When you arrive at the doctor’s office to check in with the receptionist, you are often handed a small pack of paperwork to fill out. Until that moment, you have probably been focused on your own ailment or your own medical worries. Luckily, for most of us–most of the time–our own health concerns will more or less resolve and life will more or less go on.
For all of us, however, that typical pack of doctor office paperwork contains a magic page that has the power to boost our happiness through the roof, if only we employ the correct frame of gratitude. I’m referring to the page that looks something like this:
This page gives us the opportunity to breathe a cosmic sigh of relief that we do not have most of those ailments on that list. That’s how I try to see it as I check off all most of those boxes with a “no.” Thank goodness I don’t have most of those medical problems. And this is merely the beginning of what I’m proposing as a journey of gratitude.
Instead of thinking about my own health problem, instead of being frustrated that my own body is not operating perfectly, the above page is a reminder that my body is an extraordinarily complex adaptive system–lots of little parts have self-organized into something so complicated that it seems miraculous. No humans could possibly make a tongue or an eye or a liver as high functioning or as elegant as the natural versions.
Imagine that humans in the distant future worked very hard and came much closer to making a reasonably functioning robotic human. Then imagine their supervisors sending down a new work order to make sure that this robot is also sentient. Imaging the groaning you would hear from the engineering team! Then imagine that the supervisors send down another new work order to make sure that this artificial human could also repair itself if it became damaged! Imaging louder groaning, especially when the supervisors remind the team that this self-repair must respond to hundreds of millions of microscopic threats and do it as well as the human immune system.
Then imagine that the supervisors send down yet another work order advising the team that they must design their human so that it runs on almost anything that it puts in its mouth. Even louder groaning. Mutiny is threatened.
Finally, thousands of years later, when millions more engineers (and their great great great great grand-engineers) have successfully created a passable artificial human, the supervisors call down with one more new request: Make sure that these artificial humans can create tiny artificial humans the size of a pinpoint that will grow, within the body of one of the robots, into large artificial humans who become wise through their interactions with any of dozens of environments. Then imagine all the engineers quitting their jobs.
At the doctor’s office, our question should not be “Why doesn’t my body work perfectly?” We shouldn’t even complain that we sometimes have one or more of those ailments on the long checklist handed to us by the doctor’s receptionist. A better question is “How is it possible that the actions of countless individual molecules self-organize into trillions of cells that result in emergent coordinated macroscopic behaviors such as the ability to walk into a doctor’s office?” Even more simply, the first question should always be “How is it possible that human bodies work at all, ever?”
Answer not forthcoming.
And that is why I believe there is a God.
I understand your impulse. It is so incredibly hard to believe that the world came about from a process rather than a genius. But if I choose the second option, I am left with even bigger projects: How did a “God” arise? And “How could a non-material entity create material beings?” Unless one is prepared to start on the path of an eternal regress (which I’m not), my simpler “answer” is to say “I don’t know.” I truly don’t know and I don’t pretend that I will ever have the ability to understand or explain such things. I have no answers, even though I am ever hungry for better and deeper science. At the same time, I am inspired and filled with wonderment, just as Darwin was, just as he wrote at the conclusion of Origin of Species (and was Darwin referring to factual or metaphorical “breathing” here?):
I love you brother. A glimpse inside my brain, three seconds prior to writing:. “Should I really make an obvious response about God to a philosopher? Yes, yes I will.”
As usual, I love the fresh perspective you bring to a mundane aspect of human existence. We certainly are miracles! But based on the mediocrity principle, it’s unlikely that we are the pinnacle of complex chemical processes that the universe has to offer, and given that it happened here, there’s probably some inevitability to the development of self-sustaining Darwinian systems resulting from the particular set of physical constants that our universe happens to have.
But boy did the universe hit the jackpot, with carbon being the element and water being the solvent with precisely the right properties to make life possible! Even carbon is a miracle, considering the difficulty of the triple alpha process needed to make it in stars. Actually, there wouldn’t even be chemical elements if the strong nuclear force differed in strength in either direction by more than a few percent.
Anyway, I’m rambling…. We may not be particularly special in our universe, but our universe itself is quite special, considering the (possibly) infinite landscape of boring, lifeless universes with the “wrong” physical constants. And on the off-chance that we humans are the most interesting thing the universe has managed to produce, I’d say that the universe still did pretty darn well for itself! It’s sort of an interesting tension between the mediocrity principle and anthropic principle.
As a synthetic chemist, I totally agree with what you said — when it comes to making molecules efficiently, we chemists feel totally incompetent when we think about what nature’s able to do. Contrary to what some futurists will have you believe, even the most rudimentary nanobots are still probably centuries away….
Thanks for your astute comments, Jimmy. I agree that this is an interesting universe to inhabit, at least this part of it, at least at this time. Glad to have you along for the ride on good ole’ planet Earth. BTW, have you familiar with Stuart Kauffman’s 1995 book, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self Organization and Complexity?. Lots more food for thought there, much of it mind-blowing. I commented on his work here: https://dangerousintersection.org/2011/02/19/the-evolution-of-the-mechanism-for-evolution/
Again, thanks for reaching out.
Hi Erich, I’ve heard of him. I guess he is a mathematical biologist who models the emergence of biological complexity and how evolution “optimizes” living things. I have a decent mathematical background, but I can’t pretend to actually understand his work. I haven’t read his book but I probably ought to!
Very interesting post — thanks for linking to it. I think a noteworthy feature of extremely complex biological networks is also the robustness. In my research group, we develop catalytic reactions. Getting one catalyst to work is hard enough, but stringing two or more together or getting them to go to work cooperatively is exceedingly challenging, and sometimes even a seemingly minor change to the reaction conditions or starting materials will make it completely fail. Not so with biological systems — in spite of being a system of thousands of enzymes in one reaction vessel, living things can handle substantial perturbations and still continue to live and thrive (for the most part — obvious exceptions exist: a microgram of botulinum toxin A can indeed kill you….)