What I find “miraculous”

[웃 910]

I don't believe in the supernatural or true miracles, of course, but there are a few things that move me deeply and produce great wonderment when I ponder them:

• Our brains that evolved solely to enable small bands of social primates to make their living on the savannah have nevertheless helped us unravel the deepest secrets of the universe, from the existence of subatomic particles, to black holes, to the Big Bang, to the compositions of atoms, molecules, and our own hereditary material. They've even led us to things like quantum mechanics—things so bizarre that they violate every notion we have about how the world should behave.

• That everything on Earth, including all the devices we use—computers, cellphones, toasters, cars, beer, pacemakers, backpacks, paperclips,and the like—are made solely of substances that have been wrested from the crust of the Earth and transformed by our hands and brains. So too from the Earth come the bodies of every creature who ever lived. And all of it originated from the hydrogen and helium of ancient stars.

• That all of those species in all of their wondrous complexity—a complexity even more amazing on the cellular and subcellular level—have arisen through the simple evolutionary process of one type of replicator outcompeting another. And it involved, again, only those molecules present in the Earth's crust.

This last wonder, of course, is not mine alone. In our era Richard Dawkins expressed it most eloquently, but it all began with Darwin:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Read that sentence again: it's the final one in On the Origin of Species. There is a lot in it, not the least the idea that evolution is still going on. (By the way, this is the only use of the world "evolve" in the entire book.) What impresses me most is Darwin's comparison of the laws of physics to the "laws" of evolution, i.e., no supernatural intervention required. It's only when you stop and think about the path from stardust to evolution that you realizing how stupendous it all is. That's not proof of God of course, because we understand that whole process as a purely materialistic one produced by the laws of physics. But it's fantastic nonetheless.

I'm sure that there are many things I haven't pondered that readers find equally amazing; do weigh in below.

http://whyevolutioni...ind-miraculous/

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FROM THE COMMENTS:

Comment 1: Hooters.

Response 1: I agree, owls are amazing.

Response 2: So are tits. Especially great tits. And boobies. Although I suppose some prefer cocks.

Edited October 17, 2011 by Lord Infamous

[slim 1,533]

I believe we've reached the pinnacle of evolution and have now started devolving into what will soon be Idiocracy.

[웃 910]

This will be my next book on the list. After A Short History of Nearly Everything and Why Evolution is True.

http://www.amazon.co...18884240&sr=8-1

[웃 910]

Some more comments from geniuses:

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Something I like to reflect on when alone (because it usually moves me to tears) is that the universe started with an explosion, the dynamics of which appear to be described by relatively few physical concepts. And yet the ensuing chemistry has resulted in replicating molecules that can now contemplate their own existence. I cannot imagine a more wondrous thing.

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Sometimes I marvel that the various elements have such different, and often in their pure or simply combined forms useful, properties.

And that a very simple metabolite, formic acid, is such a powerful solvent for proteins, and despite that, that ants are able to compartmentalize it to dissolve their prey. {The corollary of that is that without formic acid, at least the early years of protein chemistry would probably have progressed far more slowly.}

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I find it impressive that all the elements above carbon were forged in the heat of a supernova. It makes you wonder where exactly the leftovers of the star that produced all the heavy elements for our solar system ended up.

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Mindboggling and superb an example of amazingness to me is a virus. Stripped down bacteria or evolved in their own right, they are so incredibly successful to me they are – thus far – the summit of evolution. Of what else is out there, off the tiny pathetic dot on which we live and ove, I can only drop my jaw…

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This is minor miracle compared to the age and size of the universe, but every time I walk outside I am blown away by the fact that when I was a little kid, dinosaurs were big, slow, and most of all, extinct.

And now, as a grown man, I learn that some dinosaurs survived the K-T extinction event, and now represent the largest, most populous, and most diverse group of terrestrial tetrapods. Thanks to science, I now live on the Planet of the Dinosaurs!

(Have you ever looked at a sparrow’s legs? I mean, really looked?)

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One of the most impressive quotes of all time:

“We humans have seen the atoms which constitute all of nature and the forces that sculpted this work and others. We have found that the molecules of life are easily formed under conditions throughout the cosmos. We have mapped the molecular machines of the heart of life. We have discovered a microcosm in a drop of water; we have peered into the bloodstream and down on the stormy planet to see the earth as a single organism. We have found volcanoes on other worlds and explosions on the sun, studied comets from the depths of space and traced their origins and destinies; listened to pulsars and searched for other civilizations.

We humans have set foot on another world in a place called the Sea of Tranquility, an astonishing achievement for creatures such as we, whose earliest footsteps three and one-half million years old are preserved in the volcanic ash of east Africa. We have walked far.

*These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.*

”

Somehow, that last sentence almost moves me to tears every time I read it. It is the poetic equivalent of the Total Perspective Vortex.

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Miraculous? That an enormous number of evolved primates are able to get a peaceful nights sleep, every night.

Think about it: We evolved from a world where life was, quite often, “nasty, brutish and short.” Sleeping is the act of being unconscious and immobile for eight hours per day. How would that have worked even 100,000 years ago, when our species was quite definitely modern? Needing to sleep so our brains work properly, and being in that sleep state is very dangerous. So we have automatic mechanisms to protect us, in that any unusual sound or touch can wake us (but not smell, oddly enough). Part of that automatic system is the ability to process limited information to come up with reasons why we woke up; what caused us to be disturbed and how we should react. Unfortunately that system of limited information processing gives rise to superstitions, seeing ghosts and spirits when there are none.

However, we have transcended that primitive past. We now have a society with rules and laws and conventions that permit us to not only sleep in our beds, but have a very low probability of being murdered in them.(Stephen Pinkers new book is really, really good, BTW)

Getting a good nights sleep now allows our brains to work smoothly, and do vital functions such as grind coffee, understand the universe, double entry bookkeeping and read WEIT.

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I go from amazement to amazement, but one that still remains large is [nerd warning] how quantum mechanics is at the same time minimizing the number of variables (no hidden variables re Bell test experiments) and number of parameters (which is another result I forget the name of, but I think Shor’s algorithm builds on it).

So our basic physics is, despite say anthropic selection which is being most predictive today but perhaps gone tomorrow, unique.*

* Quantum mechanics is also continuous, admits a continuous transformation between states, as opposed to, say, classical mechanics discrete pre- and post- states.

Again a unique character, which may or may not be related to the previous one. But in any case amazing.

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Not miraculous but something that occupies my thoughts: There is more genetic diversity present in a small gorilla population that occupies 10 square miles of jungle than in the entire human population. In other words, my western European genome is quite similar to that of the most remote Mongolian yak herder. In effect, we are all one extended family.

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