Chapter 8

The Design, the Designer, and the Blueprints for Design

The establishment biologist is stuck and reacts in only one way to any talk of design. Design to him raises the specter of a creator God, as in the Biblical Book of Genesis. In this way, design talk is not politically correct for a biologist.

But never fear! The application of quantum physics to the situation of life's origin readily shows that the Genesis model of God and creation is wrong; it is too simpleminded and linear. In the current creationism-evolutionism debate, even journalists without any science background thwart creationists by asking, “Who created the creator?” But the quantum God's creation of life and the universe is done in one fell swoop: the whole material universe waits in possibility until the first life is intuited and the self-referential quantum measurement circuit is completed. (The physicist John Wheeler called this the completion of the “meaning circuit.” It is amazing how close Wheeler came to the ideas explored here.) The causal circularity forever rids us of the question, “Who created the creator?”

So there is no danger of succumbing to the literal Biblical creationists' ideas here. There is intelligent design, yes; evolutionism, yes; creationism, no. And we can relax.

I mentioned the Urey-Miller experiment in the last chapter. Its success in making amino acid from the basic atomic ingredients has inspired many a biologist to spend years in the vain hope of manufacturing life in the laboratory. The idea was to produce life through step-by-step chemical reactions, more and more complex molecules eventually ending up with a living cell. But this has not happened. And it never will. So right now, biologists are content to theorize how such step-by-processes might have come about; but none of these theories are convincing and there is no consensus.

The situation changes drastically when we put downward causation into the equation of life—God's creativity. The truth is that for the quantum creation of life, God does not need to follow this human-conceived step-by-step process. This scenario is the conception of the Newtonian mind that cannot see beyond continuity. God is quantum consciousness; God works with creativity, for which the operative phrase is discontinuous quantum leap. “Let there be life, and there was life.”

However, the God, quantum consciousness, that we have rediscovered is lawful in our conceptualization up to a point. Even God's creative acts have to follow the usual process that creativity researchers have codified. And even a creator God, quantum consciousness, has to deal with the probability question: it is a fact that, as pointed out by many biologists, the creation of life is a very low-probability event. The way to deal with small probability, judging from our own creative experiences, is to have the benefit of a blueprint.

A DESIGNER NEEDS A BLUEPRINT: MORPHOGENETIC FIELDS

It is said in Genesis that God created man (woman) in His (Her) own image, signifying that we can extrapolate some of God's power by examining our own. It's even easier when it comes to creativity. In creativity, we are using God's power, God being our own creative agent of downward causation. So how do we create?

Consider an architect building a house. He will start with an idea. At the second stage, the architect will make a blueprint of the idea. Only then will he engage in actually creating the physical house, beginning with the physical components.

Quantum consciousness, God, follows the same procedure in creating life. He (She) starts with the possibility of an idea that belongs to the supramental domain. The blueprints of life belong to a compartment of possibilities called the vital energy body. Concomitantly, God starts processing (unconsciously, of course) the material possibilities for a physical representation of the vital possibilities (figure 8-1).

FIgure 8-1. How A Supramental Context Of Living Is Represented In The Physical Via The Intermediary Of The Vital Blueprint—The Morphogenetic Field.

In the 19th century and even in the early 20th century, the vital body was considered an essential part of biological thinking. For example, the philosopher Henri Bergson saw life as an expression of élan vital or vital essence (energy?), that special feel of life from inside. Bergson's philosophy was quite popular among biologists. But the situation changed drastically after the discovery in the 1950s of molecular biology. The picture of a cell, containing DNA for replication and proteins for various functions of maintenance, seems to have all the ingredients to explain biological functioning. This and Darwin's theory of evolution, packaged in a new synthesis called neo-Darwinism, became the new paradigm of biology. The concept of vital energy was considered extra baggage and abandoned. It smacks of dualism anyway, which no scientist likes. Good riddance—or so the thought went!

But by 1960, biologists like Conrad Waddington (1957) were already pointing to a cloud on the horizon: the problem of biological form-making or, formally, morphogenesis: how a form like an organ is created from a single-celled embryo. A cell makes more of itself by cell division, making an exact replica with exactly the same DNA. But then why does a liver cell of a grown body behave so differently from a brain cell? How do the cells belonging to different organs get differentiated?

Obviously, the cells in different organs must be making different proteins by activating different sets of genes. This is called cell differentiation. Different programs activate the genes of the cells belonging to different organs. The source of these programs is called morphogenetic field, or so it is speculated.

But where are they, these morphogenetic fields? By the 1980s, a genetic or even epigenetic origin of these programs did not seem promising. The situation remains the same even today. Says the biologist Richard Lewontin (2000) about genetic models of morphogenesis:

The processes of differentiation of an unspecialized cell into a mature specialized form are not well understood. The reason this is a deep problem for biological explanation is that cell differentiation lies at the basis of all development [of adult form from the embryo]…. It is very well to say that certain genes come to be transcribed in certain cells under the influence of the transcription of certain other genes, but the real question of the generation of form is how the cell “knows” where it is in the embryo.

I hope you can see the play of nonlocality here. At least one biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, saw this already in the early 1980s. Sheldrake (1981) wrote a book called A New Science of Life in which he proposed that the sources, the blueprints of the genetic programs of cell differentiation, the morphogenetic fields, are nonlocal, and that as such they can only be nonphysical.

Sheldrake analogically thought that these morphogenetic fields communicated their instructions to the cell as a radio transmitter does to a receiver, through a kind of resonance: frequency matching but without the local electromagnetic waves to communicate. Sheldrake called this mechanism the morphic resonance, that is, the resonant making of form.

Sheldrake's picture is dualistic, no doubt; a nonphysical morphogenetic field, albeit nonlocal, cannot interact or “resonate” with a physical cell without a mediator that correlates the two. Sheldrake at the time was reluctant to introduce the concept of a programmer (designer) that uses the blueprints to transcribe the programs of form into the picture.

Quantum thinking can do this without dualism. The blueprints (the morphogenetic fields), the programmable genes, and the form they create remain in potentia until God—quantum consciousness—makes a match (as in a resonance) and collapses actuality (Goswami, 1997b).

And now we can see clearly what this actuality is. The physical actuality is the form, the organ—this the biologist acknowledges and everybody can verify. But there is also the manifest morphogenetic field in awareness within the psyche of all living beings. This internal awareness is the feeling of being alive that Bergson called élan vital.

So let's connect this to an age-old terminology and unabashedly revive the term vital body as the reservoir of the morphogenetic fields. The movement of the vital body is naturally called the vital energy; this is what we feel whenever we actualize a functioning biological organ and its program.

Note also that the form, the organ, is initially made in God-consciousness, but when the form-making or creation is over and we begin using the forms or organs, our experience of feeling alive reflects more and more the effect of conditioning, of conditioned continuity.

BACK TO HOW GOD CREATES LIFE

Go back to the beginning of life. The probability of synthesizing a living cell's basic components in the laboratory—the protein and the DNA—individually from amino acids and nucleotides, respectively, is minuscule (Shapiro, 1987). There is also a circularity here: the components of DNA—the genes—have the code for the assembly of amino acids into proteins. But proteins are required to make the DNA. We also know that finding a proper theory of how the DNA, the protein, and so on are assembled together in a cell, starting from the basic available nonliving ingredients, has eluded biologists so far. That such a theory will ever be developed and achieve consensus agreement is also highly unlikely.

But do we need a continuous process from the beginning to the end product? Let's invoke the discontinuity of creativity to complete the tangled-hierarchical quantum measurement system in the first living cell. The designer, quantum consciousness—God—recognizes the protein-DNA combination in possibility, albeit of small probability, because He (She) knows the purpose: self-reproduction and self-maintenance. God has the possibility blueprint of a living cell for guidance. The blueprint codifies the knowledge that to create a self-referential living cell, one needs a replicator system (DNA), maintenance managers (proteins), communicators between DNA and protein (RNA), cytoplasm for mobility, and a cell wall for confinement.

But in the actual physical production of the living cell from the quantum possibilities of the microscopic ingredients (amino acids, nucleotides, lipids, etc.), in the transition from micro (possibility) to macro (possibility) and then to macro (actuality), there is discontinuity; there has to be. The discontinuity arises from the fact that, short of the actualized living cell, no intermediate macro state of microscopic ingredients satisfies the requirements of a tangled hierarchy. As discussed earlier, the tangled hierarchy and discontinuity are the necessary price for self-reference or the subject-object split, and only God's creativity can resolve this paradox. This involves a high level of creativity able to quantum leap the usual continuity of a mechanical means of assembly; this requires an intelligent designer.

God makes humanity in His (Her) own image. The mathematician John von Neumann (1966), working with what are called cellular automata (little bits of programmed stuff), figured out theoretically the roles of the replicator and the maintainer systems in a truly reproductive system even before Francis Crick and James Watson discovered these roles in the laboratory.

But Von Neumann missed the self-reference of life, so his model is compatible with materialism; he did not see the necessity of invoking God and the quantum leap in the original production of life. Because we have recognized the importance of self-reference, we are figuring out how God must have created the first life, that only God-consciousness and a discontinuous quantum leap can actually create life from nonlife!

Holistic biologists such as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela see the materialist's predicament and propose holism, that the whole is greater than its parts: life is an emergent property of a living cell that cannot be reduced to its parts. But in view of what we know about how simple systems make up complex systems, such as atoms making up molecules, with no irreducibility there (since we know that molecules can be reduced to atoms and their interactions), the holists' claim sounds preposterous.

The biologist Michael Behe (1996) intuits much the same thing as the holist when he introduces the concept of irreducible complexity: biological features that are so complex that only an intelligent superdesigner, God, can design them. Better language, perhaps, but no more plausible.

But now we understand what the holists and Behe are trying to say. It is the tangled hierarchy of life's design that is irreducible, that is irreducibly complex.

The magic of life comes from three things: 1) God's creative downward causation, creating 2) the tangled hierarchy in the organization of the living cell, giving us the self-referential quantum collapse in the cell, using the help of 3) the vital blueprint, of which the cell makes physical representation. The magic in the creation of life is the quantum leap of creativity; it can neither be synthesized by nor be reduced to bit-by-bit continuous evolution by mathematics, mechanical computation, or biochemical reactions in the laboratory.

People say that life is a miracle; this is not a cliché. Life is literally God's creative miracle gift to us.

THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING IS IN THE EATING

The bottom line is this: is there a tangible verifiable output we garner from this creativity theory of the origin of life? If there is a pudding from all the cooking (theorizing), then we can eat it and our doubt about the authenticity of the cooking will disappear. Similarly, we need experimental data to verify the validity of the theory. Otherwise it is all hocus-pocus, pseudoscience.

The materialist model is unabashedly devoid of purpose. Life has no purpose, life's origin has no purpose, and evolution has no purpose. Indeed biologists have even replaced teleology—purposivenes—with teleonomy—appearance of purposiveness.

There is one unsolvable mystery in this kind of thinking: why does evolution drive biological systems to more and more complexity? According to the biological establishment, evolution proceeds through the Darwinian mechanisms of chance variation and natural selection. Chance obviously can work both ways, toward complexity or toward simplicity. And natural selection favors fecundity, the ability to produce offspring with profusion, not complexity.

But if God created and evolved life, God did it for a purpose—for the purpose of seeing His (Her) possibilities manifest in physical representations. In this picture, the evolution of life is the evolution of more and complex representations of the blueprints of life contained in God's vital body, to see the possibilities of the vital body find better and better expressions.

Sometimes we call this drive of life to evolve in the direction of increasing complexity the biological arrow of time. And we can explain it only with a theory in which God is the creator of the original life and the causal driver behind the evolution of life (by virtue of subsequent quantum leaps—see chapter 9).

Incidentally, Darwin's chance and necessity give us a theory of species adaptation (how a species adapts to a changing environment), but not of evolution (how one species evolves into another), and especially not of macro evolution (evolution involving big changes in traits). The famous fossil gaps between species lineages are well known. If Darwinian mechanisms—slow and continuous—held for all evolution, there would be no fossil gaps.

Behe (1996) makes the same point about the inadequacy of the neo-Darwinian model of evolution by considering the biochemistry of various “little steps” of evolution through Darwinian chance and necessity. And Behe reaches the same conclusion. Can Darwinian chance and necessity account for all the steps of evolution? No. Is the evolution of life also the product of a purposive designer? Yes.

To this we add: God is a creative designer who guides evolution through creative quantum leaps. The fossil gaps are evidence of the discontinuity of these quantum leaps. I have presented all these ideas in detail elsewhere (Goswami, 2008). In the next chapter, I give you a glimpse.