out His creation, of how He "let there be a firmament" of stars and galaxies that slowly arranged themselves on a majestic scale out of elements evolving from simple hydrogen into more and more complex atoms and molecules and dust, of how He eventually "let the earth bring forth grass ... and cattle ... and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind ..."
In retrospect evolution actually made some sense out of Job's omnigenous plaint: "I have said... to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister ... I am a brother to dragons and a companion to owls." Its sweep in effect defined the relation of every creature in the world to every other, then of every atom to every other and ultimately, by extrapolation, of every planet, star and galaxy to every other everywhere everywhen. It did so partly because it found all life and all things to be made literally of the same stuff and partly because relationships in general were turning out to be more real than things in a world that had seen itself for the first time as abstract in its essence. This may be a clue as to why physics is currently deemed evolving into a branch of geometry or why mathematicians so often have the last word in science. Certainly time as a geological and biological abstraction could hardly have been used effectively before evolution was accepted, nor could pre-evolutionist man have envisioned much sense of progress.
HOW LIFE BEGAN TO LIVE
But today the world is assuredly going somewhere and evolution is established - not only the evolution of elements, of worlds and galaxies and of life, but of all their qualities and abstractions. Indeed even the sticky question of how li
fe on Earth finally managed to manifest itself and really live, although still very mysterious, is probably not quite as mysterious as it seemed three centuries ago, when the great Flemish scientist Jan van Helmont wrote his famous recipe for creating mice: put a pile of soiled clothes in a dark, quiet corner, sprinkle them with kernels of wheat and within twenty-one days mice will appear. While the problem of "spontaneous generation" grew in complexity with the discovery of the teeming microcosm by van Leeuwenhoek and a couple of centuries later was thought to be settled (in the negative) by the sterility experiments of Pasteur, it is still alive today in the realization that somehow life must have got started upon what was supposedly originally a lifeless Earth. Yet HOW did it get started?
Could it have come from outside as early Greek philosophers and panspermists implied? Arrhenius, the Swedish chemist, and other modern scientists have thought so, pointing out that "astro plankton" in the form of dry spores and the hardiest strains of bacteria could be thrown into space by major meteoritic or cometary impacts and that probably at least a little of this viable material would drift dormantly from world to world along with the space dust well known to enter the earth's atmosphere in a constant shower, the larger grains of which may flare into visibility as meteors without necessarily losing their tiny cargoes of capsulated life within. At least one researcher (H. E. Hinton of Bristol University, England) seems to have proved that actual insects (specifically midge larvae), if completely dehydrated, can be popped into liquid helium and cooled to temperatures as cold as eight thousandths of a degree above absolute zero yet, when thawed (months or years later) and dropped into water, a percentage of them will come alive again, wriggling and feeding within minutes. If large numbers of such animals in a dry, frozen state should be hurled into space, perhaps in the breaking up of a planet (thought to be the origin of most meteorites), there seems a reasonable chance that at least a few of them might survive long enough to reach another planet. And this possibility is probably even greater in the case of vegetable organisms. In any case recent analyses of the rare carbonaceous chondrites, a class of small stony meteorites containing both carbon and water, showed a variety of organic compounds beneath their charred exteriors including amino and carbonyl groups as well as particles resembling fossil algae, some of the photomicrographs of which revealed what looked like the double membranes, vacuoles and spiny surfaces of living cells, sometimes as dense as 40 million per cubic inch. One researcher even reported finding what appeared to be the fossil of a cell undergoing a mitotic division, including chromosomes.
Still another possibility that seems to be growing in plausibility (as UFOs are becoming accepted as something more than imagination) is the starting of life on Earth by munificent beings from elsewhere in the universe. After all, we know the moon received life in 1969 from what may (to her) have been UFOs, yet which were certainly guided by beings sent from an outside world. So why couldn't some such beings in turn have voyaged to Earth in spaceships in the distant past, perhaps dedicating themselves to this particular cosmic purpose like Johnny Appleseeds of the Milky Way?
Of course whether or not life was transplanted to Earth from outside, the problem of its origin still remains, for we have no reason to suppose it is any easier to explain how it got started in another world than in our own. Indeed, for all we know, life may not ever actually start in any world but instead may just intermittently germinate and sprout and blossom out of hard-to-recognize "seeds" lying dormant in all matter.
In any event science's most serious efforts to account for the rise of life on Earth start with the fuming metallic deserts of lava and slag that formed her youthful face, which, one surmises, was by then being progressively punctuated by the deepening pools that bubbled and cooled and somehow learned to ferment and crystallize into fantastic complexities. Since scientists generally consider the cell the basic unit of life, they have focused major attention on what it must take to create a living cell. And what it takes, they find, is water (H2O) and salts (sodium, chlorine, etc.), with major portions of certain kinds of big, complex molecules made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen in various combinations with much smaller percentages of a few other elements, like phosphorus, sulfur, magnesium and potassium plus what are believed to be "vital" traces of iron, copper, zinc, chromium, manganese, iodine, calcium, molybdenum, selenium, vanadium, cobalt, cadmium and gallium. Although all these elements and a dozen more are found in living cells, it is hard to prove to what extent some of the latter ones may be essential to life or how much of life. Indeed the lack of general agreement on a definition of life leaves such a question fairly nebulous.
On the other hand the evident deadness of the primordial earth of four or five billion years ago is almost surely less attributable to the absence of any vital elements than to their inaccessibility. There was little free and breathable oxygen then in either the "air" or water, for deducibly it was all chemically bound up with hydrogen in H2O or in the solid crust of the planet. Most of the carbon was buried deep in the clenched ores of heavy metals like iron carbide. In fact all the chemical cards seemed hopelessly stacked against the creation of protein or of even the simplest amino acids that could build what we might call living tissue.
If the chance for "life" appeared impossibly remote, however, it was "impossible" only from a limited human viewpoint, for the factor of time, celestially speaking, was practically unlimited - and, as any probability engineer can tell you, time has the power to change the "impossible" into the "inevitable." It does it mathematically by adding rarities to rarities enough times (i.e., over a period of enough time) to make them abundances and eventually practical certainties.
Returning now to the raw and very patient Earth of 4 billion B.C., we find that dramatic improbabilities were brewing little by little over the eons in the outbursts of volcanoes with their sizzling lava and sulfurous clouds that clashed with the searing ultraviolet rays of the sun while multimillion-year-long deluges lashed chemicals out of the air and roaring cataracts and rivers scoured oxygen and salts from the rocks, washing unheard-of treasures into the sweetish, simmering seas, where they dissolved and effervesced and eventually fomented the very juice of life. One does not think of rocks as life-giving structures, but in eroding (one of their metabolic functions) they truly are and this may well be how granite, which is half oxygen, spawned much of the free oxygen that gave earthly creatures their first real breaths of air.
REPRODUCTION
At this stage in the advent of life we must face the nice little dilemma of which came first: reproduction or the organism? For it is about as hard to figure out how reproduction could have taken place without some sort of organism as to comprehend how any organism could maintain itself without some capacity for reproduction.
The surprising answer now appears to be that reproduction is not absolutely dependent on any organism nor perhaps even on any kind of life, although the latter conclusion obviously hinges on the breadth of your definition of life. A crystal, although not an accepted organism and not generally considered alive, nevertheless can reproduce itself naturally under favorable conditions by the simple, basic, automatic process of accretion. Think of such a crystal as sugar, salt, ice or a stone. Each of these grows by accepting aggressive molecules (from any surrounding fluid) which match its own and by letting them latch onto its solid body in the only way they will fit, which means by conforming precisely to its own characteristic lattice pattern. When pieces of this new crystal growth later break off from the "parent" body as grains of salt or sand, they may be regarded as offspring crystals "born" by division from their reproducing "mother" and, with such a heritage, they actually possess the positive identity of descendants of their particular "species" of crystal and no other.
So, in the ordinary sense of life as organism, reproduction can be presumed older than life, for it must have long served and preserved the rocks and sand crystals before the sea had time to mellow into readiness for what one might call God's green thu
mb and the unimagined appearance of genes and cells and relatively huge integrated organisms. The mellowing process naturally required a long and patient wait until the organisms became big enough so random, thermal agitation of molecules was no longer significant in their physiology. And later until distinct individuals evolved into mortal beings limited in space and time.
ELEMENTS OF LIFE
Also, although the detailed steps and multifarious chemical trials and failures that created life have been too complex for us to reason out with any fine precision of reliability, we can deduce at least that the methane (CH4) component in the primordial atmosphere, as it was blasted and diffused by lightning and cosmic rays for billions of years, must have progressively energized and freed enough hydrogen and carbon to form vast quantities of hydrocarbon molecules. And these are the extraordinary molecules of life that have an exuberant tendency to add on more and more carbons followed by hydrogens, growing into long chains, the chains in turn provoking the amalgamation and fabrication of elaborate, repetitive organic molecules of truly mystic potency.
Similar processes must have urged the primeval ammonia fumes and volcanic gases and water vapor to free nitrogen and oxygen atoms all around the young Earth to compound the barm of burgeoning life, breeding incredible strains of these germs and catalysts of a still undreamed future. And these matrix molecules inevitably grabbed and sorted whatever came their way with a new-found propensity for cohesion, a stickiness that turned flowing liquid into jellyish colloid whose scum would eventually solidify into lasting shapes that became the first elementary structures for living bodies, patterned into the minimal stability of form, with less than which life in a material world seems unable to maintain itself. At first these gel droplets in the ocean - some shaped like balls for easy flowing, some stretched into threads for tighter clinging - could only have been models for future protoplasm, no more alive than sea foam. But with the passing millenniums they undoubtedly developed the capacity to grow appendages or "buds" that could separate as offspring droplets and to harbor excess water in tiny bubbles like vacuoles inside a living cell. And, as ultrasensitive instruments have recently demonstrated, each of them must have been completely enclosed in a tenuous skin of water molecules, knit together by the faintest murmur of magnetism, a liquid mantle of surface tension through which dissolved materials could slip osmotically in and out without disrupting the integrity of the whole; the convex lens effect of the outer surface focusing sunlight (in those days very strong in ultraviolet rays) into enough concentrated heat to cook the contents into "life" - a life composed of metabolizing molecular clusters which biologists now call coazervates.
