In this update I would like to take things in a slightly different direction. I promise this is purely experimental. If I go to my grave only writing irreverent send-ups of pop culture, I will die a man fulfilled. That being said, I do have other interests, and one of those interests is the philosophy of the natural world. The verdant beauty of a natural canvas pregnant with potentiality, and the science that mankind paints upon it. I mean, hey, who doesn’t love Bill Nye the Science Man, or putting Mentos in God Damn Liters of Colas? I reckon those who don’t are a pitiful sort. But I am not concerned with them here. I am only concerned with you curious few who are willing to read on. One of the most fascinating things about life is the dynamism of its players, which includes you. This might be a strange, bumpy ride, one which will take many (non-consecutive) weeks. But don’t busy your pretty little head about scheduling. Instead, settle in with me as we gaze out over the grand stage upon which life plays out, the living world surrounding us in its vigor and resplendence. The patterns and intricacies of life offer a nigh-unlimited supply of mystery to stoke our sense of wonder. Why are we here? Why are we alive? What is life? Even though these kinds of questions seem done-to-death, they still overwhelm and excite, and their myriad potential answers are as diverse as the living world from which they are drawn. In science and religion, spirituality and artistic vision, we find snippets and pieces that we put together to constitute what amounts to our individual, subjective answer. What I propose to do is add one more narrative, one that travels on a slightly different path than what might be familiar. I won’t purport that what I speak about here is true or false, or even coherent in a metaphysical sense. Rather, in the act of creating it, by committing these words to digital paper, I hope to inspire you to reconsider some of the bits and pieces you have assembled in your own description and understanding of the world. Well, so much for introductions…and we’re off!
What is Life?
Considering what modern science tells us, all life as we know it is essentially the energetic combining and recombining of genetic material. We are fortunate to live in an age where the explanation of what genetic material is plays out as a technical, analytical exercise. Even a routine examination of a grade school biology textbook would tell us all we need to know about the basics of nucleic acids, genetic reproduction, and genetic manipulation. For my purposes, as much as I love science things, it is more interesting to analyze what genetic material really is with respect to our experience of the world. Far from the lifeless, inorganic material that is presented in a textbook, genetic material, or the vital impulse, is the quintessence of living nature.
But what do I mean by vital impulse? The vital impulse, expressed in its grandest form is the elan vitale 1, or the vital wave. All of our history and every human achievement has ridden on the back of this vital wave. Though partly metaphorical, this abstract notion is easier to see acting in reality when you consider the very basic function of genes. Genes exist to make more genes. Not just more exact copies, but also increasingly complicated series of genes. The chemistry behind this can be incredibly complex, and though no one knows exactly how Life began, there is strong evidence that self-organizing genetic material formed spontaneously in a soup of organic and semi-organic molecules. This is not unprecedented; the inorganic universe spontaneously undergoes sudden, drastic change all the time. Directed by the laws of thermodynamics and chemistry, stars are born and die, canyons form, weather patterns emerge and dissipate overhead, and in general there is a great deal of movement and activity in the world that is entirely undirected 2. So too, it seems that the beginnings of life are to be found in the spontaneous interplay of matter, energy, and entropy. Whether it was a bolt of lightning, the intense heat of meteor impacts, volcanic eruptions, or something unknown, we know that the building blocks of life came into being very early and with relatively little prompting. Even laboratory conditions can initiate the reactions that form organic molecules from the ingredients provided in Earth’s ancient atmosphere and ocean, and spectral analysis of other worlds indicate that we are hardly the only harbor for organic chemicals. In any case, these organic molecules then combined in a process unknown to us to form the protogerm, the first twinkling of life on Earth. No one knows what constituted this entity. It seems reasonable to guess that at first it was a simple ring of RNA – pure genetic material. Strictly speaking, it doesn’t really matter exactly what form the first gasp of life took, more that we presuppose that there was at some point a first thing that resembled and became life.
It is prudent to accept the notion of an RNA ring, because this is consistent with our understanding of life as a whole. Working backward, it is straightforward to find a common unifying trait in all living things. Even the biology textbook above would remind us that we all share the same code, the same fundamental series of letters in our genetic material. What is this, if not evidence for the first living thing? If there were many living prototypes spontaneously generating on the planet, why should they have used the same nucleic acids as letters? There could have been other prototypical impulses to life – but the one which constitutes all of us was either triumphant in its competition with others, or else it was entirely unopposed.
This ring was capable of, with no real directedness or intentionality, of attracting little bits of floating nucleic acids, and attaching them to itself. This was a passive, chemical process directed by variable charges upon the molecule. To the observer, though, it would already appear to mimic life through it’s consumption. The ring would eventually complete a continuity of pieces, stabilize the charge differential, and either form a new detached ring, or otherwise add to the ring. Here growth and reproduction, two critical components to living, appear. In case you are curious if there is any factual bases for RNA rings that exhibit what can be loosely coined “behavior”, these RNA rings still exist in the world today. We learned of this possibility by studying their actions and applying that knowledge a posteriori. This pattern, weak and undirected at first, grew in intensity as more beings came to be, and more complexity was spontaneously driven into the system. The process of competition was introduced into the first life-system, as different rings reproduced at different rates, based on their fitness and suitability to their environment. This resulted in a rising tide, the first sputter of the elan vitale. A great driving force had been created, with competition and strife as its mechanism of action.
Jump forward a couple million years and in its simplest form, the living thing is a self-motivating functional machine known as the cell. The cell is the smallest living entity, in the sense that we can exclude even smaller entities such as the virus or prion, since they do not display cellular versatility. This versatility is a difficult concept to explain in scientific detail, but for the purpose of developing a comprehensive notion of life, we can take this versatility to indicate the capacity for self-support and self-generation. Any smaller than the cell, and though an entity may display life-like impulses, it cannot truly support itself. Viruses, for instance, require cellular machinery to reproduce. Without the cell, they are incapable of continued existence. One can think of the virus as perhaps a rogue bit of the machinery of life. Capable of existing as such, but only cut off from the other processes of living beings by distance. It is with cells that I will pick up again next time.