To readers who cling to religious beliefs and ancient scriptures to keep themselves sane and inoculated against despair, I caution — please avoid this essay, if anyone can; if faith is fragile and belief not deeply rooted, why not watch a YouTube video or play a computer game?
What sense is there in exploring ways of thinking (and being) that might push the personality to unravel; that might introduce dissonance into the deepest recesses of the mind; that might, for example, induce lunatics — like suicidal lemmings — to throw themselves off cliffs of certainty into the swarming froth of oceans that want only to swallow them whole, to drown them in unfamiliar worlds of sea monsters and dark, incomprehensible dangers; to flood their lungs with the knowledge that every true thing they’ve ever learned is a lie?
Some of the smartest folks who have ever lived believe that we cannot die. No one dies; everyone lives — forever.
Some of these people would say that every person reading this essay right now is living in an afterlife; it’s an afterlife that began a very long time ago and will continue, in one form or another, forever.
OK. I warned you. Let’s get on with it.
First, some caveats. Paragraphs of caveats. The evidence seems overwhelming: all scripture in all religions was written long ago by savants who lacked — by today’s standards — education.
Scripture writers knew almost nothing about almost everything, except for those experiences unique to their personal histories, which they sometimes wrote about. Old texts written by ignorant (but smart) men are the parchment scrolls that religions always use as the foundational pillars of their creeds, doctrines, and world views.
It turns out that almost all religions promote the belief in an afterlife; the problem is that their ideas about afterlife make no sense; they don’t stand up under the scrutiny of a dispassionate examination by scholars using the methodology of science.
The Jesus of Christianity said He was God — imagine that. He was born to save the world, not judge it (as so many haters hoped he would), and to demonstrate to all the earth the sacred truth of the Bible, which says plainly that God is love.
The problem is, Jesus didn’t write anything down. A few of his male friends quoted what he said in short tracts they wrote, which were gathered together decades later into a collection that is now referred to as the Four Gospels of the New Testament.
We have to take their word. They were ordinary people; working people. They lacked credentials. Their little books, from a scholar’s perspective, are primitive and clumsily written. Their stylistic errors give their writing authenticity to a modern eye, but their understanding of theology seems confused, child-like, and kind of messy.
The value of the Gospels comes from the effort of the authors to quote from memory the amazing things Jesus said. Given the ignorance of the writers, their quotations have a miraculous lucidity, which adds weight to what they left to history.
The person who saved the New Testament for the scholar’s ear is the apostle Paul, a contemporary of Jesus whose letters make up the largest part of the volume of the New Testament; they delivered the credibility demanded by the cynical eyes of intellectuals and sceptics of all eras.
Paul was a bonafide biblical scholar — he trained under Gamaliel — and was arguably the greatest theologian who ever lived. He met Christ only once — on the road to Damascus. It was a few years after the resurrection. Paul was — along with many others at the time — on a mission from Rome to identify Christians; to arrest and turn them over to authorities for execution.
Paul’s encounter with Jesus left him blind. When his eyesight returned, he spent several years preparing. He then turned his learning and skills to the spread and growth of the new religion, which at the time was called THE WAY. Under Paul’s guidance, Christianity became a spectacular success during his lifetime. Today it is the world’s largest religion.
Since for me, Jesus is God, I don’t take any other religions seriously, though the non-Christian scriptures I’ve read are interesting — much of the writing is admittedly intelligent and enlightened.
Paul wrote many of the foundational documents of the new religion — considered by scholars today to be the most sophisticated Scriptural literature ever written. According to Paul (and other writers), what was unique about Jesus was that he claimed to have a personal knowledge of the afterlife, which he backed up by demonstrating an ability to heal people of intractable ailments and by bringing folks presumed to be dead back to life. The afterlife was real, at least for Him.
What is also puzzling — Jesus’s friends and family didn’t seem to grasp fully what He was talking about, most of the time. His closest friends (the Bible calls them disciples) followed their shepherd around like a flock of sheep, by most accounts, because feats of magic mesmerized them. His explanations were incomprehensible — right through to his crucifixion and resurrection.
Even after His resurrection, friends remained mystified. During meetings they expressed a joyful disbelief. After all, no one could survive crucifixion. Once the process started, it was a one way journey into Hell.
Survival was something that didn’t happen. Jesus’s friends couldn’t understand. Modern folks can’t help but garble what they think they know about what His friends thought they heard and saw.
If those closest to Jesus couldn’t grasp His Truth, why should modern people expect to do any better? Isn’t it a bit unrealistic to expect a modern person to have more insight than Jesus’s closest confidantes — his family and friends — who lived with him for many years and knew Him best?
Anyway, this essay is about the afterlife; it’s about what some discerning people think about it, how it might work, how people may want to plan for it, and how to protect ourselves from any consequences of not understanding it properly; of not taking it seriously.
This essay is going to unnerve some readers; especially Christians who are under the mistaken impression that they have everything figured out, because they once read and memorized John 3:16, for example, and they pray everyday.
I am probably going to take a few readers into an unfamiliar landscape — one that Jesus could not have described to primitive people. I don’t want to alarm anybody. Some readers might experience fear; a few may wobble off-balance as they feel the ground shake beneath their feet.
My intent is to strengthen the resolve of believers to make whatever changes are necessary to secure the future of humanity. Jesus said that he came to save the world, not judge it. He suffered on the cross so that those who belong to Him won’t burn in Hell, which is our destiny apart from the love of a friend who has the desire and courage to rescue us.
Jesus said that God is love, and that all people are evil. Humans — everyone of us — are haters, whether we are able to admit it or not. Wherever it is that God lives, it is no place for ordinary people; it’s off-limits to haters. People can’t live where God lives, unless they are born again into a new life that reshapes who they are at their core.
People, many of them, hate the very idea of God. They have no fear of the consequences of God’s love for the orphan and widow, the oppressed and downtrodden, the crippled and the malformed, the prisoner and the tortured, the blind and the deaf, the possessed and the mentally tormented.
They have no fear of hell — though the reality of hell lies on every side, they don’t see it. It doesn’t exist. It’s not something they feel compelled to fix. In modern minds — most minds, probably — the idea of hell is an absurdity; it can’t exist.
To be literally true, what Jesus is quoted by his friends to have said must make sense and be aligned with the reality we observe when people look up into a night sky full of stars or gaze into a drop of pond water teaming with microscopic life.
It can’t be any other way.
His words will always align with the facts we know to be true, which we discover sometimes by doing science; by living life; by suffering; by knowing people. If they don’t, then we’re missing something — I would argue that it’s always something important.
Jesus spoke truth to people who thought stars were the light of Heaven shining through pin holes in a tarp that covered the night sky; to them, mental illness was demon possession; ailments were caused by sin. Jesus cured the anguished; healed the broken; he spoke gently, with compassion and loving sorrow in his heart; but it was frustrating, possibly exasperating; it wore him down sometimes.
In AD 30, truth sounded like lunacy to most people because everyone was ignorant and worse; people were evil — every single one. No one knew what was real and what was pretend. Everyone was crazy, by modern standards. Rulers executed people for speaking truth, and today some still do. Every thinking person knows it’s true.
OK. Enough caveats, already. I want now to move away from the religion of two-thousand years ago and move boldly toward the understanding of reality that the disciplines of the sciences provide. I want to explain what very smart people (some of whom do not think of themselves as religious) imagine is the afterlife, how it might work, why it’s important, and how culture and society might be better fashioned to give every person the best chance to live free of despair and suffering.
Although this part of the essay will abandon religion and embrace science, the intent is not to cause believers to stumble; it is to wake believers from a slumber that threatens to make them impotent before the challenges to faith that are devouring America and many other parts of the modern world.
I want readers to think about how these ideas resonate with the words of Jesus — with His Truth — which is at odds as often as not with the religions of today, which by their works alone war with God’s love for human beings; war with Earth where all people live; war with the plants and animals that God gave people to comfort and protect with enlightened stewardship.
This essay offers a speculative view of science that aligns with the words of Jesus as quoted by the people who knew him best. It is very possibly dead wrong.
How could it not be? The smartest people not only don’t know what exactly is true, but truth itself, some humans have argued, might be unknowable. To his friends Jesus said, no, that’s not quite right — you will know the truth;andthe truth will set you free.
Set us free from what? Well, maybe religion, for one thing — and, hopefully, the fear of death, for another.
Speculation about truth by a pontificator? Well, readers can believe it or not. If faith is fragile, my advice is to stop right here. Hasn’t everyone read enough? Does anyone really want to learn anything new?
Who would ever endeavor to move out of their comfort zone? Does anyone believe that fate is certain; that the future of humankind might depend on how people behave, how they organize themselves, how they treat the most miserable among them, how they lift up the lowest rung of people, who Christ loves?
Some of the smartest psychologists, philosophers, and scientists — Nobel Prize winner Erwin Schrödinger who discovered the quantum wave equation was among the first — agree that it’s possible that consciousness might be a fundamental and foundational property of the universe. The smartest human ever, John von Neumann, wrote technical papers about it. Taking this view helped him to resolve many of the most aggravating paradoxes of quantum theory. Follow-on research by other brilliant scientists revealed that the problems of understanding consciousness seemed to become less daunting, as well.
I have written several essays about conscious-life and the sciences, which take readers on wild rides into the weeds of contemporary knowledge. These essays, some of them, are mind-blowing masterpieces that rummage through the garbage bins of modern science.
Click links at the end of this essay to take in more background and deeper understanding. Trust me. It will be fun.
This essay will gloss past the technical details of the science of life (because they can be found in related essays on this site). But I can begin by reminding readers that Schrödinger (and now others) believed conscious-life was something people plugged into, much like folks today plug their televisions into a cable box or connect their computers into a wireless modem for internet access.
People who think like Schrödinger are convinced that consciousness is imbibed by life forms; it’s something life-forms drink like living water; it isn’t located inside brains, although it is most likely processed there, possibly by dedicated but as yet not understood structures like the claustrum — or in tiny, sub-cellular structures called microtubules. No one knows.
When a computer breaks down and is dumped in the recycle bin, the internet doesn’t stop broadcasting. Cable news doesn’t stop when a television breaks down either. People buy a new computer, a new television; they keep watching; they keep playing.
Consciousness doesn’t stop when a human body dies. It keeps broadcasting — from its source. When a baby is born, it is thought by some to be hooked into this foundational consciousness that the universe itself depends on to exist and continue; like a child connected to her mother by placenta and umbilical cord, life continues uninterrupted; conscious life continues; life goes on.
Another way to think about it: imagine that people are swimmers in an ocean of consciousness — the ocean doesn’t depend on them. Swimmers who submit to the waves and the undertow and the currents — which together are too overwhelming to be controlled by anyone — find themselves floating along; sometimes they are tossed by the waves; sometimes the current pulls them in a direction they don’t want to go; sometimes the undertow sucks them under. Those who don’t fight the ocean do its will — automatically.
Whether they are living or dying, joy-riding or hanging-on terrified, the drowning swimmer rides the ocean and does its bidding. Those who fight — who depend on their own strength and will — exhaust themselves against the surf and drown in a frantic fit of futility, washed up on a random sandbar like rotting seaweed, separated from the sea and baking into dust under a blazing sun.
What happens when we die? Jesus said that our bodies count for nothing. If I’m understanding Him and properly applying the views of Schrödinger (and others), then our bodies have no value except as temporary storage devices for a piece of consciousness that is not, it turns out, entangled at birth with the foundational consciousness of the universe.
When the umbilical cord is cut, the newborn gets disconnected somehow. The mother expels the placenta, and the baby cries. Getting re-entangled might be a physical process that can preserve our lives and tie our destiny to that part of reality that is eternal and foundational. The Apostle Paul called entanglement reconciliation in his second letter to the Corinthians.
People who aren’t accustomed to thinking this way, might find it unnatural and unusual. Take a few on-line courses in quantum mechanics to absolve these notions, anyone who is experiencing them. Read some of the related essays in the list at the end of this post.
When Jesus said to people more primitive than us that he was the way, the truth, and the life — that no one can come to God except through Him — maybe he might better have described a concept like entanglement to a modern audience. Who really knows? Even modern people don’t understand physics; not most of them anyway.
Jesus did say: Because I live, you also will live. Someday you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.
I know this: If consciousness is foundational to the physical reality of our universe; if — as Neumann argued in a technical paper — process operators he named I, II, & III are required to bring forth the universe we observe, then the consciousness that makes us feel alive must be entangled (or reconciled, as Paul put it) with one of these operators to enable anyone to survive and persist past the death of their body.
Can anyone imagine a scenario where tiny bubbles of conscious-life that were never able to successfully entangle themselves to God might be regurgitated at death into new persons, as some eastern religions profess? It would be a better fate than going to Hell, right? Maybe not.
In a world where most people live in deprivation and physical suffering, it is almost certain that a bubble of conscious-life that once occupied the body of a billionaire, for example, would by chance alone come to rest more often than not in a body debilitated by malnutrition, parasites, and disease.
If people thought that they were going to be born again physically into circumstances dictated by the statistics of a random distribution, they might not be so enamored by the privilege and prerogatives of power and wealth. Laissez-faire systems, capitalism and oligarchy, might be feared like the ancients feared Hell.
Maybe people — if they knew that they were going to be regurgitated into the world they expended their lives to build — would take more time to think seriously about what to do with orphans and widows, the oppressed and downtrodden, the crippled and the malformed, the prisoner and the tortured, the blind and the deaf, the possessed and the mentally tormented, because after all, in that universe — in that place where there is no Christ — it’s who they will be someday, chances are, in the afterlife.
There is no genetic code. Not really. Not in the way most people think. Seasoned, sensible geneticists know it’s true.
Unfortunately, a few immature biologists don’t believe it. They are developing “gene drive” technologies that they hope will enable them to reliably and permanently alter a fragment of “the code” in any life-form that reproduces sexually — to guarantee that the altered piece of “code” will be transmitted to the next generation 100% of the time into perpetuity.
NOTE TO READERS:November 22, 2019: This essay is the longest on the website. To help readers navigate, The Editors asked Billy Lee to add links to important subtopics. Don’t forget to click the up arrow on the right side of the page to return to top.
Deployment of gene-drive technology means that an altered fragment of genetic code can be “injected” into a species, for good or ill, which is permanent and will over a few generations become universal — unable to be suppressed or removed regardless of any natural selection pressures whatsoever — until the end of time.
The changes caused by gene drivers takeover every individual in any species that has been targeted for modification. It takes about 10 generations, give or take. With insects, we’re talking a couple of years; plants, a decade maybe; humans, 300 years or so.
Gene drivers are all about changing an entire species forever and permanently — not just one individual with a genetic disorder, for example, or one generation of plants for another. It’s a higher level of intervention than conventional gene therapies and modifications.
A screw-up can extinguish a species in a relatively short period of time is how I see the danger. Worse, according to the scientists cited by the NYTimes, these genes will migrate into ecological niches, where they will force unintended consequences to the biosphere; worse still, given sufficient time “good” genes are likely to jump species, where they will wreak havoc.
EDITORS NOTE: On 18 September 2020 the website science-news service phys.org published an article titled Biologists Create New Genetic Systems toNeutralize Gene Drives.
According to the article:
The first neutralizing system, called e-CHACR (erasing Constructs Hitchhiking on the Autocatalytic Chain Reaction) is designed to halt the spread of a gene drive by “shooting it with its own gun.” e-CHACRs use the CRISPR enzyme Cas9 carried on a gene drive to copy itself, while simultaneously mutating and inactivating the Cas9 gene.
The system can in principle be placed anywhere in the genome.
The second neutralizing system, called ERACR (Element Reversing the Autocatalytic Chain Reaction), is designed to eliminate the gene drive altogether. ERACRs are designed to be inserted at the site of the gene drive, where they use the Cas9 from the gene drive to attack either side of the Cas9, cutting it out. Once the gene drive is deleted, the ERACR copies itself and replaces the gene-drive.
Both systems have been tested in the lab at a molecular level. The developers have not yet demonstrated that a gene drive screw-up gone wild can be pulled back and eliminated by these systems.
The good news is that scientists are working on the problem. The bad news is that the existence of infant, untested technologies might tempt some to release a gene drive into the wild that will ultimately prove intractable.
EDITORS NOTE: On 6 March 2021 the website science-news service phys.org published an article titled New ‘split-drive’ system puts scientists in the (gene) driver seat. The piece describes new split-gene-drive technology that promises to degrade over several generations to permit engineered genomes to evolve under the rules of natural selection. Such a system, if safely deployed, would help to prevent collapse-of-species and other bad consequences when mistakes are made.
If anybody doesn’t understand what they just read, they shouldn’t worry. By the end of this essay, they will fully grasp why the scientists pursuing this course might be dangerously eager to unleash genetic pollutants that may kill us all — because their love of science makes it difficult to restrain themselves.
Virus stands on cell surface. It will soon inject it’s RNA payload into the cell to take control of its genetic machinery.
These smart people (some might be prodigies for all I know) plan to use gene drivers to exterminate vermin and eradicate insect-borne disease, for starters. They plan to make it impossible for agricultural pests to develop resistance to pesticides.
It all sounds great. But so did using the by-products of nuclear bombs as an energy source for our cities. Ask Japan how their state-of-the-art nuclear energy program turned out. Ask about Fukushima.
Gene-drive technologies are an existential threat to the long-term survival of life on Earth — like those tens-of-thousands of plutonium-loaded thermonuclear missiles, which a number of countries have buried a few hundred feet below the surface of the earth.
The warheads on these missiles are going to rot someday, because no one can take care of them forever, and we can’t get rid of them. Their poisons — the most lethal known; a speck of plutonium dust can kill any human who ingests it — will leach into the soils; over thousands of years percolating plutonium will kill everything.
Genes — bad ones (or very good ones that turn out bad; oops!) — genes that can never die; genes that can’t be suppressed by natural selection; genes that are always passed on to the next generation under every conceivable scenario and every possible pairing of mates (no matter how mismatched) present potential nightmare scenarios for any species that possess them. Errant gene drivers can extinguish some species in a matter of a few years.
It is distressing to think that smart, young adults — I can imagine some younger than 35 who possibly lack basic common-sense — does it matter how smart they are? — might right now be playing around with molecules of DNA they can’t possibly understand fully, because the molecules have a quantum side to their nature that can make their behavior unpredictable; even unknowable.
Young adults are messing around with very complicated structures and processes inside both molecules and cells that they can’t see, even with the best microscopes and the most sophisticated instruments. It’s possible that they might — even with the best intentions; the best lab protocols — screw things up big-time and possibly forever. We need maximum oversight over these researchers and the labs who employ them, now — not tomorrow or next year.
Click on this link to an essay in the science journal Nature, which addresses the issue of gene-driver risk and its management. It is written by someone who seems, at least to my mind, to suggest remedies that are insufficiently robust.
Every biologist knows that “genes” have a mysterious way of migrating between species, crossing boundaries, and behaving unpredictably. They have a way of escaping confinement structures. If folks don’t understand why, what are they doing playing around and calling it research?
Editors Note (May 27, 2017):Here is a link to a May 17, 2017 article in Science News about the role of jumping genes in the expression of genomes, which may be of interest to some readers.
People have claimed for years that recombinant DNA pathogens, retro-viruses and yes, AIDS, escaped from rogue laboratories. Does anyone know for sure? If they do, they aren’t saying.
Anyway, I urge readers to relax for now in the knowledge that they are about to learn some amazing things. I did, writing this essay. And please remember: I am a pontificator, not a scientist.
Links are provided to verify anything written in the essays that people may question. My pledge to readers is, as always, to be as accurate as possible and to correct mistakes should I discover them or find myself corrected by others.
Yes, I can be smart and write good too. Well, I’m trying anyway. Getting it right is important. It’s my highest priority. But sometimes I screw up — usually on some arcane technical detail in an essay about science.
Sometimes the science changes and new facts emerge. When I first published this essay in May 2016 everyone thought the galaxies in the universe numbered 200 billion. As I add this note in May 2018, analysis of the latest pics from telescopes in space suggests that the number of galaxies is closer to two-trillion.
My pledge is to keep my essays up-to-date and to learn enough to fix screw-ups that might be caused by simple ignorance. Readers can help fix errors by sending corrections in comments. Errors in the text will be fixed immediately.
So far, we’ve been lucky. The number of errors identified is amazingly few. In one doozy, I published the picture of a well-known British actress (well-known in Britain) and said it was Rosalind Franklin, the X-ray crystallographer famous for making the images that hinted at the spiral staircase structure of DNA.
Celebrities in Europe (that is, in England) were kind enough to take the time to inform me how wrong I was. I appreciated the feedback and was grateful they didn’t kill me.
I’m joking. The Brits are the kindest and best-behaved people on Earth. I’ve spent enough time in London to know.
The genetic code that everyone talks about lives inside tiny spaces; one way to think about it is to imagine that it lives inside little rooms packed to the ceiling with sacks — bitty-bags stuffed full of strung-together bases — hiding in the center of every cell of every plant and animal (or disbursed throughout the cell in the case of most one-celled microbes).
It isn’t a code at all. It’s a reservoir; an inventory; a collection of templates — most broken into pieces; separated and scattered among the dozens of spiral tentacles in the vast aperiodic-crystal known as DNA.
DNA isn’t exactly a crystal either; not really. Crystals are structures made from regular (periodic) arrangements of molecules. DNA, on the other hand,isa molecule, and it is constructed from strings of chemical bases. It’s found in bundles alongside other DNA molecules. These bundles are called chromosomes.
During part of a cell’s life cycle these DNA strings can sometimes be found tightly wound around little pieces of protein like fishing lines around spinning-reels. It’s a configuration that makes them compact; less intrusive — but easier to see under a microscope when they have been stained.
Inside any particular cell each chromosome of DNA is in some ways a little like a snowflake; within a single cell, no two chromosomes are the same; no two are alike, not even close. But every cell in the body contains the same group of chromosomes; the chromosomes in each body-cell are identical to the chromosomes in every other body-cell, right? It’s not hard to understand.
Bases, by the way, (in case someone might be wondering) are chemical substances that turn into salts when acids are poured over them. Many bases exist in nature, but only four (nucleobases) are found in DNA.
These four bases are essentially one or two rings of nitrogen and carbon atoms with ammonia and vinegar-like side chains attached. Here are links for anyone who wants to look them up: adenine – thymine ; and cytosine – guanine.
A fifth base, uracil substitutes for thymine in RNA, which is a vast assortment of short, single-stranded, DNA-like segments — the cell’s worker-ants who enable cells to perform their many functions. RNA builds genes, moves stuff around, and dramatically speeds up cell chemistry by catalyzing thousands of processes.
Not to digress, but NASA found uracil on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan in 2012 during a fly-by. It’s something to wonder about.
Caffeine is molecularly similar to the bases adenine and guanine. Bases taste bitter — like the caffeine in coffee. Acids, on the other hand, taste sour — like vinegar. Combine bases and acids (bitter and sour) chemically to make salts, which are substances that taste like the ocean.
This tangled mess is one-celled life, highly magnified. It is varied, imprecise, and invisible to humans. It takes about ten of these microbes (which are about the size of human red-blood cells) to span the width of a human hair; 30 to circumnavigate it. DNA is far smaller. It requires 8,000 tightly wound DNA bundles to span a human hair; 800 to span the length of one of these microbes.
Forgive me for starting simple. Life-sciences are the most complicated sciences of all.
What adds to the difficulty is that in most animals (and all people) the DNA involved in sexual reproduction is configured differently than the DNA in body-cells. It exhibits behaviors a little less like those found in other cells.
In this essay we are talking about animal DNA, usually human, in body-cells — somatic cells; and we are talking about protein production.
A single DNA group inside certain humanbody-cells like liver cells and stem cells (while they undergo the process of replicating and dividing) is composed of ninety-two large molecules called DNA strands, which together warehouse the six billion base-pairs that will populate the genomes of two daughter cells.
During the short-lived interval when cells divide and replicate, dozens of molecules and billions of bases gather themselves into the configuration of chromosome-pairs peculiar to people, which some of us learned about in high school biology.
Most of the time (90% of it anyway) DNA doesn’t divide and multiply; it doesn’t organize itself into easy to recognize chromosomes; in all body-cells except stem cells and liver cells, DNA is the starting material for the making of proteins instead.
Making proteins is the only thing most body-cells do; it starts in the DNA molecules and is the subject of this essay. Cell division and replication is what stem cells do. Links will lead to those subjects for any who might want to learn more.
This essay is not about stem cells, which develop into any and every kind of somatic (body) cell and germ (reproductive) cell. As a pontificator who is not an expert on stem cells, my understanding is that — except for liver cells — somatic cells in mature adults don’t generally divide and reproduce themselves. That function is performed by stem cells, which start at conception and continue through life to replenish the human body.
Stem cells live inside the tissues of adults like seasonings inside cooked beef, is how I imagine it. Check me on this one, experts. Correct me in the comments section. All others read this link on cell differentiation first.
The main point is that human body-cells house 46 chromosomes (called chromatids when they are organized into 23 connected pairs), which contain six billion base-pairs. Reproductive (germination or germ) cells contain 23 unpaired chromosomes that store three billion base-pairs.
Confusing terminology constructed from the Greek language can create stumbling blocks for non-scientists, so I’m reluctant to go there. Terms like diploid, haploid, gamete, and zygote folks can look up and explore on their own. There’s enough that’s fascinating in English. Only tiny, digestible Greek lessons — sparsely sprinkled — will appear in this essay.
Besides unfamiliar vocabulary, another hard concept to grasp is this: inside every animal cell (and plant cell) are hundreds of DNA packed bundles (called mitochondria), where the DNA is not like the DNA in sex-cells or in body-cells either. The DNA in mitochondria matches what one might expect to find in another as yet undiscovered species of bacteria. It’s “coded” differently.
Yes, it’s weird, but there are explanations.
Most scientists today believe that a long time ago cells engulfed bacteria; these foreign migrants from another world (in terms of scale) were simply unable to escape.
Bacteria are small. A thimble-full of dirt can contain 50,000 species. It is amazing to learn that millions of species of bacteria exist in the soils and on the surfaces of plants on the earth.
Thirty-percent of cells in the human body are bacteria. They don’t weigh much, because they are small. It would require as many as 10,000 individuals of some strains to match in size just one of the microbes displayed in the illustration a few paragraphs above.
On average, though, a typical cell in an animal or plant can be visualized as having about 4,000 times the volume of a typical bacterium. The range of volume ratios varies widely, of course. Nothing is simple, especially in biology. Enough said.
Scientists named the trapped bacteria-like life-forms inside cells, mitochondria, afterthe Greek words for threaded granules; these granulesmake the cells they inhabit more robust, because they act like little batteries, boosting the energy in their adopted homes to help power the many tasks that cells do. Click the video link above for an animation by Harvard University that shows how it works.
Click the link above for an easy-to-understand animation of the overall structure of cells; or this link for a YouTube Video designed to transport viewers through an imaginary, animated world that makes real the complexity of a working, living cell.
And here is a link from Wikipedia, if anyone is confused about the numbers of bases and chromosomes in humans, as many folks seem to be, including myself, sometimes.
It’s confusing, because there are different “codes”, different cell-cycle phases, different collections of DNA molecules in body, germ, and stem cells — and I haven’t even mentioned enzyme catalysis or polymerases (and I’m not going to, either — not just yet anyway — because it will open a big can of worms I don’t want to deal with right now).
Don’t worry, we’ll get to some of it later after I’ve laid a little scaffolding.
But let me say this: without all this complexity, life forms as complicated as human beings would be impossible — codes or no codes.
The tools most people use to do science, especially physics, generally depend on mathematics and rigid, predictable rules. The life-sciences aren’t like that; not at all.
Should my essay devolve into complexity, readers are free to bail. I’m going to try to keep the mysteries of DNA understandable to non-technical people. Who knows if I’ll succeed or not?
DNA can be thought of as a collection of pouches or bags stuffed with billions of copies of four basic substances, called bases. DNA is like a roomful of holiday bags, each filled to the brim with four different kinds of unfinished toys like the ones in Santa’s workshops before Christmas.
Each of the four kinds of toys are strung together in-line, one after the other — in no discernible order — in long, tangled spirals. These spirals are unimaginably long, and there are many dozens of them.
The toys in the DNA sacks are unfinished, unpainted, and undecorated. They really don’t look much like toys at all. In this analogy, the four bases might be imagined as four simple blocks of wood, each a different shape and size. And like I said, there are billions of these blocks, at least in human cells.
Is DNA a big molecule? Yes, I already said that it was. It’s huge. But good luck to anyone who tries to find one. Good luck to anyone who tries to look at one. No one has ever seen any molecule. No matter how large, molecules are too small to see, even with microscopes; and that includes DNA molecules, the largest and most complex molecules in biology.
It takes a combination of high-energy light, amplification, and computer-generated algorithms to produce useful pictures of what scientists think molecules look like. A computer-generated image is not the same as a brain-generated image stimulated by the act of looking at reflected light with a pair of human eyes.
X-ray crystallography was the technique used first to unravel clues to the structure of DNA. From the data collected by crystallography, Linus Pauling shared in 1951 compelling ideas about what he thought the structure was, but he turned out to be wrong. He got protein structure right, but his description of DNA had subtle errors. A few years later, others came up with a structure that has thus far stood the test of time.
In soma (body) cells, forty-six molecules (strands or bags or sacks) of DNA contain the six billion base-pairs (or blocks) of the human genome. Most of the time these strands are loose and disorganized; a diffuse mass of hard-to-see chromatin. (Their form depends on what part of its period the cell cycle is in.)
It has to be this way for the worker elves of the cell to gain access to the bases (the unfinished toy blocks) upon which they will do their work. Only during the process of cell division do these forty-six molecules bind together and curl-up into the twenty-three chromosome-pairs that some readers may have learned about in high school biology class.
Researchers have technologies that can amplify what DNA molecules reveal, which they manipulate with computer algorithms to form fuzzy pictures that are helpful to highly trained analysts; but it’s the best they can do, visually.
An early theorist, Erwin Schrödinger, (one of my heroes) said in 1944 — before anyone knew what DNA was — that it must be an aperiodic-crystal. He gave a series of lectures, which later became the famous booklet, What is Life? It can be purchased for fifteen bucks on Amazon.com.
Schrödinger’s booklet changed the world — it’s one of the most prophetic works I’ve ever read. The tract changed my world view anyway; my view of life certainly.
It turns out, Schrödinger was right. DNA bundles store billions of bases in more-or-less random — but frozen — sequences much like crystals.
Just as molecules arrange themselves inside crystals, the bases inside DNA molecules also have an order, yes, an arrangement for sure, but it’s not a code; it’s not even a cipher; it’s merely a starting point for the most chaotic, complex, and messed-up process in nature — the creation of thinking, speaking, conscious-life (and less capable life) — all formed from a relatively few not-so-simple materials.
Here’s another assertion that might be difficult for some readers to accept. Genes don’t really exist. There are no free-standing genes; certainly not in human DNA, anyway. What scientists call genes must be constructed; they must be built; they must be put together; they must be fabricated, collected, and transported by molecules called RNA and by other processes known collectively as epigenetics. More on epigenetics later.
(Click on this old graphic (from 2004) to get a clearer view.) This illustration is a simplified representation of the chaos going on during arguably one of the simplest of the processes (transcription), which is the starting point for encoding other processes (called translation) that will ultimately lead to the fabrication and folding of proteins.
Most graphics and videos on the Internet seem to buy into a tidy notion that DNA is a code (not a reservoir and a starting point for the fabrication of templates). This notion seems to demand laser-precision and machine-like twelve-sigma reliability during protein synthesis.
Don’t believe it.
Yes, there is no argument; we can improve our chances for healthier lives by cleaning up less-than-optimal base-sequences — which are, as often as not, scattered, scrambled hodgepodges — using, hopefully, gene therapies like CRISPR. (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats)
But until technicians create tools to deal with other processes; until biologists can manipulate RNA itself and learn to change the ”weather” patterns (discussed later) inside cells, physicians will not be able to eliminate many of pathologies that plague our species and lead to diminished health and, for some, death.
RNA in all its forms (and there are many) is itself constructed from scattered templates that are hidden haphazardly like Easter eggs within the billions of bases strewn along the dozens of spirals inside a DNA bundle. RNA first builds itself up by interacting with various sections of base sequences in the DNA and then copies those sequences by borrowing matching freebases, which are floating everywhere in the medium of the cell’s nucleus.
RNA is much shorter in length and less stable than the DNA it models. But it doesn’t mutate as much as folks might expect, because it is also shorter-lived and reproduces less often. It’s more versatile too; more agile, because it is single-stranded; DNA is double-stranded.
RNA, in all its forms, is the workhorse of cell functions; it is both the building material and the construction machinery used in many important cell structures, which perform the yeoman’s task of protein building inside cells.
It seems plausible to me that over a few hundreds-of-millions of years the possibly self-generated RNA sequences may have acquired — through accident, luck, or trial-and-error — the ability to select, copy, paste, and assemble short sections of random DNA bases, which every-once-in-a-great-while actually worked to help build useful proteins that added survival advantages to their evolving hosts.
Maybe RNA designed and built DNA in the first place, which it learned to copy and manipulate. We may never know exactly how.
One thing scientists agree on: one-celled life was already highly developed, complex, and flourishing by the time the new planet, Earth, reached its first billionth year. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Life came on fast during extreme conditions vastly different than now. This fact is amazing. No one understands how.
It has taken an additional three-and-a-half billion years to get to humans and the space-traveling civilizations that seem to dominate the earth today.
Thinking about RNA and DNA can be a frustrating circular process, much like the chicken or the egg problem; which came first? My sense is that most scientists today believe RNA came first, DNA later. Inside our cells, it is impossible to tell, but there is no denying that RNA’s diversity and flexibility make it a most likely candidate.
Many kinds of RNA live inside cells. Some run around doing nothing. They simply try to survive inside the complicated universe that is the typical living cell in every animal, plant, and microbe. They are called selfish RNA.
Most RNA sequences are much less selfish. They are like Christmas elves who work day and night; some to open Santa’s bags to gain access to their contents; others to copy various sections from the strands of blocks inside; others to move the copied sections to an assembly area, where other elves glue the copied segments together to form new sequences — many of which, by the way, are very different from the original sequences that the RNA elves found inside Santa’s gift bags; inside the DNA.
Eventually, messenger elves transport the long strands of little blocks they copied and assembled; they move them away from the center of the cell; out to the gooey regions of the cell beyond its center where other transfer elves are busy assembling (by threes) free-floating blocks (called bases, remember) and attaching these triplet-blocks (called anticodons) to single amino acids. The resulting structures are called transfer RNA (or tRNA, for short).
An amino acid is simply a configuration of carbon atoms with amine (ammonia) stuck to one side and carboxylic acid (vinegar) stuck to another — plus some other simple stuff attached here and there to make each amino acid unique among all the others. Think of an amino acid as a colored necklace bead. Out of the five-hundred or so differently colored beads in nature, transfer elves in humans work with only twenty or so.
Stay with me now. You just read the most difficult sentence in the essay. These amino acids attach themselves like colorized necklace beads to triplet-blocks (called anticodons) according to which of the three blocks (or bases) the transfer-RNA (tRNA) is made from. Watch the video ”From DNA to protein” above to better understand.
In the meantime, while all this other stuff is going on, the messenger elves are directing their long strands of copied-and-pasted blocks (bases) away from the cell’s tiny nucleus (center) toward little triplet-body-handling factories (called ribosomes; ribo for triplet, soma for body), which live in the inner goo (the cytoplasm) of the cell.
Many ribosomes are attached to a winding ribbon-like structure called the rough endoplasmic reticulum. Endo is Greek for inner; plasma is goo; reticulum means network.
At the same time, transfer elves in the goo (cytoplasm) steer their three-blocks-plus-a-colored-beadassemblies — in humans these “three-base” combos and twenty or so colored beads can be arranged forty-eight ways — into the ribosome factories, where they are matched-up to the blocks (bases) in the long strands that are being delivered from the cell’s nucleus (like cars in a choo-choo train) by the messenger elves.
Inside the ribosome factories, the triplet-blocks-plus-one-colored-bead assemblies, which have been constructed and collected by the transfer elves in the cytoplasm, are paired block for block (that is, base for base) to the long train of blocks that were collected, arranged, and carried by the messenger elves from the cell’s center (its nucleus).
As each transfer assembly triplet is matched-up three bases at a time to the blocks in the long messenger train, the single amino-acid bead that the three-block transfer assembly carries is ejected out of the ribosome factory.
Assembly elves — think of them as molecular forces — secure each ejected amino acid bead to the next bead, one after the other — in the exact order demanded by the order (in threes, called codons when located in the messenger RNA) of the bases (blocks) in the messenger sequence — creating as they go an amino-acid-chain, or necklace.
Once the amino acid chain (necklace) is long enough (and remember: there can be as many as twenty-three different colors of amino-acid beads in each necklace, and each necklace can be almost any length at all — up to hundreds or even tens-of-thousands of beads long) elves (molecular forces that work through the micro-scaffolding of the cell) go to work; they transfer the chains to Golgi structures, where they are bundled and folded into the twisted shapes that make them proteins. Like an Amazon distribution center, the Golgi apparatuses deliver the proteins to their destinations.
Like holiday elves, they deliver protein toys to every child’s bedroom in the cell, which in this analogy lie inside the abyss of the cell’s cytoplasm (cyto means cell; plasm means goo).
Some elves might feel compelled to deliver their proteins down the street to other homes (cells) in other neighborhoods by way of certain processes known as cell migrations.
These migrations can bring healing to injured tissues in other parts of the body, among other benefits. However, as I wrote earlier, stem cells that live inside the tissues of the body do the heavy lifting of cell replacement and healing.
Here is a way to visualize a human cell: think of cytoplasm (the cell goo) as the yolk of an idealized egg. A chicken egg is nothing like a human body-cell, but it makes a good model for explanations.
(Click on pic to enlarge.) This drawing is an idealized view of a typical eukaryotic cell, which in this essay is compared to the yolk of a chicken egg. The egg-white is the thin plasma membrane.
The nucleolus (at the epicenter) is a tiny, hard to find collection of proteins, RNA, and DNA at the very center of the nucleus where ribosomes are fabricated, if anyone wonders.
Ribosomes are made entirely from RNA; they are, in fact, one of the most ancient structures in cells; they are essential players in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic (ancient and modern) cells, which I will discuss in more detail soon.
Chromatin (the usually unorganized mess of DNA) lies in the nuclear goo of the nucleus that surrounds the nucleolus.
Remember that ribosomes are the tiny factories, where proteins get their start. Ribosomes themselves move between the nucleolus and the surrounding nuclear goo until they are ejected out of the pores of the nucleus into the goo of the yolk (which in this analogy is the cytoplasm) where many will float freely in an ocean filled with a dozen or more other structures important to cell functions. Many ribosomes attach themselves to the endoplasmic reticulum.
But we’re not concerned about these other structures right now. Proteins are the most essential substances from which our bodies are made.
Some biologists believe that as many as 50,000 different proteins are required to construct a human being. Others say 100,000. The human body is capable of producing two million. Each cell type on its own is capable of making 5,000.
Ribosomes are very important, because it is inside the ribosomes where proteins get started, so we concentrate on them first.
Think of the cell’s membrane as the “white” of the egg. It surrounds and protects the vital cytoplasm, where the making of proteins takes place.
Of course, the chicken egg analogy had to break down. A chicken egg is surrounded by an oxygen-permeable calcium carbonate (CaCO3) shell. Forget about the shells of chicken eggs. Human soma-cells aren’t protected in quite the same way.
In a chicken egg the nucleus is a little white mass that sits on top of the yolk and feeds on it. The nucleolus is inside that little white mass. So the breakfast-egg analogy falls apart pretty darn fast. It might be more confusing than helpful. I hope not.
A lot more is going on. And — I have to say this — the cells of most microbes (one-celled life, like bacteria and archaea) don’t look like the sunny-side-up cells of humans or most other animals and plants. For one thing, they are a lot smaller.
Bacteria and archaea can be from 20 to 10,000 times smaller than the eukaryotic cells of animals and plants. They lack membrane-bound organelles; they lack a nucleus. They look more like little sandwich bags of loosely cooked, scrambled eggs. Scientists call them, prokaryotes. (It’s Greek, meaning before they became fully formed kernels.) They are the ancient cells.
As for the other structures that live inside our own eukaryotic cells (again, it’s Greek, meaning after they became kernels) — they make a fascinating study, but are beyond the scope of this essay.
Eukaryotes are the modern more advanced cells of all plants and animals. It took two billion years for ancient prokaryotic cells to evolve to the modern eukaryotic cells that first appeared 1.5 billion years ago; it is these cells that congregated and evolved to become the plants and animals of today. Click on the links in this essay — such as the links in nearby paragraphs — to access Wikipedia articles, YouTube videos, and other sources to learn more about them.
Phosphoric acid, which people have used for centuries to remove rust and to fertilize crops makes the DNA supports (or strands) on which hang the rungs of billions of bases. Phosphoric acid is the concentrated, clear syrup that makes Coca-Cola sting the tongue (carbon-dioxide bubbles make Coke sparkle). It’s the acid found inside the nucleus of every cell.
Apatite crystal from Mexico.
Hundreds of years ago phosphoric acid was made from the stone mineral apatite (calcium phosphate) and sulphuric acid — by-products of the mining and smelting of ores. Today the production process is more arcane and efficient.
Phosphorus is arguably one of the most important elements of life. Only magnesium is more important to viability, because the ATP that powers all cells will not work unless it is bound to it. Folks who aren’t eating whole wheat, spinach, black beans, almonds, and peanuts should probably be taking a daily magnesium supplement.
People who eat steak consume goodly amounts of phosphoric acid. Early researchers always found this acid in the center of cells, their nucleus. Scientists called it, nucleic acid.
Much later scientists discovered that the DNA sacks were full of bases, crammed together into tangled masses of long, curly chains they called chromosomes (Greek, for coloredbodies).
Chromosomes stained well during lab experiments, which was fortunate for researchers, because color made it easier to see the chromosomes during the short periods of time when the genetic material in the cell’s center took on its distinctive form from out of the shapeless, invisible chromatin, where it lived.
It is by a curious twist of chemical engineering — to my mind, at least — that the bases don’t react with the phosphoric acid that anchors them. The DNA molecules don’t collapse into little piles of salt, like one might expect. Maybe they should; but on Earth, they don’t.
In this sense — the sense in which our DNA is made from acids and bases — we are salt, or could be; we are potentially a very complicated salt, yes, but a salt nonetheless.
A strong argument can be made that proteins and the polypeptide chains that make them are in fact salts. For reasons known only to biochemists, naming conventions hide this reality.
Amino acids, polypeptides, and proteins are thought of as inner salts and given the name zwitterions, of all things. Salt is at the heart of what and who we might become were it not for idiosyncrasies of nomenclature and the miracle that makes life live.
But to get back to phosphoric acid…
Phosphoric acid (phosphate) sacks (or strands) are loaded with toy blocks (bases), so they need something sticky, like sugar, to keep the blocks from falling out. The D in DNA stands for the sticky stuff — deoxyribose, which means sugar.
This simplified graphic shows sticky sugar (deoxyribose) securing the phosphate rails of a DNA strand to the only two kinds of base-pairs found in DNA — thymine / adenine and guanine / cytosine. The sugar, deoxyribose, forms both a link and a buffer between the acid and the bases; otherwise, the molecule would collapse to become a salt. DNA breaks down completely at 374° Fahrenheit, which is just 72° above the melting point of table sugar. An interesting comparison is the melting point of table salt, which is 1474°F.
DNA is deoxyribonucleic acid.
The sugar and acid, together, form the rails of the famous spiral staircase, upon which the rungs of bases are hung. It’s the most incredible structure in nature. It’s called the double-helix. Some people named Watson, Wilkins, and Crick won a Nobel Prize for figuring it out.
To give readers a sense of scale: If someone were to take the longest strand of the double-helix in our DNA (it’s in chromosome-one) and somehow increased its diameter to one-inch (the thickness of a large garden hose), the DNA strand — when pulled straight — would increase in length to 567 miles (about 40 miles longer than the distance between Nashville and Detroit).
The bases (or toy blocks, as we’ve been calling them) would stack in pairs, eight-pairs-to-the-inch, along the entire 567-mile length of the hose. In this single chromosome, each of the nearly half-billion bases it contains (in 247,199,719 base-pairs) would be about the size of a Tic-Tac breath mint; maybe a bit smaller.
At normal scales, the dimensions are too fantastic to believe. A solitary strand of DNA can’t be seen, even with the aid of most microscopes, but if all the DNA in a single cell could be laid out end to end and flattened to remove the kinks, it would stretch to six-and-a-half feet. 6.5 feet is the length of all the DNA in a typical human cell.
According to Siri, 1E14 cells make a human. It’s “one” followed by 14 zeros. It’s 100 trillion. Other sources say no; the number of cells in a human being is between 15 and 70 trillion. A trillion has twelve zeroes, right?
Do the math. It will show that all the DNA in a single human is enough to spin a strand from the earth to the sun and back 99 to 662 times (which is somewhere between 198 and 1324 astronomical units, right?) depending on who is trusted to do the human cell-count. Does anyone believe it?
An astronomical unit (AU) is simply the distance from the Earth to the Sun. It is the distance traveled by light during 499 seconds, which is 8 minutes and 19 seconds. It’s close to 93 million miles, right?
The point is this: strands of DNA are too thin to see, but in humans their total length is on an astronomical scale that spans two-and-half to sixteen-and-a-half times the diameter of the solar system out to Pluto — a diametral orbital distance that is nearly 80 AU.
It’s a lot of DNA, even if the exact amount is uncertain.
Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958). Franklin received her PhD from Cambridge University at age 25. (Her thesis: The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal.) Franklin spoke several languages, which opened opportunities for her to work in France, where she acquired the skills in X-ray crystallography that enabled her to advance the world to a new understanding of viruses and the molecules of life — DNA.
Rosalind Franklin, the gifted X-ray crystallographer, who did the experimental research that led to the discovery of the double helix, died of ovarian cancer at age 37. The Nobel Prize Committee has a long-standing policy of not awarding prizes to people who have died. It’s why Irish physicist and mathematician John Stewart Bell didn’t receive a prize for his civilization-changing work on quantum-entanglement, after he suffered a brain hemorrhage and perished in 1990.
In Franklin’s case it was doubly sad, because she was also doing important work on the molecular structure of viruses related to polio (funded by the United States Public Health Service) when cancer overtook her. Once again another scientist — this time her partner, Aaron Klug — received the Nobel Prize that she might have shared.
Had Rosalind Franklin survived to receive two Nobel Prizes — one for her work on the double helix and the other on the structure of polio virus — she would be a household name, like Albert Einstein or Francis Crick or Jonas Salk.
Rosalind lived in a generation and a culture that devalued her; she was a woman who competed with men, some of whom may have undercut her and wanted nothing to do with her, a few admitted. It was a different time, the 1950s. Who knows where the truth lies?
For Franklin, fame-and-fortune wasn’t to be. Blame cancer, a disease of the “genes”, which she sacrificed her life to understand by working daily with the deadly X-rays that helped her unlock the secrets of viruses and, most important of all, to finally pull aside the opaque curtain that was hiding the shape of the molecule of life: DNA.
Once the structure of the double-helix became known, the potential to store information in a molecular bundle constructed like DNA was immediately recognized — and it appeared to be unlimited. It is why everyone at first thought that the DNA molecule must be a code, like an old-fashioned computer tape.
I’ve suggested that DNA is not a code; neither is it a cipher. Some researchers view DNA more as a storage device and a starting point for processes — complicated processes — that have taken place inside every living cell for 3.5 billion years.
Yes, a group of three bases and an attached amino acid, properly transformed and manipulated by RNA elves inside little protein-making workshops called ribosomes, can help to fabricate and string together colored beads to make necklaces (chains). Chains of amino acids (polypeptides) — properly ordered and folded, again by RNA elves — can become proteins.
Scattered DNA base sequences inside a cell’s nucleus, its center, are a starting point for an involved and complicated process of selection, duplication, transformation, and fabrication before anything useful can happen; before proteins can be built and released for living.
To think realistically about life, especially human life, people should remind themselves that two-thirds of their bodies is water; two-thirds of what’s left is protein; the rest is mostly fat.
The interior of a cell is a complicated space. The space between cells is other-worldly.
The process that goes on inside cells, instead of being thought of as a precisely executed computer code, might better be compared to the process of weather found on every planet in the solar system.
Each planet can be identified by its surface weather, which starts from a kit of basic materials, and is amplified by an avalanche of environmental conditions and chemistries, much like the bases in chromosomes, which are selected, copied, shaped and reshaped, configured and reconfigured by RNA elves and other characters we have yet to meet (because the science of the evolving genome — the genetic material — and the phenome — what animals and plants look like — is still young, and scientists understand less than the little they think they know about the complete process, at least so far).
The processes used to construct life forms by starting with the bases in DNA are analogous to the processes astronomers observe on the planets of our solar system, where each planet creates its weather from the matrix of materials and thermal conditions that seems to define it. Each planet in the solar system has a characteristic weather profile that depends on a chaotic interplay of materials and environment unique to that planet.
Earth has weather; so does Mars and Jupiter. Those who study planets know immediately which planet is which, simply by observing its weather. From telescopes on Earth, each planet looks like its weather. Each has its characteristic colors and patterns. Weather is a planet’s phenotype; it’s what folks see when they look.
This mammoth storm on Jupiter looks eerily like structures that are found in living cells. The inset is planet Earth, shown for scale.
That’s how it is with life forms, too. Each life form is the result of weather patterns inside cells, which give each animal, plant, and microbe its unique essence; its physical presence in the larger world where it lives.
It becomes conventional wisdom to think this way about life forms, when one considers that identical twins — two humans who share exactly the same DNA — always display a variety of differences when examined closely.
Identical twins never have the same fingerprints, for example. There are systems of weather occurring around their genetic material in every protein-producing region in their bodies. Epigenetics is the technical term for the study of how it is that variations in phenomes occur in organisms that have identical genomes — that is, identical gene sequences.
Click pic for larger view in new window. (from Wikipedia article, Epigenetics)
The outcomes of these storms are never the same; two supposedly identical children do not always receive the same toys from the RNA elves who rummage through their shared bags (strands) of DNA for the bases they will copy and rework into proteins. Things get mixed up and turned around. One toy gets selected; another doesn’t; one is painted green; another purple.
What I find interesting is this: identical twins get less identical as they age. They are easier to distinguish.
How many of the differences are due to variations in the production of proteins, which occur at the molecular level?
How much of the variation is induced by external stresses on the genome caused by lifestyle differences? How much is driven by an unavoidable drift in the statistics of protein production, which emerge and diverge over time in each phenome of the twins regardless of their lifestyle choices?
An animal cannot be constructed from its DNA alone. RNA elves — millions of them, like colonies of ants — must do their work.
It’s a chaotic process that produces life on the earth. It’s a process that cannot be described or predicted by mathematics. If it could, scientists might take the DNA from prehistoric bones to create the original animals. Jurassic Park would be more than a Hollywood fantasy, which is what the book, movie, and sequels were and are.
An animal cannot be constructed from its DNA alone. A lot more is required than a simple collection of sequences formed from four bases and frozen in a molecule of DNA. A lot more of life’s machinery is required. The RNA elves — millions of them, like colonies of ants — must do their work.
When the work is done, and a protein has been made and delivered, the path back is lost, forever. No way exists — or is even possible — to reconstruct the sequence of bases in the DNA that started the process that built the protein. The process is not backward compatible, according to Matthew Cobb, the British zoologist and historian, in his latest book, Life’s Greatest Secret. Not only are the DNA sequences not reachable from knowledge of the proteins alone, but the processing steps that took place between the protein and the DNA are unknowable.
I don’t want to get too Mathy but think about this: sixty-four three-block (or three-base) sequences can in theory “code” for a mere twenty or so amino acids. It means that as many as three or four of those three-base sequences (the transfer elves we talked about earlier) can “code” for the same amino acid.
Reminder: four bases are all the choices DNA offers. Taken three at a time, they are more than enough to “code” for twenty or so amino acids. Get out the calculator, those who don’t believe it. 4 X 4 X 4 = 64. As mentioned earlier, humans have acquired over the eons 48 three-base combinations to work with. Bacteria, for another example, have 31 according to Matthew Cobb. We need less than two dozen.
Amino acid sequences long enough to form proteins can be hundreds to tens-of-thousands of acids long.
Forget about how amino acid chains get folded properly to make proteins. How can anyone work backwards from a protein formed from thousands of amino-acid beads — each one of which was secured to any one of three or four different 3-way combinations of bases (or blocks) — and then go about the task of reconstructing from all those possible combinations the exact sequence of bases (or blocks) in the original DNA, which more than a few random RNA sequences interacted with to make their choices from billions of bases in the first place?
Take a breath. There isn’t enough time in the history of the universe to figure it out for the tens-of-thousands of proteins that it takes to make a functioning animal or plant.
Raise the number “three” (or four, or five, or six, or two; it doesn’t matter) to the thousandth power on a calculator, those who may be having trouble accepting a possibly demoralizing fact. Most calculators will spit out the word, OVERFLOW. The number of possible sequences is impossibly large. It might as well be infinite.
This is the genetic code. I guess I should show it. (Click the pic for a clearer view.) A lot of folks worked on it; it was a pinch point; a roadblock that once slowed progress toward the understanding of what makes life live; how cells behave. Now that it’s known, is anyone sure it is the only code? The answer is, no. Variations have already been found in nature — at least 15 so far with more expected as researchers continue their work.
It seems likely that the ”code” has changed in dramatic ways since the first primitive cells formed 3.5 billion years ago. British zoologist, Matthew Cobb, has suggested that words like ”code” and ”information” might better be thought of as mere metaphors when applied to the machinations of complex molecules like DNA and RNA, which — can we admit? — operate on quantum scales for which we humans have no natural intuition.
There are thousands of chains of all different lengths and folding patterns. No one is going to reverse-engineer the DNA of a life-form as complex as a human being from its proteins; nor from its RNA elves; nor from its essential enzymes and catalysts; not anytime soon; not ever. It goes for dinosaurs, trees, or any other reasonably complex living thing — now or from the distant past.
Why do we have to reverse-engineer? Why not read the instructions right off the DNA itself? By now most readers must be starting to understand that the sequences necessary to build proteins are scattered among billions of bases. We can’t find the right ones in the right order. It’s not possible; not for creatures as complex as humans or dinosaurs.
Even if someone could reverse-engineer DNA sequences from proteins, how would they construct and organize the ant-like colonies of RNA elves that must sort through the DNA bases to select and build the right sequences; how do they identify and isolate the sequences necessary to build and orchestrate, for example, the tens-of-thousands of enzymes that are required to give researchers any chance at all to build a functioning human-being or even a prehistoric dinosaur?
It gets more complicated.
Those who don’t believe it might want to read about CNVs, or copy number variations, that disrupt the probabilities that certain base-sequences in genes can be fabricated in the same way time after time. Click the link.
It’s a form of change that has nothing to do with mutations or inheritance. It is more related to the untidy mess that three billion base pairs make whenever they get together to do anything at all. It’s a genetic Woodstock of variation, where almost anything can happen and sometimes does.
Now might be a good time to mention that there are virus infections that can alter the DNA in cells. These viruses are called retroviruses, because they reverse the DNA to RNA transcription process described earlier by introducing an enzyme into the cells they infect. This process is disease producing — it causes cancer — and destroys the host animal (or person) if left untreated.
The enzyme, reverse transcriptase, has become a tool that molecular engineers now use to modify organisms in experiments. Enough said. The weeds of molecular biology grow thick and deep.
This is the inverse genetic code. I might as well show it, too. (Click the pic for a clearer view.) Tables like this one make the ”code” appear to be comprehensive and far-reaching. Some readers might be surprised to learn that only one or two percent of the bases in human DNA are ever copied by RNA to make proteins.
Tables like the one above make the ”code” appear comprehensive and far-reaching. Some readers might be surprised to learn that only one or two percent of the bases in human DNA are ever copied by RNA to make proteins.
Added to 2% for protein synthesis is 8% to make little pieces of RNA that oversee and coordinate the process of protein-making — like colonies of swarming ants. The rest of the bases (90%) do other things; maybe — many of them — do nothing at all. No one is really sure what they do or don’t do.
Geneticists used to believe they could clone animals from their DNA sequences alone. Yes, there once was a cloned sheep named Dolly. Some readers may have read about her.
After many heart-breaking failures, researchers managed to take the DNA from the mammary gland of one sheep, inject it into the nucleus of an egg from a second sheep, and implant this DNA cocktail into the womb of a third. By some miracle, Dolly was conceived and born, on July 5, 1996.
Dolly (5 July 1996 – 14 Feb 2003). Pic by Tony Barros, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Sheep live twelve years, on average. By Dolly’s fourth year arthritis crippled her. At year seven researchers euthanized her; she had developed a chronic and incurable lung disease.
Dolly was the recipient of arguably the best healthcare any sheep ever received in the history of veterinary medicine. She didn’t do well. Click this link for an update on the Dolly research.
For the sake of complete accuracy, permit me to admit that no one I know clones sheep anymore. There are too many failures. The failure rate for clones is right around 100%.
Some breeders claim to clone horses, which they sell to folks who hope to increase their odds of winning races. I can argue that their definition of cloning differs from science, and the proof is that the horses have noticeable differences which negatively impact their ability to win.
Clone researchers, as far as anyone knows, have never used DNA alone, anyway. All borrow the enzymes, RNA, ribosomes, and other cell structures of other life forms to incubate the DNA they play with to try to create “artificial” life.
Mitochondrial DNA is unreachable. It is produced only in the ovum of the female. Mitochondrial DNA carried by sperm is miniscule in amount and quickly identified and destroyed in the fertilized egg.
Any technique that involves in vitro fertilization can bypass this natural process and inadvertently scramble the DNA in mitochondria. It can be debilitating, even disease producing.
Any technique that swaps out nuclear DNA while avoiding mitochondrial DNA doesn’t get to the power source of cells — a major enabler of stamina and endurance. In racehorses, the role of mtDNA is probably crucial, it seems to me.
My point is that duplicating a DNA sequence is not enough to produce an identical copy of an animal as complex as a sheep, horse, or human. Too much other stuff is going on during reproduction that is not controllable or even known.
And speaking of enzymes, can we please not go there? I’m reminded of Chris Farley in the 1992 movie, Almost Heroes.
Does anyone remember?
His tutor asks him to learn the symbol for lowercase A. ”What do you want from me?” Chris bellows while rolling his eyes and clawing his hair. ”You want my head to explode?!”
Well, no, of course not. But for those who have to know more, why not push ourselves just a little bit harder? May I point out the obvious? Enzymes speed up chemical reactions. A chemical reaction that might under normal circumstances take years can be reduced to milliseconds by an optimally configured enzyme.
Some enzymes are made from RNA; most are proteins; in fact, most proteins are enzymes; they all get their start from sequences of bases hidden deep within the mountains of DNA inside our cells. These bases are selected, copied, and transformed into their many convoluted shapes for a very special reason: to help accelerate over 5,000 processes inside cells.
Without these highly specialized structures, metabolism would grind to a halt; DNA and RNA would acquire all the mobility of a conga-line of standing stones; cell processes would freeze into a petrified forest of non-living complexity. Life as we know it would be impossible, code or no code.
This is XNA. I’m told it’s less messy and easier to manipulate than DNA. It’s very good at being loaded with code and used as a storage device for information.
Here is a good question: Has any research team ever created artificial life in a laboratory?
Craig Venter, who has been interviewed on 60 Minutes and appeared in several Ted Talks videos, says that he has. He oversees a number of research labs funded by big oil and the government. His labs write computer code to generate base sequences, which they construct and then inject into yeast (among other techniques) to produce life-forms that they hope will someday lead to biofuels and greenhouse gas inhibitors.
Among other accomplishments, one of the labs, the Craig Venter Institute, is known to have introduced a gene from the bacteria, escherichia coli, into the earth’s toughest microbe, “Conan the Bacterium” (Deinococcus radiodurans), to create microbes that can detoxify radioactive wastes at nuclear facilities.
So, the answer to the question about whether anyone has ever created artificial life must be, probably not, not really — not from scratch, anyway. Yes, people have done amazing things. No one has created life without using existing life to do it, though. The process is too complex. On Earth, it has taken 4.5 billion years.
Many argue that life fell to Earth from the stars. Even Earth itself might not have been able to ignite the spark that led to humans and all the life we know.
In 2012 a different group of researchers did find a way to arrange a set of different bases inside DNA-like molecules called XNA. But it was a way of coding sequences only; it didn’t produce or even arrange proteins into anything that could be called, alive.
The “X” stands for the Greek word, Xeno, which means “other.” XNA is other nucleic acid.
An informed reader told me that in fact a protein was made from a sequence of XNA in 2015. If true, the future of genetics could get interesting in coming decades.
XNA is at the very least the precursor, many hope, for long-term storage of massive amounts of information in small, stable molecules — demanded now by data-churning behemoths such as CERN, home of the world’s most powerful particle-collider, located in Geneva, Switzerland.
Just because artificially constructed molecules like XNA can store useful information does not mean that DNA does the same. People have imagined meaning into the bases of DNA, which they simply don’t have — to help better understand their function and to more effectively manipulate them — for good or ill.
Another development in 2012, which some readers may remember, is that researchers learned to use a process known by the acronym CRISPR to change the sequence of bases in stretches of DNA. They adapted an immunization process that bacteria use to kill viruses and defend against subsequent attacks.
Click on the pic to open a more readable image in another tab.
Bacteria use CRISPR to suck the DNA out of an attacking virus, which they store in a kind of library for future reference. If a bacterium survives and the virus dies, somehow the bacteria is able to develop a quick-kill strategy that it will use whenever it is invaded by more DNA that matches a copy in its collection.
Researchers learned to create novel CRISPR DNA based on the system used by bacteria. They then attached RNA guides and cas9 protein shears to the sequences. They learned to deploy the assemblies to search and destroy bad DNA; and to insert designer DNA in its place in the cells of plants and animals; even humans.
These scientists insist that gene “therapies” are necessary, because the fact is: DNA is defective — most of it, anyway. Very few humans are symmetrical, attractive, disease-free, smart, emotionally stable, long-lived, or any other desirable trait anyone might want that is driven by how humans are built, or how they are “coded” at a molecular level.
Crisper video published October 25, 2019 on YouTube.
Gene drivers (mentioned in the first paragraphs of this article) are being developed in coordination with CRISPR techniques to enable changes to DNA molecules that will be permanent and transmittable 100% of the time. Their success will depend on how well lab technicians understand what is going on inside the molecules of life; and inside our cells.
Editor’s note:In January 2018 some researchers admitted that problems related to positional locating have created a roadblock to success for CRISPR technologies. They hope to solve the difficulties soon to avoid a catastrophic failure in the application of this heralded gene-altering process. One process under development that seems to promise more precision and speed is to use electro-magnetic positioning in place of viruses.
I believe we need to slow down and learn more before we unleash immortal genes into the biosphere that no one can pull back and which may turn out to be harmful despite best intentions. Asilomar style conferences that lead to best-practice regulations with the force of international law behind them are desperately needed to control biotechnologies that are quickly getting out-of-hand and beyond the control or understanding of government and politicians.
It is quite certain that PCR technology (polymerase chain reactionamplification), which scientists use to amplify into a viewable goo the molecules of DNA-style life might be misleading folks into believing that DNA-style life is all there is.
Earth could be infested with non-DNA based life, but no one will know until other technologies capable of detecting and amplifying it are developed and perfected.
People need to remind themselves that we are talking about molecules here — molecules of life that can’t be seen — even with help of the most sophisticated microscopes. Everything science knows comes from amplification techniques and mathematical analyses. I hope someday to write an essay on the techniques scientists use to tease out what they know for sure about these next-to-impossible-to-observe molecules.
Serious scientists refer to the possibility for the existence of non-DNA style life as the “shadow biosphere.” If this non-DNA life interacts with our own in a symbiotic way, the potential for harm, it seems to me, increases the more lab technicians play around with molecules they don’t fully understand while they remain oblivious to life they can’t detect, because they lack appropriate laboratory tools and techniques.
An even messier problem is “dark DNA”. It’s DNA that can’t be found, though tests clearly show it must exist for certain cell processes to work right.
Some researchers argue that as many as twenty thousand proteins are manufactured in humans that, when they search the human genome, they can’t find the sequences that are required to be there, somewhere, to enable the proteins to be built. I urge readers to click this link to learn more about this potentially serious inability of sequencers to decode DNA accurately and completely.
No one knows what they don’t know; and what they don’t know can kill us all, if lab workers aren’t cautious. Researchers know they don’t know stuff — important stuff if they intend to play around with gene drivers and CRISPR induced gene sequencing.
Researchers might be walking through a genetic minefield but are so eager to cross that they ignore the dangers of amputated limbs; the loss of sight and hearing; the possibilities for disfigurement to the genomes and phenomes of species like our own, which all people may one day come to regret.
No human is perfect. Sometimes our imperfections are caused not by bad stretches of DNA but by naughty RNA elves who copy less than optimal sections of bases, which they hammer together into less-than-optimal genes, which can screw-up a sequence of amino acids. The RNA elves end up making defective proteins that pollute cells, damage our bodies, and make our lives miserable.
To the extent that these screw-ups are the result of a lousy sequence of bases in our DNA, perhaps these patterns will be able to be altered using CRISPR technology (if anyone can get it to work right), which is likely to increase the odds of inducing better outcomes. But many screw-ups, perhaps most, are not caused by poorly sequenced genes constructed from DNA.
Many problems result from bad choices made by some arbitrary RNA elf, for example, who might have decided, perhaps, to cut and paste a random mix of bad sections it rummaged from the DNA strands; its errors and mistakes might not always be able to be located, identified, and repaired successfully. Renegade RNA elves are hard to track down and kill; at least so far.
Some problems can be caused by all kinds of things not related to DNA, like temperature, quantum effects, and cosmic radiation, including sunlight. The number of things that can go wrong with the weather-environment inside cells is enormous. Copy number variations in gene sequencing is another problem area that I mentioned earlier.
Safety and reliability are probably the two most important reasons why our haystacks of six-billion DNA bases hide a mere twenty-one thousand so-called genes, most of which are scattered in pieces throughout our vast DNA bundled-network.
Those few sequences that are important for survival are less likely to be attacked and mutated if they are surrounded by sequences of little or no value to survival and good health. Base-sequences essential to life hide within chromatin like proverbial needles in a haystack.
Dolphins have noses but can’t smell; they lack olfactory lobes. Sequences in their DNA have been identified that resemble corrupted versions of sequences related to olfactory lobes in other mammals.
Big chunks of DNA are thought to be junk — relics left behind by billions of years of evolution and change. Junk DNA could be a legacy of screw-ups and obsolescence. Dolphins, for example, have noses, but can’t smell. They seem to have a lot of corrupt DNA sequences related to smell, which are broken and don’t work due to neglect and disuse.
Humans are no different. We have DNA we no longer use. Through disuse, our base sequences, some of them, get corrupted over time, some think, and become unusable. The base sequences don’t get up and go anywhere, though. They just hang around, paralyzed, doing nothing. They become unrecognizable to the RNA elves, who learn somehow to avoid them.
Mitochondria and bacteria don’t seem to have much, if any, junk DNA, but humans, like other animals and plants, have almost no nuclear DNA that isn’t junk. It’s kind of mysterious.
A Russian agronomist from the Soviet era, renown in his time as an expert on the cultivation of wheat, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, believed that plants and animals which were unlucky enough to find themselves subject to environmental stresses could draw on reserves from a pool of what is today called junk DNA to change their hereditary direction and enhance their survival odds. His idea has yet to be discredited.
The simple onion has 16 billion base pairs in its DNA. The loblolly pine tree — it’s an important source of lumber, which thrives in southern swamps — houses 22 billion. Humans have 3 billion.
EDITORS NOTE:As of January 2018, a Mexican salamander that can regrow limbs (the axolotl) has been sequenced. It is known to have 32 billion base pairs.
What do all these bases code for? They code for nothing, apparently. Maybe they are a warehouse of survival tools left behind as the distant past of billions-of-years ago gradually transforms itself into now; our miraculous present.
Another compelling idea that occurred to me as I wrote this essay is that the tangled mess of unused DNA in every plant and animal might have grown both in volume and complexity during ancient times — quite apart from environmental pressures on the life-forms themselves.
Could massive DNA growth have preceded evolution to enable and accelerate biodiversity during unforeseen environmental catastrophes?
It’s important to find out, because statistical studies on the rate of mutations seem to support the idea that mutational frequency cannot be the primary driver of species differentiation. Mutation rates are too low; the process is a snail’s pace compared to what is needed to transform a chimpanzee for example into an orangutan; or primates of any kind into humans.
Is it possible that mammoth reservoirs of disorganized and unused bases grew and multiplied inside the nuclei of ancient cells — like molds in petri dishes — to fuel bio-explosions of diversity and complexity when conditions were right? It’s a thought.
An abundant supply of unused DNA combined with aggressive colonies of swarming RNA segments might help to explain rapid, diverse bio-blooms (and even account for absences in fossil records) that seem to have occurred during the Cambrian era — to cite one example out of many.
The world’s smartest people are just getting started in the field of molecular genetics. Despite all that others have learned, much remains to know; more, much more, remains to discover and understand. Secrets hide in the complexity that are certain to better explain how biodiversity bloomed on planet Earth.
DNA bases are not a code, it seems to me; they are simply a platform for departing mRNA trains that, when properly coupled, can become assembly templates for chains of amino acids — complex assemblies of molecules that depend on very many processes and structures to have even the remotest chance of being transfigured by ribosomes into a seeming infinity of unlikely proteins — matrices of proteins and other structures, which have risen from the dust and the seas like the miracles of angels; an endless froth of bubbles; a deluge of structures that have over eons shaped the messy, sometimes ugly, often beautiful human beings and all other life on our planet; our home; our beloved Earth.
Adam Rutherford, the British geneticist said, ”This is the definitive history of arguably the greatest of all scientific revolutions.”
Life’s Greatest Secret is a must read for anyone who is interested in the science and history of the human genome. We strongly advise our readers to buy and read this important book. Billy Lee has read it twice, marking it up each time with magic-marker and margin-notes. It is a science blockbuster; a fantastic book written in an engaging, easy-to-understand style.
In an earlier article, Sensing the Universe, we asked the question: What exactly is the Universe? Most folks seem to agree that brains process the input of senses to create a useful but completely false view — a hallucination, really — of reality.
For one thing, sensations in minds of colors like yellow impart no knowledge whatsoever of the electromagnetic radiation that triggers the color experience.
Colors do not exist in the physical universe at all, right? Color is an illusion that brains conjure to help make certain choices — to enhance survival strategies, probably. Colors exist inside minds, nowhere else, I argued.
Readers can revisit the earlier essay if they want to better understand this follow-on, which is going to push everyone a few steps farther.
NOTE TO READERS:December 4, 2019: This essay is one of the longest on the site. To help readers navigate, The Editors asked Billy Lee to add links to important subtopics. Don’t forget to click or tap the up arrow on the lower right-side of the page to return to top.
Is the universe able to exist apart from conscious life?
Does anything exist apart from conscious experience?
Is it possible to know what exists in a Universe where conscious life is completely absent?
What consequences follow should all answers turn out to be, “no”?
How can this be?
The terms conscious life and consciousnessdeserve to be defined. For now, it’s better to leave the terms undefined except to say that anyone who reads this essay and believes they understand at least parts of it probably qualifies as conscious life.
As for Consciousness, it doesn’t necessarily require life, does it? How about intelligence? The simplest definition of Consciousness might be awareness. Most scientists and engineers agree that machines can be made aware when they are built right.
But this essay goes further. It suggests that neither machines nor biology are required to generate either awareness or conscious life.
Is there anyone reading this essay who believes I’m right?
Consciousness is likely to be a fundamental and basic property of reality.
It’s true.
Consciousness might be the most fundamental and basic property of the universe. Many philosophers of science agree. Every thinking person in their gut feels on some level that reality is ultimately immaterial, don’t they?
I think so.
Can something bubble forth from nothing?
These lead-off questions are important.
Why?
Imagine it was demonstrated either by direct experiment or mathematical deduction that — apart from consciousness — the universecould not exist.
Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem has dazzled mathematicians since 1931. Douglas R. Hofstadter wrote in a preface to his Pulitzer Prize winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid that any formal system based on mathematics (which he believed the universe was) ”…must spew forth truths — inadvertently but inexorably — about its own properties, and … become self-aware…”
What if Hofstadter was right, or at least partly right? What might be some implications?
Well, to begin, it seems necessary that consciousness must exist first before the universe can get going; or at least exist in the same spacetime to give the universe meaning.
What else might logically follow?
Well, again, if consciousness exists first (or concurrently), it must have always existed. Otherwise, the conclusion must be that consciousness bubbles-up from nothing. Human logic seems to require that something not bubble-forth from nothing.
Said another way, if something cannot exist apart from a conscious observer, then consciousness exists forward and backward in spacetime, forever — even if it turns out that the physical universe does not.
Consciousness might have mysterious and not yet understood properties — eternal and fundamental. And it might not be confined to awareness alone. To precede a physical universe, consciousness might have attributes related to causation. A long lineage of quantum physicists bends toward the view that particles don’t emerge from fields in the absence of measurements by conscious observers.
Erwin Schrödinger, the physicist of yesteryear who wrote the quantum wave equation, believed that consciousness existed independently of human beings. Consciousness in his view had a singular quality about it.
No matter how divided the mind, or how schizophrenic an individual, or how many personalities someone might display during their lifetime, consciousness seems always to be singular, Schrödinger wrote. It didn’t manifest itself in pairs or sets or multiples.
Subatomic particles are imaginary constructs invented by scientists to explain the results of experiments. No one understands what quantum objects are or what they ”look” like. Science has yet to reveal the underlying secrets of reality. It cannot explain how life began. It is not yet able to locate consciousness, or explain why it works the way it does.
Consciousness always has the same familiar qualia as it did in childhood. Even when an individual transforms and grows, learns new skills, gathers knowledge, and is reborn a dozen times — physically and psychologically in life’s many stages of metamorphosis and regeneration — consciousness feels the same. The aura doesn’t change.
To Schrödinger, consciousness was unique, singular, stable, unchanging, and consistent from one human being to another and over any one individual’s lifetime. The quality of consciousness had an invariance about it that seemed atypical for biologically driven attributes.
Consciousness, to Schrödinger, was something people shared, even plugged into, much like people today plug their televisions into a cable outlet.
To Schrödinger, consciousness had to be a phenomenon that lay outside the brain, not inside, as many of his contemporaries insisted. People were simply guessing wrong about consciousness, he said.
It wasn’t the first time. Ancient people once thought the center of consciousness lived inside the heart — until surgeons of the Spanish Inquisition discovered it didn’t.
Consciousness, to Schrödinger, was something people shared, even plugged into, much like folks today plug their televisions into a cable outlet. He attributed his insight to passages read from the Upanishads of ancient India.
Erwin believed that consciousness was an absolute and fundamental feature of the universe; something basic and simple; simpler even than an electron or quark, for example. It could not be accounted for in terms of anything else; certainly not in physical terms of something like what would become the Standard Model, for example.
I mention this view now to let readers know that ideas which might seem strange (and disturbing to some) are coming to anyone who gathers enough courage to read on.
Now might be the time to mention that many animals act like they are conscious. Self-awareness — measured by recognizing oneself in a mirror — might not bea reliable test of awareness in animals. Recognition of self in a mirror is a test of intelligence, which is something different.
Most scientists today seem to believe consciousness is a property of brains, not the universe itself.
Anyway, the prevailing view of science in the 21st century is to take a physical view of the universe and conclude that conscious life arises from physical processes on Earth, certainly, and perhaps many other places in the cosmos yet undiscovered. Since conscious life is assumed to be complex — more complex than particles and forces — consciousness must have developed after the physical universe, not before, most scientists reason.
Science takes the view that complexity evolves from simplicity; it has a direction similar to the arrow of time. Consciousness — invisible; never observed; undiscoverable; lacking any physical attribute that can be measured; indescribable; unknowable except to the individual who experiences it — is assumed to have evolved from physical objects and forces, which can be observed and measured, discovered and manipulated.
The legendary scientist, Francis Crick, who described the DNA molecule, suggested that the Claustrum might be the structure that brings the brain into the state called ”consciousness.” No one knows if he was right, because experiments to find out would be lethal, not to mention unethical and illegal.
Consciousness is like a ghost who inhabits complex life forms on Earth — the holistic result of a grand evolution in the complexity of physical brains. Consciousness is a feature of the brain, science insists; it lies inside the brain though it cannot be found there.
Some have suggested that a structure called the claustrumcouldplay a role. It is an assemblage of mostly identical neurons that looks like a potato-chip embedded in the brains of some animals, including humans. From it run connections to many important structures.
But the function of the claustrum remains a mystery. It might orchestrate the firing of neurons to flip the switch to consciousness. Then again, it might not. No one knows what it does.
Another possible candidate for the fabrication of consciousness is the micro-scaffolding, called microtubules, which support the internal structure of many kinds of cells. They permeate the interiors of soma cells and the root-like structures of brain neurons called dendrites.
NOTE from the EDITORS: This 13-minute video is a somewhat technical explanation of microtubules; interplay with neurons starts at 10:30.
Both Stuart Hameroff — an MD and emeritus professor for anesthesiology and psychology at the University of Arizona — and Nobel Prize winner Sir Roger Penrose — physicist, mathematician, and collaborator of the late Stephen Hawking — are promoting the notion that quantum properties of microtubules inside nerve cells of the brain and heart are the drivers for electrical dynamics of nervous-systems in people and other organisms.
These quantum level structures enable the simplest one-celled organisms — which lack neurons but are scaffolded by microtubules — to perform the neural functions of life.
Penrose and Hameroff are making a claim that the putative quantum behavior of microtubules, which are orders of magnitude smaller than neurons, might enable the subjective feeling of awareness and control that conscious life seems to share.
Some have argued like Schrödinger — see essay What is Life? — that some kind of structures (perhaps micro-tubules) might exist and function like quantum sensors to detect and interact with conjectured proto-consciousness, which is likely to be quantum in nature and foundational to a physical universe like ours.
The putative quantum nature of the brain is a reason why some theorists think entanglement and superposition explain much of the unusual behavior of conscious life.
Other scientists have stepped forward to label as absurd any notion that consciousness is quantum in nature or an intrinsic property of the universe; a few have ridiculed Dr. Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, for aiding and abetting what seems to them like quackery.
But not all.
Erwin Schrödinger believed consciousness was a fundamental property of the universe.
Consciousness is not, in contemporary consensus, a phenomenon that lies outside the brain (like light), which can be experienced by a life-form once it achieves a certain level of physical development.
Eyes, for example, evolve to detect a narrow band of electromagnetic radiation, which — though pervasive within the universe — is unknowable to life-forms who lack sense organs for vision.
The consensus of modern science seems to be that consciousness is not an intrinsic phenomenon of the universe that can be detected (or imbibed, to use a better word) by physical organisms after they attain a high level of biological complexity.
Most scientists would argue that a physical universe can teem with activity unobserved for billions of years. The universe may not exist for conscious life to observe until the universe creates it through an ageless process of evolution.
At the point when the universe manufactures conscious life, it acquires for itself a history and a definition determined by the life it brought forth, which now observes it. This idea seems reasonable until one understands that some of the most brilliant philosophers, many fluent in mathematics and sciences, disagree.
One popular opponent of this view is Australian David Chalmers who argues that consciousness is a fundamental requirement for a physical universe like our own; it predates life-forms such as humans.
Even a hard-headed scientist like Erwin Schrödinger, who gave the world the mathematics of the quantum wave function, imagined that quantum structures in the brain, should they exist, serve simply to connect (or entangle) the living to universal consciousness, which resides somewhere, somehow, outside brains, where it operates as the, perhaps, fundamental, intrinsic, and foundational property of the cosmos.
The smartest people who ever lived disagree about the nature of conscious life.
Why wouldn’t they?
None understand anything at all about what everyone calls the “hard problem.”
Matter and antimatter are in theory produced in a one-to-one ratio, which ought to ensure their mutual destruction. But if matter and antimatter emerge within spherical volumes, then their ratio must depend on the irrational number, π. The graininess of space determines to what decimal-place π rounds-off, which determines whether the ratio permits a little more or a little less matter than antimatter. In our universe the ratio may have gone positive and stayed that way for a long time. SOURCE: The Billy Lee Conjecture. To balance positive-matter and keep the universe in a zero-sum configuration, negative energies (like gravity) result, according to the late Stephen Hawking. Recall that energy and matter are equivalent per Einstein’s equation, . Energy and massless particles like photons of light are equivalent based on their frequencies; Einstein included this feature in his less familiar but expanded equation . These equivalencies are clues that might enable someone to properly explain how the universe works on large scales and small.
Virtual Particles
It might be worthwhile to pause a moment to examine another phenomenon about which physicists are in actual agreement. Taking a more wide-angled view of the universe should make conscious-life easier to think about and understand.
Because when anyone thinks about it — really thinks about it — what could be more unlikely than something dead — like a singularity that goes bang — bringing forth something that is not only alive but also conscious?
One popular explanation is that of science writer, Timothy Ferris, who wrote in a recent National Geographic article, ”Space looks empty when the fields languish near their minimum energy levels. But when the fields are excited, space comes alive with visible matter and energy.”
In other words, the apparent vacuum of space is an illusion that misleads observers about an underlying and hidden reality that includes pervasive fields of energy permeating all of space.
The positive and negative values of matter, energies, and forces of the entire universe sum to zero, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking wrote. But quantum uncertainties at every Planck-sized point in space oscillate about zero between positive and negative values. At this moment countless fluctuations across the vast expanse of space are skewing the balance — perhaps temporarily — into the structure of space and time, matter and forces, scientists observe.
My question is this: what is it that skews the balance of quantum fluctuations into a universe where humans can live in and observe? What brought the universe with its array of unlikely settings and its many arbitrary but exquisitely fine-tuned constants into the precise configuration required for the emergence of conscious life?
Stephen Hawking, former British Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge; born January 8, 1942; died March 14, 2018. The Editors
As Stephen Hawking made plain to non-scientists in his book, The Grand Design, there’s really nothing here. Not when it’s added up. The values of matter and energy add to zero. He speculated that the odds against a universe configured like ours could be as high as 10 followed by 500 zeros to one.
The number is so large that it might as well be infinity. It’s not possible for most people to say a number this big using only the words billion or trillion. They have to say a billion times a billion 56 times in a row without losing track — probably impossible. Or they could say a trillion times a trillion 42 times — not much easier.
It turns out that the only sure way to create a universe with conscious life by pure chance is to start with a multiverse populated by a number of universes equal to 10 followed by 400 zeroes multiplied by the entire number of protons and neutrons that exist in the one universe we know about — this one. Take a deep breath.
According to Stephen Hawking, developing a reasonable chance for a universe with human-like life might require a multi-verse containing a large number of other universes. Hawking estimated that it is equal to the number of protons and neutrons in our own universe multiplied by 10 followed by 400 zeroes. (As a practical matter, the number is equivalent to an infinity.) Some theorize that a multi-verse might resemble a vast ocean of foam with each bubble being a unique universe with its own fundamental constants, number of dimensions, and physical laws.
As mentioned before, everything observed in the universe seems to be the result of quantum uncertainties that hover around and sum to zero, both on small scales and large. Can uncertainties around a zero-sum reality give rise to consciousness?
Is it really uncountable trillions upon uncountable trillions of universes in an unimaginably large multi-verse that makes the existence of conscious human beings inevitable? Or is there some other mechanism which has drawn a single universe suitable for life out of the quantum fires of non-existence?
It’s a simple question. If the concept of a multi-verse turns out to be fantasy, then what is left? One solution to consider is that some form of conscious-life, fundamental and eternal, skewed the numbers and somehow imagined the universe into existence by a process that seems thus far unknowable.
What else could it be?
Think about it.
Without an unimaginably large number of universes, it’s not really possible for physical laws to configure themselves by chance into a universe with conscious life. It’s not realistic. Stephen Hawking said the odds are overwhelmingly against it; the chance might as well be zero, he said.
Take another breath.
EDITOR’S NOTE: July 4, 2019: Billy Lee published an essay today describing Roger Penrose’s conjecture about the origins of the Universe called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) or ”Eon Theory.” Recently launched satellites are gathering supporting evidence but the conjecture has not yet been embraced by mainstream cosmologists. Click the links to learn more.
Stephen Wolfram, British computer scientist and physicist, born August 29, 1959.
Stephen Wolfram in his book, A New Kind of Science, argues that a simple sequence of iterative quantum events which repeat and branch out according to a simple set of rules could, given enough time, generate a complex universe. Discovering what these simple rules might be has so far proved daunting. Presumably, the rules and events for such a sequence would have natural origins and create many universes out of the quantum uncertainties present in natural sets of initial boundary conditions.
Who knows?
One thing is certain. If it is ever proved that multi-verses are fantasy — if it is demonstrated that our universe is the only universe — then the argument for a conscious-life which has somehow imagined everything into existence is strengthened.
But it can’t be confirmed unless scientists establish that the so-called big bounce does not happen. If cosmologists show that the universe is in fact a one time non-repeatable event, then the case for a universe-generating conscious-life will be compelling if for no other reason than that the odds against a spontaneous one-time creation of a universe with unique and unlikely parameters are infinite.
Sean M. Carroll, Cosmologist, California Institute of Technology, born October 5, 1966.
One cosmologist who has gone on record against the possibility of a big-bounce scenario is Sean Carroll of Caltech. He has said that there is enough dark energy to drive an infinite expansion of our universe into a kind of entropic death.
His assertion, if proven true, seems to strengthen the argument for proto-conscious-life except that he also said that the whole of reality is probably a multi-verse populated by the births of trillions upon trillions of Big Bang events — which weakens the argument.
It seems that a definitive answer to the question of whether we live in a multi-verse (or not) might be a key indicator for or against the presence of a fundamental and foundational consciousness in nature.
Paul J. Steinhardt of Princeton University; born December 25, 1952.
In 2013 a new theory was proposed that argues against a multiverse. It was proposed by Paul Steinhardt, the Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University. His team’s idea is based on data gathered by the state-of-the-art Planck Satellite launched in 2003 to map the infrared cosmic background radiation.
The theory is ekpyrotic, or cyclic, and asserts that the universe beats like a heart, expanding and contracting in cycles with each cycle lasting perhaps a trillion years and repeating on and on forever.
Steinhardt was once a major advocate for the Big Bang theory and the mechanism of cosmic inflation. He had been a prominent proponent of the inevitable multi-verse that most versions of the Big Bang theory permit. He is now proposing an alternative scenario.
His latest theory has the advantage that it makes certain predictions that can be tested — unlike the mechanism of inflation required by the Big Bang theory, which can’t. In his new theory, every bounce of the universe resembles every other bounce and presumably generates similar constants, laws, and physics. If conscious-life is rare, most bounces will spawn a sterile universe.
If the idea is right, fine tuning of our universe would have to be the natural result of some underlying feature of reality not yet understood. In this model, consciousness can emerge, certainly, but is not necessarily fundamental, causative, shared, or even inevitable.
To my mind, this is the model of the universe that is the most compelling, the most incomprehensible, the most mind-blowing. Unlike all other theories, this one suggests that the universe might have no beginning and no end. It doesn’t change. It’s eternal. It beats with a familiar rhythm, the rhythm of our hearts, and it will never stop.
What is frustrating to me is that the ekpyrotic model doesn’t add insight into the question about conscious-life posed by my essay: Is consciousness a fundamental and necessary feature of physical reality?
Or is conscious life a rare accident that occurs inside a long path of infinite oscillations in a universe whose reason for being humans will never understand?
Editor’s Note:As of July 2017, studies of the cosmic background radiation have not revealed with high enough statistical precision the presence of primordial B-mode gravity waves — a discovery which, if confirmed statistically by high sigma, would undermine the ekpyrotic theory. Refinement of the search and examination of data continues. Right now, the ekpyrotic theory is hanging by a statistical thread.
Editor’s Note July 4, 2019: Another theory gathering supportive evidence is the Conformal Cyclic Cosmology model (CCC) proposed by Roger Penrose. Click the link to learn more.
I want to veer back to the previous discussion about matter and antimatter for a moment. It seems that each precipitates equally out of the energy enriched dimensional fields of spacetime so that in a smooth, un-pixilated universe matter and antimatter should self-annihilate and sum to zero. (Refer to the Billy Lee Conjecture in a prior illustration.)
A universe whose space is smooth and continuous will not self-generate anything at all from such a process. It is the geometry of a spherical bubble within a pixilated space-time fabric that forces surplus in the production of either matter or antimatter.
The choice between the two is completely determined by the size of the pixels that make up the fabric of spacetime because pixilation of spacetime forces the normally irrational ratio of the surface area of a sphere to its diameter to collapse to a rational number, which necessarily warps the symmetry of the sphere. If matter is generated inside multi-dimensional bubbles, any reduction to rationality that compels symmetries to fail will force an excessive production of one of the two possible states of matter. It can’t be any other way.
Some physicists believe matter (and its equivalent, energy) is pixilated at the scale of the Planck constant, at least in this universe. Experiments are underway to find out if this idea is true. For now, scientists observe mathematical evidence for mysterious particles coming into and out of existence everywhere all the time. And it is matter particles which seem to completely dominate anti-matter.
To counterbalance this preponderance of positive matter, negative energy must emerge, which scientists like Isaac Newton called gravity.
Einstein showed that matter and energy are equivalent; they are two sides of the same coin. He treated gravitational energy as a deformation by mass in a mathematical fabric he referred to as spacetime. Massless phenomenon like photons of light held energy by means of their electro-magnetic field frequencies.
No one understands why quantum fluctuations occur. Some think it’s an illusion driven by the mathematics of quantum mechanics. Others think it’s real.
We know that this phenomenon of spontaneous creation of positive matter (or frequency) and negative energy is occurring, because conscious minds (scientists) observe its effects in their laboratories. No one understands the mechanism of quantum fluctuations enough to rule out the possibility, it seems to me, that our own minds — in collusion with the instruments we have invented and built — somehow create the impression — a kind of illusion, really — of phenomena that can occur only in the presence of a conscious mind.
Is it possible, for example, that inside the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), scientists are creating the particles they want to see in order to confirm their parochial notions of the universe? They sometimes seem to be using their conscious minds and the machines they have designed to fabricate new worlds so remote and so tiny that they will never be observed, not by any human, not even by themselves, except in their imaginations as they read through publications of the results of their experiments in science journals.
Atlas ”particle” detector at CERN. Notice tiny human worker at lower center for scale.
Are theses scientists creating particles in worlds that lie deep within the subterranean matrix of exotic materials and forces they have built and modeled within their labyrinth of super-computers — which exist only in their imaginations, but which they are able to confirm by employing thousands of researchers around the world to pour over hundreds-of-thousands of pages of machine and sensor-generated gibberish, from which they glean the unlikely patterns they marvel-over in their peer-reviewed scientific publications?
Are these human beings, these scientists, in the first stages of using pure consciousness to create universes — albeit tiny ones — in the mammoth laboratories of CERN?
Maybe not. It seems preposterous. But it is a conspiratorial perspective I couldn’t resist including in my essay. Sorry.
Sean Carroll, in his book about CERN, The Particle at the End of the Universe, describes in chapter-six subsections — Information Overload and Sharing Data — that the data-handling and sampling processes used at CERN could enable just such self-fulfilling validations to occur absent careful and conscientious oversight.
There may be another reason why experiments always seem to confirm the Standard Model of quantum physics and never contradict it. A strange symbiosis between the standard model of sub-atomic reality — as measured by synchrotrons, accelerators, colliders, etc. — and mathematics may actually exist in nature.
If true, no one need despair that gathering resources to build larger colliders and other instruments is not practical. Theoretical physicists can simply do math to discover new truths. They can trust — should an experiment ever be completed in some unimaginably resource-rich future — that their math-based conjectures will be confirmed in the same way as was the Higgs boson.
Nima Arkani-Hamed, American theoretical physicist; born April 5, 1972.
Absent larger colliders, the path forward, according to theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, is to keep the work of discovery inside the experimental constraints imposed by the knowledge already gathered, as theoreticians labor to develop new theories.
These constraints are already so restrictive and so reduce the number of paths to truth that it’s possible someone might find a route to understanding which is unique, sufficient and exclusive. If so, theorists could have confidence in the new theories though experimental verification might lie beyond any foreseeable technology of the future.
Anyway, the universe shouldn’t exist, it seems, except that people can imagine — under the influence of the uncertainty in the remote decimal place described earlier — that tiny differences in the ratio of matter to antimatter which emerged in the ancient past created an imbalance — temporarily, perhaps, but continuing for billions of years — which piled up to become enormous. As matter continued to pile up, so did the negative forces like gravity, which counterbalanced it.
One day, gravity (and perhaps other forces like the mysterious and long sought-for dark energy) might pull all the positive matter back into a little pile; pull it back behind the event-horizon of what Stephen Hawking calls a black-hole; pull it back into the unfathomable uncertainties of a blinking and unstable quantum singularity aching to explode.
Explode into what? Perhaps the next quantum eruption will spiral out into a new and completely strange universe of different-valued fundamental constants and a bizarre number of dimensions — a universe almost certainly unsuitable, this time around, for life.
Is it possible that such a process — driven by tiny uncertainties (or tolerances) in the natural quantum ratio of matter to antimatter within a rare configuration of fundamental constants and numbers of dimensions — could give rise to not just any universe but to one with an emergent conscious life as well?
Stephen Hawking has speculated that it can, but cautions that the odds against life are huge. He has speculated that an infinite number of universes — a multi-verse — is required to get a reasonable chance that a universe as unique and unusual as ours will appear.
Some believe the large scale structure of the universe resembles a collection of neurons, much like a human brain.
Modern science agrees with Hawking and has decided that this universe — the one we live in now — is probably only one of an infinite number of universes that make a multiverse. Our unique and unusual universe has, over billions of years, fabricated a transient conscious life which is, at this very moment, observing it.
A fleeting conscious life is discovering that the universe hovers in a state which from a matter/antimatter perspective could — if a preponderance of antimatter were produced (perhaps in an adjacent universe, if not this one — sum to zero someday like a popping soap bubble and cease to exist. When the observing conscious life is extinguished during this possible zero-sum resolution in the distant future, the result will be no universe, no life, no memory, nothing.
In any event, if antimatter doesn’t annihilate the universe, entropy might. (Entropy is the natural process of heat death, where all motion and information decay to zero over time.) Under this scenario, when the end comes, in the far distant future, it will be said (were there anyone around who could say it): the universe never happened. It will become a vanishing blip on the screen of reality, because no one will remain to remember it.
Then again, the negative forces of gravity and dark energy might restore the zero balance required by quantum non-existence to pull together all positive matter into an uncertain quantum singularity called the Big Crunch. A new universe with new parameters and constants might then emerge after the singularity undergoes a quantum fluctuation.
Maybe the universe cycles endlessly, contracting and expanding like a beating heart, which some have characterized as aBig Bounce. During some expansions conscious-life emerges; in most others, though, it does not.
Another theory of a possible catastrophic scenario has recently emerged after scientists determined the mass of the Higgs ”particle” at CERN in March, 2013. It turns out its value might permit the Higgs field to someday (no one knows when) undergo a spontaneous phase transition.
A phase transition would change the value of many of the fine-tuned constants and forces that shape the chemistry and biology of the cosmos. A phase transition in the Higgs field would certainly be catastrophic for life. It would be as if the universe was a block of ice for billions of years and in one short spasm turned to steam.
In any event, a Higgs field phase-transition would obliterate all knowledge of the universe. All history of the existence of a missing universe from the recent (or ancient) past would be lost — unable to be reconstructed, detected or proved. The universe didn’t exist; it never existed. In fact, it could not have existed.
One dynamic that no one talks about is a mass of parallel universes stacked like pancakes on all sides of our own. The mass that lies outside our own universe might be dense enough to transmit a gravitational tug that is pulling our universe apart like an expanding soap bubble in a field of foam.
This external mass might drive an expansion that provides the energy that forces galaxies to rotate at their far reaches faster than physicists think they should. Mass outside our universe could transform the metrics of our own space-time to initiate someday the phase transformation in the Higgs field that would follow a runaway expansion — an expansion that ends in nothingness, like a soap bubble popping on a grand scale.
The consequence of zero-sum, under which matter and antimatter, like popping soap bubbles, add to nothing;
or entropy, where all the material and information in the universe decline and decay by cooling and freezing to a motionless absolute zero;
or the big crunch, where negative forces pull positive matter into a quantum singularity which fluctuates into one of an almost infinite number of new realities;
or an endlessly repeating big bounce, where the universe contracts and expands like a beating heart that is driven by a set of fundamental constants that never really change — though the history of every bounce is erased by the bounce that follows;
or an inevitable phase transition in the Higgs field which vaporizes the cosmos into a state of virtual non-existence…
…means, logically, and in the perfect hindsight of an imaginary observer billions (or, perhaps, trillions) of years from now, that the probability there ever was a universe of matter populated by conscious-life might actually be zero.
A long time from now, the universe may disappear, either from the natural process of entropy, or an increase in the generation of antimatter, or both. Then again, it could morph into something unrecognizable and hostile to life through the mechanism of the Big Crunch. It might endlessly regenerate copies of itself through a cycle called the BigBounce where conscious-life almost never develops. Another possibility: a spontaneous Higgs Field phase transition, which vaporizes the universe where we live, perhaps driven by forces that live outside in a field of universes we will never see.
Yes, scientists say, under every scenario they can imagine, the universe in which humans now live will cease to exist. Conscious-life will disappear. No one will be left to argue about it. All the evidence will point to a universe that never happened.
Of course, no one will hear the evidence. In the universe that doesn’t exist, and even in an existing universe where conscious-life cannot or does not emerge, there is no reality, there is no evidence, no information, no history.
EDITORS NOTE: July 4, 2019:Based on the recent theory by Roger Penrose it may not necessarily be science-fiction to imagine that intelligent life might communicate across successive universes using the cosmic background radiation as a kind of writing tablet. As crazy as the idea sounds, evidence gathered by recent satellites is making a statistical case for Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.
These views, as I understand them, reflect the most popular ideas in modern science about the universe and conscious-life. They make sense. But these views reek with futility and despair. And, despite sensibility, they fail to answer a basic question: how can this be?
This graphic shows what scientists think happened, not why or how.
How is it that random fluctuations in the aether (for lack of a better term) generated something on the scale and immensity of a universe; perhaps an infinity of universes; and gave birth to conscious life?
The mere existence of a universe (and its conscious life) emanating from uncertain and random fluctuations in the vast nothingness of nothing seems ludicrous on its face. We can’t make sense of it; not in any way that permits us to exhale, throw out our arms and say, ahhhh… so that’s how it works.
We are missing a piece of the puzzle. It seems that modern science has led us into a tunnel that has no light at its end.
Like the radiation that stimulates our brains to create the brilliant colors we see inside our heads, consciousness may pour into us from out there.
What is anyone to make of all this? On the one hand, there is a consensus among contemporary scientists who believe consciousness results from the way brains are hard-wired. Throw in enough parallel electrical circuits to reach a threshold, add in sufficient hormonal feedback loops, and, voila! — consciousness. One problem, though: no one has done it; not yet.
On the other hand, we hear the echoes of the voice of one of the fathers of quantum physics, Erwin Schrödinger, calling from the shadows of recent history. He says, No! Brains are detectors, imbibers, of a consciousness that lives outside ourselves and is, in fact, a fundamental and foundational feature of reality. Like the mysterious electromagnetic radiation that pours into our skulls to excite our brains into conjuring up the brilliant colors we see inside our heads, consciousness pours into us from out there.
Like the unseen and as yet undiscovered dark matter and dark energy that many scientists believe together shape the universe and drive its expansion, consciousness remains elusive of attempts to discover it. Perhaps scientists aren’t looking hard enough or in the right places.
Then again, maybe dark matter doesn’t exist and will never be found, if alternative theories like MoND (modified Newtonian dynamics) prove true. It might be that the shape of galaxies and the accelerating expansion of space are instead the evidence of parallel universes that stack like pancakes against our own universe to add the elusive gravitational forces necessary to both constrain the galaxies and drive the expansion of space. Who knows?
It might be that MoND and the gravitational tug of parallel universes work together to produce the odd cosmology astronomers are observing with today’s modern space sensors. Constructing a successful model of the universe which incorporates the reasonable conjectures of MoND might depend on a collaborative summation of forces that occur both inside and outside of our own universe.
What the universe is and how it really works is not yet understood by the scientists who line up for funding before governments and universities; not even close.
What if life-forms are connected in some way to a Conscious-Life who brought the physical universe into existence?
In any event, under the stimulation of consciousness, all seem to know on some level deep inside that they are alive and aware and connected, somehow. They feel a certain common awe when they look up into the night sky and see the universe that birthed them; folks seem to sense a Conscious-Life who stands behind it all; who knows and cares about them; who shares with them the glorious experience of the universe. It’s the religious experience that every culture on the earth has in common.
What if this experience is real? What if we are connected in some way to a fundamental and eternal Conscious-Life who brought the physical universe we know into existence, perhaps through pure thought like we imagined earlier the scientists at CERN might be learning to do?
Is this a question worth exploring?
Does consciousness come first or last?
Is an answer within our grasp that will satisfy our yearning for truth and certainty? Or is it a dispute that will never be settled?
Tobias Dantzig, the Latvian author of Number (one ofAlbert Einstein’s favorite books), once claimed, …from the standpoint of logic either hypothesis is tenable, and from the standpoint of experience neither is demonstrable.
Can he be right? Will the arguments between hard-headed scientists and stubborn philosophers last forever?
I don’t think so. Scoffers may say no, the dispute is already settled. Schrödinger was wrong. And if he wasn’t wrong, could anyone detect the difference? Does it matter at all if consciousness lives inside our heads, or if brains draw consciousness from the universe outside?
I believe the issue can be settled. And it is important. The stakes for humans are enormous. In religion, philosophy, politics, and government what people do, the way they live, their planning for the future; the ways they choose to live out their lives and organize their societies, humans seem to be grounding every decision, every action, every moral choice they make on an assumption that each person creates inside themselves a unique view of reality, which will die when they do.
But what if they are wrong?
What if we learned that consciousness doesn’t die?
What if we learned that, though our bodies may someday die, consciousness never dies; the feature of our existence which imparted the sensation of awareness was something our bodies fed on during their brief lives to give them meaning?
What if our kids and grandkids, our friends and neighbors, even our enemies, and all those that came before us and will someday come after us imbibe alike from this same life-enhancing pool of awareness?
What if all life-forms, sufficiently developed, drink from an ocean of Conscious-Life everywhere in the universe?
What if we learn it isn’t our bodies that make us feel alive?
It is instead a fundamental and basic feature of the universe, a sea of consciousness from which we all drink while our bodies live.
What are the consequences should we learn that, though our bodies and brains may decay to dust,the awareness that makes us feel alive never does?
What if we learn we are conscious-life and always will be?
Billy Lee
Addendum by the Editorial Board, 16 September 2018: Michael Egnor is not a public person; his biography on Wikipedia is hopelessly incomplete. Nevertheless, he has performed a number of neurosurgeries, apparently, where outcomes ran counter to popular theories about how the brain and consciousness work.
On September 14 Michael Egnor published in Christianity Today a non-scientific article where he wrote about his clinical experience. Billy Lee strongly argued against publishing a link to his article, but The Editorial Board, unanimously overruled.
Seen through the prism of Billy Lee’s essay, we agree that the article contains clues that readers might find helpful despite the surgeon’s biases — one or two of which Billy Lee might characterize as kind of silly. Here is the link: More Than Material Minds. The Editors
Sensing involves seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting, right? It’s the traditional five senses that most folks learned about in elementary school a long time ago.
Scientists added complexity to the number and capabilities of the senses in modern times to include “modalities” like sense of place, pain, balance, temperature, vibration, and awareness of chemical concentrations — like salt and carbon dioxide— inside the body.
All this complexity pushes readers into deep weeds, which I am going to avoid in this essay. It will work just as well not to needlessly bewilder people.
Never mind that certain life forms like birds can sense the earth’s magnetic field, or that sharks can sense the electrical activity in living prey. Many ways of sensing the universe are possible. This essay deals with those most familiar to humans.
Until humans developed the technologies of modern science, sensing (and making sense of what was sensed through the mental process of reasoning) was how people formed ideas about what the universe is. But there was a big problem.
Senses told us the sun looked yellow, thunder sounded loud, rocks felt hard, roses smelled sweet, and almonds tasted bitter.
The problem should now be obvious.
These qualities don’t exist in the universe. They are hallucinations of brains created when organs like the eye, ear, skin, nose, and tongue interact with elements of the universe which, in themselves, share none of these qualities.
Qualities like these don’t exist in the physical universe. They are hallucinations of living brains.
These hallucinations are inaccessible to all but the living organism who experiences them. They are unique and not detectable by others, in this sense: people can ask others if they see the same yellow color they see. When they say yes, they can decide to take them at their word, or not.
It is not possible to prove that they are telling the truth. In fact it’s not possible for anyone to answer truthfully, because no one can know how anyone but themself experiences the color yellow.
The interaction of sense organs, like eyes, with electromagnetic radiation is selective. Only a limited range of frequencies will stimulate the retina of the eye, for example, to emit the necessary electric and chemical messaging the brain uses to construct the hallucination called vision.
Some of the radiation falling into the eye does not interact with any sensing organ and remains undetected. In fact, the human eye can detect only wavelengths of light between 15 and 35 millionths of an inch long (400 to 900 nanometers).
Note to the non-technical :A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, which is written as a decimal point followed by eight zeroes and a one — i.e. .000000001. In engineering shorthand it’s written as 1E-9 meters. Humans see wavelengths of light that are 400 to 900 times longer. Scientists and engineers usually work in meters, not inches. The Editorial Board.
This narrow range is transformed by structures in the retina into messaging the brain can use. Wavelengths up to a thousand times longer (one thirty-second of an inch) are able to be felt as heat.
To the rest of the light spectrum, humans are completely blind. This spectrum includes light with wavelengths as long as sixty miles (called radio waves) down to wavelengths of light called gamma rays, which are many millions of times smaller than the wavelength of violet, the shortest wavelength human eyes can detect.
One reason people (and other life) see and feel a limited range of frequencies is because the energy of the sun that is able to penetrate Earth’s atmosphere to reach its surface lies in this limited band. The rest is blocked.
Of the sun’s energy that is able to reach Earth’s surface, 43% is in the narrow visible spectrum people can see. 49% is in the form of heat, which can be felt. Ultra-violet light — which some insects see — makes up 7%. Life on Earth evolved to sense light at wavelengths able to reach its surface.
The other parts of the light spectrum — like X-ray and gamma light — are deflected or absorbed by the nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere. Only 1% of the sun’s energy that manages to reach Earth’s surface lies in these high frequency bands.
A great deal of the light that reaches Earth from outside the solar system falls into the range of low-energy radio frequencies to which all Earth-life is completely blind. Radio-frequency light-waves are long and fuzzy. The sun produces mostly higher frequency light. Radio-waves seem to be unnecessary to the survival of life on Earth.
An ability to sense radio waves makes no impact on living things; it provides no survival advantages. Yes, on Earth intelligent life-forms (i.e. humans) have learned to amplify and convert radio light into sound to communicate and entertain themselves over large distances.
Scientists continue to search for evidence that far away life, should it exist, might share the same aptitude for communication. So far, the search has found nothing — no evidence for any kind of life whatever.
The image of light formed by the mind is fantastic — which means it is useful to the organism that sees the image, but the image doesn’t contain many (or any) clues about the external physical phenomenon that triggered its creation.
There is nothing even remotely similar between the color yellow (or any other color) and the electromagnetic radiation that oscillates trillions of times per second to ignite the mechanisms of vision.
There is nothing even remotely similar between the color yellow (or any other color) and electromagnetic radiation oscillating trillions of times per second.
The hard solid feeling of rock has nothing in common with the silicon atoms from which rock is made and whose nuclei are separated from one another by spaces many thousands of times their size. Nor does it have anything in common with the hundreds of different molecules which make up the nearby skin and nerve cells — themselves many millions of times larger than silicon atoms and separated from them by large distances.
The feeling of hard solid and the color yellow exist in my mind. I am sure of it. But can I find, for example, the color yellow in your mind?
The answer is no. A brain surgeon might probe a part of someone’s brain, and they report seeing yellow. But if she examines the area of the probe, she has no chance of discovering the color yellow. She will never find it.
My experience with the color yellow is subjective. If you tell me you also experience yellow, I believe you, because you are like me, and it seems reasonable that we will experience things in the same way.
But if you were asked to prove you see yellow the way I see it, you couldn’t do it.
Not only colors, but sounds, feelings, smells and tastes will vanish without a trace once life is gone. So again, the question: What, exactly, is the Universe?
If life disappears from the universe it will take the color yellow with it. Only the electromagnetic radiation that triggered the hallucination of the color yellow will remain.
Since the radiation can no longer be detected, seen, or experienced by any conscious observer, what is it exactly? Not only colors, but sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes will vanish without a trace once life is gone.
So again, I ask: What exactly is the universe?
Gas Sensor
Let’s “look” at scientific inquiry for the answer. What does science do? Science examines the universe quantitatively and avoids the qualitative and subjective attributes the senses provide. Or it at least tries to.
Science designs detectors to find as much discoverable phenomenon as it can — phenomenon human biological senses can’t discern or aren’t sensitive enough to experience.
But someone has to ask: Aren’t these detectors nothing more than enhanced sensors augmented by gauges and dials to increase the precision of measurement? And don’t living, conscious human-beings use their senses and their brains to make sense of the information the detectors provide? What has anyone gained by science?
The scientist’s tool of choice is mathematics, because it dramatically reduces the fuzziness — the subjectivity — of the senses, and replaces qualities like the color yellow and the feeling hard solid with measurables like oscillations per second and pounds per square inch; that is, with attributes that can be measured by all observers and which, presumably, exist independently of a conscious mind.
Mathematics uses logic and simplified representations of objects and forces to create symbolic models. Certain operations can be performed on these models to reveal non-intuitive relationships among the simplified variables.
Ok… again, have we gained anything? Or does mathematics force a sacrifice of information and detail to simplify understanding? Are we closer to knowing what the universe is, or farther away? Can the best sensors and the most sophisticated mathematics really get humans closer to understanding what the universe is?
One surprise that mathematics has revealed: telescopes and other sensors show that too much gravity is at work in the universe for the amount of matter and energy scientists see. 85% of the matter that must be out there can’t be seen.
More shocking: 95% of the energy and matter that the theory of gravity says must be out there, no one has ever observed. Physicists don’t know what this invisible matter and energy is, or even where it is — though some scientists believe it is evenly distributed throughout the cosmos. They call it dark matter and dark energy.
I don’t want to scare anyone, but the universe is mysterious, and no one understands it. Two questions I’m grappling with:
2 – Is Consciousness powerless to interact with the universe in ways that change it?
Consciousness may exist independently of any individual conscious-being.
These are serious questions.
If the answers to these questions are yes, then consciousness is not necessary for the universe to exist, and the understanding of what the universe really is will probably never be complete — certainly not for humans. Consciousness is something that evolved over billions of years and will someday be missing once again.
The universe won’t notice or care. Conscious life — like humans — can think about the universe all they want. They will never change it. This is the current popular view, is it not?
But the answers to these questions could be no. And it might be possible to prove it.
Consciousness might be something human beings plug into and even share.
If the answers turn out to be no, the implications are profound.
No means the physical universe may have evolved from consciousness, not the other way around.
No means conscious humans may have the ability to completely understand the universe and make sense of it someday.
No means that consciousness may exist independently of any individual conscious-being.
No might mean consciousness is something human beings plug into and even share.
No might mean God exists, and — though our bodies die — we never will.
This February marks the 71st anniversary of the lecture series What is Life? presentedat Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland by quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger — best known today for his Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment.
In these lectures Schrödinger correctly described — ten years before James Watson and Francis Crick published their work on the structure of DNA (for which they won the Nobel prize in 1962) — many of the important and essential markers of the yet undescribed and undiscovered molecule that we now know determines everything about us and all other living things.
The lectures are remarkable for their prescience and clarity — they have an almost prophetic quality about them — but what I found most interesting (and it’s all interesting to me) are Schrödinger’s observations in the Epilogue, which he labeled On Determinism and Free Will.
After some warm-up remarks he says:
But immediate experiences in themselves, however various and disparate they be, are logically incapable of contradicting each other.
So let us see whether we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises: (i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature. (ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.
. Energy and massless particles like photons of light are equivalent based on their frequencies; Einstein included this feature in his less familiar but expanded equation 
. These equivalencies are clues that might enable someone to properly explain how the universe works on large scales and small. 
