Evolution shows the grandeur of life

This morning I finished Richard Dawkins "The Greatest Show on Earth," a fascinating book that demonstrates why evolution is almost certainly true and intelligent design /creationism is almost certainly false. (In science, there are no 100% certainties.)

I've been reading a few pages every day before I meditate. Now, I find more inspiration in science books than in spiritual books. Reality is uplifting.

Dawkins' final chapter was especially enjoyable. He goes through the last paragraph of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" (first edition) line by line.

Thus, from the point of view of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone on cycling according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Yes, there's a beauty to natural selection.

Which isn't something far or distant, but as near to us as our current experience. Dawkins says there are four "memories" that provide information on how to handle the present so as to survive into the future.

One is our DNA repository. This shows how our ancestors dealt with ancestral environments.

Another is our immune system. It is a database of past diseases and how to survive them (this is how immunizations work, by tricking the immune system into "thinking" that it has suffered a disease, thereby producing the proper antibodies).

Third is the memory that resides in our nervous system. At its simplest, Dawkins says, this works on a trial and error basis.

The nervous system has a rule that says, 'Any trial action that is followed by reward should be repeated. Any trial action that is followed by nothing, or worse, followed by punishment, for example pain, should not be repeated.'

This is how we evolve during the single life we're living here on Earth: by living and learning. I performed a lot of religious'y actions when I was an active member of an India-based spiritual organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

I experienced certain results from those actions: meditating, vegetarianism, giving up alcohol and drugs, providing service to the guru, and such. 

I've shared what I learned on this blog and in books that I've written. All that has become part of a fourth memory, culture.

The database in my brain contains more than just a record of the happenings and sensations of my personal life -- although that was the limit when brains originally evolved. Your brain includes collective memories inherited non-genetically from past generations, handed down by word of mouth, or in books, or, nowadays, on the internet. The world in which you and I live is richer by far because of those who went before us and inscribed their impacts on the database of human culture.

We're all connected. Not only with other humans, but with animals, plants, insects, bacteria, everything alive.

For me, this is the grandest grandeur of evolution: realizing, as Dawkins writes, that "today we are pretty certain that all living creatures on this planet are descended from a single ancestor."

Why? Because the genetic code is universal, "all but identical across animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, archaea and viruses." So when Darwin said into a few forms or into one, science now knows that one is most likely.

Meaning, there hasn't been two or more independent origins of life. Just one. But we don't know how that living entity arose.

Dawkins reviews various non-theological theories concerning the origin of life. He ends up arguing that given the seeming rareness of life in our corner of the universe (no alien beings have made an appearance so far), the probability of life arising on a planet is vanishingly small.

The theory that we seek, of the origin of life on this planet, should therefore positively not be a plausible theory! If it were, life should be common in the galaxy. Maybe it is common, in which case a plausible theory is what we want. But we have no evidence that life exists outside this planet, and at very least we are entitled to be satisfied with an implausible theory.

Nice.

I like this reasoning. It can be applied to other Big Questions also. How did the universe come into being? What is the essence of consciousness? From where did the laws of nature arise?

We look for explanations that are plausible to our human cognition. Yet when we venture into the deepest mysteries, is it plausible to expect that their secrets will seem plausible?

I'm probably going beyond what Dawkins meant. But that's OK. Meanings evolve. I just found the notion that our notions can't encompass ultimate truths of the cosmos to be strangely comforting.

For most of my life I've had a strong desire to know what lies at the heart of reality. Science is one way of trying to fulfill this desire. Mysticism and meditation are other ways.

Now I question, as Dawkins implied in the quotation above, whether ultimate questions ever can be answered. Increasingly it seems OK to me that they can't be.

Regardless, evolution is something that we can understand, albeit imperfectly (as is the case with all of our understandings).

The Darwinian world-view does not denigrate the higher human faculties, does not 'reduce' them to a plane of indignity. It doesn't even claim to explain them at the sort of level that will seem particularly satisfying, in the way that, say, the Darwinian explanation of a snake-mimicking caterpillar is satisfying.

It does, however, claim to have wiped out the impenetrable -- not even worth trying to penetrate -- mystery that must have dogged all pre-Darwinian efforts to understand life.

...When you think about it, our own existence, together with its post-Darwinian explicability, is a candidate for the most astonishing fact that any of us are called upon to contemplate.

Comments

[tAo]

MADAME TUTLI-PUTLI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcdzdHoDvkg

[Ta Wan]

Does he ever escape these ideas though of "building blocks" and "building up" and "developing from simple to complex"?

After all the most "simple" life contains very very complex DNA - did the slime make DNA?

This seems to be the battle of religion and science: both using the same model of mechanistic processes -of simple to complex- and then battling for who has the right explanation. Are we to be in awe of science or of God? - neither for me.

My idea is not one that takes this form and it is why I am dissatisfied by religion and with the science of Dawkins. I instead have a view beyond the bounds of matter, space and time. All of these are after effects and the answer (which I agree fully is not ultimately knowable) is out of the bounds of Dawkins, any scientist or any Religion.

Having said that, I'm not so sure it leaves me in a useful position but I am sure that Dawkins is just another substitute religion for the incomplete atheist.

When those truly pushing the boundaries of science (the physicists and quantum theorists) have proved there is no solidity to anything, no time and so on, then Dawkins is using this old evolution idea simply to hoover dollars from the pockets of people dissatisfied with religion but still in need of a belief.

The only safe place to be is still exploring. Which you mr blogger are, but I'm perhaps writing to your audience.

[kukuman]

quite right Ta Wan, supplanting one dogma for another is no enlightened position at all. Just more chains that the incomplete capacity of this mind shackles itself by.

Dawkins painted himself into a corner, same way as Einstein, Darwin or any other rationalist materialist so called scientist does.

And these churchless sharlatans, can't see wood for trees let alone any reality whatsoever.

[tarun]

i believe in one thing that there is god and this world and universe was created by him and how much ever we humans try to find answers to questions of reality and how things happen the fact remains and will always remain that this world was created by the almighty god.

[George]

Atheism is not a religion, neither is science a religion.

Religion attempts to provide meaning and moral guidance, science does not.

Religion is based on belief, atheism on disbelief.

Religion is based on faith, science on evidence.

The only way religion, mysticism and science can be compared is on a philosophical level, as different philsophical methods for gaining knowlege (insights) of reality (the universe). Science is the only method whose knowledge can be validated objectively.

Science offers models of reality that constantly refined and unparalleled in their accuracy. The mystic may be right, but his method is not objectively verifiable, only subjectively.

However, no mystic that has ever lived has offered explanations of any aspect of reality remotely as accurate as science, ever.

[George]

Jesus Christ, Mohammed, The Buddha, Lao Tze Tung, Meister Eckhart, Kabir, The Dalai Lama - none of them have provided an accurate description of any aspect of reality.

Instead they've offered general vague metaphorical revelations of their enlightenment experiences and a moral way of living.

None of them explained the theory of evolution or genetics. In fact, none of them even explained with any sort of satisfaction, consistency or detail why there is evil in the world? they are all constantly arguing over the Truth.

[kukuman]

what is atheism if not a belief system, what is this bullsh't cult of churchlessness if not a religion, what is any rational standpoint of belief, because that is all you have with you, belief, in those principles you hold dear to, same as Einstein or Dawkins, or Darwin, all of you creating religions for yourselves.

What can you possibly deduce about anyones personal experience from your closed encrusted state of dead debilitated thinking, you have no means, nor apparatus to measure mystic revelation, you have no capacity with your dead end scientific models to understand life beyond your pitiful walls of crystallized closed off isolated reason.

the bottom line of it all is in fact that these crystaline dead beat thinkers are in fact cowards, they have not the capacity nor the courage nor the will to truly enter the realms where true scientists venture. These dead beat self aggrandized coward so called scientists have closed themselves to the death knell of dead end reason, they have neither the humility nor the courage to grasp the truth from where it eminates, so they stand out there in the perifery of their encrusted thought processes, not knowing anything whatsoever and classifying that which they have no idea about nor means of any deduction to be such or such.

What is religion? do you really know?

What is mysticism, you have not an iota of a clue, yet you dictate through the incapacitated conviction of your closed off mind that which you have not even a meagre minute grasp of. What possible determination can you possibly make, you the blind bat ignoramus, castigating one who sees with clear perception as blind.

It is the likes of you closed rationalist encrusted dogmatists that will crucify truth, time and time and time again, because your very rationality is so emphatically blind by your own encrusted inflated egotism, there is no hope in hell for you to see or recognize your own pitiful blindness or where to locate sight.

What I can tell you simply is this, if you are sincere in your quest for truth or reality, you will seek it where you can find it, and I can guarantee you without a shadow of a doubt that you are barking up the wrong tree if you are following after the likes of Darwin, or Dawkins, or the Brian Hines of the world.

If at all you are indeed truly in search of yourself and who you are and what reality or truth or light or understanding IS, then you will venture into the realm where it can be attained, most definitely not here, nor in the ravaged ramifications of your rationally deducing incapacitated mind, or in the test tubes of the materialist house of cards. If at all you have the courage and the conviction to truly test where life and truth and reality resides, you will enter into that real laboratory and partake of the experiment. And only then perhaps will your mind learn to shut the hell up, and become still, and Know That I am God.

[comment from Blogger Brian: wow, kukuman, this rant and the others you've shared isn't a good example of a mind shutting up. Yours is chattering full speed ahead. So obviously you don't know that You Are God. What gives you the right to preach to other people, when you aren't following your own advice?]

[George]

The Lion does not sit down with the lamb, he kills the lamb, and the lamb suffers as a result of getting his throat ripped out and/or his body feastered upon. The lion kills the lamb because he needs to eat otherwise he will die and suffer too. Either way someone suffers.

That is the way of nature. Man's mind has nothing to do with that.

The Lion does not having a thinking mind, he has a still mind, perhaps none at all other than instinct, certainly the lion does not do calculus or fret existentially over the meaning of it all.

Yet the lion identifies or percieves the world around him, just as we do. The lion perceives something different from himself, i.e. the lamb, and proceeds to kill it. the lion does not percieve oneness and sit down with the connected lamb.

[George]

ah the old fundamentalist frothing at the pulpit with shock and awe rhetoric when others dispute his Truth.

Its something i've never really understood about just how basic and archaic the religious mind really is, its hardly surprising the east was so backward.

Its the same with these zen masters who treat their students with ill-tempered brutal shock tactics to supposedly shock them out of their encrusted conditioning.

Can anything be more encrusted and patriachal than the idea of a student whose will must be bent to the master's? this is what is known as an old fart.

So much for enlightement, think for yourself, that is what your mind is for.

[George]

When the Dalai lama gets sick, where does he go? A hospital based on western medical science.

When the RS satguru or his kids get sick, where do they go to? yip, hospital.

These Masters who know Truth, who know all, all off to the hospital faster than you can say 'ohm' when sick. Its the poor indoctrinated fools who coat their kids in oil or pray to the god of bora-bora that dont and cant.

Now I am not saying the hospital can necessarily help them, but why would these all-knowings GIHFs go to hospital at all?

[Blogger Brian]

kukuman, I left your rants up as an example of how religious true believers can use lots of words to say nothing at all. Your comments had absolutely no substance. What the heck are you trying to say?

Dawkins, Einstein and other scientists have presented us with truths about the physical universe, which religions tell us is God's creation. I doubt that it is...God's creation. But if it is, then learning about what God has created is an act of worship -- an insight into the consciousness of the creator, just as art is an insight into the consciousness of an artist.

Yet you and other fundamentalists prefer to worship words, holy books written by fallible humans rather than the "holy book" of the universe, Nature. You have eyes, but you don't see the glory of the cosmos that is all around you, and indeed is you.

Science opens our vision to these glories. It shows us how reality really is, not how we believe it to be. Yes, there is more to know beyond the horizons of current scientific understanding. No scientist denies that.

But you and other worshippers at the idol of religious dogma want us to keep our mind's eye pointed downward at what supposedly holy books and holy people tell us is true, not what we can experience for ourselves as truth -- which is the much wider view that science (and an open mind) offers humanity.

[elizabeth w]

Brian, re last paragraph in your post (Dawkins).
The older I become the more astonishing do I find existence itself. More and more awe and wonder. Here I am and millions of others made of such perishable materials - soft organs working harmoniously; pints of red liquid cruising around; a mushy governing director (the brain); yet feeling so solid, substantial and everlasting.
All overshadowed by the knowledge that some day I will crumble away; the "I" will cease to exist; the learning acquired with such intensity will vanish. The only temporary consolation is distraction.

So with the awe is the unresolvable sorrow.
Elizabeth W

[1%]

Here are some wonderful nuggets of inspiring love, wisdom, and exalted santliness that were gleaned from those beautiful comments of Kukuman/Ashy:

"And these churchless sharlatans, can't see wood for trees let alone any reality whatsoever."

Posted by: kukuman | December 13, 2009 at 03:30 AM

"what is this bullsh't cult of churchlessness if not a religion"

"your closed encrusted state of dead debilitated thinking"

"your dead end scientific models"

"your pitiful walls of crystallized closed off isolated reason."

"these crystaline dead beat thinkers are in fact cowards"

"they have not the capacity nor the courage nor the will"

"These dead beat self aggrandized coward so called scientists"

"they have neither the humility nor the courage"

"you the blind bat ignoramus"

"you closed rationalist encrusted dogmatists"

"your own encrusted inflated egotism"

"there is no hope in hell for you to see or recognize your own pitiful blindness"

"you are barking up the wrong tree if you are following after the likes of Darwin, or Dawkins, or the Brian Hines"

"the ravaged ramifications of your rationally deducing incapacitated mind"

"perhaps will your mind learn to shut the hell up"

Posted by: kukuman | December 13, 2009 at 05:44 AM

[tucson]

Yes, coo-coo man (Ashy) really sets a fine example of what Sant Mat can do for you.

The great sants Sawan, Charan and Gurinder would be pleased indeed with such a fine representation of their teachings.

Carry on with the great tradition, Ashy.

And 1% thanks for revealing Ashy's greatness. His contributions should not go unheralded.

[Blogger Brian]

Elizabeth, I resonate with how you feel. If we enjoy life and appreciate how marvelous existing within existence is, sorrow is indeed going to accompany our joys -- since all this will come to an end one day.

And yet...knowledge of The End makes turning the pages of our book of life a heck of a lot more interesting. If we knew that the story never ended, we'd be pretty blase about the twists and turns of any current plot.