Archive Post "Cosmic Ancestry" Oct 2008

Archive Post "Cosmic Ancestry" Oct 2008

Blog Entry    Cosmic Ancestry....is God a Virus?       

Oct 1, 2008 4:31 PM

In the context of the debate between evolutionary theory and intelligent design in the American education system and the impact of that debate here in the UK (and elsewhere) I want to raise some doubts here about the adequacy of both of those perspectives, in the light of developing theories about the origins of all existence.

Essentially the debate between the 'creationists' and the 'scientists' is about the origins of life on earth, but the thesis I want to briefly propose here is that those debates are parochial disputes that have resulted in an intellectual dead end.

At this time in the history of human society there is an enormous upheaval, a revolution is taking place politically, economically, sociologically and ideologically all the cards are all spinning in the air.

Alongside this temporal maelstrom there are seismic spiritual shifts taking place and impacting upon on all of the major world religions and belief systems.

From the rise of fundamentalism to the stalled experiment at CERN, there is a reaction to and a questioning of the nature of reality that has resulted in conflict between radical science and conservative religion at the end of the modernist epoch.

This dispute can be seen in all areas of cultural life and is played out in the uncertainty and loss of confidence in the global economy during this, the tertiary stage of capitalism and the collapse of those beliefs that have sustained it for the past 500 years.

In Max Weber's important work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) he suggests the origins of our current socio-economic and spiritual crisis in the west. 

Weber wrote that capitalism evolved when the Protestant (particularly Calvinist) ethic influenced large numbers of people to engage in work in the secular world, developing their own enterprises and engaging in trade and the accumulation of wealth for investment. In other words, the Protestant ethic was a force behind an unplanned and uncoordinated mass action that led to the development of capitalism. 

This idea is also known as "the Weber thesis".

Ref:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism

The 'Weber Thesis' sets out to demonstrate the connection between the dominant Anglo-Saxon spiritual ideology (Protestantism) and the revolutionary social and economic relationships (capitalism) that evolved out of it.

In a similar if much less ambitious vein, I want to suggest here that theoretical innovations in the contemporary sciences are beginning to reshape the zeitgeist of the Post-Capitalist Age and influence the shape of the future.

 

The Key to Complexity

Perhaps the greatest conundrum for evolutionary theory is the emergence of complexity.

How did life first emerge from the primordial soup and end up in the information age we inhabit today?

This has been an unanswered question that creationists have been able to pose and which natural selection Darwinists have struggled to answer in the absence of an organising principle like that of 'intelligent design'.

As Brig Klyce has recently noted in an article posted on the panspermia website

"Science can tolerate being unsure about some things. But science cannot entertain the notion that there are phenomena in the everyday natural world that require supernatural intervention. That requirement would emasculate science. Yet that requirement is precisely what creationists, by definition, want to establish. Darwinism responds to this challenge with scientific excommunication — "It's not science." This reaction often causes Darwinists to dismiss too hastily the valid scientific points creationists raise against aspects of Darwinism. In this way Darwinism behaves much like a religion with its own cherished, unquestionable beliefs. And so, for explaining evolution and the origin of life on Earth, a holy war is being waged."

Ref: http://www.panspermia.com/mechansm.htm

Over the past half century, since the discovery of DNA the biological explanation for diversity is that small errors occur when genomes are copied and passed down the generations. Small mutations accumulate into big evolutionary leaps over time and they are say the biologists, the reason for diversity in nature. The creationists have cast doubt upon the serendipity of such mutations and posit God as the guiding hand in the emergence of the diverse life forms that inhabit our universe today.

The 'invisible hand' of the market is an equivalent notion in classical liberal economics since Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the bible of Enlightenment free market philosophy... now perhaps on it's last legs as global capitalism goes into a flat spin.

During the past decade or so, new theories about the agent of these mutations have emerged however that seem to dispense with both God and serendipity as the first cause of biological diversity. Those evolutionary shape shifting entities are in fact viruses.

Back in 1995 Don Chamberlain at the Woodrow Wilson School of Bioloigcal Science at Princeton University was asking questions like:-

What are viruses?.......Answer:- Viruses are submicroscopic, intracellular parasites.

 

Are viruses alive?

The debate continues around those questions. According to Aristotle, an object that has life if it "has a plan" for survival. All viruses contain either DNA or RNA. The molecules could constitute such a "plan." Thus, Aristotelian philosophy suggests that viruses do live.

Now when we invoke a 'plan' we seem to be moving toward intelligent design and seemingly away from Darwinian notions of the survival of the fittest and a natural selection dependent upon random factors determining evolutionary fitness.

Viruses are especially instructive here because they evolve very rapidly between 20 and 30 times a day and therefore can tell us much about the relationship between the virus and the host cell.

Viruses of course have a very bad press and rightly so, viral infections have killed more human beings (not to mention other life forms) than all of the wars and famines throughout history put together. But are viruses simply killers or do they have more important functions in the evolution of life?

Research into the human genome is now changing our view of viruses and their role in evolution in radical ways. For a start they are the most numerous life forms on earth and they are everywhere as Garry Hamilton writing in New Scientist (August 2008 pp38-41) points out 'they are found in hot springs, deserts, polar lakes and in rocks 2000 meters below the ground'. Hamilton goes on to indicate that a millimetre of water from the Barents Sea turned out to contain 60,000 virus particles, in a similar sized sample from Lake Plussee in Germany...... the count was 254 million.

Prof. Luis P. Villarreal is a leading theorist in the role of viruses in the evolutionary process. He is Professor, Molecular Biology & Biochemistry, School of Biological Sciences, Director, Center for Virus Research, Director, Viral Vector Facility, and Director, Minority Science Program School of Biological Sciences, all at University of California, Irvine.

For about 100 years, the scientific community has repeatedly changed its collective mind over what viruses are. First seen as poisons, then as life-forms, then biological chemicals, viruses today are thought of as being in a grey area between living and nonliving: they cannot replicate on their own but can do so in truly living cells and can also affect the behaviour of their hosts profoundly. The categorization of viruses as nonliving during much of the modern era of biological science has had an unintended consequence: it has led most researchers to ignore viruses in the study of evolution, but not Villarreal and his collaborators whose work now proposes viruses as fundamental players in the history of life.

In this way viruses have been elevated above the mere vectors for disease and death and promoted to a primary evolutionary role and are now seen as agents of change in a symbiotic relationship with their hosts.

If this line of enquiry is correct viruses are the missing link in the evolution of diversity of life on earth, but some theorists go further than that and suggest that viruses arrived here from outer space and are ubiquitous vectors of change that have resulted in such complex structures as the human brain. At this point we encounter an interface between cosmology and virology and the development of a new way of describing the relationship between human beings and the universe in which we live, a perspective called 'Cosmic Ancestry'.

Cosmic Ancestry is a new theory pertaining to evolution and the origin of life on Earth. It holds that life on Earth was seeded from space, and that life's evolution to higher forms depends on genetic programs that come from space. This theory has a very respectable scientific pedigree which begins in ancient Greece and it represents a separate evolutionary line to that of Darwinian theory.

"The first point, which deals with the origin of life on Earth, is known as panspermia — literally, "seeds everywhere." Its earliest recorded advocate was the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, who influenced Socrates.

However, Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation came to be preferred by science for more than two thousand years. Then on April 9, 1864, French chemist Louis Pasteur announced his great experiment disproving spontaneous generation as it was then held to occur. In the 1870s, British physicist Lord Kelvin and German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz reinforced Pasteur and argued that life could come from space. And in the first decade of the 1900s, Swedish chemist and Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius theorized that bacterial spores propelled through space by light pressure were the seeds of life on Earth."

Brig Klyce http://www.panspermia.com/intro.htm

The case for Cosmic Ancestry is not yet proven, of course says Klyce. At this point the best reason to notice it is that sustained evolutionary progress and the origin of life on Earth are not satisfactorily accounted for by Darwinism. We will mention some of the flaws in the Darwinian account, but our primary purpose is to present Cosmic Ancestry as a viable, new scientific account of evolutionary progress and the origin of life on Earth.

Panspermia, the most controversial hypothesis about the origins of life on Earth is gaining support.

The theory that we are all descendants of an alien life form that 'seeded' our planet billions of years ago becomes stronger with time, also because we realize that much of what we considered 'scientifically impossible' can instead happen.

The notion of Cosmic Ancestry and role of viruses as the creative forces responsible for the leaps in the complexity of life itself is potentially ground-breaking and epoch shattering discovery.

In the above cited New Scientist article Garry Hamilton (2008:41) says:-

"All in all, biologists are confronting what may be the biggest advance in evolutionary thinking since the discovery of the gene. Our emerging knowledge of viruses challenges many tenets of evolution, not least that it is driven by competition between selfish genes.

Viruses provide a strong argument for the idea that evolution is also driven by fitness boosts gained through give and take."

This changing view of the origins and evolution of life based not upon competition, but on reciprocity between the virus and the host cell may not bring comfort to orthodox evolutionists, but it is potentially devastating to the creationists and their theory of supernatural intelligent design.

Just as former innovations in Christianity in the form of Protestantism according to Weber became the spirit of capitalism, so the universal holism of Cosmic Ancestry theories has the potential to reshape the spiritual underpinnings of a post capitalist age.

An age where competitive concepts of 'human nature' as endorsed by both Darwinism and capitalism are replaced by a symbiotic 'give and take' conception of life, in which the role of the 'creator' is replaced by the interaction between the virus and the host cell in a creative process has resulted in the fantastic diversity of existence.

If the creationist arguments seek to give God the credit for viral mutations like human beings, then God will have to take responsibility for the pathogens that have cut a swathe through human and non-human populations of his alleged creations from time immemorial.

This must change our conception of creation from being an essentially benign and sacred happenstance to a random chance dynamic with an absolute moral neutrality, neither 'good' nor 'bad'. It also changes our perception of the cosmos which now becomes a living entity swarming with actual and potential lifeforms, in which viruses are the active agents of creation across the entire universe.

As a matter of fact it seems to suggest a form of Gaia theory as explicated by English chemist and inventor James Lovelock during the 1960s and 70s.

The Gaia theory is an ecological hypothesis proposing that the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth (atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere) are coupled to form a complex interacting system. This coordinated system of living organisms according to Lovelock maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

Commenting on Cosmic Ancestry theory Brig Klyce  points out:-

“This account of evolution and the origin of life on Earth is profoundly different from the prevailing scientific paradigm. The new theory challenges not merely the answers but the questions that are popular today. Cosmic Ancestry implies, we find, that life can only descend from ancestors at least as highly evolved as itself. And it means, we believe, that there can be no origin of life from nonliving matter in the past. Without supernatural intervention, therefore, we conclude that life must have always existed.”

 Epilogue

We are I think on the verge of a global cultural revolution, Cosmic Ancestry contradicts and confounds the Big Bang Theory and that is why it is essential that the experiment currently under way at CERN restarts as soon as the fault that halted it is rectified, hopefully early in the new year.

Whichever way it goes however, the virus theory of evolution continues to go from strength to strength and threatens to leave both creationists and Darwinists locked into an increasingly sterile debate that is hopelessly out of touch with the new realities of the 21st century.