In The Beginning E equaled mc squared: Days 1 through 3
In the beginning of the Mayan universe there was water that produced six blue feathered gods who planted a ceiba tree to separate the earth from the sky, which led to the creation of plants and animals, humans without souls (who had to be destroyed,) then humans made out of wood who decayed into monkeys and of course a macaw that pretended to be both the sun and the moon. A while later two brothers emerged who angered the underworld with their incessant ball playing. They were eventually lured down yonder where they were both decapitated, their heads were displayed in a cacao tree, one of which spit on the goddess Xquic, who became pregnant, gave birth to hero twins who eventually — in a round about way — created humans with souls from corn meal.
The end.
In the beginning of the ancient Chinese universe the god Pangu was born inside a black egg that appeared amidst the primordial chaos. For 18,000 years he slept as the cosmos calibrated itself, emerging from the egg (the top half of which became the sky, the lower half the earth) Pangu put the final touches on yin and yang’s work with a swing of his ax. But as all good things do, Pangu came to an end; whereupon his eyes became the sun and the moon, his flesh the soil, hair the plants and trees, his blood and sweat formed our rivers and lakes and humans evolved from the parasites that infested his body.
The end.
In the beginning of the Sumarian universe… or I should say, In one of the beginnings of the Sumarian universe a fight erupted among the gods over the noise level allowed during nap time. In that fight Marduk killed both Tiamat and Qingu, then split Tiamat’s body “like a dried fish,” using one half to form the heavens and its various lights and the other half to form the earth and its various landscapes. From Qingu’s blood he formed humans.
The end.
Continue this tour of creation myths yourself and I’m sure you’ll find similar tales of deistic violence or lust wherever you touch down in the ancient world… except in one spot, among a band of largely illiterate nomads who wandered back and forth between Ur and Egypt thousands of years ago. In stark contrast to every other ancient creation myth I’ve read, the opening scene in the opening chapter of their tale moves patiently across time in an eerily scientific fashion. No violence, no swearing, no adultery and no Hogwartsian solutions to the problem of creation. Just a boring progression from simplicity to complexity. Yet despite a similarity with modern cosmology, from Aristotle up to the middle of the 20th century the story had one major problem: the phrase “In the beginning…”
“In the beginning” was a non-starter because the universe allegedly had no beginning. Until the modern era the idea of a static universe was so alluring that when Einstein’s field equations suggested that the size of the universe changed over time he introduced the concept of the cosmological constant (a number represented by the Greek letter lambda “λ” that made his beloved steady-state universe possible again.) But when a few years later data from the Hubble telescope uncovered evidence that the universe was not static but was expanding, Einstein deleted the λ from his equations and referred to the introduction of his cosmological constant as his “biggest blunder.”
Although Einstein quickly adapted to the idea of an expanding universe, for decades much of the scientific world remained committed to the millennium-old theory of a beginningless universe. But in 1965 most of the holdouts were converted when physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson waded through a pile of pigeon dung to discover photographic evidence of the event that astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively referred to as the Big Bang:
The end.
In the beginning of the ancient Chinese universe the god Pangu was born inside a black egg that appeared amidst the primordial chaos. For 18,000 years he slept as the cosmos calibrated itself, emerging from the egg (the top half of which became the sky, the lower half the earth) Pangu put the final touches on yin and yang’s work with a swing of his ax. But as all good things do, Pangu came to an end; whereupon his eyes became the sun and the moon, his flesh the soil, hair the plants and trees, his blood and sweat formed our rivers and lakes and humans evolved from the parasites that infested his body.
The end.
In the beginning of the Sumarian universe… or I should say, In one of the beginnings of the Sumarian universe a fight erupted among the gods over the noise level allowed during nap time. In that fight Marduk killed both Tiamat and Qingu, then split Tiamat’s body “like a dried fish,” using one half to form the heavens and its various lights and the other half to form the earth and its various landscapes. From Qingu’s blood he formed humans.
The end.
Continue this tour of creation myths yourself and I’m sure you’ll find similar tales of deistic violence or lust wherever you touch down in the ancient world… except in one spot, among a band of largely illiterate nomads who wandered back and forth between Ur and Egypt thousands of years ago. In stark contrast to every other ancient creation myth I’ve read, the opening scene in the opening chapter of their tale moves patiently across time in an eerily scientific fashion. No violence, no swearing, no adultery and no Hogwartsian solutions to the problem of creation. Just a boring progression from simplicity to complexity. Yet despite a similarity with modern cosmology, from Aristotle up to the middle of the 20th century the story had one major problem: the phrase “In the beginning…”
“In the beginning” was a non-starter because the universe allegedly had no beginning. Until the modern era the idea of a static universe was so alluring that when Einstein’s field equations suggested that the size of the universe changed over time he introduced the concept of the cosmological constant (a number represented by the Greek letter lambda “λ” that made his beloved steady-state universe possible again.) But when a few years later data from the Hubble telescope uncovered evidence that the universe was not static but was expanding, Einstein deleted the λ from his equations and referred to the introduction of his cosmological constant as his “biggest blunder.”
Although Einstein quickly adapted to the idea of an expanding universe, for decades much of the scientific world remained committed to the millennium-old theory of a beginningless universe. But in 1965 most of the holdouts were converted when physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson waded through a pile of pigeon dung to discover photographic evidence of the event that astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively referred to as the Big Bang:
Although admittedly I don’t know why, this photo provides mountains of evidence that our universe unexplainably and suddenly began to exist
In 1998 two independent studies confirmed that not only is the universe expanding but the expansion rate is increasing, which implies that if you go back in time the universe shrinks in size. Keep going back and it keeps shrinking until you arrive at a moment when both the universe and time didn’t exist. Although Sir Fred Hoyle (leader of the opposition to the Big Bang Theory) went to his grave insisting that the universe was eternal and accurately described by the steady-state model, few of his colleagues have been willing to die on that same hill; possibly because Hoyle’s opposition was due more to ideology than evidence. In a recent book cosmologists Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok write that…
“Hoyle, in particular, found the big bang abhorrent because he was vehemently antireligious and he thought the cosmological picture was disturbingly close to the biblical account. To avoid the bang, he and his collaborators were willing to contemplate the idea that matter and radiation were continually created throughout the universe in just such a way as to keep the density and temperature constant as the universe expands.”
Unfortunately for Hoyle, the last 100 years of astronomy has dealt death blow after death blow to the idea that this universe is eternal. The evidence suggests that all you see around you had a beginning; a point in time prior to which science offers us no insight because only after that point did our universe and its laws begin to exist. If we’re interpreting the data correctly, there seems to be something to what those ancient nomads in Canaan said in the opening line of their millennium-old creation story…
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
That introduction exists as a preamble of sorts, and if it was the only phrase in the tale that matched the cosmological record, the story wouldn’t be all that interesting; but keep reading and you’ll find that in the very next verse, things get weird…
“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
Initially the verse makes no sense, because how on earth can “earth” be “without form, and void?” Similarly how can water, which comes in three different forms, exist in a formless void? It doesn’t make sense… unless you couple an accurate description of the very earliest stages of the universe with the universe’s most famous equation: E = mc²
In the beginning, in the very beginning, in the first trillionth trillionth of a second, the substance of the entire universe could fit into the palm of your hand; and at that moment, matter did not exist. The substance was substanceless. All that existed at that moment was energy. Although the concept of matter in energy form is not intuitive, it can easily be made so by looking at Einstein’s equation and simply deleting the “c²” (the speed of light squared,) like this:
E=m
Do that and you’ll find that what Einstein is telling you is that energy and matter are different expressions of the same substance. Just like H₂O can exist as ice, water or gas, so too can matter become energy and energy, matter. The two are variants of the same material theme. Look, I’ll show you what I mean.
“Hoyle, in particular, found the big bang abhorrent because he was vehemently antireligious and he thought the cosmological picture was disturbingly close to the biblical account. To avoid the bang, he and his collaborators were willing to contemplate the idea that matter and radiation were continually created throughout the universe in just such a way as to keep the density and temperature constant as the universe expands.”
Unfortunately for Hoyle, the last 100 years of astronomy has dealt death blow after death blow to the idea that this universe is eternal. The evidence suggests that all you see around you had a beginning; a point in time prior to which science offers us no insight because only after that point did our universe and its laws begin to exist. If we’re interpreting the data correctly, there seems to be something to what those ancient nomads in Canaan said in the opening line of their millennium-old creation story…
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
That introduction exists as a preamble of sorts, and if it was the only phrase in the tale that matched the cosmological record, the story wouldn’t be all that interesting; but keep reading and you’ll find that in the very next verse, things get weird…
“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
Initially the verse makes no sense, because how on earth can “earth” be “without form, and void?” Similarly how can water, which comes in three different forms, exist in a formless void? It doesn’t make sense… unless you couple an accurate description of the very earliest stages of the universe with the universe’s most famous equation: E = mc²
In the beginning, in the very beginning, in the first trillionth trillionth of a second, the substance of the entire universe could fit into the palm of your hand; and at that moment, matter did not exist. The substance was substanceless. All that existed at that moment was energy. Although the concept of matter in energy form is not intuitive, it can easily be made so by looking at Einstein’s equation and simply deleting the “c²” (the speed of light squared,) like this:
E=m
Do that and you’ll find that what Einstein is telling you is that energy and matter are different expressions of the same substance. Just like H₂O can exist as ice, water or gas, so too can matter become energy and energy, matter. The two are variants of the same material theme. Look, I’ll show you what I mean.
The United States brought an end to the Pacific campaign by placing 2.2 lbs of uranium 235 into the tip of a warhead, then above Nagasaki they somehow figured out how to get a mere 2% of those uranium atoms to simultaneously self-destruct. The key to the venture though was the simultaneity of the event. It turns out that a massive amount of energy is released every time the bonds that hold a solitary atom together, break. But if the breaks occur sequentially, one or just a few atoms at a time, then the event goes unnoticed. However, figure out how to synchronize the break among neighboring atoms, and in the nearest pen cap you find (go ahead and find one, hold it in your hand,) as I was saying; get the atoms in that pen cap to simultaneously erupt and you will level your city. Because matter is energy. And there is a massive, city-leveling quantity of energy in even very small quantities of matter. It’s like Einstein wrote…
m=E
And in the beginning all the matter that you see around you, and in the night sky, and through all of the globe’s most powerful telescopes, all of that matter and more was contained in an infinitely minuscule space that began to expand suddenly at an unfathomable speed. So violent were the initial seconds of the universe’s existence that the formation of the bonds that make atoms possible was impossible. So if you were to write that in the beginning “the earth was without form, and void” you would be dead on. Because everything that would one day become “earth” was initially expressed in its energy state. There was no matter. Earth was formless, and void.
Weird huh?
Now if those illiterate nomads were merely 2 for 2 and the rest of the tale’s accuracy broke down when compared to the cosmological record, I wouldn’t take the time to note the congruence of their story with cosmology. But their string of lucky guesses continues, although not if you misread the story.
Misread the story and you might get tripped up by the fact that the early Hebrews wrote that “darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Admittedly it’s very easy to mistake what’s going on here because it sounds like the writer is describing an irreconcilable contradiction: an ocean in a formless void. It seems like this God of theirs can’t get though a single sentence without stumbling over His own premises. But keep studying the earliest stages of the universe’s development and you’ll note this fascinating fact:
When the universe finally expanded enough to give room for energy to convert into matter (3 minutes after the initial explosion) it was roughly 128,000 times hotter then the surface of the sun and the particles that did exist were colliding at such speeds that the only possible form that matter could take… was liquid.
The stuff that became us was still moving so fast that it couldn’t stick together long enough for non-liquid substances to emerge. Of that moment in our pre-pre-pre-history, NASA writes “According to the theories of physics, if we were to look at the Universe one second after the Big Bang, what we would see is a 10-billion degree sea of neutrons, protons, electrons, anti-electrons (positrons), photons, and neutrinos.”
But even more interesting is the fact that it was a dark sea. I know that’s counter-intuitive, because every single explosion that you’ve ever witnessed was accompanied by a burst of light. Therefore it seems totally reasonable to assume that our universe’s inaugural explosion would be accompanied by the greatest of all bursts of light.
But it wasn’t.
If you had been standing outside of the universe at its birth, what you would have seen is the rapid expansion of a very dark fog. For the first 380,000 years of its existence, the cosmos was opaque. But by the time it had grown to the size of our milky way, the subatomic matter that had previously blanketed every single one of the universe’s photons at last released its death grip on light. Of that moment in time, when photons became liberated en masse, Astrophysicist Carlos Frank states:
“Had we been there we would have suddenly seen this opaque universe become transparent. Suddenly the fog would lift and we would see a flash of light coming from everywhere around us. It must have been a spectacular moment.”
Now, returning to the creation story in Genesis (and please remember that in that story the ensuing verses come after the formless void became liquid, and dark liquid at that) we read:
“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”
That division phrase at the end there always baffled me. I had chalked it up to either poetry or ignorance; because since when do we divide light from darkness? Light and darkness are binary events; wherever a photon exists, darkness doesn’t. Except in the early universe, where intense compression made strange bedfellows of all things minute.
Anyways, moving on…
“And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.”
Admittedly, of this firmament-driven division between two waters I can make little sense, which forces me to consider the possibility that I’m actually not making sense of anything else either. But I am enjoying myself, so for investigation’s sake I’ll continue and note that, by referencing a firmament, the author moves the perspective from a platform upon which one views the progress of the entire universe, to a platform that exists on a specific planet within that universe; one with a firmament, or atmosphere. And from that platform the writer makes the following observation:
“And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth: and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.”
Interestingly enough 4.55 billion years ago the earth was a mass of boiling rock. The surface temperature was approximately 2,000°F and the atmosphere was composed of methane, ammonia and water vapor. Through that atmosphere a meteor bombardment pierced, off and on, for about 60 million years and when it at last tapered off, the earth cooled, allowing a crust to form that was almost immediately covered — every square inch — in water. So if of that moment an author from four or five or six thousand years ago were to write “let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear” it would be a tremendously lucky guess as to the actual sequence of events! But does the luck of these lucky guessers run out in the very next verse when they describe the first life form on earth as grass, which begat the herbs that in turn begat trees?
(But before we answer that question, isn’t it interesting that when those ancient, a-scientific nomads described the progression of plant life they moved from the simple to the complex? If your answer is “No,” that’s only because you’re reading the story in the 21st century.) Anyways, as I was saying…
“And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind.”
Anyone who digs 1 internet search deep into the question of the origin of life on earth will note that this section of Genesis chapter 1 gets it all wrong; because life began — not on land — but in the sea. And not only that, it appeared first in the form of single-cell bacteria, not as a grass. And with that contradictory fact it appears that my fun must end, as I place this origin story in the mythology section alongside Pangu’s tale… … unless of course, that ocean-bound, single-cell bacteria quickly developed into blue-green algae, a.k.a. cyanobacteria. If that were the case then maybe this case isn’t closed just yet; because blue-green algae is, after all, a photosynthesizing bacteria (the very creature that began oxygenating our atmosphere 3.7 billion years ago.) Not only does it photosynthesize but famed biologist Lynn Margulis and others theorize that chloroplasts (the photosynthesizing organelles in all plants) descended from free-floating blue-green algae and were absorbed into early plant cells in a process called endosymbiosis.
m=E
And in the beginning all the matter that you see around you, and in the night sky, and through all of the globe’s most powerful telescopes, all of that matter and more was contained in an infinitely minuscule space that began to expand suddenly at an unfathomable speed. So violent were the initial seconds of the universe’s existence that the formation of the bonds that make atoms possible was impossible. So if you were to write that in the beginning “the earth was without form, and void” you would be dead on. Because everything that would one day become “earth” was initially expressed in its energy state. There was no matter. Earth was formless, and void.
Weird huh?
Now if those illiterate nomads were merely 2 for 2 and the rest of the tale’s accuracy broke down when compared to the cosmological record, I wouldn’t take the time to note the congruence of their story with cosmology. But their string of lucky guesses continues, although not if you misread the story.
Misread the story and you might get tripped up by the fact that the early Hebrews wrote that “darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Admittedly it’s very easy to mistake what’s going on here because it sounds like the writer is describing an irreconcilable contradiction: an ocean in a formless void. It seems like this God of theirs can’t get though a single sentence without stumbling over His own premises. But keep studying the earliest stages of the universe’s development and you’ll note this fascinating fact:
When the universe finally expanded enough to give room for energy to convert into matter (3 minutes after the initial explosion) it was roughly 128,000 times hotter then the surface of the sun and the particles that did exist were colliding at such speeds that the only possible form that matter could take… was liquid.
The stuff that became us was still moving so fast that it couldn’t stick together long enough for non-liquid substances to emerge. Of that moment in our pre-pre-pre-history, NASA writes “According to the theories of physics, if we were to look at the Universe one second after the Big Bang, what we would see is a 10-billion degree sea of neutrons, protons, electrons, anti-electrons (positrons), photons, and neutrinos.”
But even more interesting is the fact that it was a dark sea. I know that’s counter-intuitive, because every single explosion that you’ve ever witnessed was accompanied by a burst of light. Therefore it seems totally reasonable to assume that our universe’s inaugural explosion would be accompanied by the greatest of all bursts of light.
But it wasn’t.
If you had been standing outside of the universe at its birth, what you would have seen is the rapid expansion of a very dark fog. For the first 380,000 years of its existence, the cosmos was opaque. But by the time it had grown to the size of our milky way, the subatomic matter that had previously blanketed every single one of the universe’s photons at last released its death grip on light. Of that moment in time, when photons became liberated en masse, Astrophysicist Carlos Frank states:
“Had we been there we would have suddenly seen this opaque universe become transparent. Suddenly the fog would lift and we would see a flash of light coming from everywhere around us. It must have been a spectacular moment.”
Now, returning to the creation story in Genesis (and please remember that in that story the ensuing verses come after the formless void became liquid, and dark liquid at that) we read:
“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”
That division phrase at the end there always baffled me. I had chalked it up to either poetry or ignorance; because since when do we divide light from darkness? Light and darkness are binary events; wherever a photon exists, darkness doesn’t. Except in the early universe, where intense compression made strange bedfellows of all things minute.
Anyways, moving on…
“And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.”
Admittedly, of this firmament-driven division between two waters I can make little sense, which forces me to consider the possibility that I’m actually not making sense of anything else either. But I am enjoying myself, so for investigation’s sake I’ll continue and note that, by referencing a firmament, the author moves the perspective from a platform upon which one views the progress of the entire universe, to a platform that exists on a specific planet within that universe; one with a firmament, or atmosphere. And from that platform the writer makes the following observation:
“And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth: and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.”
Interestingly enough 4.55 billion years ago the earth was a mass of boiling rock. The surface temperature was approximately 2,000°F and the atmosphere was composed of methane, ammonia and water vapor. Through that atmosphere a meteor bombardment pierced, off and on, for about 60 million years and when it at last tapered off, the earth cooled, allowing a crust to form that was almost immediately covered — every square inch — in water. So if of that moment an author from four or five or six thousand years ago were to write “let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear” it would be a tremendously lucky guess as to the actual sequence of events! But does the luck of these lucky guessers run out in the very next verse when they describe the first life form on earth as grass, which begat the herbs that in turn begat trees?
(But before we answer that question, isn’t it interesting that when those ancient, a-scientific nomads described the progression of plant life they moved from the simple to the complex? If your answer is “No,” that’s only because you’re reading the story in the 21st century.) Anyways, as I was saying…
“And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind.”
Anyone who digs 1 internet search deep into the question of the origin of life on earth will note that this section of Genesis chapter 1 gets it all wrong; because life began — not on land — but in the sea. And not only that, it appeared first in the form of single-cell bacteria, not as a grass. And with that contradictory fact it appears that my fun must end, as I place this origin story in the mythology section alongside Pangu’s tale… … unless of course, that ocean-bound, single-cell bacteria quickly developed into blue-green algae, a.k.a. cyanobacteria. If that were the case then maybe this case isn’t closed just yet; because blue-green algae is, after all, a photosynthesizing bacteria (the very creature that began oxygenating our atmosphere 3.7 billion years ago.) Not only does it photosynthesize but famed biologist Lynn Margulis and others theorize that chloroplasts (the photosynthesizing organelles in all plants) descended from free-floating blue-green algae and were absorbed into early plant cells in a process called endosymbiosis.
Meet ancient cyanobacteria
Along similar lines, paleobotanist Russell Chapman and others make the even bolder claim that all of today’s multicellular plants had a single, single-celled algaeic ancestor. But where the story gets really strange is when you look for an explanation as to how that first oceanic algae made its original foray onto land. Scientists at the John Innes Centre in England suggests they’ve found the answer.
Land plants live off of the water and nutrients they find in the soil. To go about that business they recruit the assistance of soil-dwelling fungi called mycorrhizae, which have the ability to reach deep into the earth to extract and then deliver nutrients to a given root’s doorstep. But how did the first beached algae learn to elicit the help of a passing mycorrhizae? It seems like in the time it would take an algae to learn the Mycorrhizaen phrase “Hey buddy can you give me a hand?” That specific, pleading algae and each one of its successors would have shriveled up and died while generations of mycorrhizae looked on indifferently. This communication gap or systems gap is a problem that repeats itself over and over again throughout nature, and it didn’t just start with primordial algae.
In 1954 Nobel laureate and Harvard biology professor George Wald, commenting on a then recent experiment that had successfully produced amino acids from a cocktail of prehistoric gases, published the following in the Scientific American:
“However improbable we regard this event [the start of all life,] or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once. And for life as we know it… once may be enough. Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time the ‘impossible’ becomes the possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.”
But is time that heroic?
In 1979 the very same publication answered that question in its special edition titled Life: Origin and Evolution. Regarding the Wald article from 25 years earlier and in light of additional insight into the probabilities associated with the mechanics of creation, the Scientific American issued the following retraction:
“Although stimulating, this article probably represents one of the very few times in his professional life when Wald has been wrong. Examine his main thesis and see. Can we really form a biological cell by waiting for chance combinations of organic compounds? Harold Morowitz, in his book ‘Energy Flow and Biology,’ computed that merely to create a bacterium would require more time than the Universe might ever see if chance combinations of its molecules were the only driving force.”
To give you an idea of the magnitude of the waiting game that nature must play whenever it attempts to leverage time and random events to produce life-constructing biological systems, we can visit that hypothetical room full of monkeys banging away on typewriters in search of a sonnet. Of those monkeys world renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking wrote “Most of what they write will be garbage, but very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare’s sonnets.”
But is that true?
Land plants live off of the water and nutrients they find in the soil. To go about that business they recruit the assistance of soil-dwelling fungi called mycorrhizae, which have the ability to reach deep into the earth to extract and then deliver nutrients to a given root’s doorstep. But how did the first beached algae learn to elicit the help of a passing mycorrhizae? It seems like in the time it would take an algae to learn the Mycorrhizaen phrase “Hey buddy can you give me a hand?” That specific, pleading algae and each one of its successors would have shriveled up and died while generations of mycorrhizae looked on indifferently. This communication gap or systems gap is a problem that repeats itself over and over again throughout nature, and it didn’t just start with primordial algae.
In 1954 Nobel laureate and Harvard biology professor George Wald, commenting on a then recent experiment that had successfully produced amino acids from a cocktail of prehistoric gases, published the following in the Scientific American:
“However improbable we regard this event [the start of all life,] or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once. And for life as we know it… once may be enough. Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time the ‘impossible’ becomes the possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.”
But is time that heroic?
In 1979 the very same publication answered that question in its special edition titled Life: Origin and Evolution. Regarding the Wald article from 25 years earlier and in light of additional insight into the probabilities associated with the mechanics of creation, the Scientific American issued the following retraction:
“Although stimulating, this article probably represents one of the very few times in his professional life when Wald has been wrong. Examine his main thesis and see. Can we really form a biological cell by waiting for chance combinations of organic compounds? Harold Morowitz, in his book ‘Energy Flow and Biology,’ computed that merely to create a bacterium would require more time than the Universe might ever see if chance combinations of its molecules were the only driving force.”
To give you an idea of the magnitude of the waiting game that nature must play whenever it attempts to leverage time and random events to produce life-constructing biological systems, we can visit that hypothetical room full of monkeys banging away on typewriters in search of a sonnet. Of those monkeys world renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking wrote “Most of what they write will be garbage, but very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare’s sonnets.”
But is that true?
To find the odds of a monkey randomly spelling a two-letter word you take the number of letters in the alphabet (26) and multiply them together: those odds are 1 in 676. If the word had three letters the odds would be 26³ or 1 in 17,576. As you can see, as the complexity of the word increases linearly the odds of a monkey accidentally spelling it increase exponentially. So what are the odds that if given all of the time since the universe began, a room full of monkeys could produce Shakespeare’s sonnet number 18, which includes the famous line “Shall I compare thee to a summers day?”
That sonnet has 488 letters, and if you ignore the spaces between letters the odds that random monkey plunking could produce it are 10⁶⁹⁰. To give you an understanding of the scale of the problem those monkeys face, the number of seconds that have ticked off since the universe began is 10¹⁸. The number of quantum particles in the universe is 10⁸⁰. So unfortunately for Mr. Hawking’s monkeys, even if they had all of the time in the universe they would never produce anything remotely resembling so much as a misspelled, half-sonnet. In fact, even if you magically converted all of the known atomic particles in the universe into typewriting monkeys and then you gave those quantum monkeys over 13 billion years to wax poetic, they couldn’t accomplish the task.
Which brings us back to the quandary faced by that primordial beached algae yearning to be terrestrialized. Scientist have compared the genetic material of ancient oceanic algae with the earliest known land plants and have discovered that primitive algae DNA appears to come pre-packaged with “How To Communicate With Mycorrhizae” instructions, which means that the algae didn’t have to lay around on the beach waiting around for the environment to selectively favor some random, speech-inducing genetic mutation. If the scientists at the John Innes Centre are right, to get from the ocean to land we didn’t have to rely on monkeys!
Now the reason I ended that last sentence with an exclamation mark is because of a twice-repeated phrase that I could never make sense of found in Genesis chapter 1 verses 12–13. They read:
“Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind.”
Why did the author repeat that line about plant seed existing “in itself” twice? I can’t know for certain, but what I can know for certain is that although grass’ origins are oceanic, ancient oceanic algae appear to have encoded — “in itself” — the genetic instructions for land-based living. Furthermore, the author of Genesis accurately wrote that planet earth “brought forth grass.” It didn’t appear suddenly and from foreign material as if through wizardry, although such prehistoric descriptions of creation abounded around the globe. Instead of and in stark contrast to all of those superstitions, Genesis’ author believed in an entirely different creative force. When describing the emergence of grass the writer could have used the Hebrew word barah, which means created. But instead he chose more circuitous verbs, referencing potentials that were “brought forth,” and not from a dead god’s blood or a dead god’s parasites, but organically. When looking for a way to describe the creation of grass, herbs and trees, for some reason the author decided to “Let the earth bring forth” grass, herbs and trees.
Why did he write the story that way? And when he says, at the conclusion of Day 3, that “God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.” I have to wonder, how did the writer in all his ignorance of physics and astronomy describe Divinity’s creative acts in a way that gels with 21st century cosmology? Read the story today and it’s difficult to look at that opening chapter and not conclude that it’s a pretty good description of what went down 13 billion years ago. So while the rest of the world populated its creation narratives with superheroes and superstition and superstitious superheroes, the Hebrews settled for a mundane, evolutionary tale.
Why?
But more importantly, what on earth is going to happen on days 4, 5, and 6?
That sonnet has 488 letters, and if you ignore the spaces between letters the odds that random monkey plunking could produce it are 10⁶⁹⁰. To give you an understanding of the scale of the problem those monkeys face, the number of seconds that have ticked off since the universe began is 10¹⁸. The number of quantum particles in the universe is 10⁸⁰. So unfortunately for Mr. Hawking’s monkeys, even if they had all of the time in the universe they would never produce anything remotely resembling so much as a misspelled, half-sonnet. In fact, even if you magically converted all of the known atomic particles in the universe into typewriting monkeys and then you gave those quantum monkeys over 13 billion years to wax poetic, they couldn’t accomplish the task.
Which brings us back to the quandary faced by that primordial beached algae yearning to be terrestrialized. Scientist have compared the genetic material of ancient oceanic algae with the earliest known land plants and have discovered that primitive algae DNA appears to come pre-packaged with “How To Communicate With Mycorrhizae” instructions, which means that the algae didn’t have to lay around on the beach waiting around for the environment to selectively favor some random, speech-inducing genetic mutation. If the scientists at the John Innes Centre are right, to get from the ocean to land we didn’t have to rely on monkeys!
Now the reason I ended that last sentence with an exclamation mark is because of a twice-repeated phrase that I could never make sense of found in Genesis chapter 1 verses 12–13. They read:
“Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind.”
Why did the author repeat that line about plant seed existing “in itself” twice? I can’t know for certain, but what I can know for certain is that although grass’ origins are oceanic, ancient oceanic algae appear to have encoded — “in itself” — the genetic instructions for land-based living. Furthermore, the author of Genesis accurately wrote that planet earth “brought forth grass.” It didn’t appear suddenly and from foreign material as if through wizardry, although such prehistoric descriptions of creation abounded around the globe. Instead of and in stark contrast to all of those superstitions, Genesis’ author believed in an entirely different creative force. When describing the emergence of grass the writer could have used the Hebrew word barah, which means created. But instead he chose more circuitous verbs, referencing potentials that were “brought forth,” and not from a dead god’s blood or a dead god’s parasites, but organically. When looking for a way to describe the creation of grass, herbs and trees, for some reason the author decided to “Let the earth bring forth” grass, herbs and trees.
Why did he write the story that way? And when he says, at the conclusion of Day 3, that “God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.” I have to wonder, how did the writer in all his ignorance of physics and astronomy describe Divinity’s creative acts in a way that gels with 21st century cosmology? Read the story today and it’s difficult to look at that opening chapter and not conclude that it’s a pretty good description of what went down 13 billion years ago. So while the rest of the world populated its creation narratives with superheroes and superstition and superstitious superheroes, the Hebrews settled for a mundane, evolutionary tale.
Why?
But more importantly, what on earth is going to happen on days 4, 5, and 6?
