Every living thing around us is a ratcheted, evolved response to support the immortality of the original form of life – a self-replicating arrangement of chemical molecules as a packet of information. If this arrangement happened about 3-1/2 billion years ago, most likely near deep-sea hydrothermal vents, all that happened at that moment of the paradigm shift from inorganic to organic chemistry, was that a set of chemicals came together such that they had a proclivity to replicate its own combination ‘data’ and pass it on as inheritance to another set of chemicals from its immediate environment. We might be tempted to think that these chemicals carried ‘intention’ in continuing to remain ‘alive’ or be immortal but it simply was one among many sets of chemical reactions that happened to survive entropy by means of changing form while holding on to information. Any intentionality in direction or tendency towards perseverance originates within natural states of the physics and chemistry of these pure happenstances. This happenstance of lifeless atoms and molecules storing packets of information and self-replicating as an avoidance of entropy was the beginning of life, as we know it, on our planet.
The conditions of early Earth atmosphere caused billions upon billions of permutations and combinations of chemical reactions in the swirling clouds of reactive elements, compounds catalyzed by electrically charged lightening as the planet settled through its 10-billion-year history since it first formed in the cosmic explosion. This happened to cobble together chains of simple molecules – combinations of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus atoms that formed the genetic material for life as we now know it – the simple nucleotides called RNA and DNA molecules. Scientists, up until the 1980s were stumped by the ‘chicken-or-egg’ conundrum as it related to the building blocks of life – protein or nucleic acid; because protein was required to build nucleic acid and nucleic acid required to build proteins. The discovery of the property of some RNAs to store information and catalyze chemical reactions to replicate itself solved this problem – nucleic acids came first and then ‘life’ as we know it, some time in the billion-year past, switched to the DNA method of inheritance.
Natural selection then jumps in and leads (see… I can’t resist, even when I know better, to write without this inexorable urge to create personification and intention! So how can I blame ancient story tellers who tried their best to explain things they didn’t know anything of! I do rue the tendency of modern brains to continue to hold on to the ancient concept of ‘supernatural intentionality’ when we have new knowledge to the contrary.) evolution down its merry path of unremitting persistence and merciless culling until now where we humans have settled at the top of the protein-exchange system because of our neural horsepower.
From this self-replicating imperative arises every form of physical and metaphysical motion or notion on our planet – whether photosynthesis or jealousy, it is all an accumulation of ratcheted responses of that one initial information packet that found a way to survive natural decay.
This hypothesis may well be wrong and I’ll be happy to correct or learn more to refine it, but training our evolved brains to understand this, or similar attempts of natural explanations of the world around us, opens up possibilities for science to work our knotty problems out. Knotty problems that are a legacy of incomplete knowledge or explanation attempts based on wrong assumptions via societal conditioning, religious dogma and authoritarian edicts. What a waste of resources to hang on to old stuff when we see and know better!
My 2 cents 