No Intelligent Design Nor accident

It is an attempt at scenarios elaboration other than the one of considering life (specially humans) as an intelligent design by ’God’ or an accident of evolution. Let us start from only the known and sufficiently well established scientific knowledge of today.

There is a time scale discrepancy between the universe creation and the advent of cellular life as we know. It is not necessary that the same author or same chain of events were at the origin. The universe is 13.8 billion years old and the earliest signs of life on earth, micro-organism fossils in S. African mines, 300 thousand years after the earth’s birth i.e.4 billion years. Thus cosmic theory of universe creation and our objects of wonderment- ’ourselves’- are sufficiently distant and can’t be necessarily attributed to the same cause, events or entity.

Let us fast forward to future now. In about 600 million years, by natural evolution, not by intelligent and focussed research, the bacterial life has come to the point where we may be able to change a few organs of our body and live on. With barely a few decades of genetic research, eternal life has become a reasonable proposition . It may not be far fetched to imagine that one day in next billion years - a very conservative estimate, we can replace every part of ’ourselves’ including the mind and its capacity to analyze and rationalize by bio-mechanically regenerated organs, including the property of replication. We may not even need a body- a fragile hardware which deteriorates, keeps us in material bound and susceptible to make us disappear by accident. But just software- capacity to think- may be sufficient. It will be able to drive the things around without suffering any damage, ride on electromagnetic waves to distant stars light years away, replicate ourselves with local material. In other words, self replicating robots. If we develop the capacity to adapt to the changing circumstances and environment,... we have created life.

A crude estimate of the number of life sustaining planets is over a few hundred thousand in this universe. The first ones came into being some 9 billion years ago. On some of them life must have started, we don’t know today how. But like all science we’ll find it tomorrow- attribute to God if you like but then early humans also thought that lightening, wind, sun it is all pleasure or angry grunts of Gods. In these 9 billion years, all kinds of violent events, may have seen an event generating the basic amino acids to initiate the bio-chemistry. So one simple hypothesis can be that the life was transported by meteorites and seeded on planets like earth. It took off wherever and whenever it found appropriate conditions.

However there is another option. If such an event took place in the first few violent billion years of universe on some planets, life has had probably a head start of at least 5 billion years and most probably 8 billion years on us. It developed, flourished, and discovered the same laws of physics and bio genetics as we’re doing now...probably a little late in the game. Someone- probably a software only had decided to seed earth with self-replicating and self adopting hardware robots. Just as in our garden, without knowing the bio-mechanism, we can change, mutate, create new species by just playing with some empirically established formulae. Then are we simply robots, fabricated on purpose by someone? And imagine if this software is an evil thinking creature exiled from his planet? Is it the one asking us total obedience, unflinching loyalty through his messengers... The God?


So probably the wonderment is not on our design but on those unknown laws of physics. That ingrained rule in us, robots and takes the form of bio-mechanics. It makes us do everything for surviviing? No, not even. Just ensuring the continuity of our genes by evolving and adapting to changing environment. Then are our genes the God? When at certain times, we can’t adopt to the circumstances, the same law makes us develop death wish, suicide. Why the gene will decide to die. Also in such cases, the life replicates slightly different copies of itself, expecting some to be able to adopt and survive.

Isn’t it surprising that this craving for continuity is not limited to ’intelligent’ or even cellular life only. The virus, with no cells, just a few molecules, of which some simple forms we have even succeeded in creating in lab in recent years, also exhibit same ’desire’ of replication and adaptability to the circumstances. This year has seen the birth of ’bio reactor’, a prudent word for a bacterial cell, fabricated artificially with primary material collected from other cells. It exhibits the same properties of replication, adaptability to changing circumstances. But are we inventing life? NO, we already had multiple examples of life-cum-inert substance which jump from inert to life and back again according to the circumstances. In fact, the drive to mutate, even at the cost of their own death is greatest among those creatures who are trying to control their environment. The foremost may be homo-sapiens.

But then why a virus will try to ’survive’ when it is not living. It does not even have a cell. It changes form from one kind of flu, Aids, etc.to another. It will mutate to another kind just to survive our attempts to eradicate it. But it doesn’t even have a cell to think, decide... How does it do it? Has it been designed on purpose.. intelligently?

Are we seeing the birth pangs of probably a new set of physical laws which were always there but still known like the laws of conservation discovered a minuscule 400 years ago? The only thing common between a few simple molecules of a virus and us is probably... Carbon with its full electron orbits. And its extraordinary capability of looking for bonding and stable...’ life’. You may say it is a biological equivalent of Newton’s law of conservation of life.

As always one answer generates a host of questions?